Answering The Fool's Call
The Spring season is a masterclass in how to grow, and on the podcast, we'll be exploring the theme of "Growing into Village." In this first episode of the Spring 2025 season, I'm exploring what Village is, where it went, and what The Fool can show us about how to step toward a new way of living in a good way.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Well, hi friend. Welcome, welcome to the spring season here in the Northern Hemisphere in the spring season of the show. I hope that wherever you are, you're feeling the new life and brightness of a new season and that you're feeling maybe some strength and fullness in the land as more life comes and grows and blooms and unfurls.
And I just hope that you're reveling in that in whatever way that you can and that maybe you feel that even in yourself as well. More life and fullness and strength coming as we enter the spring season and integrate what happened in the winter and fall preceding this time. For this season of the show, I want to talk about growing into Village. And, you know, the spring is such a time of growth. It's the time of the nature element and the plants are blooming and blossoming and fruits will come later in the spring depending on where we live. And there's so much growth that's possible and happens in the spring season. And that's, think, I hope for a long time, I hope that's inevitable and continues to be inevitable that there's growth in this time as long as the conditions are right for it.
But what are we growing into? We can be discerning and intentional about that to some degree in our own lives and in the ways that we're interacting with the land. What is growing? How is it growing? What are we growing into? What are the fruits or flowers that will come as a result of our stretching and our labors? And what I hope we're growing into is village.
That's what I want in my own life. And I'm curious to understand this spring what the pieces are that need to be repaired, healed, or fortified in order for us to divest more and more from capitalism and really start to live in different ways. So spring is the season of growth and I want to grow toward village and toward a different way to live.
And I thought it might be nice if we did some of that growing together through this podcast as a sort of disparate across the world connected by this weird internet sort of village. And I'm grateful for it and so honored that you're here today. And I'm really excited to talk to you today about what it might mean to grow toward village and take those first steps.
And then I have four really amazing guests who are coming on to talk with us about what it might look like to grow toward Village through the different life stages of growth and relating and how we can do that from the very, very beginnings of our lives until we, you know, become elders and beyond. So, yeah, I'm just really excited to learn along with you this season. And I hope that we transition into the summer knowing something different about what's possible for village and maybe even bearing fruit in that regard in some way.
So today I'm going to talk about what village is, where it went for most of us, and how to take some first steps toward it. you know, spoiler alert, it does have something to do with the fact that today is April Fool's Day, April 1st. And yeah, so before we dive in, I'll just say that if you ever want to engage further with these ideas, with anything I share on the show, I do a lot of other stuff besides the podcast. And many of you know that and are involved in other things, but I teach seasonal classes. I've written some books and journals. I teach a class called Composting Capitalism about the origins of capitalism. And that starts actually next week, April 9th.
So yeah, you're just welcome to engage at any level that you'd like to, including just listening to the show. That's wonderful. I really trust the desire that we have and the readiness we feel when it's actually the right time to engage more with something.
And there are things that I've listened to or just taken peeks at for years and years, but then something shifted and I was ready to go deeper with a certain idea or teaching or philosophy and I'd really trust the way that that unfolds. So I just want to let you know that there is a lot more that I'm up to if you would like to learn more and you can do that at awildnewwork.com.
And I would just want to say a big thank you to everyone supporting the show financially by pitching in at buymeacoffee.com. You're really helping to make this work sustainable for me and helping me keep it free and available for everyone else. So whether you've contributed once or you're a monthly member, please know that I'm so, so grateful for that and grateful to all of you who just, you know, share the show or give it a rating or, you know, make meaning of it in your own lives. This feels like a really reciprocal way to be with you and I'm really grateful for that. So before we start, I'll...guide us through our opening invocation and I invite you to just take a deep breath if you haven't done that lately.
And never underestimate the power of a sigh. So if you need to like just let it out with a heavy sigh, I hope you'll do that. Feeling the body that you're living in and living with today, your body has probably just done so much already for you today to give you life and to help you experience what it means to be human on this wild planet in these chaotic times and I'm so grateful to your body for holding you and carrying you and enabling you to be with me today.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible.
And I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. All right, well, let's start by talking about what I mean by village. And I think what I mean is essentially just humans living as humans. It's very simple. I'm thinking about humans living in intact...pro-social networks within larger, vast communities of plant, animal, and fungi kin. And this is not a new way for humans to live. This is how we evolved. That, you know, we evolved to live as integral parts of the web of life, not separate from it.
I'm thinking of villages where lineages of understanding and relationships with the more than human world are passed down, where people have autonomy, the freedom to move, to do as they like, so long as they don't cause harm, to love and make a life with who they want, to go slow and at a natural pace.
To make their own foods, to have rituals and traditions that are life-giving and sustaining, to be in a village where there's a culture and a perspective that is inextricable from the landscape, where there's an intimacy with the land, where rites of passage are a huge part of the fabric that knits the village together, where people's gifts are seen and welcomed and put to good use.
Village is a home, really, just a different kind of home that's made with many other kin, where each of us is known and seen and cared for and responsible to offer that care to others as well. And this is what your long ago ancestors had, what my long ago ancestors had, and what some people still have today around the world to varying degrees. So.
There's the long-term vision of village that I hold on my heart and like I shared in the previous episode 142, the last episode of the winter season. And then there are the shorter term visions that are like bridges that help us to maybe get to the longer term vision. Little ways that we can each start to create village where we are in the mess that we find ourselves in.
And, you know, it's possible that for those of us in the West and in the United States empire specifically with so much crumbling away, it's possible that circumstances will begin more and more to push us toward village. I don't think it's an accident that myself and many others are thinking about this a lot and talking about it because most of us know that the way that white European settlers lived and were taught how to live was just never sustainable and we're seeing the effects of that now and I hope more and more of us who carry that ancestry and heritage are beginning to understand the real value and wisdom in living in ways that are much closer in alignment with the earth and with the way that we evolved to live. So where did Village go? Most of us know that we don't have it here now, but what happened?
How did we come to this way of living that is so isolated and lonely where many of us aren't feeling seen or known or cared for and not really very responsible for many others? And how did we get to a place where this fractal of, my individual experience of feeling lost without village repeats or comes is distilled from a whole society of isolation and loneliness and lack of care or relationship. I've been thinking a lot about this episode for a couple of weeks and what I wanted to say and what felt most pertinent and what I'm learning about Village and what the first steps toward it might be. And I've just been thinking a lot about the contrast between this vision I have for Village and where we are now and
Sometimes I can get into like a little bubble, you know, I don't feel like my world is very big. I see, you know, the people at my kid's school and, you know, some close friends and neighbors, but I'm not like out and about in the public a ton. But this last week was my, my two kids had their birthdays, their birthdays are two days apart right around the spring equinox. And my son, Kylan wanted to go to this place called Enchanted Forest for his birthday.
And it's like a 50 year old, fairy tale theme park and it's kind of, you know, it's kind of weird but also kind of really sweet. so we went and this was like a place where it's like a maybe a more accurate representation of America and who lives here. It's like just, you know, very public and it's outside of Portland. And at the risk of sounding really judgmental or harsh, I just noticed in the sort of milling about between little rides and the carousel and everything that is at this place, that people here just do not seem well. And it feels like we're all sort of wandering around and there's not really a lot of light in people's eyes. There's not a lot of vitality.
And maybe the enchanted forest is not an accurate representation, but it just looking around, it's like, wow, the way that we have been living has really taken a toll on people's bodies and spirits. And to me, when I look out, we look like a people that has been thoroughly conquered. You know, every aspect of our lives, not every, but many aspects of our lives feel like they have been conquered by this corporate oligarchy settler-colonizer heritage bullshit. Whatever word you want to use for it. People are just struggling and I include myself in this and like there's just not a lot of life and vitality and strength that I think people, humans,
have natural access to and that we, you know, get glimpses of and maybe feeling glimpses for ourselves. And I just, it made me really sad. And I just, I don't know, for some reason, I saw it with new eyes this time. And I've just been thinking a lot about how this came to be. And there are many theories for this. This is like a huge overview of ideas. And I think one resource that I trust and really respect is the rewilding podcast with Peter Michael Bauer. So I think if you wanted to learn more about human history and rewilding, that would be a great place to start. But for our purposes here in terms of how we lost village, what happened, I guess I would say that from what I've learned, it looks like around 10 to 15,000 years ago, there began to be this development of agriculture in the Middle East in the Fertile Crescent. And something began to change among human societies, which for millennia before this had lived in smaller groups of hunter gatherers where, you know, you're foraging for your food, you're hunting. Most were quite egalitarian societies.
You have, you know, initiations and rites of passage and cultural treasures like intact legacies and stories and myths and, you know, people grew and evolved in alignment with the landscape and the seasons. And then around 10 to 15 years ago, there begins to be this evidence of agriculture and domination over nature, which is not how all agriculture has to be, I think. And there is compelling evidence that the Amazon and the First Peoples here on Turtle Island were farming in a way, but they were doing it in such a beautiful and harmonious way that you couldn't really tell, like white settlers couldn't tell that this was a landscape that had been cultivated for food, but it didn't look like the fields and plowed landscapes of Europe. So agriculture begins to emerge as a primary way that people meet their caloric.
needs and they begin to organize differently. There's a food surplus that begins to lead to hierarchy and domination because, you know, who has the excess of food and who gets to, you know, share it or control it. And village can't exist is anathema to hierarchy and domination because true village requires that the gifts of all are welcomed and honored. You can't subjugate women, for example, or children and still have village. It just doesn't work. So this area begins, as agriculture grows, we begin to see more more civilizations like the Greeks and then the Romans who eventually conquered indigenous peoples across Europe, enslaving them or forcing them to assimilate to Roman rule.
And eventually Christianity becomes the state religion of Rome and is brought to Europe. And in that context, after Rome collapses, but Christianity is still intact, that's where capitalism was born. And I won't go into all of it because it's what I cover in Composting Capitalism and it's too much for us today, but any semblance of village that was left, and there was a lot that was left under Roman rule.
Any whispers of village that remained, even in the most Roman areas, were just crushed and decimated under capitalism. Capitalism required the destruction of the commons, so any land that had not privately been owned before was taken into private ownership, so people's relationship to wild open land is destroyed. There's social control. There's nowhere to gather. It's unsafe to gather. know, laws passed around dancing and communal gathering. The hatred of women comes to the fore and the embodiment of that through brutal laws around reproductive justice, the European witch hunts, women being forbidden from earning a wage. The wage itself is, you know, a form of slavery that comes to the fore inside of capitalism. So Village had no chance in that birthing process and was intentionally destroyed because village can't exist inside of capitalism because village isn't a place that can be commodified or be subjugated to profit and production and consumption. So now here we are, capitalism has been afoot for around 500 years.
It looks pretty well established, you know, it's got a firm stronghold, but it is not permanent. It's not sustainable. It cannot last. It will not last so long as the earth lasts. So here we are inside of this capitalist culture that may look permanent, but it's not, but it's still very real for us today and causing harm. And we're wondering where is the village? You know, we outsource in this
culture outsource everything to private, commodified entities. We pay for childcare, we pay for elder care, we have to pay for our health and wellness support. We, you know, pay for someone to build a house or we purchase a house with materials from all over the world that we don't know that are anonymous. We outsource our kids' educations. We may even pay for therapy or spiritual guidance.
Everything is commodified and reduced to a transaction and we're sad. We're so sad we don't know ourselves. We're just not well. We long for village, but it often feels so far inside of this culture and that's by design. So we may not know where to start. It may seem very inconvenient, even if we knew where to start, you know, it's not efficient or clear.
And it's just not the way life is structured anymore. So we're kind of here wondering like, how do we meet this longing? And that's what I want to talk about in this season of the show. And I don't mean to idealize village. know, it's not like our ancestors who lived in intact villages never experienced hardship or grief or conflict. That's not the case at all. But they had long-standing rites and rituals and belief systems and relationships and, you know, just basically like access to fresh air and clean water with which to contend with those hardships. But we're experiencing all of that without any material, meaningful safety net or container. And sometimes it feels like we're treading water in the ocean alone and someone keeps throwing weights at us. Like it's just too much, it's untenable. So how could we begin to rebuild village? Like I said earlier, I think the rise of this idea and this longing is not accidental. I believe that in my, speaking for myself, I believe that the ancestors are guiding me and us toward this.
that life itself is conspiring for humans to learn how to live well together again. And I think where we have to start is the audacity to believe in and claim another way to live. And this is where the fool comes in. The fool is an archetype. You might know them as the trickster or the jester. The fool is a card in the tarot and an archetype in that system.
And in my experience of this archetype, the fool is here to scoff at convention. The fool walks the borderlands between what is taboo and what's acceptable. The fool helps the village to stay honest and true to itself. The fool actually shows us what is valuable by laughing at what we hold most dear and showing us our faults.
Putting a mirror back up to us to keep us humble. The fool is all about paradox. On one hand, nothing matters and it's all a big joke. And on the other hand, everything matters. On one hand, we shouldn't be so serious about life. And on the other, we need to wake up from the stupor and take each day as a treasure. On one hand, you know, who do we think we are to entertain the idea of village to be here even?
And on the other hand, the fool tells us that we're meant for so much more than this way of living. And one of the ways I like to study concepts like this is by just learning more about the root of the language. So what is the word fool? What does it mean? Where did it come from? And it's from the Latin fallus, which meant like a windbag or an empty headed person who's just full of air. And there's a
Sanskrit root as well, vatula, which literally means inflated with wind. And this is really interesting, this wind idea, this airy kind of sense of the word fool, because wind cannot be contained. It can be channeled, like through a cavern or now through maybe a wind farm, but it cannot be trapped or caught.
Wind is functionally invisible to us. Only its effects can really be seen. We see what it touches, what it moves, what it does to a place, but we don't see the wind itself. And wind, what is wind, but breath. It's air. It's life itself in many ways. So it's not like we always want to emulate the fool.
You know, the fool is only one archetype of many, many, and for good reason. The fool, there's no one archetype that's always powerful and always the right way to go. But the fool serves a really important function. What would be helpful or medicinal about becoming an empty headed person right now? What would it mean to become like the wind, to be inflated, animated with wind. What is the wisdom in that? And of course, it's like, of course the fool is inflated with wind, because then you get into like gas and farts and fart jokes, and it's just too good to be true, I think. I also like this connection between foolish and naive. naive comes from the Latin nativus, born innate, natural.
So to be naive isn't a negative thing at all. It means to be in touch with what is innate and natural to you. And there's a connection there between naive and foolish, being naive and being foolish, because the fool can help us to remember and return to what is already within us, to that naivety that can help us just soften into village.
You know, just accept that that's what we need. That's what we want. That's how we evolved. It's not weird or stupid or silly. It's absolutely true and innate to who we are. So we can just soften into it like a little child might just claim it and just like, you know, make a pretend village and just want to be there. And they just know that they need more people in their lives and they need a lot of support and everyone's gifts are welcome.
It can absolutely be a childish yearning and I think it should be. And we also need to be really fierce about claiming our right to it. It's kind of like there's a difference between capital F fool, this wise archetype that laughs and brings paradox and makes fun of us and also shows us what is really true and is a necessary part of our world. And then there's like lowercase F fool, which is just rampant in our culture and the foolishness and the madness of the way that we're living right now. But we get those two things confused. We see someone maybe following their heart or a calling or living in a way that's not quote unquote normal. And we think that they're being irresponsible or foolish and silly. But actually, what if we turned it on its head?
And the idea of living in one house with everything one person or a family could need, even though your neighbor has a bunch of that stuff as well, and living in ways that destroy our planet and that make us feel totally isolated and alone and is causing us to be really unwell and sick and lack the vitality to fully live in the ways that we want to. That's real foolishness and silliness and depravity. So we have these two things mixed up because the fool understands that we are absolutely meant to live in village. The fool as an archetype is just an expression of life force and life forms in webs which humans once knew and emulated.
So the fool, think, is supportive of our desire to live in village and calls us into that through paradox and humor and trickiness. But the fool is not going to show us a convenient, comfortable way from here, where we are, into village. If we're talking about the fool and the wind, then this is about sailing, working with the wind.
Not trying to control the process or the energies that are pushing us there, but working in alignment with them and letting go of control. you know, convenience and comfort, these are like two of the most seductive golden handcuffs that keep us trapped. The fool despises convenience and comfort because the fool knows that they are sedatives and that they are, again,
paradoxical. On one hand, we are way too comfortable, like in this sort of quote unquote American dream lifestyle. We're way too comfortable. None of our ancestors would have been sitting this much or eating foods with chemicals in them or, you know, not spending hours outside. So on one hand, it's just way we're way too far in the realm of comfort and convenience and giving our bodies like every single pleasure possible.
On the other hand, we're deeply uncomfortable because of the loss of village and not having the true, our true needs met, our need to feel seen and loved, the pleasure of, you know, being under the sun or feeling the rain on our face, knowing that our kids have healthy food to eat and that our elders aren't going to be forgotten. Like there's so much that's backwards about where we find comfort and what levels of comfort we're experiencing in different parts of our lives. So it's kind of like we're treading water in the ocean alone, but then every once in a while, someone throws us a buoy of distraction or consumption or, you know, our false ambitions. So we get these little reprieves and it's really comfortable and convenient and fast and it feels good.
but we're still trading water in the ocean alone and there's sharks around and we're scared and it's not comfortable in the least. So if we're going to grow into village, we will have to let go of a lot of comfort and convenience. And I think this might be the piece where I want to talk about intentional communities or like eco-friendly resorts or like pseudo villages kind of. And
I think the reason I've never really felt drawn to those, and again, I don't mean to come from a place of judgment, but I just want to be honest about my experience and my perspective. Village is not just an intentional community or an eco-friendly place. Like, I just came across this eco-friendly community, I guess, where it's just...
It's like the houses are, you know, between 700 grand and a million dollars. And it's this super, it's like capitalist village, I guess, because real village, what I'm inviting us to consider in this season and what I think the fool is calling us into is about a different kind of culture and way of being. is understanding ourselves as animals, as part of a larger web.
It is about contending with death and life and rebirth and having rites of passage, it has to be built around a new culture or else it just repeats domination culture and you have your intentional community where, you know, it's a million dollars to buy into. It's just absurd. So I think the place I'm trying to start is in this cultural piece and learning how to connect to my wise and well ancestors, what it means to be a settler on this land, what does it mean to rebuild relationships with the land and the more than human kin that I live with. And that will take time and hard choices, but I think that's the only way to get into Village because I just don't think it will work if it's just a matter of buying property together, which I've thought about and may do one day, I don't know.
But I've seen so many times the same troubles come and infect an intentional community or people with really good intentions to live among one another. But it's still so rooted in domination culture and in the sort of lies of civilization that it didn't really have a chance because we're not, it's not about making a whole new culture that's actually a very old culture. So.
I don't know because I'm not there yet, but I believe that Village will really require creating a new culture and giving up on anonymity, total privacy, control, so many of those things that we have learned in white supremacist culture, self-sufficiency, having things the way we want them when we want them immediately, know, never being hungry, not having any duties or responsibilities.
And so much more. The costs are great. I don't pretend like they're not. And I don't think the fool would pretend otherwise. He probably thinks we can't do it. There's part of me that wonders if we can do it. what we might gain in return could be being really known and loved for our gifts, having support before we even know to ask for it.
Enjoying a rich life that has been stitched together through the gifts of others where we don't always feel guilty and like everything including us is just disposable. We could live in a way where we know that we are needed, where we eventually can grow into elders who are respected and trusted. And to me that's worth a lot and it's worth way more than my comfort and convenience. And those are edges that I'm...
Constantly growing into and challenging and it's not a perfect process at all, but I think it's where we're meant to be looking and growing into right now. So this spring, I'd like to invite you to consider what about village, if anything, calls to you? Are there specific parts of this idea or this dream?
that feel really alive for you? And are there entry points where you could begin to cultivate that in your life right now? And what about the fool and your relationship to the fool? If you were on a walk in the woods and you met the fool, who I'm sure would look ghastly and wild and, you know, shocking even, what might he say to you about the way that you're living or the yearnings on your heart? What scares you about his call to really live and to trade conformity for greater integrity. We can all begin by loosening the grip of capitalism and colonization within us and just allowing ourselves to hear the fool's call. You know, do we want to live? Do we really want to live? And what does that mean for each of us in our own unique bodies and circumstances and histories?
It may mean, you know, letting go of the need to have a nicer car or feeling like embarrassed about the car you drive or letting go of the need to care about where someone works or like feign being impressed if someone works at a big corporation or something or you know what if it meant only taking advice from children for a while. It could look like doing something that everyone else might say is reckless or naive and just relishing in their derisive comments. So I think maybe for the spring, a good guidepost could be that if we're not making sense to most people, that maybe that means we're on the right track. If we're being called foolish or naive, could those be badges of honor? Could we adore that and keep going in that direction?
You know, as a descendant of peoples from Europe, it's true that since the Romans, at least I'm sure before that, that we have been a conquered people, that we all have legacies of being conquered and then coming and conquering others and ourselves. And we are still under the thumb of conquest and empire, these corporate elites commodifying every part of our lives.
People with brains that have microplastics in them, people with their attention addicted to apps and devices. It's madness. It's absolutely madness. But the fool will not be conquered - is unconquerable. So in this early spring period, as the Aries ram shines over us and the most naive but courageous little sprouts show themselves above the soil, could we become less conquered, less conquerable? Could we recognize more and more the ways that we are controlled and trying to control others, even trying to control the earth herself? And could we stop investing in that control and in being controlled? Could we ride these winds of change and stop treading water alone, but board ships of sanity together?
And see where our foolishness and where our naivety take us. I would really like to see that happen and I hope that this podcast series this spring is a part of that and is a little boat of sanity that you can get on and we'll ride these winds together. So I hope that you are foolish in some way today or in the coming days. I hope you find your foolish edge and meet it as courageously as you can. And if you need to know how, I invite you to look to the young ones, look to the little babies, to the kids, to the little sprouts, the kittens, the puppies, the little baby birds that are gonna start hatching. Watch them, see how they do it. They can show us what it means to be good fools and courageous in that.
I hope that today's episode was a blessing to you. will see you again in two weeks with my first guest who will be talking about growing into Village as part of our human development. And if you enjoyed the episode and have the means, I welcome your financial support. You can pitch in at buymeacoffee.com slash Megan Leatherman and I'll put that link in the show notes.
And as always, I'm so grateful for you sharing the episode or making meaning of it in your life or rating the show and subscribing. All of that are ways that you can help get this work and these messages out to others. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.