How Things Could Be
In this final episode of the Winter 2025 season of A Wild New Work, I'm offering a vision of how things could be. May this vision be a seed that nestles inside us this Spring and may it grow to give us the heart and courage to live in a good way. Enjoy!
Click here to listen to this episode on Spotify
Click here to listen to this episode on Apple
You can also play the episode via SoundCloud below, or by searching for “A Wild New Work” wherever you stream!
A written transcript can be found below the embedded player.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help get it to others by subscribing, rating the show, or sharing it with a friend! You can also pitch in to support the show once or monthly at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/meganleatherman
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 and welcome.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really honored to share this space with you. This week on March 20th, we are going to cross over the spring equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, that would be the autumn equinox. But up here, we're crossing from winter into spring. And in some...systems, I guess this would be the mid-spring festival, not the beginning of spring. And I encourage you to just notice what the landscape is doing where you are. Does it feel like the middle of spring? If so, you know, enjoy celebrating that. If it feels like things are still kind of just getting started and you feel like it's winter has been around, you know, then perhaps this is the start of the spring season for in the land that you live on. You get to decide what fits and I encourage you, know, as long as you're paying attention to what the land is doing and how it feels and what you're noticing to just roll with it. There's no wrong way to observe the spring equinox.
For today's episode and in honor of this stepping into the next season, I want to help expand our imaginations a little bit and help life move even more in the direction of healing, repair, and joy. You know, sometimes we get so used to how things are that we don't take a minute to imagine how good things could be. And I don't mean that we should be in denial about where we are or always living in a fantasy, but I do think there is a lot of power in our imaginations and in the ability to imagine even more birdsong, even more flowers, even more beauty or fruits or joy in the world around us. Dominant Western culture, capitalist culture deadens our imagination, right? That's how it serves itself. It gets us to a place where we can't even imagine living differently.
There must just be this job, these jobs, earning a living, getting as much money as you can and finding security there. But if we can open up to other ways of living, other possibilities, if we could even allow our hearts to dream into or desire greater beauty this spring and in the springs to come, I think that has a real meaningful material effect on us and on the world.
So I want to offer a new vision, not really a new vision, a new vision steeped in old visions about how things could be, how we could live, what the spring equinox of the future could actually be like. And I hope that you really love it or that you at least learn something about where you are and what your orientation to life is feeling like today.
Just one announcement before I dive in, which is that the Spring Journal is here. The Spring edition of Living the Seasons is available now. I've been shipping them out to those of you who ordered early. This journal is the third in a series of four, one for each season, and it is all about your gifts, what you came here to this planet to do, your true nature, and how to grow sustainably, just like all of the plants and animals know how to grow at this time. And growing doesn't have to mean just doing more or getting better at capitalist things. Growing can be about living as your most natural self, being in service to the ecosystem that you live in, enjoying your gifts and enjoying this life as much as any other being on this planet has the right to.
So there are a couple of ways that you can get a journal. One is by becoming a sustainer member. Sustainers get a journal for every season and they also support this show and make it available to everyone. They also get free access to the seasonal classes that coincide with the journal and some other, I think, really sweet benefits. So I'm so honored to be in a reciprocal relationship with sustainers and that's one way that you could get a journal.
If you would like to just purchase the journal, can do that at awildnewwork.com slash shop. It's available as a physical thing that I will mail you or as a PDF. And both versions this season come with an audiobook version where I read the journal content and you can take it on the go with you in case that is helpful. I want to say a big thank you to everyone supporting the show financially by pitching in at buymeacoffee.com.
Jess, an anonymous contributor, and all of the monthly members and past contributors who are making this possible. Thank you. I am so, so grateful to be in that relationship with you. Okay, so with that, why don't we shift into our opening invocation? So wherever you are, you might just notice how your body's doing today. If it's been a minute since you've taken a deep breath, this might be a good time.
Might be good time to let out a sigh.
And just for, you know, five seconds even, just feeling the vitality that's moving through your veins right now and in and out from your lungs.
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
Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about the spring equinox as I do and what it means to give new life, what it means for the land to be reborn, for life to renew itself. And this has kind of coincided, I think really sweetly with a lot of thinking about what it means to be a witch. And some of this has come up in my...preparations for the next round of composting capitalism, which is my class on the origins of capitalism. And a big part of that was the European witch hunts. And we go through a book by Sylvia Federici called Caliban and the Witch. I've been as part of this prep. I've been listening to this awesome podcast series by BBC four called Witch. And it's really, really good. You'll love it if you're into this kind of stuff.
And one of the things they talk about is just the larger archetype of witch and how that has moved through history and shown up in different ways and just kind of what it means in the past and now. And obviously a lot of what it has meant has been evil, scary, bad, dangerous. It's a very provocative term and has been denigrated for a long, long time. And in one of the episodes they interviewed Silvia Federici and something she said just really stood out to me. She said, “The witch is the enemy of God, is the enemy of man, is the enemy of the state, is the ultimate, ultimate, irredeemable evil, and it's a woman.”
And to me, this quote is really exciting.
I feel...alive in the call to be an enemy of the state, especially, and also the call to be a woman and all of that power and complexity and expansion that it can be for each of us if we identify as a woman. And there has been such a complex history in the past and present of what it means to be a witch and that term and what it means to identify as a witch. And it's not a label that I have ever been very public about or that I even really rely on that much. It's just kind of like, like my daughter asked me a couple of years ago if I was a witch and it just was like, yeah, it was not a witch, you know, if you love the earth and you believe in the cycles of the seasons. And to me, it's very basic. You know, for me, the core of what it means to be a witch is to be in deep relationship with the earth and to act as a conduit in service to life.
And how that looks is different to all of us. It doesn't have to be as a witch. And there are many different kinds of witches, know, green plant witches, kitchen witches, hedge witches, which is my favorite sort of beings on the edge of the village, at the edge of the forest in conversation with something larger, not so wrapped up in society and sort of someone in a more solitary, perhaps, practice. But however you identify whether that term fits for you or not, I do believe that we are all conduits, we all can be conduits for life and to be in service to life. If you think about a tree, you know, the sun shines down, life can sort of come down through the crown of the tree into the roots.
The soil is fed, the air is purified around the tree. Life can come up from the roots as well. Others are fed. So these trees, these incredible beings are like these vertical conduits for life up and down and around. And I think the same can be true as well, that when we are open and in our own magic, whatever that means for each of us, our visions, our dreams, our desires, our actions, our prayers, can nurture the soil at our roots, at our feet, and nurture seeds of new possibilities. When we are connected to the earth in our own unique ways, we can draw up what we need and be so sturdy that we can actually be a source of nourishment and protection to others. And for me, to be a witch means to have agency, to be an ally of the earth and her power, to be in love with life in relationship to life. And I don't think we can really protect or cherish what we're not in love with. And through hundreds of years, thousands of years even, of globalization, forced migration, war, colonization.
You know, more recently white trauma like the witch hunts in Europe, that a lot of us, no matter where our ancestors are from, but maybe I'll just speak to people with European ancestry for a minute. A lot of us have not processed the pain and suffering that has been in our past. And it came over with us here to this place now called the United States.
And it took shape as colonization and genocide. So our own bonds with the land were severed either through being conquered by Romans or through the emergence of capitalism. We brought that over with us, severed the relationships between the indigenous people here and their lands. And most of us are just here now a little bit further from that history, but still absolutely living in its reverberations, wondering how we connect to the land. How can we fall in love with life again? What does that even mean as the ancestors, as the descendants of colonizers and as the descendants of people who themselves were cut off or forced off of places where they had deep intimate connections to the land? we might, you know, cognitively love the land and believe in conservation and we know that climate change is real and we might feel worried about the future, but our actions, what we do with that is a lot different when we're acting out of a deep knowing and love of a place, of the beings there. When we have been fed by a place, when we have cried there, when we've done ritual there, when we've nurtured the plants there, or had special animal encounters.
Those ties of love and relationship are what can give us the courage then to actually protect it, to love it, to cherish it, to stand up for it, to choose to stay there even when things get really challenging. And the word courage comes from the old French word courage, and it has a Latin root of core, which is heart.
So courage comes from the heart, not the mind or the phallus. Courage comes from the heart beating in your chest where you feel love, where you feel heartsick, where you feel grief and elation. And I think courage is a really compelling feeling and idea. It's something that I hope to cultivate more and more the older I get.
Years and years ago, I remember my parents were on this like family ancestry kick and I can't remember where they were, but they went to some like genealogy storefront of some kind. And I feel like this is probably a scam, but I'm going to take what I find useful from it. they, you know, shared like where, what the family names are and when people came over and then this shop gave them like our family coat of arms for both sides, like our German ancestors and our Irish ancestors. And I don't think our ancestors had coats of arms. I think they were like, at that point, very low on the ladder in society kinds of people. And I don't believe those people had coats of arms. anyway, the family motto that was assigned to my Irish heritage was, “renew your courage.”
And I remember this and I hold on to it and I am grateful for that genealogy shop who probably kind of scammed my parents, but who gifted us this phrase that I find to be really powerful. Renew your courage. Courage can be renewed. It's not a once and done stagnant kind of thing. Like you have it or you don't. And if...
Courage is about your heart and your love, then you can renew your love for this life. Renew your courage, renew your love for the magic and wonder of this place where we live. That I think is what is possible for us this spring. And we all need to be courageous right now. And what if the pathway to being more courageous right now is to fall deeper in love with this life that you're living, with the people that you share a life with, the home you live in, the beings who visit your yard or the park where you go for the sun, for every flower that blooms, every little bird that's making a nest right now, what would it mean and what would it take for you to fall more deeply in love with life this spring? Life, big L life that doesn't take any...
Purchases or degrees or a resume or an application? It's all there just here for you if you would like to be in relationship with it So the witch may not be a role or an archetype that fits for you right now, but what does what would allow you to expand your relationship with this earth, with this life that you get to live. Can you see yourself as a tree, you know, both rooted and reaching? How can you see yourself more and more as a partner to and irreplaceable part of this web of life that we are each in? And to kind of stoke the flames of this love today, I want to take you on a journey.
And I think that's another special thing about witches is that they know how to journey, they know how to identify what they want and draw it nearer with their imagination and intention. And this is something that all people can do. And what I'm going to share with you is a future that I dream into all the time. It's just kind of like a musical backdrop throughout my days if it's not replaced by worry or like moving through my to-do list.
But it's always kind of humming along there. And it occurred to me that you might not dream into something like this or that you might like to hear someone else's dream and see what resonates or doesn't resonate with you about it. So as I tell you about this spring day in the future, I encourage you to notice when your heart kind of leaps in a yes and when you feel some resistance.
Like that's not something that you'd like or there's some kind of block that might be worth just investigating. And my dream, of course, is not perfect. It's limited by my perspective and my biases and it's not finished. It's never going to be finished. It doesn't need to be. But I do feel pretty strongly that it is a lot more enriching and beautiful than the vision that capitalism is offering to us right now.
The bar is very low. So I think whatever you're going to hear today is going to lift your heart in some way. And we need new visions to guide us, to show us what life could be like, to show us that this earth is still beautiful and worth protecting and loving and cherishing. Okay, so this is a story about a spring equinox in the future, and you and I are moving through the day together, and I encourage you to again just listen and see what stands out for you, what feels like a yes or a no, and just notice how it feels to imagine this with me.
So it's the future and the world is a lot different than it used to be in 2025. Things changed so quickly. It was pretty jarring at first, but actually it ended up being for the best.
The earth got the relief she needed from being mined, drilled, and polluted, and now it seems like things are finding balance and renewal again. A big reason why this change could happen so quickly with minimal damage was that we all started to listen to Indigenous leaders more, to people who never lost track of the old ways of how to relate to the earth, and they very graciously helped everyone start to heal from the disease of colonizer mind and come back home to themselves, to one another, and to the land. So things aren't perfect, there's still a lot to be done, but it feels so good knowing that huge swaths of land were returned to indigenous tribes around the world. There has been a profound shift in resources as reparations were made to Black and indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, and the same has been done in other places around the world too.
The United States Empire dissolved, which was a little scary for a lot of people, but again, we were taking our cues from the people who never bought into empire in the first place. And they showed us how to organize ourselves, how to be in village with one another, how to get our needs met in better ways and how to be guided by our own wise and well ancestors.
So now here we are. We live in a modest village in the woods near a beautiful bright blue river with more fish coming back up every day. There are bald eagles nesting nearby, chickadees, robins, nut hatches, wild bunnies, so many sweet and special beings. The deer roam freely, unharmed and beautiful, and it is so quiet.
There aren't planes overhead constantly and with cars being so few these days, we don't really hear road or truck traffic like we used to. And there are other villages nearby and it's been really lovely to see new cultures emerging from these villages made up of so many different kinds of people, each bringing their unique heritage forward and finding new but old ways to live and relate to the earth and to each other. So here in our village, our homes are modest dwellings. They're not nearly as big as our old homes were, but it feels so nice to live inside of a shelter that was made by us, by our hands, with wood from this forest where we live and the wood that we only took after asking the forest and receiving its blessing to do so. There's almost no plastic around anymore. We get to live inside of real wood homes that are sturdily made. We use handmade clay bowls and cups. Our textiles are recycled or handmade. So many of them imbued with meaning or given as gifts from loved ones.
We are just surrounded by craftsmanship and it has really made us feel more noble, like we kind of hold our heads higher and we appreciate all that goes into making something as simple as a fork, you know, which we took for granted in the before times. So it's breakfast time now and you're here in my home for a meal. Welcome.
We drink water straight from the mountain that comes down this river and we still have to boil it, but it's so fresh and tastes so much different than the chlorinated tap water that we used to have. We have a hearty breakfast that includes food grown right here in our village or forged from the woods. And there is no rush to get through it. We eat next to a wood burning stove that keeps us warm on these cool spring mornings. And we just take our time.
And when we're done, we ready ourselves for our days and we walk down a wooded footpath, dappled in sunlight to the main village center where we see others that we live with. And everyone looks so much more alive than they did in the before times. It's really amazing what regular grief rituals, no electric lighting, deep sleep, wild food and fresh air can do. People are just shining.
And you go off to join a group that's helping to prepare for the Spring Equinox Ritual tonight. And it's a group of others who share some of your gifts. Perhaps you're all gifted in music and you're preparing the set for tonight, or perhaps you're gifted in making food, so you're prepping the feast. You find where your gifts are needed and you're asked to join and contribute, because everyone's help is needed. We make everything ourselves.
And everyone's gifts are welcome. Children run around, pets kind of mill about as the adults prepare for the ritual to welcome spring. It's a beautiful morning. starting to warm up now. It smells so fresh and good. There are no clocks. There's nowhere else that we need to be, nothing else we need to be doing. There is plenty of good herbal tea and healthy snacks to keep the energy up.
And you're still surprised actually by how much energy you have throughout the day when you used to crash so regularly in the afternoons or the evenings. With as much as you walk and use your body now, you sleep so well and you have more than enough energy to get through the day without a bunch of caffeine or stimulants. So when there's been enough preparations made, everyone takes a break for lunch, which you can have with the village or at your own home or even in a picnic alone in the woods. And after you eat, you take some time to just lay down in the sunshine. You listen to the birds, to the river, to the children who are laughing at a story told by an old grandfather. They think the way that we lived in the before times is really silly.
And there's just no rush to get up. Time is so much slower here when you want it to be, when you need it to be.
And as you lay down just listening and feeling warmed by the sun, you think about how different this life is in the village, how there's so much more time and capacity to take care of one another. And you're beginning to realize more and more just how much it weighed on you before, knowing that others were suffering, driving by unhoused people on the street or knowing how alone new mothers felt or how forgotten elders felt. You just never realized how heavy that made your heart feel. And now living among people whose lives aren't perfect, but who truly do have their needs met and are not left alone or forgotten, you just feel this undercurrent of joy that resonates and moves through you. It's like a river that just flows.
So with these thoughts kind of drifting through your mind, you doze off with a full belly and you have a dream, a visit from your ancestors with an important message about what you need to tend to at the Spring Equinox ritual tonight. You wake up grateful, still in awe of how easily the magic and the messages come in this new way of living when you can be silent and listen, when your nervous system is grounded, when you're literally laying on the earth, breathing in all of this fresh air your heart tended to.
And the ritual is starting to near now. And so you go home to freshen up and gather some materials to bring. You return to the village square where your loved ones and friends are gathering and the sun is starting to set. There's a large fire in the center and it feels so nice and warm to be around. And you know that the ritual is about to begin.
The Council of Grandmothers who guide the village come to open the ritual and you feel so grateful for their wisdom and their long-term perspective. You don't always agree with everything they decide, but you really appreciate how much more natural and healthy it feels to look to their leadership, these wise old women. They pray prayers to the earth and to the ancestors and to all of the helping spirits and the ritual is started.
And beginning with the children, everyone is invited to circle around the fire, either walking or dancing to the music that's playing and just releasing whatever needs to be released from the winter season into the flames. Songs are sung, some people dance, many people cry. The children are wearing crowns of plants and flowers as today is a day when we honor the wisdom of the young ones and the courage they have to love life, to play, to act with abandon and hope. The grandmothers pray prayers of protection over the children so that they will be well and loved and guided throughout their lives. When everyone has circled the fire, we all go to a sacred bowl of water and cup the fresh river water into our hands and grace our faces with it, cleansing ourselves from the winter so that we can step into the spring balanced and renewed, ready to take part in life's rebirth. The music kicks up, the feast is brought out, and it becomes a party. And you can stay as long as you'd like to.
And whenever you feel ready, you might even stop by the soaking tubs that are set out under the stars and tended to by the community. You've come to really love having a warm soak under a star-filled sky before you head to bed.
And as you wind down your day, you go to sleep feeling known and loved and an ease in your heart knowing that the way we live now isn't hurting so many people. It's not hurting the earth like it was before. It's not perfect, but you wouldn't go back to the before times as comfortable as those were at times. You are so grateful that you had the courage to listen.
To change, to imagine and then step into a new world and a new way of living. What a beautiful spring equinox. And now I invite you listening here in this present moment to send any nutrients from this vision down now through your body, through your roots into the ground.
May our visioning bless this earth on this equinox. May it nurture the seeds of possibilities that are germinating within her. May you be well. I hope that vision lifted you, lifted your spirits in some way. May you keep imagining the rebirth of good ways. Keep imagining how beautiful and delicious and delightful things could be. And I hope you have a beautiful spring equinox.
If you are listening and feel moved and have the capacity to support the show, I would be so grateful. You can pitch in once or monthly at buymeacoffee.com slash Megan Leatherman. If that doesn't feel right at this time, I also welcome your rating of the show, your reviews, your sharing it with loved ones, and especially hearing about how you're working it into your life and what it's doing for you. I really love hearing from you.
The spring season of A Wild New Work will begin on April 1st. Today was the last episode in the winter 2025 season. And our next season of the show is going to start in two weeks, on April 1st, April Fool's Day. I love the fool as a teacher. I'm excited to share some thoughts and ideas with you and get things moving in a more foolish direction. I hope you take such good care until then and I'll see you on the other side.