Bill Plotkin, also known by his soul name; Impossible Dreamer and I Sara McFarland, also known as Hologram Heart, speak about these times of crisis as personal and species wide initiatory journey and how we might turn towards this beautifully crafted crisis as the dying of the old paradigm needed to descend into the depths. We also speak about what is needed to answer the call. Impossible shares his vision for communities as transitional cultures and necessary next steps for our evolution as a species. We listen in to questions around elder hood and who might be our elders in these times, as well as the call that might come through the deep imagination for Beauty making and the way Myth is an ancient remembering and map for these times given to us by our ancestors. This is a delicious conversation at the edge of the known, calling out our longing to Mystery and the human species for a response that is generative and transformational. Please join us in the wander through the wilds of the deep imagination and the hearts of two edge-walking humans.

Bill Plotkin, he/him, www.animas.org

Bill Plotkin, PhD, is an eco-depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural regeneration. As founder of southwest Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute, he has, since 1980, guided thousands of people on the journey of soul initiation. He’s also been a research psychologist (studying nonordinary states of consciousness), rock musician, and white-water river guide. In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a “call to spiritual adventure,” leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development), Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (a nature-based map of the psyche), and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (a guidebook for the descent to soul). His doctorate in psychology is from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Visit him online at www.animas.org.

Manda Scott (I’m with Audrey Tang on pronouns: post-gender feels pretty good. She uses - */* which means ‘any entry accepted' in computer code, but if we have to nail it down then she/her is fine.)

Born in Scotland at 318ppm CO2, Manda Scott trained as a veterinary surgeon, but is now an award-winning novelist, host of the international chart-topping ‘Accidental Gods’ podcast, co-creator of the Thrutopia Masterclass and a contemporary shamanic practitioner/trainer at

Manda Scott is probably best known as a novelist, though she’s also host of the Accidental Gods podcast which, like us, gives a voice to people who are at the leading edge of inter-becoming, the emergence into a new paradigm that we all know we need. She’s the author of the Boudica: Dreaming series which explored the ways people lived in the islands of Britain before the horror of Roman colonisation, but with her last novel, she’s moved to the future five minutes from now - what she calls a Thrutopian future: how do we get through to a way of living we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. Manda is also a contemporary shamanic practitioner of over 40 years standing, and she’s been teaching since the early 2000s, so we stepped into the other words and took our whole conversation from there.

Podcast: https://accidentalgods.life

Novelist website: https://mandascott.co.uk

Website for aspiring writers: https://thrutopia.life

Contemporary shamanism: https://dreamingawake.co.uk

Holding the responsibility of healing through the personal and the collective

Charla and I explore the layers of the personal and the collective and how we move through the "pearl necklace" of karma, which is the way we respond habitually through the lenses of trauma, ancestral gift, cultural worldview. We explore together what it means to belong, how we feel and deal with anger and where its expression belongs, performative belonging versus authenticity and the question of why is it important to have a voice? This is a quantum and personal conversation with a dear dear friend of 20 years.

Charla is concerned about the ways in which humans, both the collectivity and individual humans, are embedded in community and in larger systems, including the somatic, psychological and spiritual implications of that. As well, Charla tracks the sociopolitical consequences of: being embedded, being engulfed, being dissociated, or being conscious of one’s own role to play in this lifetime; the contingencies that led to the position one finds oneself in; and the ways in which their role and trajectory impacts the larger systems. They are concerned with the relationship between our responsibility to show up fully within larger systems and the knowing that there is a larger, vast, expanse in which these larger systems and our roles within them are playing out. Their work is an exploration of what it means to be able to hold both perspectives of personal and collective, and to show up in both ways for oneself, for other humans, and for the innumerable beings that live on our planet.

Charla is a psychoanalytic therapist living and working on Abenaki land, or New Hampshire USA, though strongly identified as a Californian. Though they work with all, they have a special interest and lived experience in trans-affirmative care, specifically focusing on work with queer and trans youth. They have practiced and facilitated rites of passage work, somatic healing sessions, sacred wilderness practices, are a longstanding practitioner of American Zen Buddhism. They anticipate entering into training for psychedelic-assisted rites of passage and psychotherapy at some point in the near future.

https://www.charlamalamed.com

Music: Carry this All by Ahlay Blakely

Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendent of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator, and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memory. Her community singing album Spells from the Unknown offers songs for collective transformation, inquiry, and living in service to the future ones. Her second album, WAILS: Songs for Grief, was recorded with a 200-person choir and is entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, especially “the five gates of grief.” Her forthcoming third album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, arrives September 2025 and explores themes of collapse, courage, and abolitionist love. Through her music and gatherings, ahlay invites people into deep feeling, collective remembering, and the restoration of belonging across time.

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