The Returning Home Podcast

The place-connecting power of friendship
 
The great adventure of our time is to “green our deserts” in every sense: to help damaged places come back to life, leave our local ecologies and communities stronger, and journey home together.
Give this one a listen to hear what that means…
 
It’s easy to see the world is wanting to change, and in fact the only constant is change…
But it is so natural to resist change, to forego the adventure for the couch and screens. But we were born for this!
So how do we feel the stakes enough to be compelled ahead, to enter the adventure and keep going?
Beware of overwhelm and heroism, those are exhausting…
Quest 2: Befriending the World
For this quest, you are going to form one thread.
Choose one person, living being, or part of your place that you feel genuinely curious about and would like to know more deeply.
It could be:
Someone you often pass but have never met
A tree that stands out to you
A bird whose song you recognize and have been curious about
A creek you love but haven’t spent the time to really get to know
A garden
A trail
An animal
Any part of the living world around you
Find a way to befriend that part of the world.
If You Choose a Person
You might:
Learn their name
Ask what they are doing that day
Ask what they care about or what makes them feel alive
Be curious about them, and try to make them feel “seen”
Remember something they told you and follow up another time
The goal is to simply create an opening…
If You Choose Another Living Being or Part of Place
You might:
Learn its name
Notice its patterns or learn about its lifecycle
Spend time observing until you learn something you couldn’t have expected
Ask someone who knows more about it to teach you something
Find one friendly and respectful way to express your desire to connect
A friendly response might be picking up litter nearby, learning how to protect a habitat, creating some symbol of appreciation, or simply returning to visit and observe again.
What You Are Looking For
Do I feel more connected to the world around me?
Do I feel more capable of helping local connection grow?
Do I feel any more ready to meet what the adventure of Returning Home may ask of me?
If you aren’t sure, go out again to visit what you’re trying to befriend. Ask a new question and try to be earnest, notice something more specific, squint your eyes a bit, wait for a surprise, or choose something else that makes you more curious.
Your Artifact
The final step of the quest is to create an artifact.
This artifact is a symbol of the thread you formed, but even more than that, it is a symbol of your ability to be a Befriender of the World.
It is something you can look to and remember:
I can create openings.
I can form connections.
I can help friendship and connection to form in my place.
Your artifact should be specific to the connection you made.
It might be:
A card with the name of your new connection and perhaps a short description of your quest
A piece of thread or cord that represents the relationship being formed
A sketch or photo
Something pocket-sized so you can keep it with you as you continue on your Returning Home adventure
 
Share The Story of Your Quest
If you go on the quest, share what happened in the comments.
You can share the story, a description of your artifact, or simply the name of what you befriended.
 

What if the next great adventure is not in faraway lands, but waiting for you in the place you already live?
In this first quest of the Returning Home Adventure Series, we explore Forming Eyes of Place: learning to see in a way that helps us reenter a vibrant, connected, living world.
Drop into the sounds, insects, cottonwoods, traffic, and web of life beside Bear Creek where we sit and remember why it's a good thing to do.
See why our adventure starts with a great paradox, how addressing the big-scale problems of the world can start by slowing down where we are, and how attention to place can help us get our footing again.
 
First Quest Instructions: Forming Eyes of Place
Go sit in a spot near where you live.
It doesn’t have to be wild.It doesn’t have to be pristine.It just has to be somewhere you can get to easily and often, and where you can sit safely for a while.
Start for five minutes. See if you want to stay longer or return for more.
Notice what’s moving around you.Notice the sounds.Notice what’s moving.Notice what notices you.
Then ask yourself:
What did I notice that most people miss?
Side quest: Interview somebody who has a different way of seeing place - maybe a bird watcher, or a community organizer, or a park ranger.
Then ask them:
What do you notice about our place that most people miss?
See if you can discover a new set of eyes to somehow see place anew.
Please share this with anyone who might want to join the adventure.

What are the conditions we have to get into to learn how to make our community feel more like home? 
Over the last six episodes of Returning Home, I’ve been exploring six simple ways communities can learn about exactly that: 
Noticing Place
Finding Belonging
Listening for Local Story
Sensing What's Changing
Opening to Possibility
Acting and Becoming
 
This episode is a pause to look back, but mostly to look ahead, toward turning these practices into small, welcoming adventures people can try where they live.
I share a surprising lesson from a story I stumbled upon recently. It helped me see Returning Home from a new angle.
It’s easy to think the future of our places is mostly in the hands of institutions, organizations, and folks with official titles. But a place is a living field of changing conditions, and too much of our response is divided across separate organizations, categories, and responsibilities.
Maybe that means more of us need small ways to get out there, notice what is happening, find each other, connect things up, and practice moving into the future together.
Visit awakeninglands.com to learn more or get in touch.

In Todmorden, an old textile town in northern England, Pam Warhurst and a few friends found something everyone can do, right outside their doors, and paired that with an infectious can-do attitude. For a bit of British English and a quote from Pam:
“Why don’t we just start doing stuff for ourselves instead of having a whinge about everybody else not doing stuff.”
They got the whole town “unstuck.” And in fact, they really got moving!
This is the awesome story of Incredible Edible, which demonstrates how local food became a path for ordinary people to grow food, grow self-belief, strengthen community, support local farmers, and begin responding to planetary problems starting right outside their doors.
If you eat, you’re in.
In the Returning Home Podcast, we are exploring things small groups and whole communities can do together to deepen their sense of home.
That means growing our connection to the places we live, the people around us, and the wider living world, starting right outside our doors.
And it means growing a sense of home within ourselves, so we feel more rooted, more connected. 
This episode explores: how do we move from caring about the places we call home, and learning more about them, into real action?
But the actions we can participate in that actually improve the world can feel out of reach and overwhelming when our focus is on the big, far away stuff. This leads to a lot of people feeling stuck.
It’s absolutely essential to know that changing ourselves for the better is very often easiest by removing what holds us back, instead of pushing ourselves harder. Bit of useful psychology there…
Please visit awakeninglands.com to learn how we’re exploring things everyone can do to grow the sense of home, wherever you live.
Just like Pam and Incredible Edible.
Featured Sources
Incredible Ediblehttps://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/
Incredible Edible Todmordenhttps://incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
Pam Warhurst TED Talk: How We Can Eat Our Landscapeshttps://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes
Do Good Podcast #50: Pam Warhurst on the Power of Small Actionshttps://www.dogoodpodcast.co.uk/ep-50-pam-warhurst
The Guardian: Incredible Edible Yorkshire town’s food growing scheme takes root worldwidehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/09/incredible-edible-yorkshire-towns-food-growing-scheme-takes-root-worldwide

How a Food System Can Learn to See Itself.
 
If we want to live in a healthy relationship with the places we call home, with each other and the rest of life, we have to learn how to sense a better way forward together.
To sense what’s possible, we have to get out into the world together.We have to journey out and learn what is actually happening.
But to truly change…We have to have a quality of presence to know what we may need to let go of…
If we are able to do so, what better future might then be able to come through?
In South Africa, the Southern Africa Food Lab brought together people from across the food system to explore creative responses to hunger and malnutrition.
Farmers, researchers, civil leaders, funders, and other representatives of the food system entered learning journeys, dialogue, and co-creative spaces to better understand how to fully transform.
This episode begins with Norah Mlondobozi, a former teacher and smallholder farmer from Mopani, who once said:
“You cannot teach a hungry child.”
Through the Southern Africa Food Lab, we explore the practice of Presencing, described by Theory U, which asks the question:
What might we need to go out and sense clearly, so we can know what to let go of, and what to let come?
This is also one of the community practices we’re learning to host within Returning Home.
Visit awakeninglands.com to learn more.
 
Featured Sources:
Southern Africa Food Labhttps://www.southernafricafoodlab.org/
Creating Transformative Spaces for Dialogue and Action: Reflecting on the Experience of the Southern Africa Food Labhttps://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss3/art2/
Researchers Convening Dialogue to Address Grand Challenges: Affordances, Tensions, and the Shift to Deep Dialoguehttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14761270241279132
Mopani Learning Journey Reflections https://www.southernafricafoodlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Mopani-Learning-Journey-Reflections.pdf
Theory Uhttps://www.presencing.org/

If we want to live in a healthy relationship with the places we call home, with each other and the rest of life, we have to understand what’s actually happening around us.
No one person can ever see the whole picture.But what becomes visible when we weave our experiences and perspectives together?
 
What might be happening around you that you simply can’t see on your own?
In the 1960s, the Governor of New York called the Hudson River “one great septic tank.”The living system was completely overwhelmed. 
Everyone could see it. Everyone could smell it. Those who allowed themselves, could feel it.
But the situation was complex and those who wanted to understand it were up against a culture that saw industrial grime as a necessary byproduct of progress and strength.
As awareness of environmental issues were growing, a small group of mostly college students and fishermen set out to understand the river for themselves. This group soon became known as the People’s Pipewatch Program. 
They formed a distributed network, each person observing a different patch of the river.
This episode tells the story of how a group of people, coming together, were able to understand a complex system in a way no individual could alone, and in doing so, offer a much needed fuller picture.
It’s also an exploration of an essential practice we’re learning to host within Returning Home, which asks the question:
What becomes visible when we start weaving our experiences and perspectives together?
Visit awakeninglands.com to start your own Returning Home Practice.
Featured Sources:
Hudson River Sloop Clearwater https://www.clearwater.org/
Hudson River Maritime Museumhttps://www.hrmm.org/history-blog/the-hudson-river-then-and-now-a-brief-history-of-water-quality
Hudson River Valley Heritagehttps://omeka.hrvh.org/exhibits/show/rescuing-the-river/bagging-polluters/people-s-pipewatch
 
Updated Information:
After publishing this episode, I sent it to the only student from the People's Pipewatch Program who's name was listed in one of the sources.
I heard back from her and she shared that the effort was actually a small investigative team rather than a larger distributed group. Their monitoring began with what were called “permits to pollute.” Then they visited sites to see whether what companies reported matched what was actually entering the river. In doing so, they uncovered many additional, often unreported discharges.
Her message left me even more impressed with what they were able to accomplish. 
A clear lesson for me: rely as much as possible on primary sources.

What happens when a story of place reveals something we couldn't see before?
In this episode of Returning Home, a conversation about migratory birds unexpectedly opens into a larger story about hidden patterns in living landscapes, the surprising power of story, and how people may begin seeing themselves as part of something larger by knowing more stories of the places they call home.
Featuring the inspiring Western New York Wildways as one example of a story of place, this episode explores how stories can change how we relate to the living world around us… and perhaps even what becomes possible.
As promised in the episode, here’s a link to the Western New York Wildways website, with “The Map” - https://www.wnylc.org/wnywildway 
 
After listening to the episode…
Does your home region feel different after hearing this story of place?
Please feel welcome to come explore more of the Returning Home practice at https://awakeninglands.com/.

There’s an instinct we may all have, a feeling of home.
In this episode, we explore that feeling as something already present, but often overlooked in a fast-moving, increasingly placeless world.
In a world where many of us have lost the meaning of home, it can often be painful, too easy to ignore, or hard to name.
But what if we just need to turn our heads to see it from a new angle? What if that can actually show us the way home?
In this episode, you'll find out just what that means.
Visit awakeninglands.com to start practicing Returning Home, alone, with a partner, with a group, as a place...

Our attention shapes our experience of the world… and who we become.
In this episode, we explore what it means to pay attention in a different way, and what begins to happen when we do.
What becomes possible when we notice small, meaningful details in the places we live?
What changes when we begin to do that with others?
 
This episode invites you to reflect on your own attention:
Can you see the life around you with fresh eyes?
What might you not be noticing?
What could become possible if others around you began to notice it too?
This is part of an ongoing exploration of what it means to return home,and the practices that help us do that, together, where we live.
If you’d like to explore further, visit awakeninglands.com.
There, follow where it says to Begin and you'll find self-guided activities. There are opportunities to deepen a practice and invite others from there...
See you soon.

Returning Home is an emerging practice exploring what it would mean for people in a place to learn from reality together, over time.
This podcast exists as part of that process.
It’s a practice in place-based listening, reflection, and action.
In this first episode, we explore the breakdown the practice is responding to and what we're focused on next.
If you’re already participating, this may help you situate yourself more clearly.
Visit awakeninglands.com to learn more about our mission and methods. There, you'll also find a "Begin" page where you can access two self-led activities to begin practicing. From there, if you want to keep going, you'll discover how it deepens.