In this current political moment of polarization and divisiveness, when and how do we commit to staying in fellowship with one another? How do we discern individual and institutional next steps with faithfulness and humility? In this conversation, Adria discusses the ways Jesus’s life and ministry grounds her work, the importance of approaching one another with compassion in disagreement, and her continuing discernment journeys around staying aligned with personal and organizational purpose.Adria Gulizia is an attorney, mediator, facilitator, and coach. Her concern for the spiritual formation of Friends of all ages has led her to serve in roles ranging from children’s religious education to Earlham School of Religion’s board of advisors. In collaboration with the School of the Spirit, she is currently exploring what it might look like to step into radical faithfulness across theological boundaries amid the twin temptations of anger and despair. Adria is a member of Chatham-Summit Meeting (NYYM) in Summit, N.J. To learn more about Adria's work, visit  https://shadowofbabylon.com/  You can watch Adria's Pendle Hill First Monday Lecture, Embracing Spiritual Gifts, on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Parker Palmer is an teacher, activist, and writer whose work explores issues in education, community, spirituality, and social change. He and Dwight explore vocation, aging, and the paradoxes of solitude and community, life and mortality, faithfulness and urgency: How do we embrace paradox to pursue that which is life-giving?Parker Palmer is a teacher, writer, and the founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal, who works on issues in education, community, spirituality, and social change. He is the author of ten books, including Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, and most recently, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. He holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and his work has been recognized with thirteen honorary doctorates. Parker Palmer first came to Pendle Hill as a resident student in the fall of 1974, an experience that stretched into an eleven year tenure as the Dean of Studies. His time here catalyzed his relationship with Quakerism and shaped his work, thought, and writings on pedagogy and spiritual communities. This work, and his ongoing contributions to Pendle Hill, continue to have an incredible influence on the study, work and worship here on Pendle Hill’s campus and beyond.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

In this opening episode of Season 4, Dwight and Francisco discuss grief, gratitude, staying grounded amidst uncertainty and polarization, and the guiding queries and themes of the season. Dwight Dunston is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. Francisco Burgos is the executive director at Pendle Hill and has facilitated spiritual retreats and lectio divina sessions for many audiences. Francisco was a De La Salle Christian Brother for almost ten years, serving in Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, and has been a Friend since 2004. He is a member of Harrisburg Friends Meeting and an attender of meetings including Monteverde Friends Meeting in Costa Rica and Adelphi Friends Meeting in Maryland.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Welcome to Season 4 of The Seed! Join us as we explore what spiritual alignment looks like in this moment of escalating social and political upheaval and violence: How do we cultivate discernment to stay the course and stay connected to our leadings? How are we being called to transform ourselves and our communities to break down systems of oppression and embody new ways of being?Guest voices in order of appearance: Adria Gulizia, Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, Felix Rosado, Valerie Brown, and Parker Palmer. The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

K. Melchor Quick Hall is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. In this final episode of Season 3, she and Dwight explore the importance of nurturing practices of creative play, what it means to honor legacies of liberation and care, and what freedom and hope look like in our lifetimes and beyond.Read the transcript of this episode.–K. Melchor Quick Hall, PhD is a popular educator, writer, and researcher. She is the author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, and co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Advancing racial equity in education and research, she is Executive Co-Director, alongside Cheryl Jefferson Page, of the African American Education & Research Organization (AAERO) @ Melchor-Quick Meeting House (MQMH), an organization founded by her mother and first teacher, Paula Quick Hall. As part of the food sovereignty movement, Hall is also the Director of Education for Global Village Farms.Watch Melchor's June 2023 First Monday Lecture, "Reparations is to Justice as Art is to Freedom: Linking Healing and Creativity," on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel. The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How do we begin to imagine futures not yet here? What can we do today to embody the liberation we want to see?Matthew Armstead (they/them), an experiential facilitator and performance artist, asks how, right now, we can embody the worlds we want to create. Here, Matthew grounds in the past, present, and future, delving into Nichelle Nichols’s role on Star Trek and a transformative phone call from Martin Luther King, Jr., the current climate crisis, and performance pieces that have transformed their sense of what it means to come home to ourselves. This interview was recorded on Pendle Hill’s campus. The bell you hear in the background during the episode is the bell inviting people to the dining hall for each meal.Read the transcript of this episode.–Matthew Armstead (they/them) first learned about Pendle Hill when studying at Swarthmore College, and years later returned to Pendle Hill to co-develop then teach Radical Faithfulness in Action. Matthew is the Director of Culture Work Studios, where they accompany small, multiracial organizations committed to social justice through change processes to be who they say they want to be, with compassion, creativity, and complexity. At Culture Work Studios, Matthew also makes performance experiences for audiences that are reclaiming power to embody the futures we want to create. At the heart, Matthew helps us practice being the change we want to see. To learn more about Matthew's work, visit cultureworkstudios.com.Watch Matthew's October 2023 First Monday Lecture, "Belonging in Unknown," on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How can we cultivate a relationship to communal silence? How can practices of silent worship allow us to build trust and open to the unknown?Ingrid Lakey, co-founder of Earth Quaker Action Team, talks with Dwight about her journey to a public-facing role in environmental activism, the power of collective action, and the ways silence allows us to attune to Spirit and embrace a multitude of truths. Read the transcript of this episode.–Ingrid Lakey has been a trainer and facilitator for 25 years, leading workshops on anti-racism, diversity, team-building, non-violent direct action, and conflict. Almost 14 years ago, after the birth of her child, she gave up a career in public radio to follow her leading to be a climate justice activist, becoming one of the founders of Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots organization building a just and sustainable economy through nonviolent direct action. She is a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and lives in West Philadelphia, four blocks from where she grew up.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How do we create rituals to witness each other and our communities in transformative moments and cultivate a sense of belonging? What role does forgiveness play in our individual and communal spiritual practices? Autumn Brown is a writer, musician, facilitator, and organizer. Here, she and Dwight explore the power of choosing how we want to be witnessed, the vulnerability required to find and create community, and how forgiveness allows us the space to reclaim our senses of self.Read the transcript of this episode. –Autumn Brown is a writer, musician, and facilitator. She co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, and supports liberation movements and workplace democracy as a worker-owner of the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). To learn more about Autumn’s work, visit www.aorta.coop and www.iambrown.org. The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Season 3 is here! As we begin to explore the practices that enrich our connections to ourselves and to each other, Dwight and Francisco share what's been spiritually nurturing them, their relationships to community, and their understandings of radical hope.Read the transcript of this episode. –Dwight Dunston, host of The Seed, is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. His love of people and his belief that our stories and histories hold the key to our healing and wholeness has inspired him to design unique workshops, classes, and programs that support individuals to feel more rooted and heart-opened to themselves and to others.Francisco Burgos is the executive director of Pendle Hill. Francisco comes to Pendle Hill from the Center for Community Initiatives at the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica. He was born in Santo Domingo, but identifies as an internationalist. Francisco was a poet, an educator, a father, and as a self described dreamer whose visions are grounded in reality.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Welcome to Season Three of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. This summer, we're exploring the practices that enrich our connections to ourselves and to each other. How do we cultivate relationships in spiritual community? How do these relationships and practices support our work for liberation and justice and transform our sense of what is possible? The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

When systems of oppression are so entrenched, omnipresent, and internalized, how can we discover, remember, and recognize the truth of who we are? Is it possible to transform our deepest-rooted convictions about ourselves? The roots of our essential selves and the constraining narratives we’ve internalized can feel inextricable–for Niyonu Spann and her work as a facilitator, creator, and teacher, this question is central to the possibilities of integrity and wholeness. Niyonu and Dwight discuss the origins and leadings of the Beyond Diversity 101 workshops, witnessing the possibilities of radical love and wholeness beyond guilt/shame/blame cycles, and honoring the interconnectedness of our lives. Read the transcript of this episode.–Niyonu Spann is a facilitator, musician, and community leader with decades of experience inside and outside of Quaker Institutions, including time here at Pendle Hill as the Dean in the early 2000s. She designed the transformative workshop Beyond Diversity 101 which has been attended by hundreds of Friends from around the country. Niyonu is a prolific musician, and the founder and director of the group Tribe 1 which performed songs of peace and justice all over the US and Nicaragua. She has worked extensively in Chester, PA with Chester Eastside ministries and is currently in the process of opening a school called The Academy for Peace & Liberation Education. To learn more about Niyonu’s work, visit http://niyonuspann.com/Watch Niyonu's May 2023 First Monday Lecture, “Integrous Testifying: Body, Mind & Spirit,” on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel.–The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How do we align our everyday decisions with our ideals to create the world we want to see?Anton breaks down the distinction between morality and integrity, discussing the mystery, fear, and unknowns that arise when our values don’t align with “dominant arbiters of morality.” Drawing on learnings from Walter Brueggemann, Thich Nhat Hanh, and his own work in community with asylum seekers at Casa Alterna, Anton shares his understandings of prophetic imagination, experimentation in loving community, and the importance of self-compassion when striving to live a life of integrity. –Anton Flores-Maisonet is the founding director of Casa Alterna, a ministry offering hospitality, accompaniment, and assistance to individuals and families from over 50 countries seeking asylum in the United States. Anton also serves as the Friend-in-Residence at the Atlanta Friends Meeting and is a spiritual director, writer, speaker, husband, and father.To learn more about Casa Alterna, visit https://casaalterna.org/ –Anton shared the following quote: “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”  Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination–Find the transcript for this episode here.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

What can people of faith offer to broader environmental and other social justice movements? Cherice’s work in ecotheology–a field of liberation theology centered around the relationship between religion and environment–seeks to support communication between communities focusing on theory, action, and reflection. Drawing on early Quaker history and her own ecospirituality, she examines how an insistence on individual integrity can leave us preoccupied with performative virtue, and how people of faith can move away from false charity toward an ethic of liberation. –Cherice Bock (she/her) is a Quaker from Oregon who combines advanced degrees in theology and environmental studies to teach, advocate, and organize with people of faith. Cherice leads Oregon Interfaith Power & Light and is an adjunct professor of ecotheology at Portland Seminary. She co-edited the book Quakers, Creation Care, and Sustainability, and she has a book forthcoming entitled, A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends. To learn more about Cherice’s work, visit https://chericebock.com View Cherice’s August 2022 Pendle Hill First Monday lecture, “Friends & Sabbath in the Time of Climate Change,” here: https://youtu.be/k6tB3vqebxA–Cherice shares the following quotes: “May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these possessions or not.” - John Woolman“False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life,’ to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.” - Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed–Find a transcript for this episode here. The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

eppchez yo-sí yes, a Quaker playwright, inventor, and spiritual companion, offers ways to practice noticing patterns of faithfulness and patterns of oppression to begin moving through transformations of self and community. Using eir own experiences in reparations work and Quaker business settings, ey and Dwight detangle integrity and perfection, calling us  instead into processes of transmutation. Through an interactive audio experiment, eppchez invites us to look inward: What would it look like to move beyond cultures and cycles of domination? How can we use noticing practices in our communities to better align our actions, words, and values?Read the transcript of this episode.----eppchez yo-sí yes is a Quaker playwright, inventor, and spiritual companion living in Philadelphia. Eir work uses historical research combined with channeled wisdom to remember what our culture of domination has tried to erase. eppchez is one of many Friends working to implement a cultural shift toward active anti-racism among Quakers. Ey are called to earnestly and imperfectly model strategies to do reparations and build systems that make integrity and care more possible. To experience more of eppchez's work, visit  www.almasengine.comThe transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Blanca Pacheco, co-director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, discusses the relationship between community care and self care, the power of laughter, and the need to elevate personal stories and wholeness in an immigration system that denies resources, rights, and humanity to people of color. Blanca shares the miracles and sacrifices of her own journey, and asks: how can we respect the integrity of ourselves amidst individualism, urgency, and unjust systems?Read the transcript of this episode.----Blanca Pacheco is a passionate community organizer and a single mother with over 15 years of experience organizing with immigrant communities in Philadelphia. She is currently the Co-Director of New Sanctuary Movement, an interfaith immigrant justice organization which she helped found. Throughout her career she has worked on successful campaigns such as stopping collaboration between Philadelphia Police and ICE, and won Sanctuary campaigns with families fighting their final deportation orders. She is currently one of the leaders in the state of Pennsylvania fighting for Drivers Licenses for All regardless of Immigration Status. Watch Blanca's March 2023 First Monday Lecture, "Building Sanctuary within to Build Sanctuary for Others," on Pendle Hill's YouTube channel.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Why a podcast season on the Quaker testimony of integrity? What makes it relevant now? Host Dwight Dunston and Pendle Hill executive director Francisco Burgos give an introduction of the Quaker testimony of integrity and offer their definitions and groundings. Francisco interviews Dwight about the testimony’s relevance to community and authenticity, Dwight’s experience recording The Seed’s second season, and what listeners can expect from upcoming episodes.Read the transcript of this episode.Dwight Dunston is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. His love of people and his belief that our stories and histories hold the key to our healing and wholeness has inspired him to design unique workshops, classes, and programs that support individuals to feel more rooted and heart-opened to themselves and to others.Francisco Burgos is the executive director of Pendle Hill. Francisco comes to Pendle Hill from the Center for Community Initiatives at the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica. He was born in Santo Domingo, but identifies as an internationalist. Francisco was a poet, an educator, a father, and as a self described dreamer whose visions are grounded in reality.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Welcome to Season Two of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. This season, we're exploring the Quaker testimony of Integrity: What does it look like to meaningfully live out our deepest spiritual truths with authenticity and grace? The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

“My life’s work is really finding ways to remind people of, and validate, what they already know.” Ricardo Levins Morales thinks of his art as a medicinal practice, dedicated to treating both our cultural immediate diagnoses and the underlying inflammations, helping people to see their realities with more clarity. “The underlying inflammation in our society is hopelessness, despair, and disappointment,” but drawing on the cycles of the natural world, Ricardo reminds us of our places in the deep liberatory cycles of the world, and how awareness of these timelines is a necessary ingredient for hope. If despair shuts down our ability to take in information, hope is the practice of awareness of our current condition and what’s happening beyond our field of vision, bringing us to a greater sense of agency, power, and mutual responsibility to each other and the earth. Using this as a frame, Ricardo and Dwight grapple with what it would mean to embrace the cycles and focus on changing the soil in order to plant the seeds of new worlds.–Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He considers his art political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression. He was born into the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico and was drawn into activism in Chicago when his family moved there in 1967. This began with the Black Panther Defense Committee and has included organizing for labor, racial justice, and environmental struggles.Learn more about Ricardo’s work by visiting https://www.rlmartstudio.com/ View Ricardo’s June 2020 Pendle Hill First Monday lecture, “Planting in an Earthquake,” here: https://youtu.be/DWqBIcwxsTk –The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational to them. Ricardo shared the following quote from Amilcar Cabral’s essay “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories”: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” –Find the transcript of this episode here.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

How can we practice courage?  How do we build our “fear toolbox” and find our roles in social change work? In this episode, Eileen breaks down concrete steps for discernment around these questions. Her work as an environmental activist and spiritual writer has long focused on building effective movements that are grounded in love and harness people’s power. Here, she and Dwight break down the turning points and learnings over her career that have transformed her thinking about the relationships between love, power and justice, and about the illusion of separation.–Eileen Flanagan has served as both clerk and campaign director of Earth Quaker Action Team, which uses nonviolent direct action to pressure corporations contributing to climate change. She has also been a Pendle Hill Resident Teacher, a university lecturer on racism, and Trainings Coordinator for Choose Democracy, which trained 10,000 people in nonviolent strategies to prevent a coup in the lead up to the 2020 election. Her online courses on effective and spiritually grounded activism have engaged people around the world. The award-winning author of three books, she tells the story of her leading to work on climate justice inRenewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope. Read more about Eileen's work at eileenflanagan.com.Listen to Eileen’s November 2020 First Monday Lecture, “What Happens Wednesday? Preparing Ourselves for the Work Ahead” here. Register for Eileen’s upcoming Pendle Hill workshop, Making Our Activism More Effective through Nonviolent Direct Action, here.–The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational for them. Eileen shared the following quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “Where Do We Go From Here?”:“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best … is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power, correcting everything that stands against love.”–Find the transcript for this episode here.The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Cai Quirk frames their art and their work expanding gender narratives as a collaboration between themself, the natural world, and Spirit. Despite the continued erasure of queer stories, Cai reminds us that the natural world keeps these stories of the “fluidity and diversity of ourselves…for us to be able to relearn.” In their conversation with Dwight, Cai invites us into those processes of collaboration, expansion, and relearning.–Cai Quirk (they/them or ey/em) is a lifelong Quaker with passions for Witness, personal discernment, and diverse methods of spiritual deepening. With a gender that transcends binaries, Cai is practiced at deeply questioning societal expectations and norms and in shifting towards roots of individual and group integrity. Spiritual deepening, Witness, and integrity are expanded in Cai’s writing, photography, and music practices. Cai’s upcoming book of photography and stories, Transcendence: Queer Restoryation, connects themes of spirituality, mythology, and gender diversity, nature and storytelling. Learn more about Cai’s work here: https://caiquirk.com/Preorder Cai’s upcoming book, Transcendence: Queer Restoryation, here.Listen to Cai’s First Monday lecture, “Myths of Gender,” here.–The Seed asks guests to share a quote or text that has been transformational for them. Cai shared the following quote from Winona LaDuke: “When we start our stories at the moment of harm, we get limited, we lose imagination. What were our stories before the harm? We can reimagine our pasts, imagine the pieces, the stories that weren’t handed down.”–Find the transcript for this episode here. The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/----The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Follow us @pendlehillseed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast. This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.