For a while I have been searching for a way to have deep intentional conversations with minds I admire, so this is it! I really believe in the power of play, of inspiration, and of conversations to make new connections that birth universes of possibility! Imagination, humor, analysis, synthesis, critique, poetry, and more all flourish in these cozy one-on-one recording sessions flying with our curiosities while sitting on the floor of a lush forest with Cuban cafe y Costa Rican chocolate! This project explores a digital library with a fascinating history that I encountered while doing a work exchange program in the nomadic permaculture ecovillage @FincaMorpho in Costa Rica!

First guest Smita Sen and I meet in the forest on a dive through the digital library over some Cuban Cafe and Costa Rican Chocolate! Smita is a sculptor and a performance artist who recreates environments for meditative healing. She’s one of my favorite artists, and a long time friend! We once spent a weekend making flower essences with wolves. Our conversation morphs from imaginative silliness about teacups to the sociopolitical history of India to deep vulnerability about our experiences with mourning! After this conversation, we danced in the forest until we were covered in dirt.

With an Easter Lily and forest cats as witness, Anthony Gonzalez and I drink some Cafe y Chocolate to ponder hope in an apocalyptic future! Anthony is a sociologist with a research focus on demographics, especially minorities in post-secondary education and the lives of the elderly. He is also a self-identified nerd with a love for writing high-fantasy! Anthony once called me at 1:11pm to talk about Norse Gods as I was exiting a cemetery after dropping off some rainbow sprinkles to celebrate the end of an era. In this conversation we listen to the humbling lessons of ancient rocks, then spiral through the social engineering implications of combat robots until we arrive at an analysis of power and the importance of social justice in the future of education. #teamrockswins

We’re back in the forest but this time with Third Eye Chakra Tea, a mandolin, and actual physical books on Tibetan Buddhism courtesy of Keysel! Keysel Pelaez is always suspected of being famous and moves through the world like he is from another time period. In this current timeline, he is a maverick musician and devoted anthropologist who most recently spent two years bringing yoga to Mongolia with the Peace Corps. Keysel once helped me build a 20-foot labyrinth on the beach and I swear we time traveled to finish it on time for the sunset ceremony. Racing against the battery life, we discuss the role of personal mythology in the nature of reality by exploring how the “emptiness” leads us from Tibetan Wisdom Displays to Arabic Calligraphy to Carl Sagan on Aliens to the Flow of Lightning that finally brings us full circle to engaging with the “awareness.”

In this episode, Odalis Garcia and I explore the Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies category of the digital library while watching children walk through the forest! Odalis Garcia is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School with a research focus on Latinx Spiritualities and Pop Culture that became a Master’s thesis on #Brujas of Instagram! She works primarily as a journalist, and just launched a project looking at depictions of teens on screen. My bet is Odalis is going to write a hit Latinx coming of age screenplay someday, if she’s not already working on it! Tune in at the 23 minute mark to hear Odalis reading “The First Water is the Body” by Natalie Diaz from the award winning 2020 poetry collection A Postcolonial Love Poem! We go through the rabbit hole of postcolonial studies beginning with Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands onto Glissant, Spivak, Wynter and more to dream delicately, intricately bigger. After this conversation, we planted a ñame that my mother gave me from her altar to Orula (an Orisha deity of divination).

On the heels of the Biscayne Bay fish kill water crisis in the Summer of 2020, I meet with no other than Alexander Zastera to reflect on the role of the artist in catalyzing change. Alexander Zastera is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and educator here in Miami who balances civic action with a mystical inner life. As Climate Crusader, he goes around the city and advocates for everyone to become their own environmental superhero. In the first half of the episode, we go on a journey to fully understand the crisis in Biscayne Bay, give some love to the many real-life superheroes making a difference, and discover a very tangible solution to the problem through algae biofuel! BRB we’re starting a green energy business!!! In the second half of the episode, our many ideas to save the city lead us to ponder the way creativity works, the metaphysics of electromagnetic portals, and following the guidance of our visions. Processing some apocalyptic predictions on sea level rise and our nuclear power plant down South, we ended our time together in the forest by spinning like Sufi mystics!

Immersed in a soundscape of a badass gang of motorcyclists and exotic birdsong, Oscar and I meet in the forest to explore the inspiration behind his artistic practice. Oscar Rieveling is an emerging artist based in Miami whose projects investigate his Mexican heritage and transnational identity growing up between Miami and Mexico City. This dive through the digital library was born out of a previous conversation inspired by a show-and-tell strategy Oscar inherited from his fabulous mom, and which he continues to develop in his current role in education at The Wolfsonian. If a photo is worth a thousand words, then an object is worth a million words! When his mom showed me a collection of pottery fragments painted with the Aztec-Mexica calendar right after that conversation, everything clicked. We took his recent project turning the mariachi serenade in on itself as a jumping off point for this round of wanderings through Aztec palaces, pope mummies, and Odysseus’s walkman. If you listen closely, you can hear the ethereal transmissions for an upcoming project exploring sonic architecture!

On a balmy afternoon suspended outside of time, I sat with Summer in the forest to find the language to reclaim Truth and Being from the fog of default cultural programming. Summer Jade Leavitt is an artist and a poet with an otherworldly sensibility that envelops you in the charm of fantastical gestures, and strikes at the poignant complexity of the internal rebellion we all must do to remain soulful in this world. She’s also a fellow librarian! Summer recently received a Wavemaker grant from Locust Projects to support her in developing The Queer Theory Library as a service for the Miami community! In this episode we weave together 7 selections from her treasure trove of books. Almost all the texts we discuss were written in the past 10 years. These are indispensable paradigm-shifting texts that create the language for understanding, processing, and validating the experiences of Queer, Femme, and BIPOC folks. In my opinion, it’s this deep work of nurturing different ways of being that ultimately holds the key for humane futures worth living. Our conversation gave me life! Summer hopes to make these academic texts accessible and free to a broader audience to create community dialogue that can impact what we create. After our session, we went on an enchanted walk through the woods and confessed our encounters with helpful ghosts that led us to follow the karmic trails of past lives through to the most joyous experiences.