The Somatic Scribing Podcast

Welcome to the Somatic Scribing Podcast micro-season - where I’m sharing interviews with clients and collaborators about projects that have catalyzed transformation and  radically expanded the possibilities of what scribing can do.  Walking Water is a project and a prayer that centers water as teacher, guide, and sacred source. Through the act of walking together along waterways both human-made and natural, their work is to listen for how we might serve as one tributary within a global and intergenerational movement to restore relations with waters, lands and peoples. In this conversation, Kate Bunney of Walking Water interviews me and two other incredible water-working artists in a dynamic conversation about decolonial mapping, and our various approaches to art making in collaboration with water.This episode was originally produced for Walking Water’s podcast, Talking Water, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts.For info on the book, Waters Becoming, go HEREFor stories about the Lake to Lake walk, go HERETo donate go HEREYou can find out more about Somatic Scribing including upcoming classes, workshops and season 3 of the podcast by subscribing to my nesletter through my website, asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino

Welcome to the Somatic Scribing Podcast micro-season - where I’m sharing interviews with clients and collaborators about projects that have catalyzed transformation and  radically expanded the possibilities of what scribing can do.  Layel Camargo reached out to me in 2023 for support on developing an org chart for the Shelterwood Collective, a 900 acre QTBIPOC land stewardship project in Northern California, combining ecological restoration with building cultural power.  At that time under Layel’s leadership, Shelterwood was thinking innovatively about governance as a collective that was both building a non-profit as well as building home on and with the land.  In this conversation we go through an example of how a somatic scribing residency can be of service to organizational change.  This episode was originally produced for Layel Camargo as Episode 52: Healing with the Land, Stewarding Shelterwood Collective on the We Rise podcast, which you can find and follow wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about Somatic Scribing including upcoming classes, workshops and season 3 of the podcast by subscribing to my nesletter through my website, asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino

Welcome to the Somatic Scribing Podcast micro-season - where I’m sharing interviews with clients and collaborators about projects that have catalyzed transformation and radically expanded the possibilities of what scribing can do. In this episode I sit down with Albertina Lopez of the Center for Evaluation Innovation. The Center for Evaluation Innovation partners with philanthropy on strategy, learning, and evaluation efforts that are intended to advance racial equity and justice. They lead evaluation projects, consult with foundations on strategy and learning, and support field building through convening, organizing, and research.  Albertina and I look back on our time together and reflect on what we learned through the process of our Artist in Residence.  You can learn more about CEI at their website evaluationinnovation.orgYou can also find out more about Somatic Scribing including upcoming classes, workshops and Season 3 of the podcast by subscribing to my newsletter through my website, asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino

A hello and hang in there, sneak peek of Season 3, and intro to the mini-season of client interviews.

Neith Sankofa is a sacred healing artist, dancer, African dance scholar, shamanic practitioner, sacred mama, warrior, artist, singer and more.  We close this season with Neith (punctuated with drops of wisdom from her daughter) sharing about where art and embodiment intersect in her practices, and how movement is not only a language, but the origin of all life.  We recorded this episode in the spring of 2023, a few weeks after the police murder of Tortuguita - member of our community and environmental activist - who was defending the Weelaunee forest from being bulldozed to build Cop City (an ongoing struggle as of this publishing).  Our community was reeling and in deep need of space to be together and process what happened.  Neith and I break down the ritual we held for community, and how we applied principles of cultural somatics to understand what was needed in a cultural body experiencing so much inflammation.  The sound gets a little choppy at times, but stick with it because we close with some powerful reflections about how to be a ritualist, even if you are just beginning your journey, and how connecting to creative energy is a fundamental skill for holding ceremony. Neith is currently offering monthly online Process Inquiry Sessions the 22nd of every month. Each session is a rotating medicine teaching including song, movement, visual art making, animal medicine, and more. You can learn more and register by emailing [email protected]. Thanks for listening.  This is the last episode of the season!  Upcoming announcements: the Fall Scribe Lab is going to be in person this yearrr.  Registration opens in July and you can learn more about the Lab, other upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing by subscribing to the newsletter on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.  Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.  If you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi.  We’d love to hear from you.

Dreaming is a central practice to being symbolism literate, and the skill of symbol literacy is a core competency for reimagining our world.  Dare Carrasquillo is a super smart colleague, host of the Underworld Party Podcast, and one half of the play-based collaboration Animist Arts. In our conversation from Fall 2022, we follow dream practice into death practice, contextualize somatics inside of our 300,000+ year old nervous systems, and we riff on putting our contemporary pop-psychology field into science fiction mode.  Dare’s practice of polyphonic singing harmonizes with my practice of layering images, and we discuss resonance and the impacts of wave dynamics on bodies and other material.  We wade into riskier waters of what liberation means inside of a non-dual framework, queering with a yes/and lens the dominant trauma narratives seeping into all aspects of how we understand ourselves. The theater backgrounds come out as we open the challenges of translating the map of a social field back into our bodies that have been trained out of our ability to express, and we close in speculation about how to get out of the police states of our internal landscapes and back into the play practices that allow us to make the new map together.  Animist Arts is a space for priming the body for play without dominance, which is a foundation for pretty much anything you could be up to, so check them out at animistarts.art, they’re currently running several workshops and series.  I recommend between sun and moon, all that in the show notes. Enjoy the convo! Thanks for listening.  You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.  Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.  You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi.  We’d love to hear from you.

It’s the hustle episode with the brilliance of Tiaré Jung, two-spirit indigiqueer scribe baddie and my go to sounding board for all things related to the work of scribing.  We open the taboo subject of money with some background about how we think about income and income sharing inside of our non-nuclear families and wider mutual aid networks.  We touch on living anti-capitalist values in how we set prices, work with clients, and distribute resources, and Tiaré shares some really powerful stories in this episode about working with clients who step out of the mold and into collaboration, opening up conversations that lead to gifting resource and beauty and open possibilities for how to be in relationship.   I gush about their style and portraiture and making people in the room feel seen - it’s beautiful and revolutionary to see trans, non-binary, disabled, erotic people in conference rooms y’all - so be sure to check out their work on their website and follow them on Insta. Thanks for listening.  You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.  Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.  If you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi.  We’d love to hear from you.

Since meeting in 2018 through the GTDF collective, Sonali Balajee, Sarah Amsler, Dani D'Emilia and I have been rolling deep together.  We’ve dubbed ourselves the Altared State collective, (that’s altared with an A) and apart from taking care of one another across multiple borders and oceans, we do work collectively that orbits around queer ecologies & decolonial embodiments.  That is to say, we make experiments of our bodies and their metabolic entanglements, we play with relationality in an animist way that seeks textures of belonging and moves ritually with land and our non-human relatives, we imagine kin and kinship through all kinds of queer lenses and have a really expansive take on the erotic.  In this conversation we talk about queerness as a placeholder for what contains the wholeness of us and our complexity, the path from queerness, wholeness, collective health, and what it means to aspire to be social naturopaths.  We open the axis of the spiritual and the political and the artistic approaches to “social justice” in this moment of history, and why it’s most practical to make record of all these ways of being through visual writing systems.  Thanks for listening.  You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.  Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.  You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi.  We’d love to hear from you.

In 2019 Shiree Teng manifested a vision she had been carrying for years: Measuring Love, a brown paper, part manifesto part framework for infusing love as a practice into the hustle of the non-profit sector.  She brought me in as a scribe to support the writing process and produce the artwork for the paper.  We boldly declared love as a threat to systems of separation, the driving force of decolonizing and the essence of building real community power.  This conversation spans the arc of this first gathering all the way to the 2022 publication of our follow-up paper, Healing Love: Into Balance.  We talk about our non-linear process of writing and artmaking in dialogue with one another and with the land, why love requires us to embrace wholeness and wholeness requires healing, and what to do when you’re faced with having to love the monster.  Here are the links for Measuring Love, a Brown Paper and Healing Love: Into Balance⁠.  I’m so proud to share this collective work just infused with love.  Enjoy the convo! Thanks for listening.  You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.  Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.  You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re in a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi.  We’d love to hear from you.

Kelvy Bird and Reilly Dow are both brilliant scribes, facilitators and teachers.  Kelvy is the author of Generative Scribing: A Social Art of the 21st Century and is one of my scribing elders, friendtors, and just general artist crushes.  Both Kelvy and Reilly are co-facilitating the upcoming Scribing Essentials Course from April 24-28, so if by the end of this convo we have swooned you into wanting to become a scribe, you can find information about that course in the show notes, it’s going to be fabulous.  In this conversation, we discuss the need for social art practitioners to advocate for group storytelling as an inseparable companion to the pieces we produce.  I’m really interested in Kelvy’s take on scribing as a social art, and we discuss what conditions are necessary for groups to get creative together.  Our conversation touches on hypervigilance as a cultural norm, fostering vulnerable heart space, and how power shapes everything as we ponder what’s possible in using our work to weave more connection.  We close the conversation asking each other about how our work can be less meeting, more ritual, so be sure to stick around for that, and enjoy. The link for Scribing Essentials is here via the Lark Collective. Thanks for listening.  You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website ⁠asthecrowfliesdesign.com⁠ or by following me on Instagram ⁠@crowcamino⁠. Music for this podcast is from the album ⁠Black Shamxn⁠ by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.