My friend Peter and I started – drumroll – a podcast! Here is my very first (short and sweet) episode. Like, share, review and subscribe, as they like to say! Supposedly, this is particularly useful on Apple Podcasts because it does voodoo with the rankings. In any case, we’ll take any R+ on any platform, so keep it coming!
You can listen on all the major podcast players, or right here, which is also where you’ll find links to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Amazon Music and Radio Public!
New episodes will be released every second Tuesday. If I’ve got time, I’ll write a blog post about them – if not, you’ll find them under the new “Podcast” page in the menu, or in the podcast player of your choice! I’m aiming for bi-monthly episodes … Maybe one day, there will be more, but at the moment (and since editing takes up A LOT of my spare time), that’s what you get!
I’m really grateful to Peter for joining me on this new adventure (you are awesome, Peter!), and really excited about this project. As the benevolent dictator, I get to rant about anything I want on the episodes I do by myself (evil laugh), and this, my friends, makes me happy. May our listener enjoy (or suffer through it, but bear with me)!
I’m also proud of myself: it’s going to be an exercise in anti-perfectionism since I’m planning to not perfectly polish or heavily script any of it. You’ll get the real me (and the real Peter, and our real dogs) – sometimes thoughtful, sometimes funny (the European kind), sometimes melancholic, sometimes dark. Flawed, beautiful, awkward, brave and vulnerable, and occasionally brilliant (aren’t we all?).
For now, I’m leaving you with the Mary Oliver poem that inspired the title.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
Indeed, I know how to pay attention, how to fall down, get back up, and be wild (oh, so very wild) and soft as well. And if it were up to me, I’d be strolling through fields all day. With dogs, and barefoot. (Preferably on a fall day. Summers are too hot.)
Listen to Episode 1: