This episode of Belonging is a swapcast with Kathryn Fink of The Heart is a Cauldron. Kathryn believes in a world where each of us lives in deep connection — with our wild soul, our purpose, and our place in the wondrous web of being. To magic this world into reality, they sew an untamed array of seeds into the soil of their work as a mentor, podcaster, and queer mystic — weaving together animist ethics and enchantment, trauma-informed Buddhist psychology, transformational coaching, reverence for the mythic spirit and ancestral folkways, a devotion to justice, and a lifetime of living in the liminal.
Together in this episode, we talk about the tender and vulnerable ways we have learned about belonging, belonging as a radical antidote to Empire, the perversion of belonging in toxic religious spaces, finding belonging and sacred connection in the places churches have been built (atop ancient sacred sites), what we’ve learned about belonging through podcasting, approaching belonging when someone disagrees with you, how to find belonging in a time such as this, and creating personal rituals and living practices around grief.
“The things we feel most strongly that we belong to, we find ways to keep alive.” -Kathryn Fink
Resources:
- I say that Stephen Jenkinson in his book Die Wise defined belonging as “longing to be”
- Kathryn gives a shoutout to Sophie Macklin
- I mention Marija Gimbutas’s work in understanding pre-Christian Europe as it relates to religion
- I mention Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman’s episode on Belonging
- I mention Kathryn’s grief hair ritual
- Kathryn mentions her friend Mary Kinney‘s deep love affair with the trees on her block in Brooklyn
- Kathryn mentions her swapcast with Gordon White on mythic time
More from Kathryn Fink:
- KathrynFink.com
- The Heart is a Cauldron Podcast
- Kathryn’s Patron community
- Coaching with Kathryn
- @kathryn.a.fink on Instagram
