I’m so excited to unveil the very first episode of the Ink Roads podcast!
This will be a series focused on conversations about spirituality, creativity, and ecology, and I’ll be starting off by featuring inspiring Substackers working in this realm.
I believe spirituality, art, and nature are all deeply connected and can mutually enhance one another, and this podcast is all about finding the threads between them. It’s also an attempt at building community, healing some of the rift between humans and nature (and each other), and inspiring those walking similar paths.
If you are looking to heal from chronic disconnection, learning how to live as a creative person in our modern world, seeking out more magic in the everyday, and/or figuring out your role in this era of crises and change, you’ve come to the right place.
Here we will learn from wisdom-keepers, healers, and people who have gone out into the world and lived and who are now sharing their magic with the masses. I believe the guests on this podcast are creating work that holds the keys to shaping a better and more interconnected world for all, and I hope that by listening, you and I can both gather up some jewels of wisdom that we can then integrate into our own work and worldviews.
First up is Johanna DeBiase of the Substack Our Uncertain Future, a marvelous hub of insight that chronicles her and her husband Eric Mack’s experiences living with their family off-grid in the New Mexico Desert, and so much more. Johanna is also a forest therapy guide, an energy healer, a yoga instructor, a writer, and an artist, and she teaches nature writing courses and runs retreats and coaching sessions through her organization All of Us Stardust, which focuses on reconnecting humans with their wild, intuitive selves.
This was a really magical conversation, and we covered everything from the importance of a balanced nervous system to how writing and creativity can be a way of bridging the distance between humans and nature.
You can read the interview transcript below, or listen to the audio above.
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INK ROADS: Hello and welcome to Ink Roads, a podcast about the intersection of spirituality, creativity, and ecology. My name is Eden Ariel, and I'm a journalist, musician, and traveler interested in the power of storytelling and connection. Our very first guest is Johanna DeBiase, who is a forest therapy guide, an eco-feminist writer, and the creator of the Substack Our Uncertain Future, which chronicles her family's adventures living off-grid in the New Mexico desert. She also founded All of Us Stardust, which offers courses on reconnecting with nature and developing a dialogue with our inner and outer wildness. And she is so much more than that. This was a very soul-rejuvenating, inspiring conversation for me. Thank you so much for listening and being here. I hope you enjoy it.
So yeah, just to dive in, can you tell me a little bit about the type of writing that you do?
JOHANNA DEBIASE: Yeah, so currently most of the writing I am doing is... I don't know what it would be called. I just call it nature writing. Essay writing. I historically wrote fiction and poetry, so I have an MFA in writing. I have a published novella and a published poetry chapbook, and I spent a long time teaching literary writing workshops and creative writing workshops. That's what I have my degree in. And then recently, I moved more into self-publishing on Substack, like you do, and writing about nature connections and animism, where my passion drew me towards.
IR: Amazing. You have this really amazing fusion of different types of work that you do, from coaching and also nature and forest therapy work and things like that. I’d love to hear a little bit about what your journey looked like to get to where you are today. I think you said you started out in New York, and now you’re in New Mexico. In between, you were writing, a Reiki teacher, and a guide. What’s your journey kind of, to be very brief, looked like over the years?
JD: Oh, it’s hard to be brief. I have a long journey. I started in New York. I started in the New York suburbs. I was like a typical urban city girl growing up. I wouldn’t have ever considered myself outdoorsy. In fact, a friend from college visited me recently and asked me when I became outdoorsy, which was really funny. But I did grow up with parents who were really into the back-to-the-land movement. So I guess I grew up in an environment where people were kind of homesteading, living off the land. Even in the suburbs, we had a sort of unruly acre of land.
I wanted to go out West after college. I didn’t really feel like I fit in in New York. New York has a very fast pace. Even in the quieter areas, it felt too fast-paced for me. I didn’t really enjoy the culture as much. So I wanted to go West. There’s that mythology of “go West,” and I really bought into it, and I’m glad I did. I had been West once before on a road trip when I was a teenager with my friend. We had driven across the country. I had an idea of what the land was like in the West, and it just felt more befitting of me as a person—the spaciousness of it.
Eventually, via Washington and Seattle, I moved to Seattle because I thought I’d need a city. I wanted to live in a city, but like a Western, laid-back city, not like New York City. Even Seattle, which I thought was going to be chill, was too much for me. That’s when I understood that my nervous system was not equipped for city areas, long-term at least. It was a lot of hustle. I was there in the late 90s, the turn of the century. That led me to Alaska. Seattle’s kind of a gateway to Alaska because it’s the Northwestern passage. I thought, “I can’t do cities,” so I went to Alaska. People in New York thought I was crazy. To New Yorkers, Alaska just seemed like Siberia.
That’s when I became outdoorsy. You can’t live in Alaska and not become outdoorsy. I lived in rural Alaska. That’s when I began to understand the connection to nature that I required for my nervous system, for who I was. It’s also where I met my partner, Eric Mack, who I write the Substack with. We’re both writers. He’s a journalist, and I was doing creative writing. I was working on my MFA at that time while I was in Alaska and teaching creative writing courses at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and through their extension office because I lived in the bush in an Athabaskan village.
After a few years there, he wanted to move back to where he was from, which is the Mountain West. So we came out this way and checked out some towns in the Mountain West to see where we’d want to settle for a little bit. That’s when we found Taos, New Mexico. That was 2006, I think, so almost 20 years ago, 19 years ago. We got married, had a kid, and ended up here. That’s where we are now. We moved off the grid in 2020 because I’m a little bit of a prepper. I’m not a prepper, but I have that instinct in me to be prepared for anything. So when the pandemic hit, the instinct was to go even more rural, more off-grid. That’s where we are now.
Also during the pandemic, I started teaching outside because you couldn’t teach writing inside anymore. I started teaching nature writing and using the outdoors as a medium for writing inspiration. I enjoyed that so much I wanted to dive deeper into it, so I became a certified nature and therapy guide. When I did that program, I realized I was already doing a lot of that with the nature writing teaching. Forest bathing and the nature writing went really well together. It was a beautiful symbiosis, a synergy. That’s when I started teaching what I call intuitive eco-writing—teaching people a form of writing using nature and their intuition to just be creative and allow it to come through them and channel through their creativity and their writing.
It’s also when I started recognizing this idea of animism as a subversive life view. I went on a wilderness solo in 2022, where you go into the forest for three days, fast, and camp by yourself. I came out of that recognizing that this idea that nature is alive and a living being, and everything wants to be in relationships, was really important. We need to be thinking about it. The ancient future is rooted in animism, and we lost that. To move forward, we need to regain that belief system. I’m not sure how, but I write little essays on Substack, and I hope a couple of people might start thinking about it a little more.
IR: I love that so much. What you just said is so beautiful. Would you mind explaining more about what you mean by this animist idea, how you discovered it, and what you’re trying to communicate with it?
JD: Yeah, animism is really important to me, obviously. I was going through a pretty challenging time in my life. It started probably in 2019 or so where I had to start reevaluating where I had been and where I was going. It's like a midlife transition or a premenopausal kind of stage of life. Moving into this next passage, you know, kind of forces reevaluation.
Also, at the time, I still had undiagnosed ADHD. That was recently diagnosed this year in 2024, I should say. And that diagnosis has helped me a lot because there are a lot of comorbidities that go along with ADHD that I had struggled with my whole life, like depression and anxiety. Learning about my neurodivergence really helped me to begin to understand myself better and where these things were coming from. But at the time, I didn't know about those things. I was having a lot of struggles and questioning a lot.
We had moved off the grid, as I had said, in 2020, and I just started walking around. Where we live, there's a lot of public land surrounding my neighborhood. It's all public lands, and I would just go for walks—long walks. I mean, there wasn't much to do during that shelter-in-place. New Mexico really sheltered in place; it was a huge lockdown. And I would just walk and walk and walk. I would talk to the trees, and I would talk to the animals, and I would talk to the rocks. I live right near the Rio Grande Gorge, the national monument, and it became very... I realized this sort of healing aspect of nature that I always kind of knew. Id go out in nature and it's healing, but even more so during this time, it felt like more than just biological; it felt more spiritual.
I would talk to the trees when I would go out there. I would get really quiet. I do a lot of meditation, I do a lot of energy work—and I would kind of start just doing my energy work with the nature beings. I started to notice that I was receiving intuitive messages from the nature beings all around. It was coming through in different ways. But I would hear wisdom or sense wisdom or feel it coming through or see it in whatever way it came through to me. I just started practicing this more and more. I dove into that. I'm like, what is this? I just got curious about it: what is this wisdom coming through for me?
I think it might've been on my wilderness solo—I'm not sure exactly when I realized that what I was doing was, I was communicating with nature beings, that we're having conversations. It was sort of a hard thing to articulate.
But it was then that I also understood that these nature beings were seeking relationship with me. It wasn't just me needing their wisdom and their therapeutic value or me trying to get something or gain something out of them. I also began to sense that they wanted to be in relationship with me as well. There was a companionship, like a friendship, a relationship developing.
I had already understood that this relationship needed to go both ways. So being in relationship to me meant that I would ask permission to sit with the tree, and I would offer a gift to the tree when the tree gave me something, like wisdom or care or shade.
I don't know—it just sort of organically evolved into this deeper understanding that there was a relationship, and it wasn't just me. It was all beings, like all humans and all nature beings. There's a relationship that we're being called to.
When we live in a culture where we just perceive nature as an object or a resource. We detach ourselves from it. And that creates a couple of problems. The first one is we lose a part of ourselves, because we are nature. We lose our connection to ourselves. The natural world is a connection to who we are. We are an interconnected being in this greater ecosystem. If I'm just human and I don't perceive the natural world as a relationship or a community, I've completely lost that. So there's a sense of loneliness. There's a sense that I don't belong anywhere. There's a sense of disconnection. There's a sense of lack of meaning. I see these all as symptoms of our modern world that a lot of people are struggling with.
I believe that one of the reasons for this is because of this disconnection from the natural world—this sort of mental and spiritual disconnection—and that if we can return to this connection, we can begin to heal, not just ourselves or even not just our human culture, but also the earth. Because then we begin to understand that the earth is a living being, and then we become more respectful of it.
As I'm speaking, you can hear this is not some brand-new idea at all. This is ancient. This is something all of our ancestors knew at one time. All human beings existed in this earth-based knowledge. All of our ancestors lived with the earth, in relationship with the earth, at one time, and deeply knew this in their core. And today, there are still many, many cultures that live this way—Indigenous and pagan and earth-based cultures that still live this way. They're born with this knowledge and they're born deeply connected to the land they live on and the nature beings they live with. But unfortunately, modern people, we don't. We aren't born within these animistic cultures, and we aren't born with this connection to the land.
I take that back — we are born with a connection to the land, but it is taught out of us. We're unconditioned or reconditioned to disbelieve those connections we feel in childhood to nature and nature beings. We're taught that that's in our imagination, and so we don't have that connection.
So how do modern people reconnect, refine that connection, and then begin that process of healing—again, ourselves, the earth, and the community? I mean, it's a huge shift in consciousness. I personally believe that's where we're going. I know it's where we need to go for sure. And I do believe that's... I hope that's where we're going. I hope that's the Great Turning, as Joanna Macy says.
IR: I love all of that so much. Just feeling such a resonance to all of your words, which is what I've also felt reading your words on Substack. I think there's such a gap, I feel like, that so many of us feel between ourselves and nature and the natural world. I've definitely thought a lot about how creativity can kind of serve as a bridge and can be a way to interface with the land, especially for those of us who need to develop a way of communicating with it or listening to it. And I think in some ways, it always has been a way that humans have interfaced with the land. So how do you feel like creativity can help us fill or reconnect or listen to some of what the land and the earth have to offer? And how do you sort of facilitate that connection in your own eco-writing journey and workshops and things like that?
JD: I absolutely love that question. I do have like a little online course situation that I created because I was just so inspired to do so. It's called Earth Sensory Perception, and it's a five-week course you could do online that kind of helps you to learn how to communicate with nature beings in the way that I figured out worked for me.
I like this idea of like, how can you use creativity as a channel? So I’ll start by saying with intuitive eco-writing, which I also teach online and in person, that one way that we connect is we listen, we observe, and we write. I think that's true for any creative art form.
In my Earth Sensory Perception course, I do talk about our intuitive channels. We all have different intuitive channels. We all have the ability to connect with every intuitive channel, but some channels come through more easily than others. And I think the way to determine what channel is most intuitively open for you is to look at your creativity and your creative path.
What form of creativity do you lean towards or is most easy for you or effortless or most passionate for you? If you're a writer, it's words, or it could be ideas, words or ideas. And so that would be how you might communicate or connect with the natural world in a quiet meditative state.
And that doesn't mean meditation like the kind of meditation we think of, of sitting on a pillow, because being out in nature is a form of meditation in and of itself. Being out in nature immediately downregulates our nervous system. It immediately restores our attention. We live in sort of an attention-deficit society right now with the scrolling and everything. So it drops us in.
You all know, everyone knows that, right? A good 20 minutes in nature and you're dropped in. If you spend it not trying to hike to the top of the mountain but really engaged with your body, with your senses, seeing and hearing and feeling and listening to your heart, and just really tuning into the natural world, you drop in and you connect.
The more you practice this, the easier it becomes to connect. So at first, it's a practice like anything else, and then over time, it becomes more natural. But if you're a writer, you might spend 20 minutes in nature and then you start writing about what you’re seeing, what you're feeling, what you're hearing, what you're observing, and then listening, what's coming through to you.
If you make a conscious, intentional effort to connect with a nature being, like a sunflower, for example, maybe at first the connection is more like a mirror. Well, this is what I see in the sunflower. It's mirroring me, my soul, my psyche. Maybe in time, it's a deeper listening, you know, where you can sense into what message that sunflower has for you that's less subjective. Of course, everything is filtered through our own being, so everything has a touch of subjectivity.
There's no way to prove that the sunflower said this or that. It's like a leap of faith and trust. When things are intuitive, you just know it. It just feels right, as opposed to the ego, which can feel doubtful and uncertain. Intuition is like, oh yeah, I know this. I feel this in my bones. I understand this. And it's only important that you understand it.
And it's loving, and it's kind. It's tender and it feels good. So if you were an artist, then maybe these messages come through to you in visions, right? Visions behind your eyes, or with your eyes open. When you're drawing out in nature, maybe you can get these messages through drawing. If you're a musician, you might hear things—the messages come through hearing.
We've all had these experiences, anyone who spends time in nature. You’re out in nature, you're having a quiet moment, and you think to yourself, wouldn’t it be wonderful right now if I—I'm trying to think—wouldn't it be wonderful right now if I lived off the grid?
I don't know, just this one thinking. Wouldn't it be wonderful right now if I lived—and then all of a sudden, there's a bird squawking, or bells ring, or maybe if you're somebody who's more like a healer, maybe a breeze blows. You feel that. You're like, whoa, that was really interesting timing.
And maybe you blow it off. But if you're somebody who is an animist and you're nature intuitive, you wouldn't blow it off. You would say, ah, thank you. And maybe you would engage more in conversation with that being. Maybe you would sing a song. Maybe you would sing back to the wind and into the wind to be in relationship, to further the conversation.
So I think creativity plays a role in allowing us to connect to nature through this intuitive space where we can tap more into nature. And when we're in creativity, we can tap into these liminal spaces. We can move into these realms, these mythical, imaginal realms, these dreamscapes, these trance states, these creative states. So creativity is an amazing way to experience animism as more than just an idea or philosophy — to really experience what it means to be in relationship with nature beings.
IR: Yeah, I completely agree. I love that, all of that, I think there's so much hunger for community and deeper connection in every way these days. We're disconnected from each other, the land, anything beyond, any kind of real spirituality in a lot of ways. I see a lot of hunger and people looking for that. And I love that insight about how a way to get there is just by accumulating skills and learning how we can contribute to community. So thank you for your for sharing that. Just to get a little more, more personal, I really admire the work that you do. Like when I think of my dream life trajectory, I think of wanting to do something involving writing and eco writing, eco spirituality, coaching, guiding, things like that. I've been living in the city for years and it's definitely become kind of clear that that's not like my long-term place that I'd rather be close to nature. So I'm just wondering if you have any, any tips or advice or things that have helped you along the path, just as you've kind of followed these different and disparate threads. I know for me, it can feel overwhelming to have so many ideas and interests, but also to not really be sure how to manifest those in life. So if there's anything that's helped you along your journey or that's guided you or anyone, um, I would love to hear if that's not too big of a question.
JD: No, I loved hearing that. First of all, I want to say that in a couple of weeks, I'll be turning 50 years old. So, you know, I've been at this a long time. This is an accumulative journey of years. When I was in my 20s, I was still just bopping around, trying to figure things out. Even in my 30s, I was like building my family, building—you know, it's a journey. So I didn't just like arrive here. I just want to point that out to anyone out there who's like, hi, I want to live like that. You know, give yourself time, give yourself patience.
Also, I think one of the things that is a side effect of our modern world is these dysregulated nervous systems. And first of all, I want to point out that I think it's so wonderful that people are talking about this now. People are talking about animism. They are talking about dysregulated nervous systems. These are really wonderful, important things we need to be talking about because of how true it is. So the more we are able to downregulate our nervous systems so they are in calm and relaxed states, the more we reduce our cortisol levels, etcetera, and the more clear we can become, the more clarity we can find, and the more we can begin to start following those callings that we're having—these deep desires for connection or returning to the natural world. The answers are all around you. They're everywhere. For somebody listening to this podcast right now, this is a message to you that this is calling to you. Follow it—just keep your eyes open and follow the messages that are all around you, and tune into intuition.
I don't envy younger generations. I think it's really hard these days to be growing up with so much social media and digital fatigue. Social media has brought a lot of homogeny into our culture, and a lot of black and white thinking. And so I think that it's even harder now than it was in my era. When I was growing up, you know, you jumped in your car and headed across the country. When I graduated from college, I think I got my first email address, but not many people were really using it. Even when I went backpacking around Asia in the early 2000s, you couldn't book a room ahead of time. It's a little digression, but it wasn't like you could go online and book a room. You had to show up in the middle of the night, starving, go to the hotel and find out if there was a room, see if it was clean or not. There was a lot more of just showing up. You had to just like arrive in a place and discover it. And nowadays we just go online and we look it up and we do the research and we look at the reviews. And so it's like a very different energy. And I do think considering how can I become more analog, which is even something that I'm thinking—or not even analog, offline. I'm going to say offline. How can I get offline, move my life offline more?
I'm online all the time. I want to say that. I'm not a Luddite. People will think that because I live off grid. I actually love technology. I think technology is benign. It's neither good nor evil. It is what we make of it. It's a tool and I love it. But also, looking at what percentage of your life is offline and asking if that is that a big enough percentage for you is important too. I hope that answered your question a little bit.
IR: It's definitely a big question, but I appreciate all of the insights. And I definitely think now we have this very addictive, tempting whole digital sphere to contend with, though I've noticed more and more resistance rising against it just as it gets more consuming. There's beautiful things about it too, which is what makes it hard to disconnect. But I think we'll see a lot of people moving away from the super algorithm-driven world soon enough, I hope anyway. But yeah, all of it, super valuable insights. I definitely know it's an ongoing journey. I love that you said to open your eyes and just be aware. I think just watching and listening has been really important for me as opposed to trying to figure it all out at once inside my own skull, you know—just looking internally. We can find a lot internally, but also just by watching for signs and things. And I like what you said about the algorithm too.
JD: What is your offline algorithm showing you? That's basically what we're talking about when you say, "Watch for the signs." What's your offline algorithm showing you? The universe is like an algorithm for us in a way. So what's showing up for you? If you click like on something, get offline. For example, if I see a class on sustainability, witchcraft, or writing, and click like on it, my algorithm will start showing me more of that—more of what I am interested in. So, let's look for the offline algorithm and get away from this online algorithm, which is just AI telling you what it thinks you want to see. We can use our own organic intelligence instead.
JD: Yeah, I love that. Reality is definitely an algorithm. That might be a good Substack newsletter!
IR: I actually have a newsletter letter called Reality Is An Algorithm :)
JD: I love that idea. It’s just a matter of taking the time to program it and remembering that what we put our attention on tends to grow. And yeah, just trusting that you already have the answers. It’s so hard to trust, right? Isn’t that the hardest thing—to trust that you already know it, that you already have the answers, and that it’s all unfolding for you exactly as you need it to?
I do think the more you connect with the natural world, the deeper that trust can grow, because you can see in nature that everything unfolds in its own time, in perfect rhythm. And that’s the reminder. And, again, just time, patience, and those hard things.
Thank you so much for this time and for getting to talk to you. These are such beautiful, insightful questions you've asked me.
IR: Oh, of course. I mean, thank you for sharing your story and insights. I’m super excited that this is the first episode. This is exactly the kind of niche that I want to have this podcast focus on. I think you've done such beautiful work and have threaded it all together in a beautiful way. I’m excited to dive more into your work and writing and to write this post and all of that.
If there’s anything else you want to share, feel free—about your offerings or anything. Otherwise, I think that’s about all my questions for now. Well, I have so many more questions, but, you know, it’s been an hour.
JD: I’m excited to listen to your podcast and hear the people you speak to. We should get together and start a club. If people are interested in my work, my Substack is OurUncertainFuture.com, and the courses I mentioned are at my website, AllOfUsStardust.com. That’s where you can find a lot of my work.
IR: Amazing. I know you have books too, and so many wonderful offerings. Thank you for sharing all of these beautiful resources. It’s been really lovely getting to talk to you. I would love to start a club. If there’s any club, let me know and I’ll be there.
JD: I think the people you interview on your podcast will be the club. Yes, I agree. So we’ll have to all gather. Do you want to be the club leader?
IR: I’ll be the one organizing. I do love organizing. That’s why coaching is something I’m interested in—just creating groups and gathering spaces. We are stronger together. This work can feel isolating if you’re doing it alone.
JD: If you have that instinct, it would be an amazing offering to create a group for like-minded people. I think these ideas are beautiful, but the challenge is finding people who are interested in them and want to nerd out on them. That’s a real service to offer—a place for that. There are so many people out there, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the same. So many people are just longing for—and myself included—to be given permission to engage more deeply with the land and creativity. There’s such a longing for that, so it’s exciting despite everything else.
I think it’s growing, but I also think it’s our algorithm, right? You and I are in that algorithm, so we see it a lot. The more we see it, the more it grows. So let’s get it out there. All these creative people that you're connecting to, or who are listening to your podcast, their creativity and expression are so important. I love how you’ve added the creative aspect to this eco-spirituality because it’s the creative people who can express these ideas and spread them. That’s how we get it out there more.
IR: Absolutely. And for me, creativity was always like my spiritual practice. I think that’s how a lot of us who are innately spiritual but weren’t raised with it come back to spirituality. At least, that’s how it was for me.
Thanks for reading and/or listening! You can find Johanna at OurUncertainFuture.com and AllOfUsStardust.com.
