Episode 104: Dan Burgess | Composting Spoiled Maps | A Rebellion of the Heart

Something different for EP 104.

I’m experimenting with an immersive audio essay.

I’m planning to do more of these alongside the guest conversations.

Beginning with this, a thing which started life here back in June which has been fermenting and I wanted to evolve it into an audio offering.

A sonic rambling.

What if the maps we’ve been using to make sense of the world…are no longer capable of guiding us?

What if those neat systems of progress, control, and productivity that we have inherited —were never meant to help us understand and remember where we actually live?

What if they were always oriented toward domination, separation, extraction?

What if the future no longer works ?

This Episode is not a lecture, and it’s not a solution.

It’s a sonic compost heap.
A messy, feeling-through offering.

It begins in grief.
Grief for Gaza.
Grief for the Ocean.
Grief for the way capitalism makes it easy to dance while bombs fall on children.

It meanders through tenderness and tensions:
Through techno, AI's extractive machinery, broken spiritualities, and trying to stay awake when so much in modernity wants us numb.

And underneath it all… a question that haunts and humbles:

What is mine to do?
Not everything. Not nothing. But something.
Something rooted in relationship.

In response-ability.

It’s an invocation of sorts.
A tracing of how I’ve been metabolising this moment.
How I’ve been listening—awkwardly, imperfectly, but intentionally I think—for a different operating system.

One that doesn’t run on endless growth.
One that doesn’t normalise violence and cruelty.
One that remembers that the economy of life runs on love.

This episode doesn’t promise hope.
But it does offer a rhythm.
Something to walk with.
Something to compost with.

An invitation into the heart.

Because the maps of modernity are damaged, spoiled. No longer viable.
And yet the terrain is still alive.

Becoming crew is really an invitation to trust in the mystery of these times, not because we’re certain, but because we’re still listening with our hearts open.

🌿 Themes We Move Through:

🗺️ Spoiled maps and violent logics of modernity
💣 Silence, complicity, and the normalisation of harm
🌊 Ocean destruction and the illusion of human separation
🎧 Capitalism on the dance floor: from music to militarisation
🔥 Response-ability and composting grief into action
💙 A Rebellion of the Heart, and remembering the operating system of life

Mentioned in this Episode

• Chris Hedges – The Last Days of Gaza

• Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur

• Dougald Hine & Federico Campagna

• Vanessa Andreotti

• Plum Village & Brother Spirit

• Palestinian DJ Sama Abdulhadi

• Massive Attack & actor and activist Khaled Abdalla

• Wendell Berry, Bell Hooks, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Captain Paul Watson

This is one for the headphones.

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With love and entangled tenderness