Becoming Ecological with Kelly Moody

What does it mean to become ecological? This is the burning question behind today's podcast episode with Kelly Moody. These days especially, the word "ecology" has been cycling around internet, sparking many, many conversations about what it means to establish new relationships with each other and the land. In this episode, Kelly and I discuss why becoming ecological is not so much about what we "know" about nature, but about recognizing our inherent relationship with the Earth, each other, and all things else.

About Kelly

Kelly Moody is the main curator behind the Ground Shots Project and Podcast as well as is one of the CO-collaborators of the Colorado Trail Plant-a-go project.

She grew up in rural southern Virginia near the border of North Carolina in tobacco and muscadine country. Growing up here, she went to her grandma's house daily as a child, where fresh biscuits and iced tea were a regular necessity. Her other grandma was a determined plant lady who started a nursery business on the outskirts of their small rural town, which remained open for almost 50 years. Kelly grew up hiding with her sister in the tropical greenhouses, taking craft classes in the small nursery workshop, shelling green beans and canning tomatoes. These experiences of being on the family farm, working with plants and creating followed Kelly into her adulthood.

The past decade she has spent living simply in different landscapes studying plants, ecology and craft, writing about the land, growing food and herbs, or honoring her wanderlust by living on the road.

She received a B. A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies in 2009 from Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She has studied herbal medicine, land tending, ecology and botany with Rebecca Golden in southern Vermont, Paul Strauss and Chip Carrol at the Goldenseal Sanctuary in southeast Ohio, Luke Learningdeer and Marc Williams in western North Carolina. She apprenticed with Juliet Blankespoor and attended the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, NC in 2013. She helped manage the gardens at Dancing Springs Farm in Asheville, NC from 2014-2016. She studied book arts and paper-making at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She taught hide tanning techniques for classes held by the medieval bookbinder Jim Croft at his rural Idaho homestead from 2017-2019. She has completed a handful of art + activism focused artist residencies and workshops including Signal Fire's month-long Wide Open Studios program during the summer of 2017 in the Pacific Northwest and in the fall of 2019 in the Southwest. These programs greatly influenced the trajectory of her work connecting creativity and human relationship with ecology. In Summer 2020, she hiked the Colorado Trail documenting plants on foot and made notes on wild food and medicine gardens found along the old Ute pathways. Her educational work over the years has included holding classes on hide tanning, plant ID, wild foods, medicine making, natural dyes, nutrition and gardening.

Kelly’s interest in storytelling and cross-cultural dialogue comes from both an upbringing in the small-town rural south and the inspiration of meeting people while living on the road.

Learn more about her work at the links below:

• Her Blog + Shop: Of Sedge and Salt
• Follow her on Instagram here and here

Other links:

• Our new workshop, Greeting the Polypoetic Self
• Follow the Regenerative Mystic Podcast on Instagram
• Follow the Kinspirit on Instagram