Waking Youth Was Shortlisted for a Podcast Award!

Coming Next: Community Series

Hi friends,

Waking Youth was shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards, for the second time in two years.

Organized by the Everybody Media Collective, this award has been steadily gaining traction in the podcasting industry, drawing support from sponsors like Amazon Music and BBC Sounds, and connecting a vibrant network of both pro and indie podcasters from around the globe.

Last year at the International Women’s Podcast Awards, with founder of the initiative, Naomi Mellor. Here’s the podcast episode that was nominated last year, with guest Chiara Baldini

While I prefer to place more value on internal alignment than external applause when it comes to my creative pursuits—regularly checking in to ensure that what I share here arises from the most honest, integral parts of both myself and our guests—nominations like this one offer a pleasant reminder that what we co-create at Waking Youth resonates beyond us.

In the spirit of celebration, I want to express my gratitude to guest

Hannah Close

for disclosing intimate details of her private and inner life with such candor and thoughtfulness. It has her contribution to the podcast that earned us the nomination in the category Insight from a Role Model. You can listen to our conversation below, if you haven’t yet.

I want to emphasize that I find Hannah’s work extraordinary. Whether in the form of an image, written piece, or social media post, her art emerges from a profound, quiet place. It moves the stuff of the spirit, and invites us to question who we are and what we’re really here for. I’m particularly curious to watch her debut documentary Islandness, which will be released soon.

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Ep36 - The Pursuit of an Integral Creative Life with Hannah Close

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I also want to give—not a shout-out, since I’m more of a quiet type—but a heartfelt note of appreciation to Carlos Sierra, the sound editor and music composer of Waking Youth. His talent has elevated this podcast to professional heights. And his good spirits and kindness and presence often give me the nudge I need to keep going—keep recording, keep writing, keep listening to this calling of mine… even when trying to stay consistent feels like building a sandcastle while the tide of everything else in my life rushes in to wash it away.

Waking Youth’s sound magician, Carlos Sierra. If you ever need support producing music or audio for podcasts, films or videos, I cannot recommend him enough.

What else? I admit that I feel conflicted about Waking Youth’s pace. It’s been slow, slower than I’d like to be. The paradox is that I’m more connected to its purpose than ever before.

I’m writing to you from El Molino de Guadalmesí in the early morning, a 20-year-old community project in southern Spain, with Morocco shimmering on the horizon—across a body of water that barely separates two continents. I’m here with a recently formed group of five souls who are brave (or delusional) enough to be seriously contemplating starting an intentional community together.

We’re treating the months ahead as a sort of group initiation—a trial by tents, and compost toilets, and as many hours of field work as of visioning and emotional processing—after which we’ll decide whether to find land of our own and continue this adventure together, or not.

Motivated by a shared longing to get to the root of the illnesses that plague our modern civilization—separation from nature and one another, fear (isn’t it always about fear?)—our intention is to co-create a space, both literal and symbolic, whose purpose is to evolve together: to continue the long transition from the adolescent stage of development our mainstream society is stuck in toward a wiser, more mature way of being.

(By the way, if you’d like to follow our group process more closely, leave a comment on this newsletter with the word “COMMUNITY” or privately reply to this email and I’ll add you to our Telegram group)

So, over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be turning Waking Youth’s focus toward the question of community: What does it mean to live in community? What models are out there? What mistakes can we learn from—and what are the new ones to be made about? Can community truly hold some part of the solution to our polycrisis—or is just another utopian mirage?

The next episode I’ll share soon is with Elad Kaspin, a friend who lived for four years in Tamera, a 30-year old community in southern Portugal best known for its radical work around love, sexuality and peace. Born and raised in Israel, Elad offers a precious and embodied perspective, not only on the Israeli-Palestinian war, but also on how Tamera, as a largely German community, articulates its activist rhetoric around this heart-shattering topic.

Warmly,
Carlota