In this episode, I sit down with artist and death midwife Melissa Word to explore grief as a doorway into the vast field of creative, visionary, and even erotic information that lives at the core of the psyche. We talk about what it means to retrieve these scattered parts of ourselves—the aspects of self that have been lost across timelines, memories, events, and family systems—and bring them home to reify our own wholeness.

Melissa shares her philosophy of tending to grief through creative practice, from the improvisational quilting work of Grief Threads to the somatic, embodied approach she brings to all her facilitation. We discuss the underworld not as a place of peril but as fertile ground where parts of us have been steeping, learning, gathering intelligence we can't access through conscious striving.

This conversation is for anyone who has avoided their grief work, who has wondered why we can't just skip to the good part, or who senses that creativity and loss are more intimately connected than our culture acknowledges.

Connect with Melissa

• Visit Melissa's Website
• Follow Melissa on Social Media

Topics We Explore

• Grief as retrieval: collecting the parts of ourselves scattered in the underworld
• The daffodil bulb teaching: why some things require deep darkness to grow
• The intelligence of hands and what fabrics can teach us about loss
• Why grief work makes us honest—and why avoiding it makes us a liability
• Ritual, creativity, and what gets recalibrated at the level of soul
• The symbiosis between personal grief and collective healing
• Getting free: what happens when the roots go deep enough

About This Podcast

Soft, Earthen Futures is a podcast about imagining and crafting a more whole world. We explore what it means to stand at the threshold between what has been and what is trying to emerge—tending to that in-between space, listening for what the earth is dreaming through us, and giving those visions form. This show is for wild-hearted creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Hosted by Daje Aloh.

Winter is a complex season that calls us into something far deeper than simple rest—it invites us to cultivate our mythopoetic identity, the soul-level essence of who we are here to be.

In this episode, we explore Winter through the lens of the four directions and how this season asks us to tend our inner fires, build psychological containment, and step into a quiet kind of leadership that prepares us to contribute to our communities. We'll unpack why winter requires both yin and yang—the deep stillness and the practical actions that keep our waters warm—and why so many of us feel like we're doing this season "wrong" when we're actually navigating its inherent complexity.

Drawing from the School of Lost Borders, depth psychology, and the wisdom of Capricorn season, this episode offers a more grounded, embodied approach to winter that honors both its mysteries and its material demands. If you're ready to stop collapsing into performative rest and start building the containers that allow your soul's medicine to rise, this one's for you.

Links Mentioned:

• Join us for Weavers, I -- we begin on January 6th

On Monday we discussed Mythopoetic Entrepreneurship and how the mythopoetic entrepreneur is here to engage their visionary process at the level of the soul. Practically speaking though, what does this look like? How does one begin the process of pulling up the stories that want to be born through you and bringing them into form in a soul-alive way?

In this episode, we explore the journey of creative entrepreneurship through the lens of soul initiation—those transformative passages where we descend into the underworld of our psyche to retrieve the medicine that wants to come through us.

We examine the stages of initiation—from the inciting incident that separates us from what's known, through the wilderness of the threshold where old identities dissolve, to the ascension and integration where we learn to actually wield our medicine with humility and skill. This episode is a call to resist the temptation of spiritual mimicry and instead earn the right to share your medicine with radical clarity and confidence through the genuine descent and return the soul requires.

Links Mentioned:

• The Worldbuilding School: Save $500 when you register by December 7th.