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.

This New Moon in Scorpio is a portal of reclamation. With Mercury retrograde, Lilith retrograde, and powerful trine support from Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Ceres, this lunation asks the most uncomfortable question: What are you compromising on?

Where have you been going on side quests instead of following your soul's path? What vision is on your heart that you keep making smaller, safer, more acceptable? This episode explores Gate 14—the gate of bounteousness and competence—and the shadow of compromise that keeps us enslaved to systems, narratives, and callings that aren't actually ours.

If you've been chasing what feels like a calling only to realize it was a distraction, this New Moon is calling you back to your soul's true path.

What does it mean to build a business from the level of the soul? In this episode, we break down the term "mythopoetic entrepreneurship", exploring what it means to “embark” upon creating new stories, new myths, and new constructs on Earth.

Mythopoesis comes from two Greek words: mythos (story) and poiesis (creation of something new). When we bring these together with entrepreneurship, we're talking about people who are creating not just businesses, but new cultural stories and codes that we live by—and doing so from deep connection with soul.

In this episode, we explore:

• The etymology of mythopoetic entrepreneurship and what it actually means to create new myths
• Soul fragmentation: how most people are living and creating from this place
• The flower metaphor: why mythopoetic entrepreneurs are like meadow flowers with deep, dense root systems and beautifully articulated blooms
• Reparenting and inner development: picking up where we fragmented as children and in prior lives and reweaving our internal myths
• The underworld journey: how we transcend obstacles not by problem-solving but by going deeper into soul, psyche, and nervous system
• What makes this different from traditional entrepreneurship: it's not about racing to build unicorn companies or extracting cash—it's about soul-level expression through that soul-level expression we bring new ideas and solutions that are in harmony with the Earth.

We discuss the adjacent questions that mythopoetic entrepreneurs are navigating: What is soul calling? How do you know if you're operating from soul versus ego? Is it possible to have a healthy ego construct? How do we pay our bills while staying in alignment with soul?

And we explore what this path requires: becoming familiar with the wilderness of entrepreneurship and leadership, doing our healing work in the underworld, and learning to create businesses that are rooted in the animate, living body of the Earth.

If you've ever felt that your work is about something bigger than just making money—if you sense you're here to write new stories and call new realities into being—this episode is for you.

Join Daje Aloh for a solo episode exploring the Full Moon in Taurus happening November 5th in Human Design Gate 2, the Gate of Receptivity. After an intense eclipse season and challenging transits, this moon offers a warm reprieve, inviting us to slow down and receive through the body.

Gate 2, emerging from the G Center, embodies the pure yin principle and the structural foundation that chooses and incubates new life. This moon asks: What vision are you being called to become pregnant with? What are you ready to release to make space for something new?

With harmonious aspects to both the South Node in Virgo and North Node in Pisces, this lunar moment supports leveraging what you've learned about wholeness and self-prioritization while honoring your inner knowing about what is next. Learn how to work with this erotic, grounding energy to bring your visions into cellular reality through conscious co-creation with the divine.

About the Soft, Earthen Futures Podcast

Soft Earthen Futures is a living prayer—a design philosophy that we can gather around. This podcast explores practical ways of world building, astrology for the visionary process, and the kind of moss-ridden, soul-led, embodied practices to nurture shared futures.

What if your online presence isn't a brand to be managed, but an ecosystem to be tended?

In this episode, we explore a radically different way of thinking about your work online. Instead of treating your business as a personal brand that needs to be optimized, controlled, and broadcast to the masses, what if you understood yourself as a node within a living, breathing digital ecosystem—playing a unique role that only you can play?

This shift from managing to tending, from broadcasting to cultivating, changes everything about how you show up online and how you relate to the work of building your business in digital spaces.

About the Soft, Earthen Futures Podcast

Soft Earthen Futures is a living prayer—a design philosophy that we can gather around. This podcast explores practical ways of world building, astrology for the visionary process, and the kind of moss-ridden, soul-led, embodied practices to nurture shared futures.

Links Mentioned:

• The Missing Piece Workshop, Watch the Replay
• The Worldbuilding School, begins on 11/11

We're standing at an incredible threshold as a species. The astrological landscape—Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius—is telling the story of massive technological transformation. Whether we're ready or not, AI, digital infrastructure, and rapid technological change are here.

This episode is about acknowledging a hard truth: opting out isn't really an option anymore

But that doesn't mean we're powerless. Instead of being reactive or trying to pump the brakes, we can rewrite our digital philosophy—claim our agency, build with intentionality, and become world builders rather than content creators hoping for algorithm scraps.

About the Soft, Earthen Futures Podcast

Soft Earthen Futures is a living prayer—a design philosophy that we can gather around. This podcast explores practical ways of world building, astrology for the visionary process, and the kind of moss-ridden, soul-led, embodied practices to nurture shared futures.

Links Mentioned:

• The Missing Piece Workshop, Free on 10/30
• The Worldbuilding School, begins on 11/11