Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

Learning Our Relationship with Nature, with Mark Warren of Medicine Bow Wilderness School | Ep. 141

·42 min·2 clips

Mark tells the raccoon story that ended with him holding the animal by his fire.

Forrest Inslee opens by framing the episode around creation-centered ways of thinking and a deeper connection to place. He and Jason Lyle sit down with Mark Warren, whose work at Medicine Bow Wilderness School centers on helping people learn fire building, shelter construction, and the identification of wild plants for medicinal use. The conversation begins with fear. Mark describes how many people, especially parents, meet the outdoors with anxiety because they do not know nature and were never taught to know it, and he treats that fear as something to gently undo rather than dismiss. He then makes a sharp turn. Instead of talking about going out into nature as if it were separate from us, he says people are already nature and are really going out into themselves when they step outside. That idea shapes the rest of the talk. He tells stories of first-time hikes where grown men shed their adult stiffness, roll up their pants to look for crawdads, and start asking whether they can eat one plant after another as they rediscover childlike curiosity. The image lands. The episode also returns to Mark's earlier life as a pastor, where a book by Mark Eldredge gave him permission to go back into the woods, take up hunting and fishing again, and imagine a different way of living. Books matter here. Two Winners in a Tipi becomes another turning point, because the story of a man who loses everything in a house fire and decides to forge a life from what the land gives him helps Mark see both the author and the path he wanted for himself. He does not copy that life exactly. Instead, he names it as a way of seeing that pushed him toward a more honest relationship with the outdoors and with his own calling. The whole conversation stays reflective. It keeps returning to the idea that creation care is not just a slogan but a recovery of kinship, responsibility, and belonging. There is room for struggle. The interview does not rush past fear, distance, or the ways people can feel cut off from the natural world, because those tensions are part of what Mark is trying to address. The tone remains hopeful. By the end, the episode has built a patient case for learning the outdoors as a way of learning ourselves, with practical skill and spiritual attention held together.

As heard by us

A quiet, grounded conversation about fear, skill, and finding your place in the living world.

Mark Warren's conversation with Forrest Inslee and Jason Lyle feels less like a tidy lesson than a slow case for belonging. It moves through fire building, shelter making, wild plants, and the unease many people carry into wild places, then settles on a plain idea: nature is not…

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm, grounded reason to care about the woods, not a hype reel.

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