Episode 4 - Ashleigh Weeden's future

Episode Notes

I don’t actually remember how I met Ashleigh Weeden, but I suspect it was on one of the rural conferences I used to regularly attend as a part of my job. Dr. Weeden is a rural researcher, an activist, a futurist, and a poet who describes herself as somebody who says yes to life and then figures it out. To find out more about her work, you can read her profile at the Rural Development Institute page at Brandon University in Manitoba.

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AI Generated Transcript

[BF] Hello. Thank you for listening to another episode of Futures Possible. I am Bojan Fürst and I make this show in St. John's on the island of Newfoundland. Today we are going to dive right in because there is no better introduction I could provide for this guest than the one she offered. So, this is the future Ashley imagined.

[AW] Yeah, that's a really, uh, strangely complicated question at this particular moment. You know, I'm Ashleigh Weeden. I'm, uh, uh, sort of somebody that moves through the world in a bit of a ping pong ball type of way. So, I've taken on a whole bunch of different identities over time like we all do. Um, at the present, I am, you know, a grieving daughter. My dad just recently died. Um, my mom, uh, about three years before that. Uh, so I'm the last one standing of my immediate family because I was an only child. Um, I am a wife. I married, uh, the love of my life so much. Uh, I love him so much I married him twice actually, uh, last summer. So, he is both my first and second husband. Um, uh, and that was sort of, uh, indicative of the way I, I do things in the world, which is my own way. So, we got legally married and then we had, uh, a wedding and two separate occasions. Um, I'm a researcher who, and, uh, as a community-oriented person who spent, you know, most of my life working on how to help, uh, smaller and rural communities or and organizations of all types get where they want to go and solve problems. Um, I'm an artist and a poet. I frequently forget that I have written and published poetry. I'm actually doing my first professional poetry reading in a, in a month or so. Um, and so, all of which to say is I like to think of myself as a person that says yes to life and figures it out later.

Since about 2017, there's been a few things I've gone after, but in large part, I've kind of responded to the things that the world is imagine. So, I had, you know, my dad got sick and was very, very ill for when I first started my PhD in 2017. So, I started my doctorate at 17. The first day of class, my dad was diagnosed with very aggressive cancer. And I spent most of that first year kind of dealing with that crisis. He got a miracle, came out, was, you know, great. And we just kind of got our feet back under us and then the pandemic hit. And then we just kind of figured out how to navigate that. And then my mother got very sick and died and just kind of figured that out, finished my PhD and got married and then my dad got sick and died. And so, it's kind of been this like, it's like being in like the world's wave pool or just like, would someone turn the dial down here? I don't want to keep getting like knocked over at the knees. And that has created kind of a reflexivity of just responding, both anticipating that the other shoe is going to drop on like kind of an every three-year cycle, but also just having to respond to things. And now finding myself in this position of what would it look like to actively choose or to make some of those decisions rather than just dealing with whatever, you know, like I often joke, you know, like the bag full of garbage that just lands in your lap and then you have to figure out what to do with it.

I'm the first generation not on the farm per se. I was born sort of in town, as it were, but come from rural background. My mom was a nurse and then my dad was an agricultural engineer. And so when I was very little, I've been an extension worker since I was about eight. You know, my dad took me on farm visits and if it was a PA day or whatever, and I was around and I got to go with my dad. And so it was just stewed in it, you know, in terms of trying to, to help the people around them, the communities that they love with a focus on smaller and rural places. And, and by virtue of that, also the fortune to, to be raised around people that really fostered my curiosity. So my father used to joke that the first words out of his mouth were why, and he passed that down to me. That's a genetic trait, I believe now. Um, and, and more than that though, both of, both my parents and my, and most sets of grandparents and all the people that I had the luxury to be around were like, don't just ask why, but also why and what can we do about it?

I, in my head, I'm kind of, I'm kind of having like three tracks of what the future could be and look like. And, and some of that's shaped by, you know, sudden and immediate traumatic loss where you kind of go, all of a sudden the, the ground is, is ripped up underneath you and you kind of go like, okay, well, what I thought the next five years were going to look like suddenly don't look like that anymore. Um, and, and when all of that's gone, you know, you're left with the sort of like, it's like, you know, it's like the tide comes out and there's this like, all of the detrius left on the floor before it comes back in and you're trying to figure out what is that now? What?

I have these few different pathways that are possible on a personal level. You know, my husband and I are wrestling with, do we want to stay here, uh, on, on the farm? Uh, what does that look like? It's just the two of us. Like we don't have children. I'm, I will, I'm just turned 39 this year. So what does that mean? And so I think on a personal level, the future is a giant question mark and, and the future, if we stay here, it looks very much like, um, turning, uh, the, the personal excavation over the next five, I'm sure it would take me five years to dig out from three generations of people's possessions and the way our family had the house set up to transition it to, to be our home more so. And if we leave, it looks like how to carry the best, you know, like the hermit crab thing, you know, how to carry the best of that with me to wherever we go. Um, and trying to figure out what that looks like on a broader level, there's a future where things continue as they are. Um, and I think that's a disaster, uh, that if we just keep going down the path that we're going as a society, both like in our inter little communities, but also large, like, you know, we just start to get into that cumulative compounding interest on disaster where it just kind of gets worse. Or we have this pathway where hopefully some point in the very near future, we collectively like kind of record scratch or slam on the brakes and figure out a way to at least pause long enough to figure out what we need to do in order to avert that and to chart a better course. And so for me, the future is very much these two diverging paths. And I feel like I'm standing right at the edge of the why, trying to figure out, um, two things, both the courage to like put a foot down one direction or another, you know, like you're kind of standing there, kind of willing yourself to do that. Um, but also still trying to be very thoughtful and put that purposeful pause in place and okay, what, what do I want to do? And then how do I want to, how do I want to make my life work in a way that also contributes to that broader future that I'd like to see as well?

When you look at it increasingly, the feeling of greater instability and, and, and sort of this, this sense of precarity that I think, um, I think for a lot of Canadians, like looking at the world around them, looking at our most immediate neighbors with Trump and what's happening there. And for me, the bridge between them all, as I think about the future, and it's, I think probably colored by my current experience. So it was like, is that grief is, is that I don't think collectively as a society, and certainly personally, it's something very confronting is that in order to move through all these things, you have to grieve the world we thought we were going to have. So there are fights that I thought we were going to have won by now. Now we're re litigating or reopening or making worse. And sort of grieving that backward slide that loss, um, in order to be able to process and acknowledge that everything is always hard fought, and that it's always an effort, nothing is ever settled. And I think that is part of this, this collective experience is that there has been so much loss, I think that there has been so much loss, um, both historically, but even in the last five years, socially, environmentally, politically, for a lot of these things, that if we don't acknowledge that loss, and what it all materially alters for us as a society, then we're at great risk of just like carrying that around all the time in a way that prevents us from being able to respond or even take that step forward.

my life, my work, my, my, my capacity for love, any of that kind of stuff has always like grown and trunk in direct relationship to like my curiosity. Um, and trying to figure out what happens if I just following that that question of why. I think the other one, um, for me is, and that I, that comes in innately for me in other people, and that I really struggle to apply inwardly, is compassion. And so I think that, um, one of the values that I think, that I think is really important both personally, but then broader, as I'm thinking about how we get towards certainly the kinds of futures that I want, where, where we are taking care of the world around us, like we are stewards for it, not like dominion over it, that we're not the owners of this place, but that we are companions to it. And that your survival is all tied up in my survival and vice versa. Um, and how do we construct a way of being in the world together that reflects that? And that requires compassion, um, curiosity and compassion and their cousins, right? You can't be compassionate if you're not curious and your curiosity is judgment if it's not driven by compassion. And the third thing is, is just, I think that it's really important that, that we encourage ourselves and everyone around us to use that curiosity and compassion to learn. Compassion and curiosity has to be put to work in service of something. It has to be towards how do I learn? How do I stay sharp? How do I learn to be able to look at the things around me and have the courage to be able to ask those questions when everyone else is just like focused on getting somewhere faster? What does it take to have that value to say, I'm going to be brave enough to say like, well, let's like put the brakes on this for a second. Um, so for me, that value of, of then related to curiosity and compassion becomes like courage and then, and intelligence and patience. And I'm really bad at the patient part. I'm patient, very patient for a very short period of time. And so I think this idea of slowing down and recognizing that a lot of the questions and problems that I have personally, or that I am challenging as a world are not going to be solved overnight, maybe not in my lifetime, but the time's going to pass anyway. So I might as well try.

Those values, um, when you put them all together for me, like they're rooted in just like remembering our humanity, like that we're here, that we're, we're here for a very brief period of time and we belong to each other while we, while we're here. And then after that we belong to memory. And so what you do with the memories that you carry from those who came before you? How do you carry those? How do you leverage them so that those memories still live, that they're an alive thing? Um, and how then do you, how then do you use your humanity, your very humanness, like your, your intellect, your compassion, your ability to feel, your ability to relate, um, your ability to, to play with things and make things? How do you use that to its best possible contribution, um, to the world around you?

I've been sort of insulated a little bit from the broader chaos. Oh, due to the personal chaos, right? When your own personal, uh, world is sort of thrown into upheaval it for better or worse, it provides you with this buffer from the broader crazy of the world, because you just don't have the ability to matter. Like I couldn't deal with both. And as I'm starting to get a little bit capacity to the crowd, I'm like, oh wow, everything's crazy.

There's the plausible future and the preferable future. So that's really what the breakdown is, is sort of like, if nothing changes, this is what's likely to happen. Here's where we're going. And is that, is that a branch that feels stable enough to hold you? Is that a branch you want to go down? Um, or is that something that I'm going to, and I'm looking at, there's a whole bunch of doves out that like, and they like to perch on like the most precarious parts of like dead trees in our, in our bit of bush here. And you kind of like, why'd you choose that one? And so that feels a little bit like that feels like the plausible one that feels like the, that's the one that if nothing changes, is that something that you can go down? And then there's the preferable one, which is like the one that has, you know, roots, the one that's growing, the one that's kind of going forward and has the, has new growth on it. Um, that, that I can't quite see. And I think standing as I am at the V of those two branches, you know, naming them kind of becomes, you know, fear of the known and fear of the unknown. Right. Um, it becomes like, I know what's likely to happen if we keep going down this way, but I don't know what happens if we go down this way. And they're both scary and exciting in different ways. In my personal life, wrestling with this, this sort of sense of, of like, well, I don't, I don't have control over anything. Right. Like that's, that's, um, um, and I think it's really, really easy for that to overwhelm me anyway, to a sense of like, then it, then you do become kind of stuck like, well, things are going to happen and there's nothing I can do about it. Um, so it's all futile and I don't like where that puts me. And so I think in terms of the things that, that I have control over and the things that we collectively have control over are certainly, you know, how, how we show up. Uh, and, and I think about that all the time. Um, you know, I describe myself someone that says yes to life and figures it out later is like, that's the thing I have control over. I have control over, uh, over saying, okay. And then how do I want to show up? And, and do I, you know, I'm making sure that I do show up to that life. If I'm scared, if I'm sad, if I'm excited, um, the only thing I have control over in any of this is myself is how I feel and respond and think and act and respond to these things. The other things are like, the things that we can control are how do I contribute to the world around me? And I hate that thing with progressives right now, which everything is systems and structures and there's zero individual accountability. And I think we took the flat, like we took the flack that we had for Thatcher's, like there's no society, only the individual. And we took that too far to be like, there is no individual, it's all society. Well, what is society made of? It's made of all of these things that we agree to participate in with each other. And so the things that I can control are, you know, how do I make incrementally better choices? And so in a lot of ways, the things that I have control over in that future to me are the choices I make now. And a lot of that has to just, again, doing to rather than focusing on making the absolute best decision, which is where I can get stuck. How do I make a good decision now and keep making good decisions as they present themselves to me and to keep moving forward? And again, that's the learning piece. So there's stuff I know now that I didn't know five years ago, and I would make different choices. But recognizing that I can respond to those things in a way that works is what I have over in the future. I'm a person that walks around as like a head carried by a body. I tend to think of myself like in terms of my brain rather than the rest of me. And that's not helpful in a lot of cases, like you have to have an embodied experience, you have to think of like, I am a physical material being that has physical material needs and operates in the world that way. And I'm also a soul within that meat suit. And what is that? You know, what, what are all those factors play together. And so for me, when I think about their future is really is really what would I feel best when I think about I'm scared, like I feel terrified by the prospect of what would it look like to listen to all three of those aspects in equally important ways rather than the just the strict mental like I know what I you know, the logical thing. But as well as what does it feel like? What does it feel like physically? What does it feel like in my heart? And I think that's true of society is is the same way as it like we already like, if it was a case of just doing what we know we need to do, then then we'd all just do it. And so the big question becomes, why aren't we doing those things? What are the obstacles to those things? And so my greatest fear is just that the time will pass and we'll have let it past without actively still working towards whatever that meaningful future looks like. And so on a on a broader way, I think what I'm seeing bubble up around us, like in terms of the activation of communities that people are starting to kind of go like, hold on, wait a minute. I don't agree with this, like there has to be a way. I think that there's real promise there. My fear is that if we don't deal with all the other heavy emotions, like the fear, the anger, the resentment, the, any of the things that we're, we're carrying around, then we, then we fizzle out because it's too much, it takes too much energy to do both. You cannot carry those things. And trying to actively create new ways of being or new ways relating, or even going back to older ways of relating, it's really difficult to, to carry all those really expensive, like they burn really brightly, like anger is a really good fuel, but it burns hot and fast. And so what will you do when that burns out? And then you're facing these questions of now what? And so for me, thinking about that future becomes, well, if that if I want that to be true, who do I need to become to get there? And the sort of the, the excitement of that, but also the, like, you know, sort of the bile in your throat at like, oh, that's asking a lot, you know, like that's asking a lot of me. And is that bad? I don't think so. But it's still scary.

[BF] Thank you for listening. That was Ashley Whedon, a rural researcher, a poet, and somebody who says yes to life. I am Bojan Fürst, and you listened to Futures Possible. I talk with my guests about their futures and a way of being they can imagine for themselves in this time of uncertainty. You can find Futures Possible wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you want to leave a comment or support the show, visit futurespossible.com. And if you like the show, please share it with your friends and family. Take care.

EpisodeBojan FürstOctober 6, 2025Episode, Futures Possible, Ashleigh WeedenComment