Steve Olson spent 30 years walking into Zapotec villages, earning trust, carrying sacred culture into the world, and asking himself every day whether he was getting it right.

We talked about appreciation versus appropriation. About what integrity looks like when the culture you're serving has no voice in the room. About a man named Aspiridion who took the first payment he ever received for his mezcal and put it all on the community table and said, "now we build a school."

And Steve said something that stopped me:

"We don't get to decide what they need. That's not our decision to make."

This is Culture 06 in the DeepEnd series.

No experts. Just honest conversation.

Siobhan came to this conversation as a grief tender, an anthropologist, and a woman raised between two worlds, her mother's open-hearted artist home in New Mexico and her Persian father's household in Albuquerque, where unspoken rules landed hard when crossed.

We wandered into what culture actually is, not as a noun but as a verb. As cultivation and devotion. As singing flesh back onto bones.

She said something that stopped me:

"Everyone longs for culture. For elders. For the songs, the dances, the togetherness. And yet so often when I am weaving, I can just feel the grief of where we are."

We talked about the colonized mind and what it takes to rewild. We wandered towards the idea of conflict as the spirit of relationship asking itself to deepen. And then to a vert personal story I can not unheard about a man on a subway with his pants at his ankles who left us with a simple offering "it takes two people to pray."

No experts. No answers. Just two people tending the soil of culture together.

You can find more of Siobhan Asgharzadeh's work as Grief Pilgrim here

Here is where my coaching and guiding lives at TheBridger.com

As we move towards the fall, reflecting on the year and exploring what is to come, I will be offering my 7th cohort of The MIRROR Year in Review program. Check it out here.

Pat Barber joined me for a conversation that went from gym culture to genetics to the cost of standing for something real.

Pat knows how to create culture from CrossFit gyms to personal family culture and now in the space of fatherhood. What he didn't expect was to land on what it costs to live inside one that's actually yours.

He said something near the end I keep returning to:

"I have a lot of grief for the fires that burn without elders."

We talked about conditional love and about the culture of social media and what it actually does to us. We also touched on his wife making a hard choice to fly home early from Switzerland because she realized she'd outgrown her best friend, and what kind of courage that takes.

No experts. No answers. Just two men wandering toward something real.

Find more of Pat Barder here:

The Father's Guild

Pat Barber Father's Guild Instagram

More of my work

The Bridger Coaching