Fifteen minutes from my house there is a forest with trees older than the United States, and twenty five years ago the state nearly closed it to save sixty thousand dollars a year. This episode is a guided walk through Bridle Trails State Park with retired biologist Jim Erckmann, the neighbors who refused to lose it, and the foragers who taught me to read the forest floor. Along the way: why a Douglas fir drops its own lower branches, why lichen is two creatures that can no longer live apart, and why old growth is not a finished cathedral but a forest in constant, living turnover.

I showed up for volunteer orientation at the Bellevue Botanical Garden expecting to learn where the compost bins were. I left three hours later with a completely revised picture of my city.Turns out the garden is run by a coalition of nine nonprofits and the City of Bellevue. Four hundred volunteers. Seventeen thousand five hundred hours a year. Free and open to the public — always.This episode: land acknowledgments, salamanders in leaf piles, extinct birds in a sculpture garden, a couple who donated their house so it wouldn't become an office building, and two people I used to know at Microsoft, both figuring out what comes next.What it means to choose where you put your time. That is what this one is about.

Andy Flower sat with his RCB squad the night they won the IPL 2026 Final and said something that stopped me cold. Not about the championship. About heart, about leading without a title, and about the person who stays ready on the sidelines when no one is watching.

This episode connects gully cricket behind a building in Mulund in 1977 to the IPL dressing room to a cricket kid growing up in Seattle — and why the weight every gully cricket kid carries turns out to never have been a burden.