JourneyTalks Podcast
Your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration.
JourneyTalks Podcast
Finding Our Ubuntu: The Power of Interconnection
JTP welcomes theologian, professor, and environmental activist Dr. Claudio Carvalhaes to explore gratitude as a radical way of being in the world. From his early days as a shoe-shiner in Brazil to becoming a leading theological voice, Dr. Carvalhaes reflects on how a nurturing church community taught him that worth is rooted in belonging, not achievement.
He shares how adopting three children sparked a profound environmental awakening—confronting the realities of climate change and reshaping his understanding of gratitude, responsibility, and self.
Drawing on the African philosophy of Ubuntu—“I am because you are”—Dr. Carvalhaes invites us to see our deep interconnectedness with both human and non-human communities.
Whether you're drawn to environmental ethics, spiritual practice, or the transformative power of gratitude, this conversation offers soulful insights for living with greater awareness and care. #jtpstories #gratitude #ubuntu #environment
The Journey Talks Podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration, hosted by Jorge Gonzalez. Greetings everybody and welcome to Journey Talks Podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration. My name is Jorge Gonzalez and I am your host. I am convinced that behind every gratitude, there's a powerful story waiting to be told, and I am convinced that if we create a space through these platforms, we can share our stories and connect with one another. As humans, we share one thing in common, and that is the experience of being alive. We're all together on this journey we call life, and along the way, we meet people that cross our path. Some of them have a short stay, others linger for a little longer. The question for me is I know that somehow people live a footprint in our lives, and my question is so who are the people or situations in our lives that opened doors for transformation right and helped us become the person we are today? Through this podcast, I will be interviewing guests with stories of gratitude, and my hope is that our willingness to reconnect with these stories will help us celebrate our shared humanity and give us an opportunity to reconnect with the unconditional love that we all have access to from within. Today's guest is someone that I love very dearly. We met about 15 years ago in Louisville, kentucky, just before I finished my master's in theology, and we have been friends ever since. In my opinion, he is the quintessential example and I have to read this because I want to make sure I say it right In my opinion, he is the quintessential example of a contemporary prophet, one who is brave enough to call out a very difficult truth in an effort to raise our collective and individual consciousness into a greater and deeper understanding of our oneness.
Speaker 1:A former shoe shiner as a kid, of our oneness. A former shoe shiner as a kid. He is a father, a husband, musician, artist, theologian, liturgist, activist, professor, earth thinker and a clown. His experience and advocacy working with minority groups, indigenous people and environmentalist groups is pretty substantial. He has written several books. His latest one that I have with me right now is how Do we Become Green People and Earth Communities? Inventory, metamorphosis and Emergencies just came out last year. Please join me in welcoming no other than Dr Claudio Carvajal. Claudio, welcome to Journey Talks podcast. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, thank you, wow, after this, how can we not be grateful? We start with that amazing, all of those wonderful things you said. Sometimes, being grateful, too, is like adding up stuff or expanding it or exaggerating, and then I and I love that, because that's the sense of when you're grateful, you have to be exaggerated in the things you do as well. So thank you for this exaggerated introduction. I love it. Thank you, thank you. It's been a while since we left Louisville. Yeah, yeah, I've been in Miami. I've been in Miami.
Speaker 1:I've been in Miami. I'm starting my ninth year in Miami now and you're at Union Theological Seminary, right? How long have you been with them? Six, seven years, I'm there since 2016.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so it's been a while. So, after Louisville, I went to Philadelphia, Chicago, and now I'm at Union with my family. Louisville went to Philadelphia, Chicago, and now with my family yeah, so much happens right in our lives, but it's so good to see you again. I have this deep love for you and the admiration. You are such a great and fantastic musician, thank you, and we've done things together, and so I love that this podcast is on, and you're doing this because you bless us in so many ways.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your kind words, claudio. Listen, this podcast is all about sharing stories of gratitude, but it's the gratitude that comes as a result of the moments of growth and transformation in our lives, and I think your story is powerful, and I just think it's so unique and I'll be honored if you could open your heart and your mind to share your stories of gratitude with me and the audience. Would you be willing to do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, I'm so happy to do this.
Speaker 1:Let's do it, let's do it, let's just jump right into it. Claudio, what is gratitude for you and what is your relationship with gratitude?
Speaker 2:Gratitude is before everything, is a way of being right. It's not an add-on thing to life, it's a way of being in the world, is a way of being in the world as a way of being aware. And once you are aware of this gratitude, then it just becomes your second skin and then you walk through life with that sense of gratitude, no matter what happens. And it's only when you have the sense of gratitude that you understand the prayer from Julia Norwich, who said all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. And that means that not everything is going to be okay, not everything is going to be okay in our lives in the way that we hope and expect. But if you have a sense of gratitude, whatever happens, all shall be well, all shall be well, and so that's a deeper sense of gratitude. It's just this gift of having this life and going through this very quickly and enjoying it the most we can and being grateful for everything that happens.
Speaker 1:You know, you mentioned something just now that really catches my attention is the fact that this life happens very quickly and we go about lives so busy, we have so many things to do, we have our to-do list and we have to check it and we need to make sure that we're here on time all of those things, yet life is passing by. That reminds me. You just quoted Julian Norrish and I was just. I had to move offices and I used to have this little thingy by my door that it's a quote by John Lennon that says life is what happens while you're busy making plans. And you put those two things life being so quick and the opportunity to enjoy life through gratitude. I just think it's a really interesting juxtaposition, claudio. So I want to maximize our time and I have a couple of questions for you.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that it's a way of life, that gratitude is a way of life. When did you tap into gratitude for the first time? And I guess I'm talking about this connection that we have with our self-awareness, connecting with our consciousness, and I've been working with kids now and I'm just blown away, because when you work with adults, okay, we all went through situations but when I tap and I connect with kids and I see that they're connecting and they're seeing new things and their awareness is just bam exploding. That catches my attention. So I'm curious about when do you start at first connecting with gratitude?
Speaker 2:I think we all connect with gratitude when we are kids, right, we all pay attention, because being aware is to pay attention to things around us and I think as kids especially toddlers and two, three, four, five-year-olds you pay attention to everything and you were. Everything is a wonder. A little ant is a wonder, a leaf is a wonder. A little ant is a wonder, a leaf is a wonder. And I think as we go by, we start to get heavy and we lose that perspective of wonder. Once we connect with wonder back again, I think it's a natural consequence to be grateful, and I don't know if that was one moment. I think there are several moments that I could mention. And, looking in retrospect, the church that my family was a part of. They gave me everything right. We came without planning and so they had to struggle, and the church gave me the first food, and then they gave me my first toy, and then they gave me a space for me to see myself. They gave me a space where there are dedicated storytellers that told me so many stories of the Bible and of the world. They taught me singing, they taught me to use my body. So I think there's this book where it says everything I learned in life I learned in the playground or something like that. I think I would say everything I learned in church because it was the place that gave me everything.
Speaker 2:And so I think that sense of a community, the sense of being part of a larger network of people, that I was never by myself, which is completely opposite to what we live now.
Speaker 2:Right now, you have to do something in order to be worth something. I didn't have to do anything, I just had to be in this community and I was worth it. I was worth my full being just to be a part of a community. It doesn't matter what I did, it doesn't matter where I went, so that I think that community gave me a sense of fullness because of connection, of relatedness, and I think we learn how to be grateful if you are in a community. Otherwise, we start to be grateful for the things that we've done, that we have achieved, and that is just consequences, that you can do more or less, and it doesn't matter. I think what matters is that I'm part of a community and that's what matters the most and that's what I want to give to my kids and the community that I'm a part of and we are grateful for who we are. It doesn't matter what we achieve, and so I think that's a difference.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing all of that, claudio, hearing you talk and hearing your stand and your perspective reminds me of the fact that we are social beings. We are intelligent animals, but we are social beings. And it reminds me I know we're throwing quilts here and there, but it reminds me of this beautiful principle of Ubuntu and I'm going to bring it here and I'd love to hear your thoughts because lately, not only as a theologian and a professor and a liturgist all these beautiful things that you are you recently you put that in your books you came to like a new awakening. You came to a new understanding of why you do what you do and the importance and the responsibility that we have as humans to really be stewards of our home, our planet. And this whole concept of Ubuntu, of I am because you are and finding ourselves not only individually but in the collective, and this idea that once we develop this ability to really hold these multiple truths, at the same time we honor each other and our tradition. Just because we come through a tradition of theological training, we're reminded that the language that we've been taught is that this means that we are all one family.
Speaker 1:In Christianity we call we're God's children, but I'm fascinated by this idea of the fact that, if you look and pay attention to all different civilizations, and especially indigenous people, they have tapped into this awareness early on, from a very primal way, and I'm curious. I'd love to hear more about your findings. You've worked for so long as an activist and bringing awareness of a new way of seeing life, of a new way of embracing spirituality, more connected to the earth and reconnecting with things that perhaps for quite some time we have separated ourselves from. Can you tell us a little bit more about this idea of your connection and your reawakening with our planet and nature?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for saying that, jorge, because I think it was about, I don't know, six years ago, when I had my kids. I adopted my kids and three kids, and then I started to hear about what's happening to the earth and all of this disastrous news about the impeding climate, disasters and what it is already upon us, and so all of this news started to get me so shaking by it, and then I thought what would I do for my kids to live? What world would I live for my kids to live? And the world that we are living for the next generation is a disastrous world, and there's a world that they will not know if they're going to be able to survive, because everything is at a place that is not like in a hundred years. Something's going to happen. No, it's going to happen now. We are at the point of no return. In about four or five years, or three years, depending on who you listen to All the glaciers are disappearing, and the UN leader now said that we have passed global warming. We are into now global boiling, and if we do not pay attention to this, there's no life that will survive, and so there's no gratitude that will survive.
Speaker 2:Everything has to do with the land and that took me 50 years to learn Attention to the land, to have a huge. For me, the most important conversion in my life which means like to convert to metanoia, to go from one side to the other was when I pay attention to the land. That was the most important thing for me and that's when the sense of gratitude was deeply for me, even clearer and even more clear than the ways that I was already living. We all have a relation to the land. The difference is that indigenous people continue to live with the land and we don't. And we live, as Bruno Latour says, we have not landed, we live off of the land, but we live as if we are floating because we are not paying attention to the land.
Speaker 2:We don't pay attention to the places that we are living, the ground that we are touching and the ways in which we have to be responsible for all of the landscape that we are, because we are part of the landscape and so the sense of self that we use. There's so much inside of ourselves, somewhere within us, that we keep on going trying to figure this out and it's almost like there is a discrete, detached individual that you have to go through and understand yourself. But it's a lie, it's an illusion, because the very sense of self that we can learn is with the others, with me, with you, me understanding myself through you, me understanding myself through that tree right there to the birds. Those are part of my self, very different from me, but fully part of myself. So when we start to listen to the earth, to the land, so then we hear a bird singing it's their own singing, but they are also singing our own songs. But we don't pay attention to the birds, we don't pay attention to the animals who are part of who we are. It is just myself in another body, in somebody else's skin.
Speaker 2:And so if we do not change our ways of perceiving ourselves in relation as we are a product of symbiosis, and move away from the human to more of the natural world that live around us, we are not human by ourselves. We have billions of cells inside of us that are not humans. That makes us human. That sense of the centrality of the human that we have is all a way of showing how we lost contact, how we become ignorant, how we have lost touch with what is the most fundamental to life, which is to live with the cycles of life, and so if we start to learn that, then, jorge, life expands much, much bigger, and that becomes something else. So, if I'm able to see, it's in my faucet, here runs a river, and where are the rivers? For instance, of where we live, my bathroom, it's a river running there too, when I use it. So it's everywhere around us, and if we don't pay attention to that, we are only going to continue to relate everything with profit, and we are not going to pay attention that our worlds are going to flood because of climate change and we are still trying to build things in places that it's not going to be there for too long. And so there's a need for this awareness, which is at the heart of Ubuntu, because it's I am, because we are.
Speaker 2:But this we is not only you, this we. It's about the land. The we is about the trees. The we is about the birds. The we since you're in Florida is about the crocodiles. The we is about much, much, all of the plants, and that is the we. If we don't understand what this we is about, the I becomes this miserable, discreet being that floats around, running everywhere, trying to connect, trying to find what is the basis of everything, trying to find where is the core of our being. Oh this book, oh this practice, oh this thing. And so we go, we jump from one thing from another, and then it's almost like what happens to our desire oh, we desire this, we have it, but then it disappears. We desire that and then it disappears. And it is. The Ubuntu is about knowing our desires and our desires in relation with others. I never desire something only for myself. I have to desire things in relation with others. I never desire something only for myself. I have to desire things in relation to others.
Speaker 1:Claudio, the main goal of this podcast is to bring attention to our shared humanity, and this is an effort to precisely bring an invitation to the fact that when we see ourselves in each other, we're discovering the beauty of life. We're discovering the beauty of mystery but you sort of alluded about this a little bit earlier and it's this whole concept of we need to have the skills and awareness, the consciousness, to see those connections, to understand. Like you said earlier, our bodies are trillions of cells working for us. They're non-human quote unquote yet this combination of things living together create life, bring me an ability to think right. And so, at the end of the day, my question to you, claudio, is it's not just what are you grateful for, but what has been an experience or someone that helped you and you were able to pivot. You were able to have a fully transformation of who you are and you know yourself better because of it, and you have shifted the purpose or find a purpose in your life because of this situation.
Speaker 1:I have known you not only as a friend and in our friendship. We have walked along together. I know your kids, even though I haven't met them personally, and your wife? You know my wife. You know my story, I know your story. We have to help each other out. You have been a mentor for me as well, but who has been? Who have been the people or the situations that all of a sudden they have marked you and they have lit this footprint in you and now you operate, you look at life, you move about life in a different way because of it. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, and I think, as we start to get older, we still have to have more and more people in our stories. That can be a part of what what you asking. So I, as I said, the, the church, all the storytellers that shaped me in a red in different ways, because they told me stories and told me that stories matter and it didn't matter, and transform my life, and my teachers, and so we keep on going. There was a person called Jaci Maraschi, which was an Episcopal priest but also a professor at a university in São Paulo, who changed my life completely. So he took me to art, to see shows and help me with art, the way that I've become. And so there are so many people that I can keep naming to you my advisors, my PhD, dr Dolores Williams and Janet Walton, and so it could go on and on. But then what shifted my life completely was getting married and having kids. That has changed me to the core, because to deal with my kids is to deal with myself.
Speaker 1:oh, my goodness yes, yes, tell me more. That's really juicy.
Speaker 2:Tell me more about that well, everything that we relate to our kids have more to do with what we feel inside and the ways we grew up than what they are saying, and sometimes we mix that and we think it is their own issues, while it is mostly ours and the things that we have to deal with ourselves before we respond to them. So I could see the ways I would respond to my kids have to do with my own ways of being grown up and learn and all of my fears and all of my haunting spaces, and so I would project over them and then feel that they are relating with me in this or that way. But those were mostly my own feelings about myself projected onto them. As I had to learn how to become a father, I had to change myself deeply with my girls and my son, and so that took so much work tremendous deep, the deepest work that I ever have done and but in some ways they unleash me into new, different forms of knowing myself that I would never be able to know if it was not for them. Because if I do therapy and all of it is not me with me, it's always me with somebody else, and's always me with somebody else, and so this me with somebody else, in this case now my family, my wife, my kids, and the difference of cultures and all of that and languages, so that was an enormous space of deep transformation, my own frustrations, my own ghosts, and so that for me has been an ongoing source of deep transformation. So I don't think now anymore there is like this, one pivotal time, but there's people times every day, every time about it.
Speaker 2:But in terms of one transformation, in terms of my thinking and relation, was Robin Kimmerer, who is this indigenous and scientist thinker. She has this book, braiding Sweetgrass, which is a fantastic book and that transformed me. She gave a talk once at Union Seminary, where I teach, and in her talk she was saying how we do not relate to the land and how we need to and how we don't have rituals to do that. And so, since I teach rituals, that was from a dead day. I had a coming to the earth moment that I gave my life to that form of. I said I will not think anything if not from the land.
Speaker 2:So what I did was to get all of my courses and I threw it in the garbage and started all over again. So that was a pivotal moment if you're talking about pivotal moments, and that has been one transformation after another transformation. My little dog is transforming me every day, because when I take the dog out, it used to be like I would take the dog to walk with me. Now it is the dog who takes me for a walk, because they relate to the world through smells and every day there's a different smell out there, and so trying to think the world with the mind of my dog is already shifting and transforming me, and trying to pay attention to other things. So transformation is always a way of shifting our attention. Pay attention means shifting gratitude too.
Speaker 1:That's powerful. There were two things that really stood out for me your openness to allow your kids to be teachers for you and to let those teachers point out to other teachers, which we call I like to call them our shadow. I understood over time and this is where I'm going to go ahead now with you. You know our training in theology. Really, let's be honest, I'm thankful for it and, my goodness, there's one thing that I'm thankful in my life. It's the opportunity to have studied theology and understand how we as humans have come up with this thing.
Speaker 1:But it's the result of us paying attention to nature and our relationship with it and, more importantly, our brains, how our brains and our consciousness slowly but steady, continues to evolve, but steady continues to evolve.
Speaker 1:The effort that we have in catching up for the many times that we have ignored that relationship, and I'm referring to the relationship with our planet, with our earth. But then I think about this your role as an educator, as a professor of liturgy, of worship, and how is it that ultimately, you have reconnected with this root, that at the core of any ritual there's a connection and a symbiosis with everything in nature, yourself and your intellect In the room for mystery. I love if you have some time to unpack your passion for rituals and the meaning of rituals for you, because for me, rituals have been a connection to the earth, to who am I. It's the little thing that I am, yet the beautiful thing that I am in terms of being alive and my responsibility to be a good steward of what's around me and how I respect those around me, humans or non-humans. And sometimes rituals are the reminders of keeping us in that conversation. What would you say about that?
Speaker 2:I would say, if your rituals connected with you, with the land, you're lucky, because most rituals don't we connect with everything else, but you with the land, you're lucky, because most rituals don't we connect with everything else, but never with the land. We relate to abstract ideas, we relate to some gestures in relation to objects.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But we never relate with the land. If we talk about Christianity, for instance, there's the buildings of the church, but what do you know around the building? What do you know about the land where this building is? Do you know about the plants around there? Do you know the landscape? Do you know the law of the land? Do you know the plants? Do you know the birds? Do you know the trees? We don't care, we just use them for decoration. When we bring flowers to church, we don't honor them, we just relate to them as decoration.
Speaker 1:What about non-Christian traditions? What about indigenous traditions that are rooted in this respectful way of connecting and relating with the land? What about others? Yeah, like I'm thinking indigenous people. I'm thinking as Puerto Rican. I know that the Aino Indians had a different cosmology, and then you look into other traditions. Buddhism is in its efforts of meditation and contemplation. Have an anchor into that. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:It really depends what religion you're talking about, because there are different ways of relating, right, buddhism helps us to see this non-dualism right. There's a deep connection that helped me a lot to understand, too, that everything is part of me. In terms of the people, they don't have a religion, right? Mostly they don't have the word like ecology in any of their languages, because it's the landscape, is themselves. There's this indigenous people from brazil, the guarani. When they say, oh, it's evening, they don't talk about it's evening outside. Oh, it's getting dark, no, it is us evening, it is us getting darker because the whole landscape is evening, so we are evening as well. So just one sense of that deep connection. So you move with the times of the day. You're not like the time is moving there and I'm moving here, the sun is doing something there and I'm doing something else here. No, we raise as the sun, with the sun, with the light, and so it is a different way of understanding.
Speaker 2:You get the African religions that also are the ones that I know most of the ones from Brazil, and so for them, like Cantomblé and every other Afro-African religion in Brazil, they have a saying that there is no religion without a leaf, because everything is related to plants, to animals. All of the rishas are related to some aspect of the earth, all of them Thunder, sweet water, salty water, trees, mountains and crossroads Everything is related to a different Orisha. And so that way you have this deeper connection with the land, because then everything has to do with the land. And so I wish, like Christianity, for instance, would take baptism, which was one of the ordinances or sacraments, depending on what religion or what denomination you are I wish that we would do baptism, thinking of the water as the river. So imagine if we say that we are not going to baptize anybody until every river around our church is clean. There would be baptism almost anywhere, because we don't care about what's happening to the rivers, but we care deeply about baptism or Eucharist. We talk about Eucharist. You have to think about who are doing the Eucharist for us. The wine and then the bread comes from grapes and the wheat who harvests those Undocumented people and we have to keep them undocumented, because then we can pay them less but the most holy things that Christians say that this is the gifts of God.
Speaker 2:Right, this is the body of Christ, this body, the literal body of God. You know who has provided that for that community? The undocumented people. Which means that what is the most sacred for some people comes from the deeper injustice of this country with undocumented people. So all you call sacred is tainted by injustice Because we are not related. We are not connected with the lands. You just have a thing in itself and not the threads, the connections, the symbiosis, the forms of being together with others. We don't pay attention to that.
Speaker 1:And Claudio. So you've really pointed out some, like I said, difficult truths, and that's why I feel like you're a contemporary prophet. I'll never forget when I learned that a prophet is not someone that foretells the future, it's someone that is constantly bringing the community to. Is a refocusing of our collective consciousness, right, and I don't. I want to be respectful of the audience that perhaps don't relate necessarily to Christianity and they may have their own spirituality or different religious traditions.
Speaker 1:You know, this whole effort of living in gratitude, but doing our part so that others can have opportunities for gratitude, is what really stood out with what you said, this whole concept of social justice.
Speaker 1:We don't do it just to prove somebody wrong. We do it, there's a commitment there because we want to lift the humanity of that other person. You know, we want to recognize that their longings are as important and as valid as my longings, and so when we recognize this shared energy and how my actions can make somebody else's experience more manageable, more seen, to me that's really special. And I know that as a professor, you are surrounded by people who are thirsty and people who want to learn, people that are eventually going to go to their communities and somehow try to work with them and try to make an impact and a difference. So, in closing, how would you think? What are your words? How can people, from your experience as an educator and your experience working with this new spirituality that you feel so connected to, what are your two sentences for people that are listening on how to connect with themselves, how to create opportunity for others and why they should pay attention to gratitude in their lives? Those three things?
Speaker 2:Because we depend on each other. That's why we care for others. We have this enormous shift of narrative in our world today. Why should I care for somebody else? Give food on the streets is forbidden in some places. Why do I need to care for people of other places, of people of other cultures or race, and why should we do that? You are on your own, you have to take care of yourself and I take care of myself, and this is the way of destruction. This is the way of impeding death, when we think that we are the measure of everything and I have to do whatever I need to do for myself.
Speaker 2:And that's when we see the injustices happening everywhere, when we are just afraid of the other and hating the other. And so that's why we are building now all these policies against somebody who are not like us, because all that we relate now is with fear and hatred. And so it is about a choice of what kind of feeling. Razors at the rivers in Texas, and I will forbid and I will throw the kids back into the water to drown, as we are seeing now in Texas, because the feelings around it is fear and hatred. But if I don't have that in me, because we have that within ourselves, so we project that into the others. But if I am able to shift myself from moving from fear and hatred to go to compassion, kindness and courage, then everything changes. Then I'm not afraid of you anymore, then I'm not afraid of you anymore, then I'm not afraid of the immigrant, then I'm not afraid of those who do not speak like me or have an accent or something like that, because now we can create something else. We can share and build structures, not only one by one only, yes, but structures of mutual care.
Speaker 2:And if you create structure of a mutual care, what does that mean, jorge? It means that I am responsible for you and you're responsible for me. So we are working right. But if tomorrow you get sick, we'll have structures that you will have all that you need to rest, to recover, and I will work and I will give my money to sustain and support you.
Speaker 2:And then, when you come back to work and later on I get sick, you're going to give me your money, your gifts, your love, your compassion, your courage to help me rest and get better and come back to life. And then what's going to happen with this in relation to gratitude? I will know that while you are sick, you are going to be grateful that somebody is holding you, and when I am sick, I are going to be grateful that somebody is holding you. And when I am sick, I'm going to be grateful because somebody is holding me. And that's how we structure gratitude to be not only wishful thinking or just a feeling, but a structural organizing of society that helps me to foster gratitude and receive gratitude. And that's when we go back to the beginning of our talk Gratitude is the way of being.
Speaker 1:Claudio, thank you so much for being with us. I think, if there's, let's just finish this up with this. I wasn't planning on it, but I think the main theme for this podcast episode was Ubuntu. I am because you are, that's it, and I hope that people can take that little nugget of love and information and wisdom and sleep with it and see how that expands their definition of gratitude or open new doors for gratitude in their lives. So, claudio, blessings to you and everything and to your family. One last thing who do you think could be a future guest on this podcast? I always ask that question, so who do you think could be a future guest on the podcast?
Speaker 2:Brad Wigger, your former professor.
Speaker 1:Brad Wigger. You heard that, brad. I'm going to reach out to you. Okay, friends, claudio, thank you again. This has been another episode of journey talks podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration. I am your host, jorge gonzalez, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you for watching. Make sure you like and subscribe to our channel, share your feedback, hit that notification bell and let's keep the conversation going.