The Cosmic Play of Clay, Collision & Colors - Kim Larkin

The Cosmic Play of Clay, Collision, and Colors"  
Host: Taran Singh  
Guest: Kim Larkin – Experiential futurist, creative, and gardener based in Taos, New Mexico  

Key Themes & Takeaways:  

1. Taos & the High Desert  
   - Kim shares her journey to Taos, New Mexico, drawn by its rich cultural history, stunning landscapes, and deep connection to nature.  
   - She highlights the interplay of Indigenous (Taos Pueblo), Spanish colonial, and modern influences in the region.  
   - The solitude and slower pace of life in Taos encourage mindfulness and a deeper relationship with time and the earth.  

2. Gardening as Therapy & Connection  
   - Kim’s garden is a circular, adobe-surrounded space where she cultivates plants suited to the high desert climate.  
   - Gardening grounds her, offering lessons in patience, cycles of growth, and resilience—mirroring life’s challenges.  
   - She emphasizes the communal aspect of gardening, sharing harvests with neighbors and friends as an act of reciprocity.  

3. Time, Nature, and Human Constructs  
   - Gardening and desert living dissolve the illusion of "urgent time," replacing it with natural rhythms (seasons, moon cycles).  
   - Kim reflects on how futurism must honor history—collapsing past, present, and future to create meaningful visions.  

4. Art & Storytelling for Transformation  
   - Kim recommends The Future You by Brian David Johnson, a book that uses storytelling frameworks to reshape personal and collective futures.  
   - She shares her collage art as a tool to reframe personal narratives, turning guilt or shame into creative fuel.  

5. Wisdom for Listeners  
   - Slow down. Taos teaches detachment from false urgency and consumerism.  
   - Engage with the earth. Gardening fosters presence and humility.  
   - Rewrite your story. Creativity (like collage) can help reclaim agency over your journey.  

 Notable Quote:  
"Gardening reminds me that time doesn’t belong to us—we exist within it. The plants, the weeds, the seasons—they all have strategies. There’s so much to learn from just observing." —Kim Larkin.  

Closing Note: A meditation on growth, both in soil and soul, this episode invites listeners to cultivate their own "mountain within"—through nature, creativity, and honoring the layers of history beneath their feet.  

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Listen to the full episode for Kim’s stories about hot springs, desert rats, and the magic of seed-to-table greens! 🌿🎨

www.inkofsingh.com

Transcript

Taran Singh 0:00

Welcome to The Mountain in Us, a podcast where the journey gets its voice. I am Taran Singh, your host. Here, we greet the thrills, jolts, ascents and descents of our uncharted adventures. Welcome to The Mountain in Us, a podcast where the journey gets its voice. Hey everybody, today my guest is Kim Larkin. She is an experiential futuristic and a creative in Taos, New Mexico. Rooted in Southwest and nurtured by creative expression, global cultures and experience, she weaves research, strategy and storytelling to explore humanity, interconnection and imagination. Welcome.

Kim Larkin 0:59

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm really excited to talk to you today about the cosmic play of clay collision and colors.

Taran Singh 1:09

Yeah, me too. Super excited to dive in and we'll go right into the high desert. I want to first ask you, were you always enchanted by the high desert and the landscape of Taos? How did you come to Well,

Kim Larkin 1:26

I grew up in the southwest of what's known as the United States in Salt Lake City, Utah. And I lived in Arizona for almost 15 years after that. I'm newer to New Mexico. I left Phoenix in 2022 after nearly 15 years. And I followed some friends that moved to just a small rural area. community in Northern New Mexico, and I just absolutely fell in love with the landscape. Northern New Mexico has all of these pieces of what I consider to be the best parts of the Southwest, from alpine forests and lakes to desert landscapes, gorges, red rocks, but without all the people. So it's a very beautiful, quiet part of the Southwest that I really just fell in love with. And I spent about 18 months in that area. And then I went to Uruguay and was living in Uruguay for about a year, or excuse me, about six months, about a year ago. And I needed a place to return to. And I knew I wanted to come to Northern New Mexico, which housing is really difficult to find. But I completely lucked out and I found this beautiful round adobe house that was built in the early 80s out in a little community called El Prado, which is about 15 minutes from Taos. And it has just open landscape. It's solitude. And I wasn't sure if I was going to stay initially. I kind of landed in Taos a little bit on accident or just out of necessity. But as soon I got to know the area and I went more out into the landscape and into there's hot springs nearby, natural hot springs on the Rio Grande. And I just connected more and more with the complex history of the area and also something that I didn't realize when I first moved, which was the deep and long arts and culture history in the community. So as I spent more and more time, I just felt like I couldn't imagine a better place to be.

Taran Singh 3:48

Yeah, the collisions of pathway pushed to Taos. That's the essay I'm reading. It's a very

Kim Larkin 3:58

common story in Taos. A lot of people talk about kind of ending up here on accident, but then feeling this pull of sort of essence that just feels really special.

Taran Singh 4:11

Yeah, I've not been to Taos, but in general, I've been to New Mexico, especially north of Santa Fe. But on surface, it looks so desolate. But as soon as you walk in further and talk to people and just understand the culture and the history that it holds, it is amazing, absolutely amazing. The name might say new, in New Mexico, but everything here has such a deeper connection to the past. And now you've been, you were in Uruguay and that's a country by the ocean and now you're in desert. And did you realize that change coming in your head or this just happened so quickly that it is still settling in your head?

Kim Larkin 5:02

Actually, that interplay was really important to me. I knew when I was leaving New Mexico and went to Uruguay, I wanted to be near the water. I was really feeling that pull of the ocean and the currents and that type of landscape. But then at heart in the Southwest, people call it a desert rat of someone who just loves this type of landscape. And I feel really at home in it. and there's a lot of challenges to living in the southwest especially as climate change increases the risk and rates of fires and things like that and there's so many unknowns about the future and i've just really thought you know i want to be rooted in this place that i love so much but it's also really important to me to go get that needed almost that moisture, that different type of energy that the ocean brings at times too.

Taran Singh 6:02

Yeah, I like the terminology, the desert rat. Yeah, that's a common feature of the landscape. Like at least, you know, I live in the bay and the salt mice is one of our most important animals. member of the ecosystem because everything is foundationally based on salt mice and they're one of the endangered species of the of the battlelands but i didn't know much i don't know much about um the rats of the that that we'll take that for another topic but i want to continue and and ask a little bit more about what you mentioned recently right is just um that global warming and the changes are coming. But I do believe that at least, you know, places like Tao where the mixes, where the wisdom of the past is still enshrined with the people, that they have a better handle of what would happen and what they would play in. Do you see that Do you see that native heritage still plays a bigger part in the vicinity and around Taos of how people think and how they embark in securing a better future for humanity? I

Kim Larkin 7:19

think absolutely in a lot of ways. I'm very fortunate that I live in a place where I'm only about 10 minutes from Taos Pueblo, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the oldest continually inhabited community in the US. So the history there is deeper than you can find anywhere else in the whole country. But there's also a complex interplay of the Spanish community who came during colonialism and then layered on top of that when the US took over the territory. So you have these layered and interconnected, almost woven histories that have a lot of things that are really contrasting and butt up against each other, and then a lot that really are intermixed. And the Taos Pueblo people are, they speak Tiwa and are known as the Red Willow people, which Taos, the community is actually named after, the home of the Red Willow people. And it is intrinsic. You see so much of that influence in everything from the landscape to the architecture. The Adobe-style Pueblo buildings that you see all over the Southwest are examples of architecture that was originated from the Pueblo people. So there's so much. And in fact, the community is... It's incredible to visit. You can visit and learn about the history and the people, but you can also interact. They're very graciously welcoming to invite visitors to come to dances and different events that mark the seasons and really get to experience this this culture and learn about in this direct way that I think is really, really special. And in fact, after our podcast today, I'm gonna be going over to the weekly farmer's market, which goes all year long at the Pueblo and get to get fresh produce from people who have been cultivating in that ancestral homeland for thousands of years, which that type of connection to past and present, exists and is just all over Northern New Mexico in really interesting ways.

Taran Singh 9:56

Yeah. And Native people are known to be great stewards of their land. They take pride in keeping the land and also sharing the bounty of the land, which is so unique to them, but also unique to, which is essential for us as humans that in the world of consumerism, we don't, we forget that land is part of us. We just can't, keep exploiting it forever.

Kim Larkin 10:20

When you were asking the question about kind of the resilience of this community, and there is a lot of self-sufficiency in ways that I think is more common in rural areas, but you really don't find in more suburban or urban communities. There are generational families who are running businesses that have often been taken over in corporate ways. There might be a butcher down the street that you could take your cows to in the afternoon, or you can find someone who's selling natural plant medicine on the side of the road. So it is this deep connection to place. We're gonna talk about my garden at some point, and something that was really special is when I got my starters for my garden, I purchased them at the local farmer's market from a farmer who said, oh, these are actually grown for your community, for El Prado, the small community of probably a few hundred people. They're propagated for this specific area's climate, the wind, the temperature, all of those things. So that connection to the earth is present in so many different ways and really cool ways that you can't necessarily find in other areas.

Taran Singh 11:38

That's a good segue to gardening. And I know you've got this beautiful house, a circular view of 360 degree, which is interesting. Most of our houses out here in West are all squares or rectangles where you have no view. It's just people, you know, stacked upon stacked. But tell us about the garden, right? You look at the house, what Did the garden come to you or you came to the garden? How was the journey to till the first clay?

Kim Larkin 12:12

My first experience gardening was when I was maybe a teenager or preteen. I had this... dream of having this garden space and my mom actually helped me cultivate it and as soon as we got it finished I kind of lost interest and I never really connected to it in the way that I expected and for years of my life especially when I was living in Phoenix I lived in a small studio apartment that had no natural light and so I really wasn't able to keep anything green and I had no outdoor space and then in 2020 during the pandemic I moved to a new space and there was an overgrown garden and some overgrown beds and I spent a lot of that first summer when in Phoenix there was you know, it was 120 degrees outside. So you couldn't really do a whole lot or go a lot of places, but I cleared out all that space and I started growing. And I realized all of those people who had told me that I had a black thumb for years and couldn't keep anything alive unless it was plastic, that I actually did have this affinity for it when I had created the time and space to really connect with the plants and the earth and what I was doing. And when I moved to Taos and to this home, the yard was completely overgrown. The yard is circular, just like the house. And there were grasses and weeds and all sorts of things growing. And I spent that first month that I was here clearing out part of the space so I could at least spend time outside. And then... with my extended time here, I realized that I'd really like to activate all of that space. And so the first month I just spent weeding and clearing and then this very meticulous way that was a little obsessive, but also was very therapeutic and grounding and connecting. And I did that I needed that sort of clearing it sort of in some ways reflected the way I was trying to clear my mind. And in fact, for a while I was having dreams about being caught in weeds.

Taran Singh 14:34

Yeah, I hear you. weeding is, you know, is the most essential part of the gardening, but also in my opinion, at least, you know, the one, it grounds me every time I have to do weeding on my garden. But when you are, but you're also overwhelmed because, you know, you do not know where to start or would it, I would end right. And, and, and, and I'm glad you, you found it therapeutic. And, and I think the good thing is that once you, once you, cut a corner and say, I want you to understand how the relationship of the soil and the weed and how to detangle them so that, you know, once you loosen the soil, less weeds occupy that same soil, which is interesting. And I've learned it now that you work the soil and then it's easy to work on the weed then.

Kim Larkin 15:22

Yeah, I felt like I learned a lot about the soil here. house is at an elevation of 7,000 feet. So it's very high desert and the growing season's quite short. And I didn't know anything about what the soil is like here. So going through that weeding process, it was, it was like, I got to know some of the plants more, what grows, the different strategies that the roots have as they, as they grow in the soil and clearing that out. Excuse me. getting from that top kind of sandy soil down into the natural clay that exists a couple of feet below, it was like uncovering these different layers of history and these elements that are essential to the components of this space. Excuse me.

Taran Singh 16:12

Yeah. And, you know, especially when you are at 7,000 feet and the growing season is smaller every year, every square inch of sun and water matter. So did you have a strategy in mind when you put in your garden, like what was, or the garden angels were helping you? You talked about you got your cedar start back and whatnot. So give us how the first roots of your creation got into the garden. I

Kim Larkin 16:43

really wanted to grow. something. And that growing keeps me feeling really connected. I talk to my plants a lot. I have a relationship with all of them. It's really fulfilling to me. But I didn't know where to start. When I was in Phoenix, I had lots of help from friends with experience who even came over and gifted me my first gardening tools, my hand tools, which I'm still using. But I had conversations, especially with the the growers. I talked to people at the farmer's market who I got my plants from, from a local nursery, about what grows well. I said, I'm a novice gardener, so start me off with the easy things, because this is my first garden up here. And how do I plant them knowing that my home is south facing? What likes the sun? So I asked a lot of questions about what would be make the most successful garden for this first year of trying. So I ended up with things like peppers and tomatoes and zucchini and cucumber and lots of different types of greens. And it's just a garden for myself. I'm just a household of one. And so it's very small, but it's going to be as I start to be able to harvest, it's incredible to be able to have all of my greens for the week, go and pick them in the morning, or I've been going and picking cilantro to put on my food. And it just feels really incredible and connected and the people who know.

Taran Singh 18:33

Yeah. And that's the beauty of, you know, cultivation and nurturing that this is, This knowledge is passed by the earth to us in many ways, and we're just a carrier of that knowledge. And I like how you said, even though you are saying it's a garden for one, once you have bounty, you will be sharing in a way that you will be surprised. I grow a lot of my stuff, but also first thing that come out, I usually like to share. My belief is that just like the native, share the first bounty with neighbors or whoever it is, right? Even like UPS folks that drop into my house, they know that, you know, if there's a zucchini growing or like I had so much garlic that I gave it to everybody that I could find on the street. Hey, buddy, if you don't use garlic, you better start using it now.

Kim Larkin 19:25

I do. I think that that idea of growing as a community act is such a beautiful and important thing. I'm so excited for my first bumper crop of chard. I ended up with almost over a dozen chard plants on accident, which I love chard, but I'll know I'll have extra. And I can't wait to go and offer some to my neighbors or be able, taking my very first peppers, I should be able to harvest in a couple of days. And I'm going up to Colorado to celebrate some birthdays with friends So I want to take those up. So that, yeah, I don't think about that so much, but it is such an important aspect, like the community aspect of growing. Yeah.

Taran Singh 20:09

And everything you grow also tastes differently. And even if it tastes differently, even if you have plucked it with your hands, suddenly you can feel your own self in the produce that you, that you can see your labor of love, but also the labor of your conversation. And that's where I want to go next is to talk about, you know, at least for me, you know, I use garden as most also not quote unquote my therapist, but quote unquote still my therapist. I spent a lot of my, especially when I'm going through our people, I spend a lot more time in the garden and I have a native plus edible garden. So I can see plant, butterflies, hummingbirds, spiders, whatnot, right? And I've realized at least over the periods that the more I converse with them, the better, the more truthful I am to my own self, right? And I wanted to hear from you what conversations you have on your bright days and on your dark days and how has that relationship changed Kim when she looks at the world now?

Kim Larkin 21:17

I know

Taran Singh 21:18

it's a packed question, so take your time.

Kim Larkin 21:22

Oh, no, it's a great question. I think that... It really is connecting and grounding in a way that I don't get from other experiences. A lot of my happiest moments are out in nature, but there's something different than going hiking or kayaking or camping even and getting your hands into the soil. And that kind of grounding, for me, it quiets my mind in a way that I'm really not able to get from a lot of things. And I enjoy meditation, but something that's an additional benefit from gardening is this sense of satisfaction and it's almost this mutual growth. So in a time when I've been experiencing a lot of personal challenges it helps me feel like um i think reconnect to a more natural version of time and a more the cycles of time and give myself more permission to let go of this false kind of human time of there's urgency, we're supposed to be busy, there's all these things. And both being here and working in my garden reminds me that time doesn't belong to us. We just exist within it. And it's in time is it's a construct in a way that we don't fully understand. And we participate in based on our version of reality. And working in the garden reminds me that, yeah, that we exist in this greater cycle, that there's the seasons, there's the moon cycles, there's even the morning and the evening. And I've started to find myself just organically resetting myself to those times and connecting with more of looking at when the plants... in the morning are waiting for the sunlight in order to spread the leaves and how they protect themselves in the wind. And I think taking a lot of lessons from that by just noticing even how the weeds have their own strategies. So some of them go really deep and some of them create hundreds of thousands of miles of tiny, tiny little roots that are all in this space that we can't even imagine how much there actually is in terms of connection with the soil and earth. So there's so many lessons to be learned.

Taran Singh 24:18

I mean... what you said is, you know, the intuitiveness and the observation that you gain by just observing, observing things as the time, time is going to keep continuing. And, you know, I also believe that time is, you know, our relationship to time is so, so sacred, but also so meaningless and so meaningful at the same way, because, you know, time, time doesn't do anything to us, but we still, you know, we, but we don't, have time you know we don't have endless life so we are suddenly bounded by the capacity of our relationship in this time frame that we have and and garden i think especially for me when i wrote time and not one of the poem is garden i do believe that garden gives us that cycle of life and death in an instant and say hey Don't worry about that you're going to live forever. This is garden. I'm blooming today and the next season I'm dead, but don't worry about it. I've left the space for another plant to come and take that spot. And same is true with us. We might not think we can be supplanted, but I do believe that the cycle is the same for everybody. The circle, the longer the circle, the shorter the circle. but but not to not to not to be swayed by you know the that the end is near or the beginning is far you also have a window from your from your home to that beautiful night sky and and that that gives you the immense escape of the creation but also provides you into the collisions of the past and the future that we hold, right? And being imaginative, futuristic. Has your outlook towards what you need to write or what you are imagining changed in this night that dawns now on your beautiful abode?

Kim Larkin 26:24

I think you just used the word collapse of time. And I think that... that experience has been really visceral in a way of that, this collapse of the past, present and future. And then I think as a futurist and also at least in the US, there's such a focus on the future, on this maybe completely made up future state that you're always trying to get to. And with that, you lose a lot of focus on the presence in the past. And something that I've really, I think has become so much more apparent for me and so much more important is this connection between not just as a strategist and as a futurist, you're often looking at what is the present situation that you're in. And then you're imagining future possibilities, but it's, really helped me look at, we also need to be incredibly cognizant of history in the past and be weaving that into our knowledge and how we think about what's to come.

Taran Singh 27:43

Yeah. And I'd go back to the same gardening terminology and from a poem that I told is glow and I've just pulled up one line from it. I think if you were to think about our future as harvesting, and say future is nothing but harvesting and harvesting is bliss beyond seasons because once you have harvested something it is not impacted by the season right and that to me is the future that you hold at the all you know we are all trying to get to the harvest and and not the dimension of the time that the future is right and and you know And flower itself is a harvest. Sometimes a leaf is a harvest, right? But in our mind, if fruit is always the harvest, which you alluded to, I want a secure fruit for my future. And that I think is a recipe for anxiety. And that's, you know, the modern, that's contrary to the native world where everything is, I live in the now and I want to do whatever it takes to get things done for now and let, let the future happen the way it happens. And I'm going to manage my harvest so that I can enjoy my presence and fulfill, right? Because having a fulfilled life is what it takes. And I think Tao's glaze preserves that in its past, right? And that's what I like when you, in your opening statement, it's so full of life, right? And coming back to Tao's, I wanted to understand a little bit more about in your imagination and in your world now, as you have discovered Taos and people around it, is there something that you can share with us and say, Taran, this is what I see in Taos that I want each one of us to cultivate and take it back in their own abodes?

Kim Larkin 29:45

Yeah, I think that An acknowledgement of the history and culture and people who have come before is such an incredible part of Taos and the opportunity to learn, to listen and to pay attention. Taos is a very lively place. very western kind of town. There's a central Spanish-style plaza in the center where people gather. But it's also, there's a lot of intentional community, but there's also a lot of quiet. A lot of time to come together, but also really spend in the sort of solitude that exists in a rural community. And those pieces of, well, one other thing about this area is if you have a sense of urgency, this is not the place for you to be. If you need convenience and instant gratification, this is not the place for you to be, which people call New Mexico either the land of enchantment or the land of entrapment.

Taran Singh 31:05

The land of detoxification, maybe. The land of detoxification.

Kim Larkin 31:13

This aspect of letting go of the things that seem to be this false sense of urgency and this false sense of need It's really freeing in a way, unless you hate it and it becomes entrapment, but it's freeing in a way to support letting go of things of, you know what, that's not quite as important as I thought. I don't really need to get that done today. I can, you know, plan things differently. I can reset my expectations.

Taran Singh 31:42

That grace of time is so essential for our growth, right? It is that you can have a deeper conversation with yourself, with others and and focus on the subtleness of the life that is around you and not worry about the gratification that is so abundant. It is not just that in the world we live, the gratification is abundant and it's also instant. So both of it makes it a toxic proportion, in my opinion, that you can continue. It's like an endless field. feet in terms you know my last question before we wrap this conversations and you have traveled the world and you know you've come back to Taos and experienced a lot of things in the early young years of your life as in this journey are there any experiences or books that you would recommend you know young people to at least give it a shot as they build their they harvest their lives that, oh, I better try this, try this. That has helped you see the world in a different way than you would have imagined when you were young or teen.

Kim Larkin 33:01

So many. I am an avid reader. But one of the books that really helped me shift my trajectory is and think differently about my life and completely kind of shifted the direction of my career was a book called The Future You by Brian David Johnson. And he's a futurist who has worked with everything from Fortune 100 companies to military, to government, to nonprofits to help them envision the future. And this particular book takes all of that knowledge and all of that approach and translates it to how you might be able to use that in your personal life in a simple framework of really that emphasizes storytelling. Changing the story can change your future. And that particular book is because my brain works in a way that I love a framework, but a flexible framework, not that's A, B, C, D, E, a process, a framework that you can kind of flex and create within. So that's a book that I highly recommend. I purchased it for a number of people in order to hopefully help them kind of think about what they want to do on their journey. Yeah.

Taran Singh 34:29

No, I'm going to put that in the notes too, but is there a story that you would like to share with us in conclusion where, you know, that you say, hey, after reading this book, this was how I framed a story. It could be anywhere, right? It could be work. It could be whatever comes to your mind that you would like to close us with a story.

Kim Larkin 34:50

Sure. So one of the things that I have been pursuing more for myself recently is making, creating, art making. And one of the ways in which I'm doing that is I use collage. And I've used this framework as a Combined with some other elements, there's the heroine's journey, which is a particular way that a story works and kind of using this to map this self-portrait that I'm creating through collage. So that sounds very, maybe overly complicated, but really what it was doing is helping me frame a picture of my life and becoming the narrator of my story. So using this concept of changing the story to change the future, I've really been looking at my story. What are these internal narratives that I have that maybe don't fit the character or the journey that I want to be on? And using my hands and materials to actually turn those fragments of thoughts or those stories into something that's tangible, that for me, kind of helps me rewrite my own journey in a way that suits me. where I want to go, not in the way of leaving out bad things, but if there's shame in an experience or how can I re... Or

Taran Singh 36:27

letting go, letting go of what you need to let go through, putting it on some physical entity. Exactly. No, that's such an interesting way, right? Because a lot of time it's not the distance, it's the guilt. that keeps the inertia right and human beings you know we keep guilt to heart and I you know I use garden to buddy my guilt you know sometimes I'll just dig a hole and do nothing with that hole and say okay this is it buddy this is it this is it it's coming in and out right but you know in our next next next collision we will talk about that and I would love to see how that painting shows up and And I'm going to imagine it for now, but I'm glad you're doing this and giving yourself the privilege and using all the subtle colors of Taos to give your journey these colors and sharing that with us. What a beautiful gift. And again, thank you for giving us the time. And I hope you're going to enjoy your farmer market. A lot of stuff is in season. Have a great

Kim Larkin 37:40

time. It's a very exciting time for the market.

Taran Singh 37:42

Yeah, enjoy. Have a good one. Thank you for joining, Kim.

Kim Larkin 37:46

Thank you so much.

Taran Singh 37:49

Thank you for joining us on the Conversation Trails of the Mountain in Us podcast. Each episode here is crafted with love, adventure, and reflection. We hope you have enjoyed this one and we welcome your thoughts on it. And if you want to be on the show, feel free to reach out.