June 3, 2025 5:00 PM UTC
Tristan Gooley is an author and natural navigator who set up his natural navigation school in 2008 and is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling books, including The Natural Navigator (2010) The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (US) / The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs (UK 2014), How to Read Water (2016), The Secret World of Weather (2021) and How to Read a Tree (2023), some of the world’s only books covering natural navigation.
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Virginia is a writer and curator exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through poetic, sensorial essays, workshops, and rituals that aim to decondition by highlighting the revolutionary power of creativity and storytelling.
Learn moreDiscover how to read water’s signs in everyday life. Tristan Gooley shares practical tips from ancient navigation to modern observation — helping you pay attention in a world full of distractions.
Tristan Gooley has come to see water not just as a container, but as a subject — a living intelligence that holds clues and patterns, memories and meaning. In How to Read Water, he draws on Indigenous and ancient navigational wisdom — from the Marshall Islanders’ wave-reading to Polynesian ocean currents — to show how water has long been revered as a communicative, sentient force. These cultures remind us that water is something we’re in constant dialogue with, not merely something other beings live beside or inside.
In this live conversation, part of advaya’s Wisdoms of Water course, Tristan Gooley joins advaya to explore questions like: How can water — in its flows, shapes, and signals — become seen as not just something we passively live alongside, but something we are in constant dialogue with?
This conversation will move between science and spirit, from how you can measure the size of raindrops by the colours in the rainbow, to wayfinding in the open sea, to why water puddles stick on a windowsill. Just as Astrida Neimanis teaches us to feel our bodies as part of a planetary hydrocommons, and Bayo Akomolafe invites us into the mythic undercurrents of Yoruba water spirits, Gooley brings water down to earth again — his approach grounds the poetic and philosophical in the scientific and practical, revealing a quiet activism in the act of observation.
Join us for a conversation that brings together natural navigation, deep attention, and the everyday reminder that: the world is speaking, if only we remember how to read it.
Tristan Gooley is an author and natural navigator who set up his natural navigation school in 2008 and is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling books, including The Natural Navigator (2010) The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (US) / The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs (UK 2014), How to Read Water (2016), The Secret World of Weather (2021) and How to Read a Tree (2023), some of the world’s only books covering natural navigation.
Learn moreTristan Gooley is an author and natural navigator who set up his natural navigation school in 2008 and is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling books, including The Natural Navigator (2010) The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (US) / The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs (UK 2014), How to Read Water (2016), The Secret World of Weather (2021) and How to Read a Tree (2023), some of the world’s only books covering natural navigation. His books have been translated into 20 languages. He has spent decades hunting for clues and signs in nature, across the globe, and has been nicknamed: “The Sherlock Holmes of Nature” by the BBC and he has written for the Sunday Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and many magazines.
Virginia is a writer and curator exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through poetic, sensorial essays, workshops, and rituals that aim to decondition by highlighting the revolutionary power of creativity and storytelling.
Learn moreVirginia is a writer, curator, and researcher exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through a poetic lens. In the last fifteen years, she has been researching and working on gender, feminism and social justice as an activist, journalist, writer and editor. Her writing exists in the in-betweens and tackles social justice, ecology, and feminism poetically, questioning the paradigms currently in place through an approach centred on the emotional and spiritual as well as the political and logical. In her writing, she often infuses ritual, embodiment exercises, and creative prompts. She believes that deconditioning can only happen if we involve not only our minds and knowledge but also our bodies. She is the voice behind WAVES (https://virginiavigliar.substack.com/), a newsletter with thousands of monthly views that questions existing paradigms through a place of joy and care. Through sensorial essays, interviews, and cultural analysis, she weaves conversations on topics such as beauty, identity, masculinity, rest, entanglement, and feminisms. She offers workshops around an ecological approach to masculinity and creative sensorial workshops, find all her offerings here: https://www.virginiavigliar.com/workshops Her mission is to use words as poetic antidotes to systemic issues and to highlight the power of creativity, inner knowledge, and art in our society. Her words are in _Atmos, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vice, The Lissome, World of Topia_ and many notebooks around the world. Words are her comfort zone, she is working on the rest. You can follow her on Instagram @vivivigliar and subscribe to her newsletter WAVES in the link above.