This is a conversation about the future. About creating a culture that values tomorrow. We reckon a slower, simpler, steadier existence is the first step - one that’s healthier for humans and the planet. We call it Futuresteading. Each month we chat to people prominent and humble in food, farming, health and environment, gathering practical advice and epic solidarity - so we can all nut this thing out together. Join our nitty, gritty, honest and hopeful convo every Monday during our 10 episode seasons.Support the pod by shouting us a cuppa >>> buymeacoffee.com/futuresteading
Step into the deeper currents of what it means to build a life that lasts beyond a single generation. Explore multi-generational living not just as a practical arrangement, but as an antidote to the fragmentation of modern society—a way of returning to rootedness, continuity, & shared purpose. Reflect on the power of family rituals, enduring traditions & the slow transmission of wisdom that strengthens the family ecosystem.
Through personal stories & cultural insight, Jeremy reveals how honouring ancestral lineage has cultivated belonging & identity, and how intentional gatherings have helped reweave the connections frayed by hyper-individualism. Jeremy speaks to the beauty & complexity of holding the responsibility of caring for aging parents, & the steady vision of togetherness that shapes their family’s choices.
This conversation touches on the importance of building community with both kin & chosen family, redefining success in relational rather than material terms, & rediscovering what “enough” truly means in a world bent toward consumption. It is a conversation about stewardship, resilience, & designing a life that honours both our roots & our future.
Loved this? Try another:
Nat Wilmot - Living her Dream
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Buy the Books - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
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Show Notes:
In this episode, we sit down with Jamin Heppell to dive into the edges where personal growth, leadership, and nature all meet. We talk about what it means to move through fear, to listen to our intuition, and to find clarity in the moments that challenge us most. Jamin opens up about his own life initiations, the experiences that have shaped who he is and how he leads and shares the practices and rituals that help him stay grounded and resilient. Together, we explore what heart-centered leadership really looks like in today’s world, and how the mountains — both literal and metaphorical — can teach us about courage, authenticity, and alignment.
We talked about:
Links You'll Love:
Jamin's offerings: https://linktr.ee/jaminheppell
Jamin's Website: https://mountainsandmarathons.world/aligneverest26/
Article on the Patagonia story mentioned in the pod: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/26/australian-hikers-chilean-mountain-blizzard-survival-stories
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
Summary
If we are going to lay the foundations of a world we are proud to leave as a legacy we need to be comfortable to move into elderhood - for Manda Scott this is about getting comfortable with emergence and asking the living web “what is mine to do”.
We’ve created a world where separation, anxiety & powerlessness have become the underlying defaults instead of a world of security, belonging & agency. We are addicted to dopamine &exist in a world of trauma rather than initiation so how are we to rewrite these patterns?
By listening to the heart-mind - its very shy & quiet but the head mind will whisper if it needs you to really listen.
Links You'll Love
Any Human Power - Manda Scott
Accidental Gods - Manda Scott program & podcast
Right story, Wrong story - Tyson Yunkaporta
Sand talk - Tyson Yunkaporta
Mans search for meaning - Victor Frankel
Francis Weller - The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Loved this? Try these:
Tyson Yunkaporta
Damon Gameau
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Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
We talked about:
Learning to live as functioning members of the earth community
Why she writes fiction not non fiction
Receiving shamanic instruction
How to be in connection with the web of life in all its complexity
Being born into a trauma culture rather than an initiation culture
Why seeing truth without self projection is hard.
Her decades of shamanic teaching - still learning to discern the difference between what her ego is saying and what the energy is saying
Returning to a sit spot to receive instructions to write a book
“Skin Listening” - an ability to be felt with all your senses without pre conceived ideas
Sit spots - what can I see, what can I feel, what does my heart say
Why some languages say “I am other” and some say “I am intrinsically part of what is happening.
Initiation culture is capable of holding contained encounters with death
We live in a dopamine culture - addicted to turning oil into adrenaline
Yearning for a serotonin mesh of connection of meaning & purpose
The four stages of Adulthood
Undoing our head mind dominance
Offering yourself in service and waiting for your path.
The chaos of our culture is that we think we can plan ahead
We live in an insane world & ourselves its sane
One of the key measures of adulthood is being prepared to walk against the tide
As a new Mum, living in a new home, having just released a new book and fertilising the idea of reconnecting back to her Vietnamese heritage Tammy Huyhn is a light hearted joy.
This lass knows a thing or two about plants - you may have seen her face on ABC's Gardening Australia and she runs her own hortucultural business Leaf an Impression which delivers garden talks and workshops...she has even been awarded horticulturist of the year!
Todays conversation though, mostly asks "how does gardening bridge us back to our ancestral roots and remind us who we are".
Post recording, Tammy thanked us for the unexpected therapy session - so its a short and sweet ep that still manages to dig beyond the top soil.
We talked about:
Loved this? Try another:
Tim Pilgrim - Creating Wild Spaces; The Art Of Natural Design
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
Come with us for a wander through the fertile grounds of possibility with James McLennon, the visionary behind Farm My School. Todays ep unearths how a patch of school soil can become so much more than a playground—it can nourish bodies, minds, and entire communities. From the thriving farm at Bellarine Secondary College to the ripple effects it’s having on students, neighbours, and local food systems, James shares how education and regeneration can thrive side by side. This is a story about reimagining our schools as living, breathing ecosystems—places where compost becomes curriculum and connection becomes the harvest. Tune in for a hopeful glimpse of a future where every school grows food, community, and a deep sense of belonging.
We talked about:
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Links You'll Love
Farm My School online
Loved this? Try these:
Jamie Loveday - Sowing Seeds for Food Deserts in the City
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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
Jade and Dalee wander through the tender terrain where creativity, womanhood, and everyday life meet. Speaking openly about the way our inner cycles shape what we make and how we show up in the world — and how hard it can be to hold space for both art and livelihood.
Together they explore the slow evolution of Dalee’s creative path, the courage it takes to collaborate, and the quiet emotional work of home-schooling while running a small business. Their chat drifts into community — the messy beauty of shared living in an intentional community, the texture that neurodiversity brings to family life, and the lessons learned from leaning into interdependence.
It’s a conversation about connection — to self, to others, and to place. About boundaries that protect passions, creativity and community so we are reminded of who we each are and what our individual work is to do - within the collective. Today we ask what it means to live a life guided by values — to curate something meaningful, slow, and true.
Buy their co-created perennial Futuresteading calendar
Links You'll Love
Dalee Ella Substack
Loved this? Try another:
EP 151, Dani Wolf, Mashing Together Mama Wisdom and Earth Wisdom
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
We talked about:
Creativity rises and falls with our cycles; honouring them deepens the work
Flat moods are quiet ground where truth takes root
Art reminds us we belong to something vast
Balancing commerce and creation asks for courage and clarity
Our art shifts as we do — mirroring each inner season
Collaboration thrives on bravery, honesty, and deep listening
Homeschooling stirs chaos, wonder, and unexpected insight
When values lead, both life and art hold meaning
Creativity wanders, retreats, and blooms anew
Awareness keeps our creative fires tended
Simplicity and making offer a gentle kind of wealth
Neurodiversity brings texture, colour, and grace to family life
Community living teaches patience, humility, and belonging
Shared spaces grow empathy and reciprocity
Boundaries make tenderness possible
Home reveals itself slowly, like a seed choosing where to root
Living together reminds us how to give and receive with care
Discomfort is the soil where growth begins
Intentional living ripples outward in quiet legacy
A meaningful life is curated through focus and gentle discernment
In this episode, Demi Lee takes us deep into the story of Eclectica — a movement, a community, and a living expression of embodiment and transformation. Together, we explore how dance becomes a language for healing, how grief can serve as an elder and sacred teacher, and how true empowerment begins with self-responsibility.
Demi shares the evolution of Eclectica from a creative experiment into a profound rite of passage — one that invites people to come home to their bodies, their emotions, and their truth. Through honest reflections on community, relationships, and heart-centered living, this conversation reveals how we can turn life’s challenges into initiations that reconnect us with purpose and love.
It’s an exploration of what it means to live embodied, to honor our inner seasons, and to build communities that hold us through the cycles of becoming.
Key Takeaways:
- Grief is not just loss — it’s an initiation into depth, compassion, and the full spectrum of love.
- Movement and dance can reconnect us with intuition, release stored emotion, and ground us in presence.
- The Power of Community: holding people in the dark.
- Self-Responsibility in Relationships: Owning our patterns and triggers allows for more authentic, heart-based connection.
- Rites of Passage: rituals that mark transformation.
- Choosing love, responsibility, boundaries, and honesty as guiding principles transforms how we show up in the world.
- A journey into remembering who you are beneath the noise — embodied, empowered, and whole.
Show Notes
Eclectica - https://www.eclecticahub.com/
Passage of Self Online Course - https://www.eclecticahub.com/passage-of-self
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Buy the Books - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
In this conversation, Jade sits down with Meg Ulman (sadly not in person) — heart led writer, mother, educator, maker & one part of Artists as Family — to unpick what it really means to live on your own terms.
They trace the winding road toward a neo-peasant life — one defined less by nostalgia & more by intention. They talk about living with a fundamental trust in yourself to make decisions, parenting within community & the grit & grace of staying true to your values.
Meg describes herself as cash poor but time rich, together they explore what that trade-off really feels like.
They talk about the ache of impermanence — how everything we love we will lose — what it means to become good at grief rather than trying to outrun it. What it feels like to feel alive, trusting your instinct to survive & holding a desire to be part of that holding — the invisible web that keeps us tethered to one another & to the earth itself.
Meg shares her reflections on solitude, on listening deeply to the land beneath her feet & on the quiet privileges of aging — not as decline, but as initiation. There’s talk of ritual, of story & of the small daily acts that remind us who we are.
It’s a conversation that doesn’t romanticise simplicity but celebrates the beauty & honesty of a life well noticed.
Links You'll Love
Loved this? Want More of Meg: Artist as family - rites of passage and grief
Pod Partners Rock:Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Show notes:
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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
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Buy the Books - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
What does it really look like to live inside the dream of community? To share walls & gardens, decision-making & dinner tables — & to raise children in a village that actually lives its values?
In this conversation, we sit down with Suzie Brown, long-time advocate for sustainable living & proud resident of the Narara Eco-Village. Suzie opens the gate & lets us wander through the realities of intentional community life — from the joy of shared purpose & spontaneous connection, to the inevitable challenges of governance, regulation & difference.
She shares how Narara’s unique decision-making structures help navigate conflict, why research & planning matter long before the first foundation is laid & what it takes to keep a community diverse, accessible, & truly alive.
This chat is as much about belonging as it is about building — about the quiet power of volunteering, the laughter that spills from community events & the deep satisfaction of knowing you’re part of something larger than yourself.
So settle in & join us as we explore what happens when a group of humans decides to live more lightly — & more together.
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Books:
Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters
Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
We talked about:
Today we wander into the layered world of Tim Pilgrim—a landscape architect and gardener who sees soil, water, and wildness as teachers. Tim invites us to connect with the land rather than control it, to design gardens that honour both human need and ecological integrity.
Together we explore the art of observation and the quiet discipline of water management, learning how these practices build truly sustainable landscapes. Tim shares how gardens evolve over time, shaped by climate change and by the gentle hands—and sometimes heavy footprints—of people. We tackle the prickly debates too: lawns that demand more than they give, the dance between native and non-native plants, and the cultural stories that every planting choice can tell.
Tim also speaks to the community side of gardening: how diversity—of species, of people, of ideas—creates resilience; how food can slip seamlessly into ornamental spaces; how the rhythm of a gardener’s life becomes a legacy of naturalistic design.
This is a conversation for anyone ready to see gardens not just as pretty spaces but as living narratives—places where history, ecology, and our shared future root down together.
We chatted about:
Links You'll Love
Find Tim online including his book "Wild By Design"
Loved this? Try another
Pod Partners Rock: Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness
Today we wander into the wild tangle that is Sarah Firth’s world—a place where curiosity is currency and difference is pure gold. Sarah calls herself a polyhuman, and you’ll feel why as she opens up about neurodivergence, the grit and grace of making art, and the small, daily rituals that stitch meaning into our messy lives.
This is a conversation about courage and kindness, about owning our impact while staying tender enough to connect. It’s an invitation to question the systems around us, take responsibility for the ripples we make, and revel in the glorious complexity of being human.
We talked about:
Australian Medicinal Herbs Code: Future5
Links You'll Love
Eventually Everything Connects - by Sarah Firth
Sarah Firth Instagram
Loved this ep? Try another
Emily Ehlers - Hope is a Verb
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - live like tomorrow matters, Huddle - creating a tomorrow of togetherness