Sign out of 2024 with this lively mastermind who suggests we take country into our body ! How?
Build routine around food,
Go barefoot to boost immunity, 
Stop seeing food as an inconvenience
Cook & eat with family often
Connect to the seasons of your life & the landscape
Create & share ceremony
Use food as a reconciliation tool

Belonging to a matriarchal community has unlocked knowledge handed down by oral stories, dance & art where kinship is more than human to human. Knowing your spirit belongs here is a gift we can all tap but with belonging comes responsibility - one to mother earth, but also to sisterhood, eldership and to being part of the greater whole.

Links You'll Love
Karkala book by Mindy Woods
Karkala instagram

Loved this? Try these:
Tyson Yunkaporta
Billa from the Wild School

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We talked about:

Living by 6 local seasons
"Being part of the greater whole - we are one of the parts of many, it’s not us & them but all of us as one contributing to our country in some way we can maintain balance"
Caring for her totems goanna, echidna & wollomi pine via broader care of her environment
Societal lack of connection & belonging
Imperfect allyship - ok to make mistakes but important to maintain connection
Mob love a yarn - connect, be quiet, shut your mouth, open your listening & be there in respectful observation. Get curious about native food landscapes, 
Knowledge is the sacred part, the fundamental core of culture & treated with great reverence despite it not being written down, its taken seriously when its shared on
It’s not transactional, it’s about relationships & allows us all to slow down to a pace that humans should actually move at.
Childhood memories on country with family - eating oysters out of jam jars
Being a proud cook - not a chef
Having friends apply for masterchef on her behalf
Debunking the myth of Australian food being meat pies & sausage rolls
Asking what is Australia's cuisine & exploring culture through food
Eating foods from our landscape, they belong here, are highly nutritious & are abundant
Moving into eldership as wisdom holders - not an age but a readiness
When you’re taking care of country you're taking care of mob & community too
The privilege of taking on responsibility for cultural teachings
When women are in charge it creates a great balance - women's wishes are always community based & they are thinking about country community & culture".
You can’t be what you can’t see - be the one to lead the way
Standing loud & proud in sisterhood - uniting.
"The privilege to eat food that you’ve grown & understand the value of: local, seasonal, country gives you what you need at the right times in abundance - feeding the old people & the young people before feeding the well ones"

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What started as a throw away title while supporting her husband James Rebanks on his book tours, Helen Rebanks now proudly refers to herself as the farmers wife - a title that has very much become her identity & set in her a burning desire to write her own book about invisible women who’s stories are not told. As a mother of four & the backbone for their farming ventures in the Lakes District in the UK, Helen declares that the only people who work harder than farmers are farmers wives. I reckon she's right! She is a small in stature, large in capability kind of woman who truly loves her daily reason to get out of bed & nurture her family. hold the many threads of keeping a family going, setting the pace and rhythm.  She speaks of honouring our capability to be in service with love, empathy  compassion & a regular roast on the dinner table not just on Sundays. Through this lens she is bringing her own kind of approach to combatting corporate greed, multi national farmland ownership & returning us to localised food systems.

Food that’s made with love & care says “I’m nourished & looked after” - imagine being the person in the house that provides this service” 
This story is about speaking up for those who hold families together, hold communities together. We need small farm futures with local food systems. Knowing where our food comes from & being able to ask the questions.

Join us at her at her kitchen table.

Links You'll Love
The Farmers Wife Helen Rebanks book
The Sheppard's wife Insta handle

Loved this? Try these:
Ep 54 Mara from Orto farm
Ep 121 Nat Wilmott

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We talked about:
Speaking up for the women who sit behind the regenerative family farmers life.
Thinking holistically about life on the land - It's WHOLE!
The farmers table as a gathering place
Reasons for transitioning into regenerative practices.
Sharing her farming stories to help others transition their on earth practices
"If I’ve ever felt minimised in the work I do its not been by me or my family"
Living small & living local rather than chasing a celebrity culture is what she strives for. 
Our deep disconnection to our food.
The power of a meal around the table
Tomatoes on toast or scrambled eggs IS DINNER
The role of motherhood taught her to become a voice for the process of becoming a mother. We can suffer in silence or talk to each other & learn.
Sharing very vulnerable things in the hope it helps others.

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Summary
As a super quiet, observing kid, Carolyn often had her head in a book or went adventuring on her own. As an adult this lead to naturally hermitty behaviour before she actively decided to show others that shy characters can do bold & hard things too - especially if they take tea wherever they go. Now, woven into a well connected community she is more or less living her daydream of tea caravans, herbal gardens, her very own herbal medicine book & a throng of good folks around her.
She reveals that growing herbs was her gateway to herbalism & that we can all know their potency by incorporating them into every day life & not just turning to them when we're sick. But to do this we must get to know them. The best way to become intimate is to grow them, dry them, taste them, smell them, feel how they moves through your body.
Join us on a magical herbal love-affair!

Links You'll Love
The Medicine Garden - Carolyn Parker
The Cottage Herbalist

Loved this ep? Try these:
Anthea Koullouros 
Perma Pixie

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We talked about:
Her seasonal daily rhythm
“It was a daydream of mine not to wake up to an alarm but to wake up with the sunshine”
Being a poly-jobist: business woman, gardener, herbalist
"I’m an evolved that-way sort of person - I straddle between being a list maker & a meanderer".
Being the kid who wasn’t ultra conversational & actively moving through the discomfort of it & learning to have conversations & a little false bravado
I want to show other reserved/shy people that you can o scary things
“I think we are hard wired for comfort but this doesn't allow us to reach our potential”
Taking herself off to a boxing gym to learn how to be assertive & confident
Drawing daydream gardens
Discovering you can be a herbalist later in life
Being a naturopath is so much more than a job - enabling the patient to undertake holistic change is really where the opportunity to change is.
Viewing it more as a lifestyle is part of the solution
Teaching her patients skills rather than selling them potions
Leading patients to veggie gardens, kimchi pots, community & settled adrenals
Wearing fun clothes & sporting dirty fingernails at the same time
Picking outfits like her dinner, according to colour
Award winning tea blends - making tea since big enough to be trusted with a kettle
Starting her tea caravan
Not being nostalgic
The importance of being connected to people
Stop moving the goal posts without appreciating what you've achieved

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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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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

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Hungry?  How bout a salad…trust me, after todays convo, you’re going to want to eat salad for breakfast, lunch & dinner. Not just the limp lettuce & store bought dressing kind of salad but one that tickles all your gastronomic senses. Once you've been satiated the convo settle into really chewing on the realities of this high energy lass' day to day existence: her rituals,  her challenge to find the gaps to do the quiet things, learning to really be in the moment & finding her path to enoughness.

Alice Zaslavski has chatted with us on the pod before but since then her OTT love for food, food education & food appreciation has exploded into the stratosphere with another 3 cookbooks, her own radio segment on Saturday mornings & now her own cooking show on the ABC, you’ll still find her exuberance filling the pages of papers & magazines nationwide & for today you’ll her convincing you to serve salad for your every meal.

 The pace of this human is dizzy-ing so its a strap in & hang tight kind of episode.

Links You'll Love
A bite to eat with Alice - ABC
Salad Days - Alice Zaslavski
Phenomenom - Free Lessons via the lense of food 

Loved this? Try these:
Alice on Futuresteading previously

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We talked about:
Being a talker on paper 
Her latest adventures in gastronomic pleasures 
Listening to your body to understand what you need at the time.
Food as medicine deserves to be understood by all
Her ‘vegetable-forward’ food, centric Georgian heritage 
Sharing a common vision but not always sharing the same timing ambitions
Movement has power - just start & collectively the energies come together
Breaking our daily fast with vegetables
Be ready & willing to adapt the recipes to suit yourself
The real life day to day juggle of such a busy busy life 
Having a ‘wife’ in her ‘husband’
Learning to say a hard NO
Prioritising her health as the most important part of her job
Being lit up by all that you do so it doesn't feel like working a day of your life
Time to update the vision board
The soma response to birthing a new project
Building an enabling network to get into flow
Enabling others to be their most magic version of themselves
Being an extroverted extrovert - learning how to absorb human energy via a screen
Learning to speak English with Big Ted on Playschool
Wishing for more time with community
Making time for reading
Saying yes to the opportunities that ground you.

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This is a pour-a-cuppa kinda convo - Matilda Brown is a rare kind-of open book where nothing is off limits and despite not actually being her friend you get the distinct feeling that you must be. 

Flipping a childhood acting career for a regnerative food business wasn’t part of her plan - actually nothing really is, this breath of fresh air claims to be “bumbling around with life, filling in time until she dies.” But her bumble is joyful & hopeful in the best way possible.

She & her husband Scott Gooding are the brains & brawn behind the Good Farm pre prepared meals range & they’ve just released a cook book with the same name - its as delightful as she is - This is her story!

Links You'll Love
The Good Farm Shop
the Good Farm Cookbook
Provinir

Loved this? Try these eps:

Alex from Cornersmith
Laura from Feather & bone

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We talked about:

Being an oversharer & wanting to know the details without any shame
Going through the world giving more than taking
Boobs peaking at 14
Fad diets of her teenage years without an understanding of nutrition
From actor to foodie
Life epiphanies via parenthood
Believing that the universe has your back & the lessons you are being served are necessary
Stumbling into a regenerative path
Creating Cow shares until they realised there was a hole in their bucket
The challenge of building a business around the true cost of a whole animal outside of the industrial food system
Creating a regenerative food business nuancing as they went.
Combining a regen story with convenience
Sharing more than just the business news in this nosey world…navigating sharing of personal stories
Avoiding a thick skin so you keep ‘feeling’
I have so much to learn as a spiritual being in a humans body, on a ride in a world that can’t be controlled or predicted.
Magic sits in the bumbling, rats & mice & problem children
Appreciating the things that money can’t buy 
The value of being relational - shunning the online solution
The need to squeeze your closest folk
How many ‘no’s’ do you need before you get to the YES
Even when things are hard they can still be heart filling and they can make you FEEL so alive! This is living, side stepping numbness is when you feel your most alive.

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Summary
Life is impermanent. Precious but not entitled to length. The past is behind us, the future is unknown & all we have is this moment. Our role is to meet the moment.
Being overwhelmed with the assignment of bringing healing & protection to the earth, todays guest looked to Gaia as the source of guidance towards effortless harmony. Easier said than done but she found that our cultural inclination to constant self referencing & focussing on I, Me, Mine was the limitation. 
Looking beyond the veil into another dimension & awakening her relationship to the earth allowed her to thread humility into all her actions & remembering that we are part of & conspiring with gaia in every living moment gave her the space to take a breath before acting.
She meditated
She took the radical act of pausing to gain clarity
She had  the courage to step out of the old patterns 
She undertook pilgrimages
She built global networks of healing & peace
She honoured those who are maintaining the ceremonies, prayers & connections that keep us all in balance.
She filled Earth Treasure vases and built a global mandala as her offering of  'sacred activism'.
This is her story.

Links You'll Love
Joanna Macey - the work that reconnects
Charles Eisenstein - new and ancient story podcast
Cynthia Jurs Book - Summoned by the Earth
Gaiamandala.net global healing community

Loved this ep? Try these:
E138 Osprey Oriel Lake
E105 Rosemary Morrow

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We talked about:
Buddhism tradition of earth treasure vases - holy vessels with purpose
Being prepared within yourself before succumbing to a summoning
Bringing the earth back into balance
Filling small clay pots with prayers, offerings, traditions & intentions as a symbolic measure for healing & balance
Clay pots are kind of like living beings - they come alive in your hands
The clay includes many sacred substances linking them to ancestral lineages Allowing ancient practices to become relevant to the world today & to the people that are participating in the offering process
The capacity for different cultures, communities & lands to accept without assumption
Making offerings to the earth & the unseen-beings-without-a-voice that we know we need to keep in balance
Becoming a vessel but not imposing your own ideas & self importance on what you think is best for the world.
Getting down on her knees and opening her heart and asking for support from the unseen energy.
Our own true nature is so much a part of the nature of Gaia

“ When I learned how to get myself out of the way, form an intention, but allow that intention to unfold on its own without trying so hard to make it happen, things started to unfold in a very different way - in ways I never could have predicted"

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Summary
The age of short termism now dominates - Todays guest however takes long termism the way we all take breakfast (those not on a fasting regime anyway) Apparently he was born this way. 

In his recently released book Taming the Apocalypse he states that the only remaining sustainable resources after industrialisation runs its course will be biology & culture. To prepare for this time, Shane Simonsen has an exceptionally original approach to zero input, large scale farming & has committed his life's plan of living long enough to connect varieties of crops that have been separated by 60 million years of evolution by creating plant hybridisation at scale - his seed collection rivals Svalbard the Global Seed Vault.

His thesis so far:
-The shortcoming of science is that it wants all organisms to behave like machines.
-If we have 1000 farmers over 1000 years doing this, we would see a miracle  - not a machine.
- Now is the moment for sacrificial offerings of research & time for the sake of learning for future generations
- Putting seeds in the dirt NOT a seed bank is the best path to build genetic diversity

Links You'll Love
Shane Simonsen substack

Loved this? Try this:
Artists as family episode

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We talked about:

• Learning to think long term
• Zero input large scale, experimental  farming
• Changing career direction away from complex & fragile systems
• From hunter gatherer culture to industrial ag with nothing in between
• Culture gaps and skills gaps
• Biological systems are complicated, networked & chaotic 
• Why Bunya nuts were his starting place
• Humans have the capacity to recognise the uniqueness & value of something in the eco system & support it to become an ongoing part of our food future.
• Why biology is the unexpected miracle. 
• Rebuilding culture so we can accept slow, magical outcomes 
• You don't need many people like Shane to create real change - seed sharing, experimentation, desire to create new things
• The defense chemicals of our food 
• Why humans are really bad at imagining things that gradually change our base line
• Opting out from resource intensive lives - creeping off into the margins to exist
• Spending months of hand farming to grow $20 worth of grain
• Rebuilding trust & re-forming collectivism
• Beginning your own hybridisation program with vegetables 
• Almost all the vegetable seed you buy originated in hot houses in Holland
• Australia is on the end of supply lines so it’s likely we will experience a supply shock - this might be just the wake up call to realise the vulnerable state we are in.
• Can we get our politicians to fly the permaculture flag?
• Taming elephants to hybridise them

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Summary
In a world dominated by a striving for endless growth, it can be hard to see that while a drive towards money and individualism is great for the economy, it is fundamentally destructive for humanity, community & ecology. This conversation tackles us relearning our ability to grow our environment with each other & to meet our own needs rather than outsourcing to those who will make the divisions based on profit. It asks us to opt for less transactions & more relationships, it addresses the epidemic of loneliness and it settles on the idea that a little bit of debt is a good thing - relational debt that is.
The time to navigate difficult & complex divisions  to make us anti fragile is now but it requires us to heal our hurt hearts so we can do the work we need to do in our current system.
Degrowth is the salve, held by love that is the container for our path forward as humanity.

Links You'll Love
Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
National Degrowth Network
The Overstory - Richard Powers

Loved this? Try these:
Ep 125 Jane Hilliard - Enoughness
Ep 120 Just Collapse
Ep 77 Tammi Jonas

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Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:
Poverty is political 
Building action into your everyday existence
Seeking inspiration from socialist countries
Building an obsession with nature 
Composting as a gateway drug 
Evolving from being individuals to being change making huddles
Making academic theories approachable & practical
Finding collective inspiration for criticising growth
Creating coalitions of the unlikely by side stepping black & white 
Creating containers for people who are looking to connect despite the inevitable conflicts that will arise
We need more spaces to hold respected disagreements
Despite relationships being thorny, we are going to have to work this out.
The hardest skills of all are the soft skills of really working wth humans - meeting people with what they need to unpack the complexity 
Being part of groups where the hard stuff can be held
Building the ‘neighbourhood’ - learning the name of the person next door, even when they are different to you
Being materially dependent on one another is a good thing
Our mobility has meant we are avoiding our ability to learn to manage conflict.
Why cleverness is disarming
The role of grief & gratitude in this journey
Slow is smooth & smooth is fast
Instead of air conditioners - lets have an afternoon nap
Returning us to our natural cycles & building our life around it
Side stepping linear, capitalist striving.
Connection to the earth is not lost on us - it’s in our ancestral knowledge, but we need to sit still, reskill & really want to relearn 
Learning to be comfortable with a lack of control

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As a food grower, lover of the natural world, cook and wizened plant expert, todays conversation meanders between the veggie patch & the kitchen, the garden shed & the pickling shelf. 
A reverence for the food we eat was planted deep inside Paulette's young mind by a mother who shared her skills and passion which then carried her onto this trajectory of life where she experiences the world through her garden.
As founder and owner of Provenance Growers and now author she tells the story of where our food comes from, how it was grown and what nutrients it might share with us in our interwoven way of existence with the natural world.

Links you’ll love:
Provenance growers
Broccoli and other love stories

Loved this? Try these:
Similar themes but of course wonderfully different stories.
Ep 134 Jane Stevens who is a herbalist & astrologer in the US
Ep 121 Nat Wilmott who shares her story of homesteading, homeschooling & living simply in the West Gippsland Hills
Ep 53 Simeon Ash from Spoke and Spade market garden.

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We talked about:
Learning lessons outside with her Mum
Seeing a process evolve from environmental impact to food 
Tapping back into her childhood skills to step away from the pressure to sell things
Changing careers in her mid 20’s & landing in horticulture
Making people feel happy & safe with what we do with our hands
The many uses of flowers for culinary, health & horticulture
Her addiction to seeds - especially spring loaded ones
Tips for managing cross pollination for seed saving
Her caffeine supported daily routine 
The cycle of paddock/soil  management 
Her love of perennial edibles for ease of management & health of soil
Creating plants that are hardy & weather beaten that thrive when planted
Kids pulling away from their parents
Being a reluctant elder
Market gardening as an ideal job for a human low in confidence & introverted
Her ADHD diagnosis
Her husband is the doer & she is the wanderer
Storytelling as a tool for knowledge sharing
Following the rhythm of her brain as a pattern to writing her book
The freedom of knowing you can hold more than one idea at once
The beautiful cyclical nature of observing & interacting
Lean model of market gardening
Managing failure - easier to do when you are safe & have your basics met
Avoiding waste from the outset

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This gent who goes by the name of Das is eccentric, passionate, articulate & intelligent so strap in for this fast paced, heady conversation framed through the lens of equal rights for species other than humans to the very resources we are destroying. His voice grins, setting a positive tone & his true love of the natural world is just a tad intoxicating.

We leap from the truth that adaptability trumps strength for resilience. We quip about how the finance sector is filled with animals,  we both agree that animals are more sensible than human beings - they don’t go about destroying the landscape that keeps them alive & we ponder how we came to be a culture that thinks we can click our way out of the quandary we find ourselves in. We ask if you're suffering from 'Prognostic Miopia' where you are so focussed on the near term things you don’t connect with the real long term consequences of our actions. We suspect the very culture we all swim in, means we all suffer & rather than feeling the weight of this, taking the approach of finding our own, individual ways to swim out of it.
 It covers a lots and its a cracker!

 Links You’ll Love
Aldo Leopold - The Sand County Almanac
Wild Quests by Das
Barry Lopez - Arctic Dreams

Loved this Ep….Listen to:
- Damon Gameau
- Dan Palmer
- Helena Norberg Hodge  

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Show Notes
Defining what it means to be human through studying animals 
Coming face to face with a grizzly bear in Alaska
Failing our natural world as its guardian
Our need for 1.7 earths
"Human eyes need more pixels than there are in the universe to capture the beauty of some animals"
Going to the root cause of the problems rather than bandaid-ing
Human beings as mere hosts for bacteria & viruses
The danger of our reliance on tech
"Humans address every problem with Paleolithic emotions, medievil institutions & godlike technology - a dangerous recipe
Reading your landscape
Entering the phase of populism for answers
Moving our problems into the future
"Ultimately the worth of our species will be measured by our acceptance of our true role within the complex web that is life"

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