Big things. Little things.
Conversations with inspiring community leaders about the big things they’re doing and the little things that make them who they are.
Big things. Little things.
Elisa Rathje - Appleturnover
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An episode from the 2021 archives with Elisa Rathje of Appleturnover, Canadian artist, filmmaker, writer, and permaculturalist.
Hi, I'm Sophie. Welcome to Big Things Little Things, a podcast series where I sit down with inspiring change makers to discuss the big things they're doing, the little things that make them who they are. And together we vision pathways towards a better future. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording, the Gethabore people of the Bungelung Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Hey guys, welcome back. We're at week 18. Today I'm sitting down with my first international guest, Elisa Rathji of Apple Turnover Farm in Salt Spring Island, Canada. So Elisa is an artist, a writer, a creative, a filmmaker. She has many capabilities in terms of traditional skills like cheese making, fermenting, animal husbandry. We touched on a lot of these things today in the podcast. And we also discussed her new documentary series, The Journal of Small Work, which documents small acts of climate activism that you can implement in your day-to-day life. And it's super beautiful and inspiring. So I loved our conversation today, and I hope you do too. So if you do enjoy it, I'd love if you could share it on social media and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. So thanks for tuning in, and we'll touch base on the other side.
SPEAKER_01I'm coming from Apple Turnover Farm, which is on Salt Spring in Canada, which is an island connected to multiple First Nations. It's part of the unceded territories of the Hulkemenam and Sinkotin speaking peoples, which includes the Kowetsen and the Seout First Nations. So lots of people have used and do use this island.
SPEAKER_00It looks like such a beautiful island. I have watched your videos and it's just magical. So I actually didn't get to look it up on the map before we started talking. So which coast is it on in Canada? Which side?
SPEAKER_01So it's the west, it's the west coast, and we're actually further south than most of Canada. We're kind of in line with almost Bellingham. And folks uh in the States would know us by Orcas Island. We're not far from there. We're the Gulf Islands, um, the Salish Sea. Vancouver Island is the biggest island off Vancouver. So Vancouver, Victoria. Victoria is our capital. Everywhere everywhere's got a Victoria, right? She exported. Well exported.
SPEAKER_00We have Victoria too. Yes, we have a state. I know.
SPEAKER_01Sometimes I get the weather for Victoria in Australia and I get really confused.
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, it's I I'm like really fascinated with that sort of part of um, well, I guess Washington State I've been pretty obsessed with within the United States. And also when I've been to Vancouver to visit a friend, it's just so magical around there, like just so beautiful and green. I did go in summer though, so I imagine winter would be um different, like very chilly.
SPEAKER_01No, you know, it isn't. It's the the South Coast, it is today. It is today. We're having the it's the coldest it's been in 50 years. We've had minus eight Celsius all week, and we're not used to it. And the folks from the prairies are laughing at us because they've got minus 41. Oh my gosh. But generally, our cold is really properly bone-chilling cold because it's damp. Although I would say right now it's quite dry. So I keep going out and going, well, this is okay. This isn't too bad. Um, but if it kept up like this, we could skate outside. But that's unusual. But this is a year of unusual. Yeah, we're the ones who had the heat dome. Did you hear about that?
SPEAKER_00I didn't know what what was we had it.
SPEAKER_01We had this crazy heat dome all over the Pacific Northwest that just went on and on, and it um then there were fires that followed it, and it was just an insane. And then we were like a potted plant that you haven't watered properly, and we got so much rain. We got the amount of rain you'd get in a month, in a day or two, three, and it went right through our basement. It went like it washed away all these farms, except the gen regenerative farms that had cover crops, they were okay. Uh, so it really, and now this cold, so it's basically been extreme upon extreme drought, flood. Yeah, so it's definitely making people sit up and notice.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah, so which brings me to my first question. So I wanted to ask you, because um, just to give the listeners a little bit of context, so um Elisa does some beautiful videos um from her farm, Apple Turnover Farm. And um I guess the the first series that I watched, they were um about kind of slow living, but also adapting your life to be of benefit to the planet, um, but also so that you are um resilient in the face of climate change. So, I mean, I view what you do as, I don't know, beautiful art, but also climate activism. I hope that like sits well with you, that description.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, I'd be honored. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And then um, I've just started watching, which we will talk about a little bit later, um, your most recent video, which is the beginning of a documentary series called The Journal of Small Work. Oh, it was so beautiful. I watched it with um my daughters again yesterday just to prepare for this, and um, they just thought it was so cool. Um they're only like one and a half and two and a half, but the two and a half year old was like asking about your wood stove that you featured in the in the images and talking about the snow and the geese, and she thought it was beautiful. Um so I'm I'm just interested to start out to ask you about your um your kind of climate awakening story and how how it is that you got to this place where you know you're you're very conscious about the the troubles that the world is facing and you're moving to to try and do as much activism as you can. So I wanted to know, like, did you always have an awareness of our um situation with the climate, or is it something that came on later in life?
SPEAKER_01I would say it was an extremely slow dawning. Like I I I understood something of what was going on, but I think it didn't really I I can't I can't mark a certain moment, you know. I I can say that when we left Sussex in England, where we lived for a while in in the countryside, we'd moved out of London. And we moved out of London for um because we wanted to live closer to the land, because we wanted to keep chickens, and we we were getting into the the old traditions. I was getting into the old traditions, and I have always unschooled my kids who are now um a teenager and a young adult. Um, and so getting getting into history there is just like so easy, and yeah, we were living in a part of the world where traditional skills were still so lively, and I could just learn anything I wanted. And I was writing a lot for Apple Turnover at the time, and so I would just explore and I would make cheese and I would um I went to River Cottage and learned to bake bread, and I I would just go and interview people and have them teach me what they knew, and somehow those traditional skills like that was following from my art practice, and then it came around in a circle, and I think because um growing your own food, it's just like this in a inevitable kind of I think there's multiple ways into this. For me, I would actually date my first steps from when we first got pregnant, 21 years, and had a midwife. And that led to home birth, it led to attachment parenting, a family bed, it led to um that led to to homeschooling. And just as soon as you've dropped into that, I think there's a trust in the body, there's an implicit trust in your children's ability to learn. Everything resolves around revolves around food anyway, when you're parenting, right? Like it is the center. And you know, that's when we started eating organic food is when our child started to eat, is we really were like, okay, this is my partner said this is critical. And I thought, oh my god, that's gonna be like down payment on a house. Goodbye. Yeah, which it yeah. Uh so that all just layered upon layered. And then when we moved back to Canada, we ended up living on this lake on Vancouver Island, and there's this amazing, there's amazing people there, um, Ann and Gord Baird on EcoSense, and they had built this incredible uh cob house. Am I saying that right, Cobb? Yes, I believe. Yeah, yeah. And and they um they were doing humane, they were they have a permaculture nursery, right? The perennials, and I had just been hearing about permaculture, and there they were, and they were practicing it. And seeing that, I think that I could say that's the moment when it got really real. They're very frank, they don't, you know, they were saying what's happening right now, and everyone's like, oh my god, like 10 years ago they were, yeah, they have their finger on the pulse and they don't look away. And I think I was pretty much coming at it more from parenting, from an art practice, from traditional skills. So there's so many ways in. I kind of took maybe all of them at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is, it's really interesting to ask people how they sort of yeah, got to that point where their eyes became open to the state of the world and and the potential, you know, trouble that we're facing within our lifetimes. And um yeah, I guess it can be really, it depends on who it is. Some people that I've interviewed, you know, it's been a slow kind of thing that's just happened over their lifetime, and then some people it's been more quick. Um, but I'm very interested because I I like to know what opens people's eyes up because I like to try and think, well, if if this person learnt about the severity of the climate crisis this way, well, perhaps, you know, we could amplify that on a grander scale. And I think it's really true what you say that um there are many ways in to it. And I because I've heard um other people speak about, you know, there's this like um lady who lives in Byron Bay, she's called the um plastic-free mermaid, I think. She's really, she's she's got like a lot of followers. She's American, and she um she really promotes like a plastic-free existence. And um, she said that that's like um a highway, um, I don't know, a highway to the the sort of cleaner living where you're being more proactive in terms of the world. Like it just wakes people up when they start to think about how much plastic they're using in their life. It other things seem to click into place. Um, I mean, for me it was listening to somebody very frankly, um, which you might have heard this story, but yeah, very frankly read an essay on uh on exploring.
SPEAKER_01I've just been looking up, I've just been looking up her work because uh I wanted to find out who what did she say to you? What was it I hadn't heard of her before?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's been a while since I listened to that essay, but basically she just kind of she summarizes um what the climate science says, really, and then she translates that into how it may roll out, may, because we can't predict the future, we don't know. But and she even says that. She just says this is how you know things could play out in the future in terms of like food security, water security, pollution, extinction, huge um weather events like you're talking about. And and then also like the social consequences of that for our children. And I think that hearing about that in terms of the children is what really resonated with me because you've just you've got a hand in the game. Like I think growing up, when I was completely oblivious to this, I just always thought, well, these problems, they're just they're down the track. I won't even be alive when this happens. Um, but you know, now it's the this sort of urgency has been dawned upon me, and I say, oh well, you know, I feel like I could start to see these things, or we are starting to see them already. And my children certainly are going to feel the full force of the way we've been living. So it it's hard, but I don't know how do you how do you sort of um feel about the future and and how do you deal with that like on a day-to-day basis, you know, having children? I just I'm interested to ask other parents.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's it's super daunting. I think uh I have to admit when I see folks with really little ones, I do think, oh, that's hard. Because for me, we lived all those years, yeah, with this sense of distance, which was false, but yeah, I just the obliviousness, you know, just taking a flight or having no connection to what that actually means to take a flight. Um I think that my basic state is very focused on creative solutions, like that's where I am happiest living. And so I think I was really lucky in that my slow dawning included permaculture. Yeah, like I was waking up to that design framework at the same time as I was waking up to, and so I've always had this sense that okay, there's bleak news, and it's been the same bleak news for a long time, and it's just getting more um concrete for people, which I actually appreciate that in terms of generating action, because when you live through a drought that's five months long in a place that should be rainy like this, you notice and you're willing to have conversations that you wouldn't. So that gives me energy to think do you know, people more and more people are are wanting solutions. And so I think with my kids, like they're right into all this. They don't, they're immersed, they they speak this language, and like they have been watching me relearning traditional skills that somehow ended up also being ecological skills. And I I didn't go into it expecting that. I did come at it a little bit from the waste-free, as you were talking about, um, because I'd heard about someone in New York who lived for a year without garbage. And this is what I'm talking about the creative solutions. I didn't focus on the how much garbage we're producing and getting upset about that. I was like, that's so cool. No garbage for a year. I want to do that. How do I do that? Well, maybe I need to make cheese. Like, cheese is always in plastic around here. Maybe I need to make some bread. I don't know how to do that. I don't, I I like to find out how things are made. And the thing is that so many times when you take something down to something simple, it may be more labor, but it's a lot less of so many other things. And so, you know, because my kids are so fluent, like they actually just told me that they weren't gonna get their driver's licenses because we got rid of the car for our electric bikes three years ago. And as far as they're concerned, we're not missing anything. We have gained, we have gained so much. And yeah, there's labor, and sometimes we, you know, sometimes that's not comfortable, sometimes, yeah, it's not convenient. But like they get they got on the mill this morning and milled 600 grams with me, and we made scones for the first time. What what have I been doing with my life that I didn't make scones? I was like, you do sour note before scones, like come on. And so those holding, like holding the future from a perspective of a solutions focus that's seeing, um, giving things up, just holding it in a different way. Like you you can think about all the things we're gonna lose, but I guess I I see a future where we have so much to gain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01We're actually on a really busy road. I have to be careful when I record sound. Uh, I can barely ever record sound that doesn't have traffic. And I would love to see that road shared and have more people cycling, right? Like more people walking. I would like to be able to walk out there and have it be quiet and safe. And so to me, that's like, well, there's so much possibility. I think life could be so much better. And and I'm not talking about the weather, I totally panic about weather extremes, and I have to be careful when I have insomnia not to go into some dark, dark places.
SPEAKER_00Me too, me too.
SPEAKER_01But I try to keep the focus on what I can do, and I just have found there's so much I could live 17 more lives and not do all the things that I personally, just as an individual, could do.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah, it it's so true. And I think that that's something that like the people who maybe are not um deep into this space don't perhaps see is that um the things that you can do yourself to um to be more resilient and to reduce your footprint in the world are so incredibly fulfilling. And it's deceptive because I think that the way that society has conditioned us is to believe that if we don't have the car, the nice house, the nice gadgets, the um international holidays, the um new clothes, that we're going to be unhappy. But you know, you can kind of adapt your lifestyle. So you still have like a taste of those things, but you're also exploring this whole new world of um of like doing it yourself, or I don't know, being more involved in community and and it's really it gives you so much joy and meaning and purpose, which are things that prior to being conscious of the climate crisis, like the severity, I I just wasn't I wasn't that fulfilled as a per as a person, and I wasn't that in tapped into what my purpose here was. And I didn't even know that I needed to be conscious of those things. I was just a very, very disconnected person. I think that occasionally I'd tap into it. But um that is one of the blessings of living through this time. And and when you do have your finger on the pulse and you know how bad things are, is that it also cuts out the crap because you think like there is not there's not the time, and there's no point in me doing things that I don't want to do as a person. So you it draws that introspection of thinking, like, who am I and what do I really want to do with my time? Because I think you're faced up with the reality of your own mortality. And I think that that that that's like a big thing that a lot of people are not ready for. But it's necessary. And that that I think is why there's a bit of resistance about um accepting the reality of the climate crisis, is because you do have to face up to the fact that you know our existence here is finite and that time is is running out. Yeah, but that's that's one of those, you know, the dark conversations, but there is a huge silver lining to it. So I wanted to take a step back because you said that you lived in England. So I was interested to hear about. So could you tell me a little bit about like your upbringing and um sort of the story of your life and perhaps how you met your partner and and just your your family's story? I'd just love to hear a bit about like the context of of who you are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So um I grew up here on the coast, and my folks uh emigrated to Winnipeg post-war. So my mother's Finnish and my mother, my father's German. And so I think that immigrant identity, even though it was kind of uh it was so mixed, it's not like we had a language at home that we spoke. We we just spoke English. I was very sad when I went to live in Germany that I had to go and study that really hard language, and Finnish is even harder. But that that was like my history is is very embedded in the immigrant experience. And then on top of that, my mother's an artist. And so when I identified as an artist, I don't even remember I was so young because it just was a clearly a path you could take, and I wanted to take that, and so that was that for me. Um, and my elder sister's a writer, my younger, much younger sister is a graphic designer. You know, that my grandfather was a musician, but he uh, you know, wartime, he was a cabinet maker, my parents renovated a house from underneath us, and one of my most dominant memories from that time was nine years old. We took apart, my father and I took apart this old carport, and we saved all the lumber. Like I crowbarred out all those nails because we were saving everything. And years later, the one of the houses nearby got just flattened, and there was a television inside like door doors, doorknobs, everything, nothing was reclaimed, not a thing was and we cried. Like I was in England at that time, and we I heard about this and just wept because it's completely uh oppositional to that immigrant experience. Like everything that came out of that house was reused in that house, and I think they weren't house builders. I mean, my dad's an engineer, but he he did that on weekends, and I think that was profoundly formative. And then I think I was always attracted to maybe folks who were immigrants, folks who had other experiences, who or who just identified or felt warmly towards uh some diversity, and um so yeah, so always, you know, the Japanese exchange students and really connecting with them. So I did go and study art in Germany for part of my degree, and I um this exchange program through the art school is actually how I met my partner, just because I met someone that we had had had a friend in common, and it was the beginning of email, and I sent an email over to her, and he just sent an email at one point to say, Oh, she'll get all your emails um when she comes up to visit from the art school back home uh in England, and and we just started talking, and it's so funny because now this is such a common experience, but then people thought I was totally crazy. I'm in love with someone I have not met. He came here to live with me, and uh he's a writer, filmmaker, uh, teacher, mentor. Um, yeah, so he so the films are if they are anything, it's because he's in the background making it all happen. And you know, he taught me to, I was looking at an old journal actually, and I couldn't believe he taught he taught me to edit a year ago, just a year ago, like the the no the like the picture editing, yeah. So it's all been growing. I mean, I did work with video. Um, in fact, my solo show just after graduating was a video exhibition, but not like this, not like this, not at all. Yeah, yeah. So when at one point we went to England, he is English and we went to live in England, we went to live in London. And I think that was it for a city. Like, once you've lived in a city like that, like the other cities sort of pale in comparison, and like really, if I'm gonna be in a city, I want it to be like doing all the things, and otherwise I don't want anything to do with it. I'd rather be somewhere where I can put down roots. I mean, not that you can't, but I did grow a lot of food in London itself, actually. That was one of my first gardens.
SPEAKER_00It's funny how you can just have an affinity for a certain place. Like, so how you feel about London is how I feel about um New York City. And oh, I just have like New York has this energy about it that just I don't know, it's just like nowhere else. And it's the if I had to be in a city, I would be in New York City because it's just, I don't know, I just love it. And that's um that's where my husband and I we got together in New York City. So maybe it's something to do with yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But that adds another layer to it.
SPEAKER_00So tell me a little bit about Apple Turnover Farm. So so you've come back and relocated there, and did you study permaculture prior to living where you are, or was it sort of once you moved there, you studied it and implemented the permaculture framework there?
SPEAKER_01I was really lucky in that I lived um, we lived on this beautiful little lake, and it was a tiny amount of land, but I still I built the chicken coop there, and we started keeping chickens, and I had a tiny garden with a lot of plants in it, which I dug up when we suddenly had to leave. And um, so while I was there, that's when I I think I just walked in the door and started learning about it somehow. It just was like, you know how things come up, it just kept coming up all over. And um so I got to practice, and I'd been practicing um other aspects of gardening. Like I must have known about no dig because I never did that. I like I wouldn't know how back in London. And in Sussex, I lived, oh, we lived beside um old Plawhatch farm and so biodynamics, right? We walked with the dairy farmer and he talked about why the cows had have their horns and their personalities, and you know what what the herd dynamics were. I think I just was getting an education very slowly, and then um we actually lived on a 10-acre farm very briefly, and it was great that we did that because we had been thinking that's what we wanted, that's what we needed, but it needs like a lot of people to work on it, and so yeah, uh Apple turnover as a small holding goes is small, it's one and a half acres. But the folks that have have lived here, the folks that built the place were homesteaders, like they were so amazing, and they planted so much, and they planted like they designed this place so well, and then everyone who's lived here, so there was um a Mennonite carpenter and the buildings, like the little sheds and like the little um covered bench, and I just the detail, the kitchen that's all yeah, and then the next folks um that I know of were she was a painter, and so that blue that's totally her. And wow, um, they put in a pantry. Actually, the carpenter who put in that pantry and made our incredible bamboo front gate um connected with us, and he's done another um barn door for our garage to keep all the chickens they want to just live in there, they want to live in there, and it doesn't work, and the electric bikes are getting um wet and very, very dirty because chickens running around dustbathing will shake always next to your bicycle. So we just enclosed like these projects, but it's so nice to work with someone who's been working here much longer. Anyway, and we connected with the granddaughter of the first people who built this place. And I mean this house. Wow, like obviously the First Nations, but also 125 years ago, the Collins farm, I'm looking at the farmhouse from where I'm sitting. So um, three three brothers, they had an apple orchard that went quite a long way around here. And so this is just a teeny little section, and to be quite honest, I I could easily be three more people and struggle to keep up with this. Like it's tons, and I I haven't even got that big a garden. Like, I I mean it's all orchard, but everyone planted stuff, they put walnuts in, like, there's three walnuts on this one and a half acres, and I brought all my plants. It was like, and here's the almond and the pecan and the chestnut, and so um, yeah, so when we got here, we brought the chicken group and the chickens, and then we've added ducks and geese, and we have a pair of milk goats. Oh, cool, and a cat, very important cat. Yeah, you might you need to have a cat just for the and you do just for the rats. The rats.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. How do you find managing the milking goats? Yeah, I actually I have I really have a big desire to get a milking goat, but um I'm not quite, I think, capable of like managing in terms of just with the children, like the time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, wait till they're milkers, wait till they're when they're when they can milk, train them young and get them to milk with you. Because it's the sort I've seen this happen before, just um, my kids are in a busy time of life right now, and they can milk. Um, but personalities, you know, everything is it's very complex. So um I've just come off a brutal year for in terms of my health and other people's health. And I mean, the pandemic alone has been so it's just taken a lot out of everybody. And so I just dried my goats off this weekend. I was considering keeping them going for a year, even though we're not breeding this year. Um, but it it definitely is for me, it is a commitment. Every morning I do have resistance, even though when I get there, it's this meditative, and I love them. And so right now we've moved back to um foraging, and that's like what we do together is we go out walking and we'll um start clearing an area of brambles and rows that's like not productive and uh making way for new plants. So um, so we take our walks every day, and that's lots. Um, there's so many things that I want to focus on right now. So I'm you know, buying dairy is like uh really, but I've I've got back to baking. So I I I'm really I think there's seasons for things, and if your children are little, go with the seasons they're into, and that's gonna change so fast, and um, and you'll have really helpful, but you have chickens, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, oh my goodness. Um, we had five chickens last week, and this week we have one chicken because the chickens, I know it was actually really traumatic. So we um we're like us just about to move the chickens to my brother's house, and I think it's because we have two dogs, and the dogs haven't been at our at our rental house for about a week, and the foxes can tell that you know the territory is not freshly marked by the dog, so they think this is fair game. So a fox got in and took two, and foxes are just murderers, like they ripped the heads off two and then left them in the yard for me to see. I came in and this poor chicken, the one remaining chicken, ran up to me and was like like around my feet, and and um I didn't recognise that she had been a little bit injured at first. Um, I sort of thought she was just hungry, so I put some grain down and then I saw the other chicken, so I was like, oh my god. Um and then we we took so this one remain this one remaining chicken, we took her out to the the new place, and we thought she'd lost her eye, and we sort of put her in like a little hospice um space to take care of her for a few days and just see how she went. And anyway, within two days, she's back to normal. She has two eyes. She thinks she's a dog, I think. She follows us around and tries to fly into the house, and we've called her Rocky because she's very resilient and feisty.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, we have one of those from a neighbor who lost their flock similarly. Uh we have raccoons and we have mink, and the mink will just kill anything that it moves a muscle. And hawks and otters. So yeah, it's it's intense, but I I am free ranging. Um, we've had a few lockdowns. It's kind of hilarious. I'm like, oh, you guys are now we're in lockdown. Uh, because like a hawk will try it on. But the the geese, I was expecting them to be super like run up to a predator and chase them off. You know what they do? They run away and get and get us. They come and get us. They're like oh, they can be, they can be. Breeding season is interesting. I have to, I have to redesign, I have to redesign for breeding season. Like how I'm gonna, because our our place is not like the animals are over there, they are everywhere. They're all I've I've started like fencing off areas and saying, I'm so sorry, but you can't come on the porch anymore. Like the house needs to be cleaner. Um, but but the geese, they do like they do run up and say, There's somebody here. Um, like they'll come up to the door if they can and like knock and say, Hey, there's somebody here. But they don't, once they get to know someone, like the carpenter who was building our doors, he doesn't get announced. We like we wouldn't know he was even there because they were just like, oh hey, yeah, hey friend, come in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's well, my my sister has 12 geese, and I tell you, they they um they are a little bit vicious. They like if you get too close to them and they're not familiar with you, well, even if they are familiar with you, they they'll bite you and they always go for like the groin region, like and and like they bit my poor daughter Sylvie, like got she went into the coop because she just didn't know and was like going to try and pat one, and it just full-on attacked her and bit her up the top of her thigh. And oh, poor, poor Sylvie is now like so traumatized about geese. Um but they are they are very good, you know. Like, there's a lot of people who are scared to go into my sister's yard because of her territorial geese. Yes. Um yeah, I was interested to ask you. So, so what do you buy? Um, because I know you've got um, so you said you just dried up your milking goats, but you have a garden and you go foraging. So, what do you actually have to buy into your property in terms of like to sustain you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is always interesting. Um, I think I bought eggs for the first time in years um because we had such late broody hens, so late in the season, so they're about to start laying when everyone else does in like two weeks, it's gonna just take off like a rocket because there's 19, 18 hens. Uh so I I'm buying dairy now, and um I'm back to milling and baking, which before I had a big health crisis, I was kind of doing all of it. Um so I'm just kind of picking that back up again. I'm buying in hay, and but the goats get a ton of food off the property, and and it's great because they're like the counterweight to the folks who planted ivy, English ivy invasive, and bamboo, and then of course there's the Himalayan blackberry and the cross blackberries that are just not, yeah, they take over. They love that. Um, and so that's amazing. And I I'd love what I want to see is a a miniature, a miniature version of um rotational grazing of like real regenerative. At the moment, uh, it's a little bit of a free-for-all, and so the geese will keep things quite grazed down, and I think the goats are like, hey, hey man. Uh so so that yeah, I'm like I I feed my chickens and my ducks grains, but like those and the geese, the geese basically eat grass, they only have grains uh when it's snowing like this, or just a little bit. They love them and they're a bit aggressive about it. I'm like, I kind of started this with you, but they love apples, and we have 2,500 pounds of apples come out of here, and so there's a lot of windfalls, and I thought that the ducks and the geese would clear that all up, but they they kind of are like, no, you have some, I've had enough. But the geese, I actually can't tell what apples are ripe anymore without going right up to it, because usually I would rely on like, oh, you're starting to have some drops, you're probably nearly ready to pick. No drops, nothing, nothing. They're really good fun if you want to throw an apple. You can like hurl it and they'll fly after it. The most fun. So there's um there's a lot of grass being eaten here, a lot of apples being eaten, pears, anything that drops, they are taking care of that. So I'm bringing in grain. Gosh, and I would love to find other ways to do that. But they are foraging all day long and lots of bugs. Like the ducks and the slugs, they're perfectly matched with this climate. Yeah, really perfect match. They're just lovely creatures. And um, you know, like I have two little olives. Someday I might have olive oil, but these are these are things that are, you know. I I I buy lemons because my lemon tree is small, but I can grow citrus here, actually. Hearty, hardy citrus. I really love those kind of plants where you just go, do you know what? I could actually grow tea here. Like a tea camellia. So why why wouldn't I? That would be so fun. So I can get a little carried away to the point that I get I overwhelm myself. My January self doesn't understand how big. Busy, my August self is like it just cannot compute what it's like to have so much come in to ripeness at the same time. So you saw the pantry in the Journal of Small Work. So that's like that pretty much happens. Like it's starting up in June, tiny bit, a little bit more in July, and like August 1st. What do they call that? It's um Lugnaza. Lugnaza in the agricultural calendar. That's like harvest season is like slams me. I I basically swim in the ocean, I swim in the lake and preserve. That's all I do.
SPEAKER_00That sounds so magical to me. I know it's busy. It sounds busy, but insanity!
SPEAKER_01I really I'm crazy for about six weeks, and um this is what the time of year that I love is the winter when I can read a book and write for like four hours before it even gets late.
SPEAKER_00That just sounds, I don't know, like your existence sounds so beautiful to me, and it really illustrates that way of living that is you know nourishing to you, but also like nourishing to the planet, and you just have such a connection to the land and a connection to the seasons and connection to place. Like you look in your pantry and it's just full of beautiful preserves and then big jars of like grain that you um that you mill and turn into flour. So I watched that video where you have the bicycle where you're like your daughter's um milling the grain. So just for the people listening, could you explain? Because you say in that video that um in terms of food security, it's important to have a source of stable energy, such as grain, and to be able to mill it yourself. Can you just explain to people who may, maybe like this is new to them, why it is important? Like, why in the future may it be important for us to have say a local source of grain and and an ability to mill it ourselves so that we have the flour? Like, why is that something that you're thinking about in terms of climate resilience?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, we I don't know if you saw this in Australia, but here and I, you know, I'm often watching England because our relatives are over their friends, the shelves did get cleared. Like you couldn't buy bread. People, people had just bought it up or flour. It was hard. And so these supply chains, uh, right now I can't get a faucet for my tub. I'm waiting and waiting, and like it's six months to get a new window, forget a new oven. That's just the tip of the iceberg, like that that is just pandemic. That's not climate, that's not severe weather, really. And we have had that here. I think because we're on a tiny island, it just emphasizes it so much more. I like I was slightly panicked when I moved to quite a large island and went. I mean, it's a lot smaller than England, but like Vancouver Island, and I would go, how am I gonna get this or that? And you just couldn't get something, or you'd have to wait. And and so I think that those supply chains are going to become more unstable. That's that's what I figure. And the thing is, we can grow quinoa here, we can grow rye and spelt or different types of grain like that. And so I can buy a sack of grain that didn't go very far and make something really fresh with it. It it'll just store and store and store in a whole like as long as you've got it cool and dry, you're good for a long time. And so, you know, the the the relocalizing of food, I think is one of the major keys to so many aspects of this. Like, actually, when people are documenting CO2 and talking about food traveling, they'll say, Oh, it's actually not that big a deal. But I don't think there's necessarily an accounting for like how far did the ingredients travel before they got packaged and where did they get packaged? And were they in a refrigerated truck, and then were they in a refrigerated shop, and what was the use by date, and and and and and um, and what kind of waste happened every step of the way, and then how easy is that to be interrupted? How much of it requires huge amounts of petroleum? So I think I think that you know it's really easy to say same thing about plastics, right? People will say, oh well, plastics not important. I I I um participated in committees, all sorts of committees on our climate action plan for our island that we just put out this year. Awesome. And I just couldn't, I couldn't believe how many of those solutions were just what I would call common sense. Yeah, you know, yeah, like we don't have to bring in boxes of lettuce from California, we just do. We don't have to. We could grow it in a I'm growing it in a cold frame right now. It's minus eight. My lettuce is fine, it's gonna be beautiful. Come February 2nd, it'll take off running. Right? Like this is easy. Kale will stand outside all year round. Why aren't we buying kale from from right? Like, okay, the avocados, we gotta work on our avocado game. I really miss avocados. I'm like, no, I can't do it. Mexico, are you joking? But but chocolate is non-negotiable in some quantities. Um, so these, do you know what I mean? Like the the the it's it's not necessarily true that you won't have bread next week, right? But it having uh local options for producing this is just another way um to make sure that your community is resilient. And I think that's the thing, is it doesn't matter if I'm resilient all by myself, that's not gonna help anyone. Um, but when we're starting to share, and like a mill is something you can share so easily. When we would go into Victoria, there's a little corner store, and they had, albeit an electric mill, and it'd be so fun to have a little bike there. Um, and not quite so loud, and but they had a little mill, and you could go in and buy some grain and mill it up and take it. I mean, that's all just the pure pleasure of that. And once you've tasted it, you realize you were eating rancid flour. Like that's so disappointing to realize. Like it's the same thing, right? You taste all these different vegetables and go, I never liked that before. It's because I was tasting a shadow. And I think that's that's one of those reclamations where you realize, hang on, when I make this myself, the quality is astonishing. You cannot buy that, you couldn't pay for it anyway. Like, no one could pay for my goat's milk yogurt, it would be so much money. But I can tell you, I was just blown away when I first tasted that. Like, this is like color, seeing in color.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And it's just funny how you know, this it's not just that it like tastes better or that it kind of gives you this like joy of when you harvest it because you you like helped it grow. Um, but it's also that then you start to see that your health improves. I mean, I I personally have, you know, my my immunity since I got into gardening um two years ago, like full, full prop gardening where I grow a lot of my own vegetables. Um, you know, my health has dramatically improved. I don't get as sick as I used to get. And I also used to get I never put the two and two together, but I have a real sensitivity to the pesticides that they spray on conventionally grown vegetables. So I used to eat an apple and I would just be like curled over because I would have these abdominal cramps that would move from my stomach all the way down my intestines until like, you know, the food was eliminated from my system. And I never put two and two together until I started to eat organic produce. Because every time I would say, I'm gonna go on a health kick and I would buy all these vegetables from the supermarket, and then I would feel terrible. And it was because there's so many chemicals on those those plants, right?
SPEAKER_01You know, it's yeah, and even how these things are bred, I think that it can get you can get in trouble. You can get in trouble. I can't, I can only eat organic spelts. So the same thing because the non-organic spelt um maybe got crossed with something at some point that's for me, it's dodgy. And I yeah, I mean, it's the same thing, spices. I can't, I can't really go out to eat. If I find a place that I can actually eat their food and not have my throat swell up, I'm like, I love you. I'm coming back to see you. And you know, the the waste alone and the plastics. So we very rarely, it's extremely rare that we eat anything that we didn't actually just make ourselves. My idea of like being like spa level, you know, your mama taking care of you is when someone cooks for me and I can eat the food.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, such pleasure. Have you have you always had those kind of food intolerances, or is that something that you've only become aware of?
SPEAKER_01When I was a kid, my like the inner elbow, I would get eczema. Um, but when I was a teenager, it took off like I was head to toe covered in eczema. Yeah. And um I count that as a blessing because I was still a teenager when I was seeking out alternative medicine. You know, my my doctor offered me cortisones, and he said, Oh, you know, yeah, you can put it around your eyelids, but it does thin the skin. I'm like, it's your eyelid.
SPEAKER_00What? How much thinner can I get?
SPEAKER_01It it just struck me as wrong. And so I did get into traditional Chinese medicine and all of that. So um I am just so much healthier for having had to solve that problem. And for me, it was definitely getting off of um yeah, just whole swathes of things that are produced in ways that are industrial. Like that's industrial food does make me ill. And I um I just I kind of forget, and I'll try it again. And I by trying it, I mean like buy someone's spelt bread, and like this isn't like fast food, this is like, yeah, I can't do it. So uh there's a lot of impetus then that we all feel so much better. And uh, I mean, as I say, I've had some health crises this year, but um I I can't imagine how much worse they would have been if I didn't have, yeah, if I didn't have all of this, and and it's an enormous privilege, enormous privilege. I I I would love to see, you know, it used to be so many people, this was just normal. Anyone would grow their veg. Like that, that was normal to my grandmothers, um, or my great grandmothers. Uh so that right, and they they had a they had a cow in the family, and they had a loom in the family, and oh, so you just you just did your things yourself and you didn't really buy that. So I just I just love the multiple impacts throughout my life that it that it has, right? It's worth the labor.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I I also just love like the romanticism that comes with the kind of lifestyle, you know. I'm currently reading, um, I just read, have you read The Girl of the Limbalost by Gene Stratton Porter?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00You would love it. You've got to read it. It's just like a beautiful book. It's set in the States, um, and sort of, yeah, back in back in the days when um, you know, there was still driving buggies, and um, you know, you'd have to walk six miles to school, and you did have to preserve all your own food, and paper was like in short supply. And it was just uh like the the kind of the excitement and joy that came from such simple things and being out like exploring the forest, and she was like into gathering moths and things, you've got to read it because you're an artist and a writer and you love it. And um, the other book that I'm reading at the moment, um, you know, uh it's Ellen Montgomery's Emily series. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Okay, okay. Yeah, that's so you know what, you know what you have to look for? It will be very hard to find it, but um, you have to look for the blue castle.
SPEAKER_00I've read it! I love it! You've read it, I've read it, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Very few people have my mom.
SPEAKER_00So, this genre, so if you like the blue castle, you will love these stories. Like you will just die for them. Like the Blue Castle is just who was it that wrote that?
SPEAKER_01That's also Ellen Montgomery.
SPEAKER_00Ellie Montgomery, yeah. That's beautiful. Yeah, we're gonna, I'll have to send you like we'll have to exchange some book recommendations.
SPEAKER_01So Canadian. Oh yeah, I know, I know, definitely.
SPEAKER_00Tell me what is it that you're reading? Like, what are you reading at the moment, or what's your favorite books that you read?
SPEAKER_01Right now, it's funny, I've just been making a book list um because with this new film series, as I was making the recording the title, like writing the title out um for for the for the video, um, my daughter was watching me and on one of them I did a little dot, like an asterisk at the end. And she said, Oh, I like that one. And I said, You know, I do. And I was thinking about it, and then my graphic designer sister was like, Why is there an asterisk? Like, I think it's for me, it just feels right because the this work is really in reference to other people's work, and my work is to connect and to find different interconnections, just like just like you've just said, oh, you've got to read this book. Well, as soon as I'm reading that book, it's gonna be making me think about something that's also related. So, what what I'm reading right now, I'm reading two books, and I really do like doing this because these crazy things happen. So, I got out of the library, I got Charles Eisenstein's uh gosh, that title I can never remember it properly.
SPEAKER_00The New World We Know Is Possible, is that it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, the the the yes, that's not it. I haven't read it.
SPEAKER_00It is I I haven't I haven't read it, but I I need to, I'm like I'm obsessed with Charles Eisenstein.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I me too. And so, but I read, I think I got it in September, and I read a chapter, and I had to put it down every couple of pages just for like a day to just absorb what he was saying. And then I would so I read the first three chapters many times because I just it I needed to really take it in. And um, and it's also hard. I think it's also it's just there, there's so much, it's so rich, right? And then I picked up this other book, uh, a friend of mine um who's dealing with just like um long-term illness, chronic illness, and it's called You Are the Placebo. And it and it's it is written at first, like the first few chapters are written like you're like health bestseller, and it's a little hard to take. But he gets into it, he does get into it, and it's pretty incredible. Look at how our mental state or how our emotional mental state can adjust what our genes are doing, like encouraging some genes, discouraging others, so that the our belief in our own illnesses or our own health or or the ability of something, a placebo or whatever, to say, you know, when I am milking the goats, and I'm saying this milk is making me stronger, right? And I can I can envision like the apple leaves that they've been eating, and I know where the hay came from, and all of that. And to me, I have an emotional connection and I'm telling my body to be stronger. Yeah, whether or not it is actually doing that, it is doing it because of my belief in it doing it, my strong emotional belief. So he's talking about epigenetics, and the next chapter I've got on my little mobile is like quantum. Okay, right. I know quantum gets turned around. But I kid you not, go back to Charles Eisenstein this morning, and what does he talk about? Epigenetics. That's like the next chapter. It was like I really needed to get this other education, yeah, yeah, and bring it back because at that moment I just my jaw draw, like, oh, you are, because the whole time that I'm reading this other book, I was thinking, if we are concerned with doom in our own bodies, we can doom ourselves. And if we're yeah, then if we are concerned, if we're focused on doom in our ecological, our greater living systems, are we dooming ourselves? Like, how how can we hold this differently? And then Charles Eisenstein was like, I I did this back in 2013, like, oh thank you very much. So this is this is where, yeah, shoulders of giants.
SPEAKER_00I I totally um just wanted to make a comment for the listeners who maybe don't know about Charles Eisenstein. He's like a modern-day philosopher, and I would say that he is one of the like leading thought leaders in the climate movement. Um, and he he I do not know. I want to interview him, but I am way intimidated to do that. I want to read his book first, re-listen to all of his podcasts. Yeah, he's so in intelligent. Um, but he just has such a knack for knowing what's going on and the problems, but creating like new visions for the future that are genuinely, to me, they feel different to anything I've ever heard before. But also everything he says makes so much sense. He has such a capacity to stand back and take a big picture view and to really articulate the the issues, but yeah, just see the s the solutions. And he's so inspiring, I think, for anybody who's looking for for hope, listening to his podcast, reading his books, which I haven't read it, I will read. Um, yeah, he's just incredible. Everything he does is is amazing.
SPEAKER_01So you know, it was actually it was actually an Australian that I read that I think gave me the understanding of the underpinnings that resonated so much with what um permaculture is saying and what Charles Eisenstein is saying, and what Rihanna Eisler and all of these folks talking about what underlies our culture, you know, the dominant culture. And um, I've forgotten her name, but Oval Plumwood. Have you encountered her? This is an old book, but it she's she lays it out feminism and the mastery of nature, and it is just crystal clear talking about how we hierarchicalize, how we polarize the way that we are othering in order to have power over and how this plays out in every facet of our culture, and until we've got that. We just keep applying the same model. And that's really the heart of what Charles is saying, as far as I am grasping, is like we we have a story we're telling. And we need to look at it differently. And actually, it's all there. It's in science. Science is already telling us a different story if we get up to speed with what it's actually saying. And I love that. I love that when you get into the not just the ancient practices that indigenous peoples are still holding and using, and folks are adopting or finding in their own um their own heritage, but also like the modern sciences, like contemporary science, soil silence science is like, oh aha, like oh, biodynamics was onto something. Whoops. You know, and and it's all just affirming this, all this, yeah. I love it. I love it.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I think that it's so I love that you illustrate how all the solutions exist and that your role is a dot connector because I think that that there are so so many people, I guess, who are kind of sort of worrying, like, what do I do? Like, how can I actually make some change? But connecting the dots for for those around you is such a big, um, a big and important job. So I think that the series that you're doing, the journal of small work, is such a great way that you can connect the dots for people about how they can live and make change um in ways that that benefit everything. So, can you tell us a little bit about the first um episode that you've done and what you covered in that episode?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um the first journal, I'm I like I've I've started with an introduction that is uh improvisatory in that I think I'm just gonna keep on um playing with it, which I love to do. Even the music, I've written new music for this, and this is another one of those things where I did not score films.
SPEAKER_00I like the music of this this journal, it's really good. Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Um, so that those are all like I'm I'm I'm learning as I'm going. That the whole thing is that. And so so the first episode is looking at Kaizen at uh continuous improvement, which actually comes out of industrial production in Japanese like car making. Uh, but it's a very collaborative method that they generated, uh, where everyone, anyone could say, hey, this isn't working as well. I can see how this could work better and just improve a tiny little bit. So James Clear talks really nicely in his book Um Atomic Habits. Um, I'm you can tell I'm I'm kind of a junkie for um productivity. I love it. Yeah, it's not really compatible with slow living, exactly, but sort of. Um, so he talks about continuous improvement, and I really loved that framework. Just, you know, it's not new baby steps, but just the idea that this is a totally daunting prospect to change how we live. That's yeah, that's what we need to do is change how we're living on this planet. And so, how do we do that? Like doing it all tomorrow, you'd crash and burn, you would be exhausted, your life would fall apart. How do you sustain your income? How do you change your diet? That everything would, and as a parent, you just you know, you've got to take your time, you you have to pace yourself. This this is it, it's a big project, but I love the idea of things compounding and of synergies that you may add something together that makes something completely different, right? That you you didn't expect that introducing the geese into the orchard would clean up all the windfalls. Um, you were expecting that they would keep the otters away and they are, but now the windfalls aren't there. You maybe won't have a coddling moth problem that you were like being told to spray copper. Like, I don't want to spray copper, right? So these are the kinds of tiny little, you're just gonna add just a small thing, and maybe then I I was really interested in how that married well with um just a couple of permaculture principles, a couple pets of mine, the the stacking functions and multiple functions. So that's the idea of layering on. So we have I've I've given the concrete example of the wood stove, and you don't need to have a wood stove, it's just an illustrator for it. And I do that a lot on Instagram. I like to wake up um early in the morning and and write when I'm sort of that judgy brain hasn't turned on yet. Yes. And I just found myself a couple of years ago writing these pieces that have a really nice short space. There's very restricted. I can't, I I get almost poetic in it because I cannot uh run on like I am with you right now.
SPEAKER_00Um you're being fantastic, it's great.
SPEAKER_01So the stacking functions means that you okay, you're getting your heat from wood, but you can also be adding like your dinner that you're cooking, and then you get used to like throwing dinner on there now and then, not maybe not all the time, but now and then, and then you realize like this is good at the heat's going up, it's going right up in the corner there. Like, I could hang my laundry up there. That's working so well between that and the clothesline. Why do I have a dryer? Like, why do I have one? There's no reason, I'm never using it. Let's let's give it away to someone who needs to use one or whatever. And so this is um, and then I spot on Instagram that someone's got their little enamel mug. I'm like, oh my god, a little enamel mug. My pots are always dirty. Oh, actually, I I have been washing the dishes in the morning for like three weeks solid because I realized I could just add that to my morning. That it works for me in the morning. In the evening, I'm way too tired. I'm in my 40s. Like evenings are not, they're off. There's no achieving anything except maybe editing a film is like too much fun. So there is no washing dishes in the evening, but I can add it to my morning, and then I get that consistency. Now I do it every day. I don't have a lot of catch-up. So that's that I mean, that's not 1% improvement. Frankly, that's 30%. But but it's just a little tweak that I made, and actually everyone's happier. My whole family likes a clean kitchen, right? They don't say that, they probably don't know that, but they feel it. And so those are those like wait a minute, if I just add this tiny little thing and then I stack that, it has all these other possibilities to it. And or you bring in something that can do many things at once, right? So the chickens have so many functions in our garden. Just I keep finding more that they that they're participating in. And so um, having anything in your life that can do many things, I mean, I use that principle in my kitchen. I do not want to have a gadget that does one thing. I don't, I try to avoid those. I love the mason jar.
SPEAKER_00Like you do everything. Well, I think it's it's it's very interesting and like so really accessible to to people to just start small and then just think about how they can add on other little things around that to make um their lives easier, you know, but also um more regenerative. So, I mean, I was just thinking about the apple tree, right? So you've got apple trees. So the apples feed the goats. Well, the goats produce milk for you, um, but also those apples you can eat. And also when you peel those apples to eat, you can make apple scrap vinegar, which you can then use for cleaning. Like it's just this kind of spiral that you can just keep going down to to kind of become more and more like resilient.
SPEAKER_01And I think yes, and you've got exactly your finger on what the pleasure is for me, where the art is. I at some point I was like, someone asked me, so what's your art practice? Like, what do you do? And I was like, I it's all the same now. To me, the most exciting thing is when you you you do you you look at that apple tree and you go, well, when I prune it in the summer, the the goats are eating, like they're delighted to eat that. And I just found out I can weave, I can use those, I can weave with those. I can use the ivy that they've stripped as like one part and the apples as the uprights. Like that just makes me so happy. Like I don't need to buy a basket, but I don't even need to buy like an imported crate or like those are all, of course, I have the lineup, and this is where the continuous improvement comes. I have that lineup of 148 things that I want to learn to do. I'm trying to learn to delegate a little bit, or just um, one of the things that I'd like to talk about in a future episode is how we manage like those massive expectations we have for how much you can do in a day and how much one person can manage, and like those intense pressures of productivity that that internal capitalism that you you have going.
SPEAKER_00Going back into that system again there, yeah, which like just in your own mind, you you're devaluing yourself because you're not being productive, totally. You definitely need to do an episode on that.
SPEAKER_01It's really it's really prevalent, especially like I find parents are like, I'm like, what are you trying to do? That's insane. That's a lot of things. Yeah, totally guilty of it.
SPEAKER_00And so, um, are you just kind of in terms of your own creativity? Because this interests me because I mean this is how I roll with what I'm doing too. Is like, do you have a plan for how many episodes you're gonna have, or are you kind of just intuitively going with the ideas as they come up and you'll just see how the lifespan of it goes as as you do it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the the latter, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's totally I I really love spontaneity and I love this is I think why I've been writing on Instagram is there's incredible um an immediacy with it. And there isn't so much immediacy with the films, and that's partly why I wanted to work with the episodes so that I can respond on my feet. Okay, winter just suddenly slammed in here. And so what am I suddenly doing? A lot of how like how am I living? And I can I can um I can be actively responding to what's happening in my life right now. And yeah, so same thing and writing on Instagram. I I can publish something that's relevant to what just is happening in the world, and and then dialogue, and I think that's that's when you're really that's the synergy, right? That's when you're really going somewhere when you start to have the conversations.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I love it. It's yeah, it's it's an such an exciting world to be a creative in. It's a it's a frightening time, but it's a really exciting time because you know, you also have the power to shape, to help to shape the new world that we're going to live in, which I mean, I don't think there's ever been such an opportunity for hundreds of years, you know, because we've never had a time quite quite as dramatic in terms of consequences. But I think that the change that you can generate right now is is un unequaled, you know, to that for a long time.
SPEAKER_01I've been thinking a lot about that with disruption, like there's just profound disrupt disruption happening, and that's like I love that in permaculture. Like, that's the edges, that's where new life happens, is out of those disturbances, and yeah, is disturbing, and it's exciting.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks for tuning in, guys. I left that conversation super inspired to get back in the garden, in the kitchen, to get fermenting, get back into those more traditional skills that really light me up, and I hope that it uh had the same effect on you. So uh next week, the long-awaited episode with Brenna Quinlan will be released, which is fantastic. We touch base with her about what she's up to right now on her uh property in WA. We speak about her time at Meliadora and some of the um fire management practices that were really effective during the bushfires that um David Holmgren implemented there, which I found really interesting. And we also hear about her love story with her partner. So um yeah, I I love that episode, so I'm excited to release it, and I hope you enjoy it too. So um please give me a shout on Instagram if you enjoyed this episode. I love to hear your feedback, and I'm also taking suggestions for future guests on the podcast because I have committed to doing a season two this year, which I'm really excited about, and I've just downloaded a whole heap of books from people I would like to interview. And the list is really exciting, so I'm hopeful that you know I can get some of those people on and have some great discussions that generate some ideas for you know for where we want to move in the world. So yeah, looking forward to that. And uh yeah, it's 4 27am in the morning. I've been up for many hours being an insomniac, reading stories, reading Claire Bodich's book, My Own Kind of Girl, which is pretty good so far. I'm uh I love her honesty and her vulnerability that she brings to her storytelling. So yeah, I'll let you know how that book goes. Anyway, let me know what you're reading. Okay, I will uh talk to you guys next time. Bye.