Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

Listen to Microphones in 2020 by The Microphones (Phil Elverum).

What are you doing with your life?What are you trying to accomplish? Where is this all going?Do you even have a goal?Do you have a retirement plan? Do you have a savings account? What happens when you get sick? What are you going to do when your truck breaks down on the side of the road?When are you going to become a productive member of society?

Luke McLaughlin doesn’t want to teach you wilderness survival skills. He wants to guide you through the process of remembering your ancestral human nature.Make no mistake — though he’ll tell you that the technology typically amounts to little more than “playing with bones and stones,” these rhythms and motions that our ancestors honed across countless millennia can show us what it really means to be a human animal — an integral participant in the ecological unfolding of a place.The beauty of this practice lies in its immediacy, and its universal applicability: whether your local jungle is composed primarily of plants or concrete, these primal living skills are accessible to all of us.For episode 71 of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I caught up with Luke to discuss his recent transition from rural woodland living to the mean city streets of Asheville, North Carolina.What does it mean to be a primitive skills instructor in the heart of the city? Though Luke’s work these days is primarily focused on the hard skills, he also brings to the table many years of experience in wilderness therapy, so he knows how potent wildcrafting can be as a tool for emotional and spiritual self-improvement.The main thread running through our conversation is the art of “inner tracking” — the mental and emotional skillset required to navigate through our own conscious experiences in a world that’s fundamentally misaligned with our animal nature.It’s always a pleasure to hear from Luke, and I really enjoyed our “cross-pollination” here, to borrow from his vocabulary.Stream and download episode 71 at the top of the page, or listen through iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play! Don’t forget to subscribe!NEW! To hear my final thoughts on our conversation, check out this bonus podcast episode exclusively for Patreon subscribers:71.5 - A Self That Touches All EdgesTo learn more about Holistic Survival School and Luke’s immersive Deep Remembering program, click here.Check out my photo tutorial on eating acorns right here.Score a free audiobook today when you sign up for Libro.fm using my referral link!All music was created by Sam Sycamore, and can be downloaded by subscribers at any level over on Patreon. If you’d prefer to offer a one-time financial contribution, you can do so through PayPal. This show is made possible by listeners like you.

The acorn is one of the most common and ubiquitous nuts you’re likely to encounter almost anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere in autumn.Somehow, tragically, the vast majority of people on Earth today think of acorns as little more than “squirrel food,” despite the fact that they are easily rendered edible for humans after some basic processing.In fact, if we lived in anything approaching a sane, rational culture, acorns would be a staple in our daily diets around the world, as ordinary as white bread.Thankfully, there’s no massive cultural paradigm shift required in order to reclaim this delicious and highly nutritious ancestral food in your own life.All you need is time, patience, and some basic guidance through the process.That’s where this podcast comes in: for episode 70 of the #GoodLifeRevival Podcast, we’re going to review everything you need to know to begin gathering and eating acorns this season!Along the way I will answer questions like:Why would anyone want to eat acorns?What’s the difference between white oaks and red/black oaks?What is the best method for gathering, and how can you tell if an acorn is no good?How do you remove the tannins in order to make acorns edible?What’s the best way to prepare acorns to eat?And much more!Nothing brings me greater joy than teaching others how to make use of the common wild foods found all around us throughout the seasons.I truly believe that sharing the knowledge of how to eat acorns is one of the most valuable things that I can do with my time, and I hope that this audio tutorial will turn you into an evangelist for the cause, too.This episode serves as a great example of the kind of tutoring I offer on a one-on-one basis through my Wild Food Mentorship — there’s still time to apply before the October 31 deadline, but spots are filling up quickly! Be sure to submit an application here if you are interested.Stream and download episode 70 at the top of the page, or listen through iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play! Don’t forget to subscribe!Score a free audiobook today when you sign up for Libro.fm using my referral link!All music was created by Sam Sycamore, and can be downloaded by subscribers at any level over on Patreon. If you’d prefer to offer a one-time financial contribution, you can do so through PayPal. This show is made possible by listeners like you.

Whether the status quo is prepared to admit it or not, climate change is not some mysterious future event looming on the horizon — it is already happening, here, now.So: how will you choose to respond?In this episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I revisit last week’s topic of climate change grief, and whether we ought to let go of the hope of salvation in favor of taking direct action to brace ourselves for what we know we can reasonably expect from a severely disrupted global climate.One crucial part of the process of preparing ourselves, I believe, is to reckon with our emotional reactions to what is unfolding in front of us. To deny the pain that we all feel when we observe the open wounds on the land that we walk upon is to numb ourselves to reality — to continue, in vain, to build a wall between ourselves and the natural world which sustains us.Acknowledging and confronting the seemingly insurmountable pain of a dying planet should only imbue our work with that much more urgency.Drawing from the writings of Steven Martyn, Kat Anderson, Trebbe Johnson and Donna Haraway, I make the case here that what we need now more than ever are visionary new myths to guide us towards novel ways and means of co-creation with the land.We do ourselves no favors by merely hoping for a better world, or praying that our leaders will miraculously change course — recognizing that top-down solutions have failed to materialize, the time has come for us to begin self-organizing in the interests of preserving and regenerating whatever is within our reach.All the while, we must not be afraid to stare down the very real existential fear that looms in the background. You are justified in your fear, but it is no excuse for inaction. You don’t get to choose what problems you face in life, but you can always decide how to feel about them. I hope you’ll join me in this difficult but necessary work.Score a free audiobook today when you sign up for Libro.fm using my referral link.Bibliography:Anderson, M. Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural ResourcesHaraway, Donna J. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the ChthuluceneJohnson, Trebbe. Radical Joy For Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken PlacesMartyn, Steven Elliot. Sacred Gardening: Seeds for the Reemergence of Co-Creative AgricultureAll music was created by Sam Sycamore, and can be downloaded by subscribers at any level over on Patreon. If you’d prefer to offer a one-time financial contribution, you can do so through PayPal. This show is made possible by listeners like you.