Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading - 40. The View From Here: Love, Partnership and Grief - Catching Up with Sam Sycamore

40. The View From Here: Love, Partnership and Grief - Catching Up with Sam Sycamore

05/21/18 • 62 min

Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

We changed our names, quit our jobs, and moved to a farm owned by friends, in a new town, in a new state.

Then our dog died in a tragic accident. Then my (life) partner left me while we were in the middle of starting a farm business together.

We had spend the past four years of our lives working toward this one goal of living self-sufficiently, closer to the land, and we had finally arrived.

So why did she leave?

That’s a question I will be asking myself for a long time to come.

In this unusual episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I take some time to explain what has transpired in my tumultuous personal life in 2018.

I share this, warts and all, because I want to make it clear that I’m no guru or master teacher with all the answers — I’m just a guy, someone just like you, trying his best to figure this stuff out as I go.

I’m still searching for “the good life,” too, and I suspect I always will be.

Stick around to the end of the episode where I share a song I wrote last week, called “The How’m I Gonna Keep My Head Above Water Blues.” If you dig it, you can download it (and all of my other original music) by becoming a supporter over on Patreon.

We changed our names, quit our jobs, and moved to a farm owned by friends, in a new town, in a new state.

Then our dog died in a tragic accident. Then my (life) partner left me while we were in the middle of starting a farm business together.

We had spend the past four years of our lives working toward this one goal of living self-sufficiently, closer to the land, and we had finally arrived.

So why did she leave?

That’s a question I will be asking myself for a long time to come.

In this unusual episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I take some time to explain what has transpired in my tumultuous personal life in 2018.

I’m still searching for “the good life,” too, and I suspect I always will be.

Previous Episode

39. Appalachian Folk Magic, Foraging & Witchcraft with Rebecca Beyer

How do we navigate the spiritual landscape of our unique bioregions while honoring both our own ancestry and the history of the land and its people?

This is a line of questioning that seems to unite all of the passions of Becky Beyer, a teacher and practitioner of foraging, folk magic, and witchcraft outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

Becky is equally knowledgeable about the spiritual practices of her European ancestors and of her predecessors in that backwoods melting-pot we know as Appalachia.

She teaches about folk traditions and ethnobotany through her blog, Blood and Spicebush, and through the classes and workshops she offers in person. She's also a foraging instructor for No Taste Like Home.

We had a great conversation about the intersections of paganism, animism and witchcraft; the indescribable magic of the Appalachian region; how ethnobotany is living, breathing body of knowledge that we can contribute to as foragers; and how we settlers can honor both our European ancestry and the original peoples of our continent and bioregions, without falling into the traps of nationalism, colonialism or appropriation.

Next Episode

41. Homestead Resilience in an Era of Uncertainty with Ben Falk of Whole Systems Design

Why do we choose to swim against the current of modern civilization in this era of rapid change?

That’s a question that each of us, individually, will have to answer for ourselves. And that answer is liable to change, perhaps dramatically, as we venture further down the path back to nature and uncover hard-won knowledge about our place in the universe.

Ben Falk, a permaculture-oriented land designer and site planner who runs the Vermont-based company Whole Systems Design, says his position has shifted over time.

“I’ve moved away from the idea of trying to ‘survive.’ The big goal isn’t me surviving... I’m doing it to have a better life, and improve a place. I’m not trying to survive forever.”

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ben on the topic of homesteading, and he was generous enough to share a mountain of practical info and advice for folks all across the spectrum of experience living close to the land.

“We’re cultivating an ecosystem that’s great for all living things here, and we just try to live on the byproducts of that ecosystem... we’re living on the interest.”

Ben’s 2013 book The Resilient Farm and Homestead played a pivotal role at the start of my own personal homesteading journey, shedding light on a seemingly bottomless well of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know... you know?

Ben is very down-to-earth and insightful when it comes to practical self-reliance, and also really a treat to converse with. I think there’s a lot to take away from this one, no matter where you find yourself on the path back to the land!