Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 1 Part 1: Our Story of Healing, Homesteading & Creating a Life Aligned With Nature

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Ep 1 Part 1: Our Story of Healing, Homesteading & Creating a Life Aligned With Nature · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a small farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Lindsay.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hi Scott.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: How's it going?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, pretty good.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: So here we are, recording our first interview with one another, sitting across from each other after, I don't know, a couple hours of dealing with tech problems.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly not my strong suit.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely not my strong suit.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're better than me, but a challenge.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: But we're gonna move forward.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we wanted to take a minute here just to introduce what it is that we're doing, why we're doing it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really this idea that we see it so commonly.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: People are so busy, stressed, disconnected from their bodies and from the earth.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just burdened with the pace of our modern life and what that looks like.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we are connected with people who live differently than that.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And we think it can be really inspiring to share their stories and to share our story about how we're trying to break out of that modern, too busy, too stressed paradigm.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we really have the life of our dreams very much.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have manifested this life that is so beautiful.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're just so grateful for so much that we have.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we really want to inspire people that they can have anything that they are dreaming of in their life.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But we also want to invite people to our farm in Vermont to experience our dream life through our homestead and heal retreats, which will be focused on different topics.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Some will be more focused on body work with me and that sort of deep healing, pelvic healing, those sorts of things for women.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the other sort of options are more homestead focus with Scott, where Scott has so many amazing skills and has really built up through the last 20 years of farming and homesteading.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: He bakes sourdough bread, he makes amazing sauerkraut that's just well known in our community.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: He hunts, he knows how to break down animals, how to butcher them, how to process lots of different food.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Gardening is my strongest at the things that I think I forgot the main one, gardening.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so the idea with these homestead and heal retreats is that there will be some different options, but people can come and also learn how to do these tasks, these ways of being in production and co-creation with the earth instead of just consumption.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it just feels really nourishing and really fulfilling to live a life this way.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that is part of our task, too, is to just inspire you to come and get a glimpse of our life through this beautiful, these retreats that we're starting to offer.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I just want to say we feel thankful.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I feel grateful every day for the life that we've built together.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: I really do feel like it is the life of our wildest dreams with our three kids and our beautiful farm and all that we get to do there.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: But just also want to make it real and have people understand that doesn't mean that we're not struggling to get our seven-year-old out the door with his proper boots and mittens and having all of the day-to-day typical struggles that are life.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But really that by having this ability to connect with both Lindsay and I, our work is really what we want to be spending our time and energy doing.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you can like align in that way, have this connection to the earth, have your connection to your body, possibilities really start to open up for you.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:25
  unknown: Yeah.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say along with that, maybe you ask me the first question and then I can speak about that some.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess going on in that same line of thinking, what is it about your work that is most alive for you, most exciting?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess that's what I wanted to speak to is so I'm a body worker.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I specialize in working with the fascia.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And our the fascia is our head-to-toe web of connective tissue.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it runs through and between every single cell of our body.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's where we hold on to traumas and stories and emotions.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I wanted to say too is that when we have this alignment within our body, it makes it so much easier to have alignment in our life and vice versa.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it allows when our fascia is unrestricted, it allows life to really flow through us.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like it allows God and source energy to help us flow with life and hear our calling and those sorts of things.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm always really excited about my work with fascia.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I do in-person bodywork.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have people come for immersions.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have a professional bodywork training now where this year and last year I have, I will have 24 women each year coming to learn how to do this style of bodywork, fascia alchemy, based on my training with John Barnes Myofascial Release and some other modalities that I've woven in to create this modality with my own essence.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm also really excited.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I have a program called Light Footprint Wealth, which is a year-long mentorship for women, business owners who want to grow their business by connecting with their bodies and the earth.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And all of these things just totally light me up.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the only other thing I wanted to say is that this is my work.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, I'm mothering three children that we have together.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And their ages are 10, 7, and almost two.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot going into that work as well.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that is, of course, a really it's one of the things I'm most grateful for in my life is our children.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the things that are exciting me the most.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And to just get into what you're describing a little bit more, I feel like I hear stories from you all the time of working with clients.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like the physical work that you're doing is really profound on dealing with the fascia and opening up that awareness in people.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like also just creating a space where people get to focus really intently on their body and what they're feeling within it can be like people have huge emotional releases and huge changes in their body and the quality of their life and what they feel just through that really intense isn't quite the right word, but really focus.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Focused inward feeling into the body.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Awareness.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe can you tell us about what that looks like?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: If someone comes in, they're seeking help from you, and they have a really profound experience just in an hour spending time with you.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think what comes to mind more generally is just that my teacher, John Barnes, believed that consciousness r runs through microtubules in our fascia.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in some ways, when we are able, when I'm able to help people bring their awareness into their body, sometimes for the first time in years.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe ever.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe, or maybe ever, or I would say mostly since they were a kid.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it can really open them up to both what is being held inside them, the emotions that weren't able to be processed at the time.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And these could be from bigger traumas or just smaller traumas, just little things they experienced throughout their life, but actually really suppressed.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when we hold those emotions, they essentially just become more solid in our tissue.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So whereas our fascia should be this gel-like liquid crystal, this fourth phase of water in between a solid and liquid, it becomes more solidified and creates these actual solid blocks within our body so that we can't be as we can't be as aware of our calling, we can't as easily feel joy or pleasure, these sorts of things.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to think of a particular story.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I will say that what I notice about this is when I ask someone to breathe into a part of their body and I have my hands on that part of their body, and maybe at the beginning they haven't connected with that part of their body, and then they do, it feels different under my hands.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it actually, the sensations I feel under my hands change when they bring their awareness there, which is just so cool.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, there's so many different stories of emotional release that people have had.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I love when so many of my clients, after they get up from the table, they say, Wow, I just feel so much lighter.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or after working with me for a while, they might suddenly realize that they are no longer tolerant of living out of alignment with their dreams.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so they will leave their job or have a hard conversation with a partner or whatever it might be.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that that feels really good to me.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's awesome.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: I can relate to that, like from the time we grew our first garden, which we'll get into later.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: But once you find that that sort of thing, or once you're really connected, you can't really go back to the way things were before.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be more present.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds amazing.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: So going back a little bit, I'd like to dig into what how you got to where you are today.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm curious, actually going back far, like what was your childhood like?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: How were you connected to nature?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Or who were the people that were really influential?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so when I think about this, and I'm so excited for our interviews with other guests to hear these bits of people's stories because I've always just been super curious and I want to know these origin stories.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when I think of it, I think about some of my earliest memories on our little farm growing up in Kansas, our strawberry patch, which I've started to relate to is it's the only tattoo I have is of a strawberry.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like a symbol of joy and innocence and really abundance when you think about strawberries and nourishment.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like I've come to just through a more recent program, one of my participants, Kelty, who probably will be on this podcast at some point.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: She's an amazing herbalist, and she brought this to my awareness that the abundance that strawberries signify, and they signify so many things for me.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that that is one of one of my memories, is our strawberry patch.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have that many other really early memories of earth connection, except I was thinking about my grandmother, my paternal grandmother had an indoor swimming pool in Kansas, which is quite rare.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: But all around her swimming pool, she had bougain via and all these tropical flowers.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I loved seeing these little citrus fruits growing on those and the bougain via, and she had gardenia, and she just she loved those kind of flowers.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I definitely think about that too.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the other memories I have, I was trying to think.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like mostly they're related to my dad, who is such a naturalist and just back to the land.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: He's been a farmer.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's go ahead, Scott.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: He is the best.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's very slow moving and connected and present all in ways that I just love so much.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: I love spending time with him.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's very observant of nature and lived out in the country in Kansas.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember things like I definitely remember at his house.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: My parents split up when I was four.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So from that point on, I was only sometimes at his house.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember our cottonwood tree there.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I remember our Osage Orange tree.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Those were a couple trees that I really connected with as a child.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But then specifically with my dad, I remember picking sandhill plums to make jam.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So these wild plums that grow in Kansas, picking mulberries from the mulberry tree that was down on the bottom of our driveway.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: My dad made maple syrup, but from the box elder, which was really cool.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think he still had it when Scott and I got together after 20 years.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: He had it in the fridge still.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And collecting echinacea seeds with him that we gave out as Christmas gifts.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, he was just so oriented around nature.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I also, another thing I was thinking about was we had cows growing up.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I would go and feed the cows with him.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I remember playing in hay bales, and I remember two walking with him as he bird hunted.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that was that's a really fun memory.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: I feel myself getting emotional just reflecting on all of these times of connection with the earth and with my dad.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really grateful for them.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have a lot of memories of earth connection, specifically with my mom.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think from my mom, I got more of that body connection, which is just, I think, partially innate from being a woman and have being raised by my mother.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that for all girls and women that they feel they learn how to connect with their bodies through their mother.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: That feels like more of what I learned from her.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have a lot of specific moments that I can think of around that, but from both my parents, yeah, I'm just feeling really emotional.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like from both my parents, I got to witness them expressing their emotions really fully.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe not all their emotions, but I did get to see them cry.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that feels important.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: That felt like important medicine that actually just totally led me on my path of being a healer because I learned from a very young age how to hold space for people that were essentially grieving.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: When my parents split up, there was grieving from I would think both of them.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then yeah, maybe we can get a little bit more into that next question.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I was gonna say it sounds like to me, it sounds like you're really well connected to the natural world and have a lot of the more you think about it, the more memories you have, which is really cool.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's uh such a solid foundation.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I guess getting into this next question, can you remember times in your life where you specifically felt disconnected from your body, from the earth, sense of purpose?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think my when my parents split up around the time I was four, my life moved into this less stable place where my mom was remarried to my stepdad, who was not a great guy.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they had a pretty tumultuous relationship.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there was a lot of from the time I was five until 10 or 11, there was a lot of moving.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: We moved in with him, then we would move away and move back every single year.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was just, they just couldn't quite figure out whether they wanted to be together or not.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And spoiler alert.
• 15:32
  unknown: Yeah.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: 40 years later, they are together.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Once again.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Or 30, whatever.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not my mom and stepdad.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm sorry.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, when I was in my 30s, my mom and dad got back together and they're still together now.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So my stepdad's way out of the picture, but my mom and dad are back together, which is just interesting.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: But during this time where my mom and stepdad were off and on, I definitely feel like I started to lose that connection to the earth, probably partially because I was just not around my dad as much.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: How are we gonna be able to put this episode out there?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm just gonna be crying the whole time.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think also there was probably a strong piece of because you're moving a lot during elementary school, the focus.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a part of you weren't with your dad who's so earth-centered, but also you're trying to fit in.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're starting at new schools really frequently, like how many different new schools back and forth, like one or one or two a year.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was just for a bunch of years.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: For five or six years.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, through sixth grade, fifth grade, something like that.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a lot to navigate as you're like getting a little older and more aware and all of that.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think, and it's just uh, I think as a as that young of a child to be moving around, it's pretty ungrounding.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So of course I didn't feel like grounded and connected to the earth.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I think also during this time, I still can remember in my house that in my stepdad's house where we we were back and forth to that house regularly, but it was also it wasn't a place I exactly felt safe because my stepdad was volatile.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember in one of my kind of bigger traumatic moments where it was just, I feel like it was the first time shame entered my body when I had my mom, I think, was away working that day, and I was alone with my stepdad at home, and I had drawn on the brick of the house with chalk.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't anything that was going to be permanent, but I got, I remember getting really yelled at and it being really hard for me to take.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was just like, I feel like it was the first time I was really shamed for something and felt bad and wrong.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like crying.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've never cried this much on a podcast episode.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, this is who I am as a person, anyway, so it's okay.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think also like when I think about who my dad is, my dad is not the type of person that yells.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's not volatile.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's a quiet person.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: He probably internalizes his anger more than anything.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I remember about this experience is going and climbing into this tree.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for so many people that have had harder childhoods, pulling it together.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is very much what they might remember in their connections with nature, are that they they found a moment where the earth held them, where they felt safe.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I remember about that tree.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know what type of tree it was, but I just remember it held me.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I do also remember these we had cedar trees all around our yard at my stepdad's house.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember sometimes just going and hiding in those trees.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I was still keeping that earth connection, but it was definitely diminished starting then.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think it just continued to diminish over the years, especially with all the moving.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: But then probably the biggest next shift for me was when my mom finally left my stepdad for the final time and we moved to a suburb of Seattle, and it was so beautiful there.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: But also we were in a suburb where close to where Microsoft is.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember one day going to school and this whole forest being clear-cut when I came home from school and like in the course of the day.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the course of the day, just crazy amount of development.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember that.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember witnessing that and being like, oh my gosh, that's so sad.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: But also feeling somewhat disconnected because I was definitely trying to fit in.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: I went from a town with less than 500 people in Kansas to a school with 400 kids in my class.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just a hugely shock, a huge shock to my system and also different.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot of people that had a lot of money.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I was coming from this podunk town.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was pretty, pretty big change.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so And this was in middle school.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: This was in ninth grade.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there it was the last year of middle school, actually.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was, yeah, I remember walking into the auditorium and it just for the first day of school and being like, I don't know who to sit with.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just felt really lonely.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, I wish I'd known to turn to the earth to lean into, but I'd just become so disconnected and I was really trying to fit in.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I became the shell of myself, I would say in high school.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped singing, I stopped playing music.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: There were just a lot of things about me that I just I was so focused on fitting in.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the little bits I remember of Earth Connection were like my mom always did little flower pots every year, and that was nice.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember little things like that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: I remember we had blackberries growing all around our house, and the shock that came to me when I realized we could actually pick them and eat them.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was just Scott and I have a different story about me with a fruit growing and my shock at, oh, I can eat that fruit.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: We'll tell that sometime.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, like I just was so disconnected in so many ways.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: And even through college, I would say like I was occasionally traveling to really beautiful places and definitely like appreciating nature some, but I really didn't have very much connection to any plant allies or specific places.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And even I studied abroad in England, which was like very much my ancestral lands, but I was very disconnected at that point and had some big traumas at that point.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like I had an abortion, and I think just in my lack of processing that grief, I just again was like dissociated from my body.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was just not really in there.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was not able to connect as easily to the earth and to my ancestors.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there's been a lot.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a lot.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then at some point things started to shift.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say the biggest shift that I experienced was I came back from England.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: I felt really alone my senior year of college.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like I just didn't know who my people were.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew that I hadn't quite figured out my path.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember having fears.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Am I going to get this sorted out?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Am I going to figure out who I am and what I'm meant to do in the world?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I was a political science major.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I was also like inundated with the news compared to how I am now.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm quite different now.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have a lot of capacity.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: I, of course, care about what's going on in the news, but also like I am more focused on my personal connections with people and how I can help them heal than being an activist or something like that.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just what works better for my system and especially as a breastfeeding mom and things like that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So my senior year of college, five minutes before class started, I signed up for this environmental politics class and it totally changed my life.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I just had no awareness around like how humans were affecting the earth and climate change and those sorts of things.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so from that point on, I just shifted my whole I took whatever classes I needed to complete my major, but then I just took all environmental studies classes and I got a fellowship with an organization called Lettuc, which connected community gardens with food banks.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there was this moment of being in a meeting with all these gardeners from the community gardens and being like, wow, I want what they're having.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like I could just feel that they I could feel resonance with them and I could just feel that they had figured something out in their lives.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can relate to that myself.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, I think we'll probably get into from there, like I that was right after or my last year of college, and then Scott and I met the following year.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we'll go to Scott's story now and then we'll come back together.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'll do my best to follow that up.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you end up with openly emotional, I don't know that you have as much.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see what you have to do.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Same sort of trauma, maybe.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess first, just what do you feel like is most alive in your work and what's exciting you the most?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: For me, that is along with parenting, like you said, that's like critical central focus.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: But in my work outside of parenting, and this, I guess they blend together.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: For me, it is our living, breathing farm and getting to have the opportunity to co-create with our place.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really comfortable being on our farm, spending time there.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we have 92 acres.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 12 open acres, and the rest of it is forested, and it's got all of these distinct different zones.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know 92 acres is abstract.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: People really never have any idea what an acre actually looks like.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's 208 by 208, which you also can't picture.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've done this with people at parties.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: They say, Oh, that gives me a better idea.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then I say, Okay, how wide do you think this room is?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: This happened at a New Year's Eve party last year.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy I was sitting with said, 80.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a 25-foot wide room.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: So again, the spatial thing, 92 acres, abstract, but it's big.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's big, it's a lot of land.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a huge amount of forest.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a forest management plan.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there's, I think, something like 10 or 12 distinct zones of different forest types.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, what's most alive for me is when I get to be in rhythm with the season, be out there, especially when I get to get my hands in the dirt.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Winter has a special place.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a gift to living in a place with a real winter.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: It causes you to uh take a breath in, be more restful, less so involved in the productive piece.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, when I really get to connect with the rhythm, which is basically all the time.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: My year, we're always looking at like when we can travel, and it keeps getting narrower and narrower.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: We used to be able to go in the spring, but now we're making maple syrup every year.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so that becomes a tight window.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then so that starts end of February and runs through middle of April-ish, like right now.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's seeding season, and then it's garden prep season, and then busy planting season, and then that gets us right into midsummer, which is I actually can take a little bit of a break because the gardens are established and a little bit on autopilot.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, for me, it's just being able to watch the place.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been living there now since 2012.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 14 years.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: 14 years on the same farm.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: We switched houses.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's two houses on the farm.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we moved a couple years ago, not quite a couple years ago.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: But getting to watch this space evolve over time for me, being in direct relationship feels so alive for me.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: And envisioning we're planting orchards, we're planting berries, establishing new gardens, getting to know the place really intimately is what gets me super excited.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I just have to say that to smell the wood-fired maple syrup being made is the sweetest thing.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And no pun intended.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the best that Scott does this for our family.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when I helped him, I I don't help very much with that operation right now, at least.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was pouring the sap buckets, getting getting sap all down my sleeve, all the way to my armpit, and just appreciating that hard work that's going into it.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I just I feel really grateful for you doing that.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I'd love for you to just tell our listeners about your childhood and what kind of makes you who you are today.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I grew up very near to where we live now.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: I guess interestingly, to throw right out there, our kids are seventh generation on my pure maternal line and paternal line.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a bunch of people that came in later immigrating from French-Canadian, like my dad's whole side, and some of my mom's.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then on my mom's side, Italian ancestors who married into a family that was had already been here for a generation, that sort of thing.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: So my mom's family farmed.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: My great-great-great-grandparents farmed on land within miles of where we live now.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so their homesteads are still there.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: The house burned, but their rhubarb is still there.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And their daffodils and lilacs and all of these things, grape vines, a million apple trees on this property that we get to go and take our kids to.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And now you've transplanted, we have your ancestral rhubarb and grapevines.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which I just love.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so cool to the rhubarb, especially because it just comes back in such full force every spring and already it's poking its head out.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And to think that's from the same plant that your ancestors were growing, I think is so beautiful and amazing.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: So cool.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: On that property, my mom had this early childhood memory of her father grafting a white lilac onto a purple lilac bush.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when we went up there and started exploring, we found it.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: However, 50 years later.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then as Lindsay and I were walking around there, the grass was really tall, like chest high.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was maybe the first time I'd explored around the place and I knew where the old house foundation was and all that sort of thing.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, we saw this tall flowering plant.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if people know what rhubarb looks like flowering.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: People don't generally let it go to flower, so you might not be aware of it.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: But from a distance, I could see this plant across the field.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I think that's I think that's rhubarb.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we wandered over there, and it just gave me this sense of the place was still alive with them, which was the things they had planted there were still thriving.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, then we got to dig them up and plant them at our place, which is which to me is the most exciting thing in the world.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: So let's see, my mom is a quintessential, caregiving mother archetype.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: She takes care of our kids a lot, it's so helpful for us.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had that basis of unending support and acceptance, which I feel very grateful for.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And she's taking care of our littlest right now.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: And my father is, and so my mom was a nurse, so she worked a bunch, but then just focused all on her energy on raising us and just being like super awesome mom.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad is a land surveyor, and so he's out there all the time on the land.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he ended up in that line of work because he is he lives to hunt and fish.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so his whole life is based around thinking about those things and being out there in the woods, being out there on the water.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so I got to grow up.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have so many fond memories of being out scouting with him, looking for a deer sign or turkey or grouse or whatever the season was, rabbits.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Literally every single animal you can do.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can hunt here.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: My dad hunts.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he just grew up with that passion, which is really interesting because our our son Remy has that same thing from the time he was very little.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: He just wants to catch everything, and he's so oriented towards that.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it just feels like my dad coming right through.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he's good at it, he's so good at it.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's a he's so much more of a natural than me.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I love being with my dad.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I remember following him and getting the signals of if he stopped, I was supposed to stop.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Some of my earliest memories were being out there, following quietly behind him, listening intently.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't really always sure what we were listening for or looking for, but he was educating me along the way.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I was learning plants and trees.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: I remember, yeah, chewing on the black birch, which has this really winter green taste and thinking that was so cool, and finding wild abandoned.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes maybe they're wild apple trees or oftentimes abandoned homestead apple trees and getting apples in the fall from out in the forest and just thinking that was so cool.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say that just these are traditions that you've now brought in with our children and like our kids love this stuff too.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: They love to chew the gum, they love to chew, they love to find wild apples and try every single one and see what they think.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was all really cool.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: The only hang up for me with the hunting was I was a really sensitive little guy, and I still I I guess I still am.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: You're a sensitive big guy now.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a sensitive big guy now.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: But so being out there looking for stuff, getting to know the woods, being in the woods, being quiet in the woods, all of that was so amazing.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: I loved it so much.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the killing part was really challenging for me as a kid.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't do it.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: I had opportunities to, for example, shoot a deer.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there was one occasion.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes my dad would put me in the most prime spot because he loves hunting and getting deer himself.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: But even more exciting than that for him was for my brother or I to get a deer.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was just his dream come true.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's so exciting for him.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, I love being out there seeing the deer.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so he'd sit me in a spot and I'd have deer walk right in front of me sitting there with my gun with no intention of shooting one of them because they're beautiful and they're just kind.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I just couldn't do it.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you had aimed to miss.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Also, one time I we saw some deer on the way into a spot where I was going to sit while I was still with my father.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so we saw these deer and they were within range.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Okay, now's your big chance.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Gave me the opportunity.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I pulled up the gun and I aimed at the deer, and then I picked it up so I was aiming well above it, so that I knew that I wasn't going to hit it.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I shot, knowing that I hadn't hit it.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: My dad's, Do you think you got it?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I had to do the whole, like, I don't know.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then I didn't.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I had target practice and stuff.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: So he was like, he was confused.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: He couldn't wrap his head around how I wasn't excited and oriented towards it the same way he was.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so for him, like in that moment, he couldn't have even imagined that I shot to miss.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of that came full circle later.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe I'll circle back to that.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I now hunt, and the killing part still isn't easy, but I put a lot of time and effort into it.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess at some point I just recognized, like, my dad had been under the impression, maybe for a while, that I didn't like venison or something like that.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And when I told him that I did, this was like during hunting season, Lindsay and I were living in Montpelier in this tiny apartment.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Oh, I didn't realize that.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, next one I guess for your freezer if you want it.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, Oh, that would be amazing.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And within a day or two, a couple of days later, I got a phone call like, make room in your freezer.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm coming by.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we got this huge box or a couple boxes of venison.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And every time I opened a package, it felt like a truly spiritual experience to have some sort of connection to, even though I wasn't the one who had hunted it, it just felt special.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: I knew this meat wasn't coming out of the system that provides meat for so many of us that is not very pretty.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: But that this animal got to live its wild, natural life and then ended swiftly and given to us with care.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: It felt so special that I that was the point where I was like, I'm someone who eats meat and enjoys it, and I should be doing this myself.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so that began my process of getting into hunting.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think with a lot of effort, it still took me like another eight years before I maybe not quite that long, but something like that before I got my first year.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: And now I spend, hopefully not the whole fall, it depends on how long it takes me to get a deer, but as much time as it takes to try to provide meat for our family.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you want to speak a little bit about gardening and your family tradition of the greenhouse business and things like that.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: When I think about this, like I'm a generation separated from gardening in that neither of my parents identify as gardeners.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: My dad has this connection to like at home, we always ate a lot of, it's interesting, we're really different from one another, but I feel like what I've recognized at some point is our drive is the same, like the sense of providing food to put on the table.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: His was oriented towards animals, hunting them, providing that sort of food.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Mine forever was about gardening and providing vegetables and all the and medicine that I can grow or wildcraft.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I feel like the drive is the same.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so growing up, my grandparents, my grandfather had an amazing vegetable garden.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: I sadly don't really have memories of it.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was located across the street from my great-grandparents' house, which was a florist shop.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so my first corsell ancestor, my dad's like going back the furthest, the family that came here to the Rutland area, the first generation, he was a gardener for a wealthy estate here in town.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think he spoke English.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: He spoke French only.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: But his obituary talks about him being like the head gardener for this like wealthy railroad person here in town.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then his son started this florist shop that was like one of the couple main florist shops in Rutland for which was like a bustling town back then.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: It got depressed later, but it was a railroad town.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: So there was some kind of industry here.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the flower shop was in business for something like a hundred years.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was that deep I do have memories of going into the old glass greenhouses.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: There were two huge glass greenhouses, one right next to the other, right out back of their house where they where they lived.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then the gardens were across the street.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: But so deep sort of ancestral connection to that sort of work.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the smell from the greenhouses just being like intoxicating.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then my mom's family, if you go back enough generations, everybody were farmers for the most part.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: But my mom's family was farming actively in Shrewsbury, where we live in a neighboring town.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: My great-grandfather, who I knew well, I knew five of my great-grandparents pretty well, which was pretty cool.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Really cool.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: And a couple of them who lived in our neighboring town.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: They had had a dairy farm and then later Christmas Christmas tree farm on this really beautiful piece of land.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, there's just an intact tradition of people working with the land, working with plants specifically, that I really feel comes through.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's so natural for me.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so I guess what I was saying before, neither of my parents, they both, yeah, they didn't quite have, they didn't have confidence as gardeners or really the patience or drive towards that sort of work.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember them calling me a green thumb uh green thumb as a little kid.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was noticing the garlic sprouting and I wanted to plant it.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: I planted it in a head, so they all grew up too close together.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe a first remembering.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then I wanted to grow peppers somehow, or we had some pepper plants, and my dad was like, you take care of them because he just felt like maybe I was going to be better at it.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: And them having this idea that peppers were really hard to grow, which is funny because it's one of the crops that kind of do the best for us always.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they grew well.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then I remember, yeah, transplanting some flowers.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: My best friend has a memory of him and I grafting a hydrangea using a clothespin that from his recollection it did take, which is amazing.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And also, your mom is an amazing cook and carries family tradition.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: She always for New Year's makes the French-Canadian meat pie and this Italian sage cream sauce, and some of the some of those recipes.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think even though she wasn't or your family wasn't growing their own vegetables, she carried the tradition of and your dad too, actually.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Your dad's an amazing cook and he uses some of he's carried forward recipes as well.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think that always did make it full circle.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: When we were when I was little, I do remember getting produce from my grandfather's garden, which was a big deal for him.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: My dad would come home with big paper bags full of stuff.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that was probably part too of like why your parents weren't motivated to do it there on their own, because I think their focus, my dad's focus, was just so hunting and fishing oriented.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And your mom had her hands full.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And my mom had her hands majorly full.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Her mom was an amazing flower gardener.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: She had really gorgeous tulips and flower gardens around her house.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like my mom just lacked some confidence, still does.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: I try to work with her, but she's just identifies as a non-gardener or that she's not good at it, which I'm always trying to teach out of people.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: She's a gardener of our children.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: More than anyone ever could be.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was that strong connection to family.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if you want to share anything about your connection to your body that you remember, and or just if I know you didn't really ever feel that disconnected from the earth, but just yeah, a little bit about your body and yeah.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: That is a little bit harder for me to answer.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: You had some challenges, not major challenges with your health growing up, but you do remember some of your you probably remember a little bit about sickness or yeah.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had my tonsils out at some point, and I remember that's kind of what it was.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: That was being that was like so terrible.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was just so painful.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: I had strep throat a lot as a kid, received just loads and loads of antibiotics.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: My mom was worked as a nurse, and so she was pretty steeped in that world.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: All my dad's sisters were nurses, were just my my mom really has adopted our sort of approach to those things now, which is cool.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: And always looking for natural things.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad was always open to those things too, and to things in nature that could be helpful.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: But there were there was a strong orientation towards Western conventional medicine.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And do you want to just speak to yeah, that the potential disconnect you've ever felt from the earth or your body?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't feel like I've ever really been disconnected from the earth.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: I just really don't.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: I just like when you were describing going into the cedar trees, being held by the tree, that's that sort of stuff has always been part of my life.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you are, I will just say, you being as you just have a different rootedness and groundedness than I have.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think from I've often thought from the fact that your family goes back so deep in this area and that you haven't had that instability as much.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: And when I'm thinking about these things, I'm just remembering the feeling I had as a very little person, young person, of really appreciating the ability to be connected with generations for the beyond my grandparents, being connected with my great grandparents and listening to their stories, my grandparents too, and getting a sense of life being different before, where life really did revolve around.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Around the rhythms of the natural world.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think in Vermont, we're a little bit more tied to that in a lot of ways.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: We live on a dirt road.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: We have we have four distinct seasons.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: People say we have a fifth distinct season, which is mud season.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: The roads become impassable.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's just part of our experience of being here.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: But having a deep appreciation of the world that they spoke of that we realized was changing.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: I realized even as a young kid was maybe fading away and just wanting to just really having an appreciation of what life had been like here.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we just still we go to parties and no one has their cell phone out.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, there's a lot of ways that I think that's pretty different than a lot of the country.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're so grateful for that.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are so grateful.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: So then do you want to speak any more about your body colour?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sorry.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't really get into that at all.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: Which we know that Scott is the cobbler's wife or whatever, cobbler's husband with without good shoes, because he is way overdue for me to do a lot of body work.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's one thing.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've been.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've had some health issues that have been at times confusing to me, if I'm being like totally honest.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I feel like we're so inundated with so much availability of information.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I read about these sorts of things a lot.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I got diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease of, I don't know, five years ago now, something like that.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: My energy was getting really off.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: I got this panel of blood tests, and the naturopath that I see was all of a sudden, oh wow, your thyroid function is really off.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was surprising to me.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lindsay and I had oriented our lives.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was still operating our farm, our vegetable farm at that point as my full-time thing, and trying to eat really well, being connected really well, and then just having these weird things pop up and have some sort of confusing health issues.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I feel like it's something that I need to continue to work on.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: I feel most connected in my body and most well when I'm out using my body, when I feel exhausted at the end of the day, when I'm just burning up energy, because I'm out there really physically intimately connected with my work.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're in the gym lifting weights.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: Never, never.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: You will never find me there.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm out with my shovel and my rock bar and just making it happen, just getting the gardens in and splitting wood, carrying wood.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if I'm thinking that we may have to do a little part two where our story comes together, but I'm wondering what feels most important to continue sharing about your own story.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to share anything about settlement projects and yeah, like when you were talking about the gardeners going to this meeting of community gardeners and feeling like I want what they're having, I had that as a kid.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, like I said, I had I really appreciate most everything about my upbringing.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had good parents, I had good teachers, I lived in a beautiful place that we still live in.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: And but also on a sort of conventional path, I would say.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that's what the life, what life, what was available in life.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: My brother and sister were both overachieving students.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was like a very deep thinker.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, deep thinker, half-assed student.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I got good grades with no effort, and I that's the way I wanted to approach it and naturally just did it.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: But my brother and sister were like top of their class and driven in a certain way, and I was different than that.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to this camp when I was nine or 10, and it just opened up a whole different world to me.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: I saw people that lived really differently, like in very intact.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't an intentional community per se, but it was this group of people who live in the community where we now.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had a dream that I had dreamt that I would live there someday because the feeling of that community was just so amazing.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: There was something about it that was so special.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there were adults that really listened to me.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: I would go to a party, and six months later, this older guy, this local beekeeper, who was such an amazing character.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: I had told a story and I didn't see him for six months.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to another party, and he remembered everything that I had been excited about six months earlier.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that really struck me.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was just there was a feeling of presence and a feeling of the opportunity being whatever you wanted it to be.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Life could look however you made it look.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really life-changing for me in a positive way.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just possibility.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when you were 10, 11.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then I continued going to that camp and then eventually worked as a junior staff member at that camp and was really influenced by what I took out of that.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: I and yeah, then we eventually worked there together.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: There was like one year that it was revived and we worked there.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think to paint a picture of what our community is like, there are just tons of people that are still living in pretty traditional ways, raising their own food, cutting ice, hunting.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: You should specify cutting ice.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: People don't know.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, like cutting ice out of the lake to have cold storage.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: To pack their ice houses.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you cut blocks of ice from the frozen lake and haul them to your ice house where you pack these blocks with sawdust so they don't freeze together, and then use that to put in your ice box because you're off the grid and you don't have power.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this is and I remember being at a wedding in, I think it was August, it might have been the end of July, and these guys showing up in this pickup truck with a canoe full of blocks of this pristine, beautiful ice with sawdust that they were like cleaning off of it to keep all the beer and stuff cold.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I was like, couldn't figure out.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never seen blocks of ice like this.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was, I was maybe I was like 17 years old and asked about it.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was ice from the lake, and that was so incredibly intriguing to me.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's but yeah, it's like at the beginning of Frozen.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably where most people have that a relationship to what ice cutting is, and it still happens to this day.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Could you sing the song?
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there are not that many people who are still living in that way, but there are just tons of people that are sugaring, tons of people raising gardens.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sugaring is making maple syrup.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: Another term that's kind of local.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think maybe we just close.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think our little one is gonna be arriving here any moment.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: She might be here, I think.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so I think we just maybe we maybe close up this chapter and we will get back into when we met each other and our connection with each other.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything else you feel like is important about your story before we met?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: There probably is, but I'm not thinking of it right now.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we might have to do some follow-up episodes because I'm thinking of some topics, but I have a feeling they're not short.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think all maybe we would end on, or that I would want to end on is all of this culminating in our really getting to sink in deeply to the rhythms of this place and to be able to provide that for our children, to have a love for the land, be connected to the land, know where their food comes from, is just like a really special and amazing thing.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is beautiful.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: So until next time and part two, we will talk about when we met, which was when we were 23 years old, and everything that happened from that point forward when we really discovered our life paths in a lot of ways.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: Even more and the life we manifested and all the beautiful things that have happened since then.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds great.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: I love you.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: I love you too.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.