Welcome back! This week on the Seeds of Tao Podcast we have the world-traveler, Kevin Cormack, here to share his fantastic story of his adventures in finding himself and becoming who he was meant to be. This is a journey all of us face in our lives, some more than others, and a big takeaway from this podcast was really to go after your passions wholeheartedly. 

Making the Decision

In Kevin’s interview, he brings up some really common struggles that he was faced with when he was younger, including finding out who he was and what he wanted out of life. We hear this all too often. Teenagers will spend their adolescent years trying to “find” themselves, most of the time trying to be what other people expect out of them. But even then, it’s extremely common for adults in their 20’s and 30’s to finish college and get a job, only to find out that’s not what they really want to be doing. Sometimes we even hear of the older adult who just...

Hello again everyone, we’re glad to see you here again for another episode of the Seeds of Tao Podcast, we’re on Episode 032 and today we have a very special guest, Marie-Pierre Bilodeau. A big theme that came up in MP's interview is that food is this amazing, universal connecting agent. Everyone is involved with food in some capacity, whether they are a connoisseur, chef, cook of the family, or mere eater of food. Food connects us to our earth, to our families, to our communities, and to our world. Here in this blog post we’re going to dive into those connections, but first some amazing resources from Marie-Pierre...

https://www.communityseednetwork.org - This is a North American
initiative and people can find seed libraries and individuals in their
communities in Canada and the US. 

https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating -
This is a copy of the wonderful essay by Wendell Berry farmer, activist, writer who also...

Here we are at Episode 031 of the Seeds of Tao Podcast. Josh is back for the World Report, focusing on People Care this month. What a fantastic time to air this episode with the global pandemic going on. People Care should be the topmost priority right now. To start the blog post I’d love to quote the fantastic David Holmgren, he says that Care for People, “means accepting personally responsibility for our situation as far as possible, rather than regarding external forces or influences as controlling our lives. The permaculture approach is to focus on the positive influences and opportunities that exist even in the most desperate situation.”

Care of the People

Caring for the people does not mean jumping off our couch and going off to save humanity. Effective people care starts with the self. The healthcare professionals right now around the world are not racing into hospitals to save every patient with COVID-19 without thought of their own safety. They know,...

This week on the Seeds of Tao podcast we have Natalie Hormann from New Zealand with us. In the episode, Natalie shares her amazing story from growing up in Germany, to living through Chernobyl fallout, moving to New Zealand, and transferring careers from law to community education to personal development coaching. One big idea we really latched on to when listening to the episode was the value of mentors in our lives. No matter where you are, no matter what line of work you are in, everyone needs a mentor.

If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can check out her website at www.futurelivingcoach.com or on Facebook, on her page or in her free Facebook Group.

Our Lives Were Changed by a Mentor

A couple of years ago, Josh and I were introduced to personal development through mentorship by recommendation of a friend. We went to an event that was going to help us focus on our marriage. I personally wasn’t so sure about it. Yes, Josh and I weren't very...

This week on the Seeds of Tao podcast for Episode 029 we are talking with Jim Gale, designer at FUUD Forest Abundance in Florida. He is an amazing source of enthusiasm and a true permaculture visionary. We love visionaries here at Seeds of Tao, they are our people. 

Get involved with Jim https://www.foodforestabundance.com/ or on his Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/FoodForestAbundance/.

Here in the blog post we’ll be discussing the elements of maintaining enthusiasm for your vision, like Jim outlines, and then wrapping it around staying true to your vision, even if you live in the suburbs.

If you have been hanging out with us for a while now, you’ll remember back in Episode 011 where we talked about how important dreams and visions are. We are avid believers in dreaming big, creating the big visions you’re truly passionate about and then going after them.

Envision What You Want

One of the first steps in working towards a vision is...

Raising our Voices for Intentional Communities and Ecovillages

We are so excited to share this episode with you today. Morag Gamble and Michael Ney are such amazing sources of knowledge and experience, it was a pleasure to have them on the podcast. If you’d like to learn more …

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Morag Gamble (https://moraggamble.com) is a global permaculture and ecovillage ambassador who has lived for over 2 decades in Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, a UN award-winning ecovillage in Australia. Since the early nineties she’s educated permaculture teachers and leaders on 6 continents, founded the Permaculture Education Institute (https://permacultureeducationinstitute.org/) and mentors women, youth and local farmers through her permaculture charity, Ethos Foundation (http://ethosfoundation.org.au/), and the new Permayouth (https://permayouth.org/)...

Gardening, Micro-Farming, and the Australian Fires

This week on the podcast we have our first Aussie guest, Marty Ware. In the interview he brings up the importance of and strategies for gardening and micro-farming, as well as the state of the Australian fires recovery. For this week’s post, we wanted to dive deeper into micro-farming and how that fits into a sustainable or permaculture-aligned lifestyle.

What is Micro-Farming?

A micro-farm is any agricultural infrastructure that is on 5 acres or less. So yes, your 1 acre food forest would technically be considered a micro-farm. But these micro-farms come in many shapes and sizes. Micro-farms typically focus on fewer kinds of crops to produce those select few in bulk and then sell, things like garlic, tomatoes, herbs, micro greens, or lettuce. 

For many people venturing into micro-farming, they do so for economic reasons in order to sell the produce for a profit to local restaurants, specialty markets...

March 2020 Earth Care World Report

As you've heard in previous podcast episodes, we're going to be taking time here and there to talk more about what's going on in the world, and how that's tied to sustainability and permaculture. In this first report, we're focusing on the Earth Care aspects of what's been happening in the world. In the podcast Josh identifies a number of topics going on right now, linking many to the recent fires in Australia. Here in the blog post, we'll dive deeper into four of the topics he brought up in the episode - longer summers, droughts, biodiversity and soil science.

Longer Summers

Josh noted in the episode that in Australia, they are experiencing summers a month longer than summers from 20 years ago. That's a huge difference! BBC noted that Australian summers have now become TWICE AS LONG as its winters! That's crazy! While Australia has been making some big strides towards sustainability and even permaculture, as a whole they...

Lessons from the Story of Pando

Welcome back everyone for Episode 025! So remember how our online course is called the Pando Academy Online Course? We today we're talking about why it has such a unique name and the lessons we've drawn from this unique, ancient organism.

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The Metaphor for Pando

What exactly is Pando? It is an ancient aspen clone forest in Utah that is the oldest living organism on the earth known to man dating 80,000 years ago. In permaculture we like to look at nature and learn from its patterns and interactions to mirror in our own environments. We're going to do that same thing here in the blog post. Josh talked about Pando and it's strengths and threats in the podcast, but we're going to address Pando more as a metaphor here, and draw applicable lessons for our individual lives.

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Living Through the Ice Age

About 12,000 years ago, we came out of our last ice age. Pando has been around since way before that ice age,...

What's the Story on Permaculture?

We have a few podcast episodes under our belt now and have been sharing some awesome stories of permies in action. Lately, however, we've been talking with a lot of people who aren't fully engaged in permaculture. Maybe they have knowledge and even a PDC completed, but don't feel like they are living permaculture really. Some used to be super into permaculture, and then migrated into the urban space to work on something completely differently. There are many different, individual cases of course, but at the end of the day there are a lot of permies who don't feel like they are really living a permaculture lifestyle, and oftentimes they feel alone in their sustainability efforts.

We've found that many permies feel this way because they are disconnect from the global permaculture conversation, the global STORY. But there's not really a central place we can go to get an idea of where permaculture is at and where it's going. So we're taking it...