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Today I Go Slowly with Jade Miles
1.2k Plays6 months ago
Jade Miles is a very special mate of mine. I turned up on her doorstep as a WWOOFer in 2018 and we got on like asparagus and eggs, which is what we had for dinner that night if I recall correctly.
You probs know Jade as the host of the Futuresteading podcast, keeper of Black Barn Farm and writer of the most personal and compelling instagram captions in all the land.
I love that Jade is consciously bridging the personal/professional schism, exploring ways to bring her whole, complex self to her roles as CEO, farmer, speaker, writer, facilitator, mother, friend and bush rat.
In this conversation, Jade gets more personal than ever — which is saying something because we love a juicy yarn. From her approach to podcasting, the creation of household rituals, how seasonal imperatives shape her schedule and why she is the way she is, this is one intimate Reskillience experience.
Jade has a new book on the cook called Huddle, coming next year, and if you don’t already have the Futuresteading handbook in your hot little hands I can highly recommend it.
Black Barn Farm’s home on the web
Beau Miles ~ Get Over Yourself
Anthony James ~ The RegenNarration
Tyson Yunkaporta on Futuresteading
Casper ter Kuile
Cecilia Macaulay
Claire Dunn ~ Rewilding the Urban Soul
Richard Powers ~ The Overstory
Indira Naidoo ~ The Space Between the Stars
HUDDLE is out Autumn 2025
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Reskilience' Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Reskilience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm gratefully recording on the unceded lands of the Jaja Wurrung people in central Victoria. And I'm writing this intro somewhat begrudgingly, I have to say, because it is a beautiful day and I just want to be out foraging chestnuts and acorns with my nose in the loam, gathering kindling on my way home and lighting the fire.
00:00:43
Speaker
And perhaps there's a second factor in my lack of motivation too.
Purpose and Personal Connection in Podcasting
00:00:48
Speaker
I've been half-jokingly saying to people that I can quit podcasting now because I've met Jordan Osmond. Because, well, here's a story for you. After interviewing Jordan for episode four, we became friends, we stayed friends, and actually found we have a lot of shared interests.
00:01:07
Speaker
including each other. Was the whole podcast just an elaborate and very public way to meet an amazing person? Has it already served its purpose? Why am I telling you this in a podcast dedicated to the skills of resilience? It is all rather personal, maybe a little too awkward and intimate for the airwaves. But actually, I'm not sold on the idea that the professional and the personal realms shouldn't mingle. Sounds fishy to me.
00:01:36
Speaker
I've never liked the notion that in order to be taken seriously, one must present a polished, predictable and palatable picture, and never ever talk about your period.
Critique of Corporate Communication
00:01:47
Speaker
I've always wondered why instruction manuals have to be so dry and dull, why news stories have to be read in the same booming and neutral voice without a hint of humanity.
00:01:59
Speaker
As a copywriter, I found it odd that organizations are so reluctant to write from the heart, preferring the cold and authoritative tone of no one in particular. Why can't business be personal? Everything else is.
00:02:14
Speaker
Giant corporations take depersonalization to the extreme, hiding human involvement behind sterile branding, meaningless slogans, and copy and paste products. Who knows where their materials come from, what their workers think or feel or dream. No wonder they operate like psychopaths.
Balancing Personal Life and Content Creation
00:02:34
Speaker
When we integrate the personal and professional, when we bring more of ourselves to our work, it may raise eyebrows, but also important questions.
00:02:43
Speaker
Like, does this work make us happy? Is this meeting actually necessary? Why don't we get a day off to bleed? Why can't we go outside?
00:02:55
Speaker
I just watched Beau Miles' new film, a nine minute exercise in extreme honesty, where Beau goes fishing and talks about the perils of making stuff for YouTube. It's highly raw and personal, Beau letting us in on his struggles to balance filmmaking and living, all while appeasing the algorithm, pleasing the audience and not being too damn pleased with himself.
00:03:18
Speaker
Thanks to Beau getting emotionally naked, we can see the pitfalls of modern media with fresh eyes, how it doesn't just predate on our attention as viewers, but sucks the life out of creators too. Blending the personal and the professional makes mischief, destabilizing systems that rely on predictability and compliance.
Guest Introduction: Jade Miles
00:03:41
Speaker
So I'll probably keep spilling the goss at the top of each episode and finding elegant ways to justify it.
00:03:48
Speaker
My guest today is Miles. It's not Bo, though he is up soon, so hit me with your questions. But it is Jade. Jade Miles is a very special mate of mine. Our relationship is professional and pro-personal. I turned up on Jade's doorstep as a woofer in 2018, and we got on like asparagus and eggs, which I think is what we had for dinner that first evening.
00:04:13
Speaker
Jade is also consciously bridging the personal and professional schism, exploring ways to bring her whole complex self to roles as CEO, farmer, speaker, writer, facilitator, mother, friend and bush rat.
00:04:28
Speaker
Of course, you probably already know Jade as the host of the Future Steading podcast, the co-creator of Black Barn Farm, and writer of the most personal and compelling Instagram captions in all the land. I love that Jade is my very first guest for season two of Reskillience, because she is the number one reason I podcast at all. She asked me to be her Future Steading co-pilot back in the day, and that's where I started interviewing movers and shakers while trying not
Jade's Approach to Podcasting and New Book 'Huddle'
00:04:58
Speaker
to shit myself.
00:04:58
Speaker
In this conversation, Jade gets more personal than I've ever heard her on the airwaves, which is saying something because we do love a juicy yarn. From her own approach to podcasting, the creation of household rituals, how seasonal imperatives shape her schedule, and why she is the way she is, this is one beautiful resilience specimen and I think you'll really love it.
00:05:25
Speaker
Jade has a new book on the cook called Huddle which is coming out next year so keep your eyes peeled and if you don't already have the future steadying handbook and your hot little hands I can highly recommend it. I've got a whole lot of shout outs and thanks to Ishu on the other side of this chat so keep your ears committed till the end. Thanks so much for being here friends, enjoy!
00:05:52
Speaker
I feel like we've had amazing conversations in the past around our kitchen table or wherever the hell we've been and I've often thought, God, if only I recorded that conversation with Katie. No, I experience that all the time with people but...
00:06:04
Speaker
There is still something that clamps down a little bit when I hit the record button. I don't know if you, after all of your time podcasting, feel like you can really drop into that genuine, vulnerable space with someone when you know that you're recording.
Community Engagement and Interview Strategies
00:06:18
Speaker
No, no, no. It's definitely, you definitely start to perform and you start to pull the lines that you have been familiar with.
00:06:27
Speaker
Um, and that, you know, land quite well, you start to pull them out of your dark crevices of your brain. No, I'll try and do my very best to be very real this morning. You're going to get me pretty real cause it's been a fairly sort of week. It's the, um, because it's good Friday.
00:06:44
Speaker
about every 40 seconds, the local fire brigade runs their siren to encourage you to run out to the street with some coins to raise money for the Good Friday appeal. So if you hear that in the background, that is a community service doing its good deed for the year. So no one's in danger and I'll be good at ignoring it, but just in case you hear it in the background.
00:07:08
Speaker
Thanks for the heads up, we also have an apocalypse siren, we're right next to the CFA, and at 10am on a Sunday morning they run the siren and do their drills, but it literally feels like the end of the world and there are so many tourists, they must think, what the fuck, these are the doomsday sirens.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah I had a question Jade just based on like what we were speaking about before I hit record which was podcasting because I feel like it's really exciting to talk to other podcasters and I always have nerdy questions about your approach to interviewing and all of the things and I wanted to ask you for your advice around speaking with people who are such experts in their field and have swaths of
00:07:53
Speaker
inspirational information to offer but I also really want to know about them and their inner workings and their inner world and their struggles and I find myself always pushing the kind of personal angle and not knowing if I'm striking the balance between their knowledge and information versus that beautiful personal terrain that not everyone's really happy to go to so I just want to understand maybe how you how you approach that when you're speaking with very illustrious individuals
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, look, I think I'm a bit like you in that I feel like the really juicy story that I actually really want to hear and get to the cracks of is the human. I really want to know how they never get their everyday life and what really makes that physiological quickening come to fruition for them. I hear you, though, when you say not everybody wants to go there. Lots of people don't want to go there. And I've had a few people who, based on the way my pod rolls out, say no.
00:08:52
Speaker
to interviews and I've not been able to pin them down because they know that I'll scratch the surface beyond their public persona. And then there's other people, I'm thinking of maybe Tyson Yunkleporo is a good example, who has no boundaries whatsoever. And they are really challenging to interview because you don't know which direction they'll head in. But they're also really joyful to interview because they will dive deeply at the first invitation to do so.
00:09:20
Speaker
I don't know. I think some people do this exceptionally well. You do this well as a human, just in our friendship, I know that.
00:09:27
Speaker
I would say Anthony James from the Regeneration podcast has this beautiful capability to do it as well and really get to the deep knowledge of you as an expert but kind of navigate you past your human personality traits to get you there and it's a real skill and some people have it naturally and I think it takes time and I think it needs you to be really patient and I'm not patient and I often don't give myself enough time and so
00:09:53
Speaker
You know, I really I come away from some of the conversations I've had with people and think you were an amazing human and I just didn't do you justice then because I didn't take the time to really do my research in the back end and work out how to ask you the questions in a way that will allow you to to be everything that you are as a whole. Bringing a whole human to an interview is something that I think is the gift that a few have. I don't think I do, but I think others definitely do. And that's when it really is beautiful.
00:10:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah thanks Jade for sharing that from your perspective because I think you do so beautifully draw people out and it feels like making love in a way. Like you have to really get to know someone and have that preliminary
00:10:42
Speaker
orientation and foreplay and warming and that's maybe the story of the day or the slice of life or what are you doing or how are you or what's what's happening what are you into and then moving into that really those deeper realms and maybe that is the the knowledge that you can draw and dredge up but um yeah it's such a fascinating framework for understanding life in general i think this podcasting business it changes when you are in person and on screen too you know i've had a few
00:11:11
Speaker
who have reached out and said can I interview you and I've said sure let's set up a date and sometimes it takes two or three years for that date to come to fruition because they want to do it in person and it definitely changes the dynamic you can hear the background noises and they refer to the scene that they're looking at and it really brings you into place as the listener as well as the person that's being interviewed you you're very much in your own space and even though
00:11:38
Speaker
It sometimes feels like you've been drawn out for years and years and God knows what you'll even talk to them about now.
Creating Meaningful Interview Spaces
00:11:43
Speaker
Um, I think you get a different outcome too, but that's just not necessarily the practical reality for those of us who also like you are on the earth and stewarding animals and land. You know, it's not so easy to duck away and do a whole series of interviews. I did do that a bit with huddle. I, um, got in the car and I, and I was also doing a sort of wrap up future studying.
00:12:07
Speaker
event series and touring a bit. And I interviewed people on the road as I went. And it's very different. It's beautiful, actually. And often you catch them in sort of a quiet, pensive or pondering state of mind. And if you've got the capacity to hit the record button, you get a very different outcome to a performance.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's so true. The in-person thing makes a world of difference. And also having a pre-existing relationship, not just coming in cold. And again, with the sex metaphor, like the one night stand versus the ongoing relationship. Because I've been doing pretty much exclusively people I know, interviewing folks I know, and then I've done a couple cold people based on recommendation.
00:12:52
Speaker
And it just hasn't felt the same. And I've almost been left with this yucky feeling of, I don't want to go into this space feeling really nervous, feeling like it's this big unknown. This circumstance, this situation as an entity, as a sacred thing in itself, this conversation I'd love to make as joyful and comfortable and generative as possible. So...
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, do you feel terrified sometimes when you are stepping into that space with someone like Tyson? Yeah, I was terrified with Tyson because I knew that he had the ability to eat me alive. And he kind of did. And I think I remember saying to you, oh, that was a two and a half hour interview. I clipped it down to an hour and a half. And, you know, he was raging at the beginning of it. And I rearranged the order of the interview so that it sort of flows better. Yeah, I put him off.
00:13:50
Speaker
There's two others I pulled off for a really long time because I didn't think I had the academic capability to hold them. And, you know, they were fine. Of course they were fine. One of them just went with her very, I didn't get deep. I couldn't connect to her as a person, but I was able to, you know, get her to provide a decent interview. But really, I didn't get much of depth, didn't get much depth beyond what she normally prattles out for the answers to questions.
00:14:20
Speaker
And then the other one was beautiful actually, really beautiful. She was much warmer than I anticipated her being and much gentler and really generous with her gregariousness and her honesty. And so it's lovely when you get surprised by brilliant humans who you've had on a pedestal for a long time when they really just give you them.
The Role of Seasonal Rituals
00:14:40
Speaker
You feel like you've been gifted a really special intimate treat. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't want to get too far along with that, having that
00:14:50
Speaker
geographic and seasonal grounding, because I have a hot water bottle on my fucking lap. It is still awesome that we've had two frosts. And I'm wondering, because you are such a creature of the season, how are you feeling as we move into this chillier time? Do you know, I always hold my breath waiting for the turning from our high heat to sort of, I call it harvest season and then the turning. The turning is in fact my favourite season of the whole year, so we're just about to tip into it.
00:15:20
Speaker
Which is interesting though, oh, you're Burke, sorry, you're at the other door. No, too little. Sorry, got a little puppy and the 16-year-old has just said, can I take her for a run? She's only about seven weeks old, so no, she's too little. Can you hear the siren in the background?
00:15:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, the whaling. Yep. OK, so the turning is my very favorite season, which is intriguing because it's then followed by my least favorite season. And so you would think that the apprehension of what's to come would be enough to to sour the season it is. But I'm still sitting here with bare feet, which is pretty special and unusual for me in this house.
00:16:00
Speaker
I think the light at this time of year is such a gift it feels like honey kind of dripping through the turning leaves and it's that thick heavy golden light that comes in early in the morning and late in the evening or in the afternoon and there's just enough warmth in the day to still feel like you could maybe have your last damn dip. So we will do that today actually we've all promised each other we'll do our last damn dip for the season.
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah, the seasonal turning is something that I'm acutely aware of because I sit in my sit spot most days and I walk in the bush every day. It really, and I'm doing that usually silently, it really washes over me like a really thick blanket and I love it. I love the turning phase. And then I get full headlong into the season that is.
00:16:53
Speaker
But this season's great because you're still picking corn and putting it on the fire. We do our sheep cull at this time of year so we're eating fresh lamb chops. You know, we've sick to death of eggs so we don't have to worry about any more eggs because they're starting to go down hills and that suits us just fine.
00:17:12
Speaker
our leaves haven't quite turned yet they're just starting to get an interesting hue on them but we've had one frost you've had two that's interesting well really really baby frosts but enough to mess with our late planting of kidney beans which were it was very helpful
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, we did an early run, and we'd already harvested and dried those, but Sophie here said, oh, I think we can get another one in before the chill really hits. But they were hit. And it was interesting because we actually mulched them. We got all of these free hay bales from a local event, and it was like Christmas. Everyone, all of the Permies, descended on the oval to just scrounge and scavenge these hay bales that were left over from Chill Out Festival. It was so funny.
00:17:56
Speaker
And so we've got 26 bales of hay, we've been mulching like crazy, which is not something that really happens here at Meliodora, aesthetic mulching, because David sees hay and stuff as kind of, it's like bringing stuff onto the property that is byproducts of the industrial system. So it's a big neti.
Cultural Rituals at Black Barn Farm
00:18:11
Speaker
No, no. Anyway, we mulch the kidney beans and fascinatingly enough, Dave was telling us about how
00:18:16
Speaker
that actually prevented the warmth coming up out of the ground and protecting those beans when the frost was settling. So yeah, it's classic kind of those gardening cliches and one size fits all recommendations like add more compost or just mulch it actually need the subtlety and the seasonal nuances. Yeah, we don't, we always put our summer beds under mulch and we put our winter beds under nothing.
00:18:46
Speaker
we let the black soil, the warmth of the black soil give them just a little bit longer because the days are still quite warm but the evenings are not and often the frost will settle on the mulch and actually could it be attracted to killing the plant rather than just flow away and so yeah you learn that with your space don't you you really have to get to know and even your garden beds some garden beds sit higher than others and they've got a higher level of sand or a higher level of
00:19:14
Speaker
compost or manure or whatever it is and you get to know exactly what grows where
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. When you mentioned that you were as a family going down for your last damn dip today, I love that invitation to ask you about these rituals and this richness of culture that you have in your household, because that's what strikes me so... It's like just this whole body sense of excitement when I come to Black Barn Farm because I'm stepping into this
00:19:47
Speaker
shimmering culture that you've created and it involves all of these rituals and these seasonal benchmarks that you've instigated as a family and you do that so effortlessly and without being, I don't know, you're not all
00:20:02
Speaker
esoteric and off-putting and irksome in that hyper kind of... You know what I mean. You're so real and it's so fun and lightly held and I'd love to know how you go about that. You know, as a busy person too, how you intentionally insert those things into your day when you really could just be banging
00:20:26
Speaker
banging out stuff on the computer from dawn till dusk, but you deliberately walk in the bush and do your sit spot and gather people together to swim. You know, what's your intentionality or the prior design behind that? And then also how do you keep it so light and fun and irreverent without dropping into that kind of earnest, I don't know, cult-like mentality?
00:20:52
Speaker
Well, there's a few things in there and in the nature of keeping it very real, I would say that our ability to actually deliver on these
00:21:02
Speaker
deeply seasonal and sort of orchestrated and intentionally curated rituals has definitely changed with the age of our kids and our ability to really get their connection into it as well in a seamless dovetailed way is definitely challenged. And as they've got older, there's definitely been significantly more pushback on some of the things that we do. Other things like decorating, blowing and decorating
00:21:31
Speaker
chicken eggs at Easter seems to be timeless, doesn't matter how old they are. And because it's only one day a year and you do it over fresh orange juice and, you know, pots of tea and hot cross buns, that never seems to lose its appeal. And neither does making the easter nests that the egg will appear in the next morning. But things, and at winter with sale, that doesn't lose appeal either because, you know, again, it's just one day a year. I think some of the things like decorating the table,
00:22:01
Speaker
according to the season so that you're bringing the outside in. That was lovely when they were little and doing the
00:22:07
Speaker
what's been your your thorn for the day and what's been your rose for the day those sorts of conversations around the dinner table they were beautiful when they were little but as they've got bigger they've definitely fallen by the wayside because you know two nights a week there's kids at soccer training or you know kids at horse riding or whatever it might be but um you mentioned the word esoteric a moment ago and i think that is actually what ritual is
00:22:33
Speaker
Ritual in my mind is taking that esoteric hard to put your finger on set of values that you live your life by and putting it into practical
00:22:46
Speaker
reverent activities that everybody can participate in and it sort of makes it tangible and real. And so it's visible and you can feel it and you can experience it and your senses are on steroids around it. I definitely feel like sometimes I'm too earnest about it. I definitely feel like I don't always keep it light. But I think over the years in my experience, if I haven't kept it light, it's actually been a bit off putting for people who are being invited to participate.
00:23:15
Speaker
And so it's more appealing when it's got pretty low expectation around it. We definitely mark when the partelote arrives on the calendar and we mark when the partelote has noticeably disappeared for the year. We definitely mark when we have our first dam swim and our last dam swim. And this year the dam has been an absolute anchor for me this year.
00:23:37
Speaker
At the end of every day of work, we've just done a four month stint of working pretty well every day because between off farm work and the barn being open for our harvest season, it's meant a really long period of working. And this year I have taken all my clothes off the minute the last person leaves the property or the minute I put my computer down.
00:23:58
Speaker
screen down and I've walked totally naked through the berries stuffing my mouth with fresh berries raspberries or blackberries depending on which week it was and just dived headlong into our dam where I've bobbed and floated around and our dam is surrounded by gum trees and so the water is black so it's like diving into black ink because of all the tannins and
00:24:20
Speaker
Every single day without fail I've stayed in there for long enough to look up and be surrounded by gum trees and feel like I'm actually in the earth because I'm below the surface level and I wait until I see an aluminium tube blowing a white streak behind it go above my head. It's just to marvel at the contrast of the existence that I'm experiencing as a human and the
00:24:47
Speaker
humans that are in that aluminium tube are experiencing as they zip between capital cities. And I don't know, I think ritual has the ability to hold us in a way that it did for since the beginning of time, really, and has really only in the last 200 years been replaced with consumer activity. And, you know, that consumption gives us these
00:25:15
Speaker
fast I said a moment ago it's we're looking for those physiological quickenings you get those fast rewards but they're very short-lived and they don't ground you in place they don't ground you with your community and they don't remind you of the passing years and the coming and going of lifetimes both human lifetimes and
00:25:36
Speaker
ecological lifetimes and I think that then takes us to a whole new question about the fact that as humans in the modern Western world we've stepped away from embracing lifetimes that come and go and actually that is the natural way of things and that needs to be the natural way of things and the further we come from being able to accept that
00:26:02
Speaker
the harder it is for us to accept our own mortality. And so I think the rituals that actually mark these moments in our life actually tell us really clearly that we're not here forever. We're not supposed to be here forever. We're supposed to really know where we are in the landscape and where we are in the broader ecological framing. And we have
00:26:31
Speaker
I guess a duty of care, not only to our fellow human comrades, but to the ecosystem that holds us to acknowledge what role everybody has and the fact that it won't be forever. Nothing can be forever. But if we want us as a race and we want our ecosystem in its entirety to operate into perpetuity, then we need to acknowledge all of the small moments. And it's those really small intentional moments that I consider to be
00:26:58
Speaker
ritual and it's taking the really boring stuff I interviewed.
00:27:05
Speaker
Caspar to Kyle who wrote a book about ritual and he said he does the most boring things and he makes them intentional. He cleans his teeth in front of the mirror and he chanced himself in his mind that today is going to be a day and it might be a great day and it might be a crap day but whatever this day is it's a day and he's going to give it everything it can be and he'll be okay with whatever it will be.
00:27:33
Speaker
And I thought, wow, every one of us could do that as you put your moisturizer on or as you clean your teeth or as you drop your kids to the school bus, all of the boring things that just
00:27:41
Speaker
fall into the mundane could actually be ritualized quite simply with a little bit of forethought and intention. Yeah so beautifully said. And I know Cecilia McCauley, I don't know if you're familiar with her, yeah, she yoga, yoga fires and meditation defies everything so when she's folding towels it's a meditation
00:28:06
Speaker
she makes sure that their shaggy bits aren't hanging out because that would be very under chorus for the towel. I love that motion. That really and truly our life is kind of stitched, a stitching and a patchwork of all of those pretty mundane and boring things. If our attitude is to transcend them then we're actually going to have a pretty bad time. But there is magnificence in the mundane and I think as long as we continue to seek shiny
00:28:32
Speaker
glossy stuff, we will continue to operate in the paradigm of, of endless growth and I think that ultimately will bring the demise that we're currently hurtling towards. So I think it's time we start to find richness and value in the really simple things, and that actually
00:28:50
Speaker
means it then provides a justness because everybody can access the really simple things, not just those who've got a capitalistic means to do so, which I think is important as we navigate what the next 10 or 20 years look like.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, very well said. And I do want to get into, you know, human's role as custodians and the cache of ideas and prompts and inspiration that is your book huddle, your forthcoming book. But first I just want to quickly backtrack to the beautiful image that you painted there of walking naked through the berry rose and jumping head first into this.
00:29:23
Speaker
inky black damn which I'm very familiar with and it is a magical place but what my question is around um yeah these moments of pure joy and ritual that you have in your everyday it feels like task switching and I know so many of us have this problem I do where I'm on a screen and I'm in a tab and I'm working on this one thing and it's in the ether and then suddenly I've got to jump into
00:29:46
Speaker
I don't know a barefoot wonder or I know that I've got to go I really want to go and climb that tree or it's time to do my journaling oh but I've got to light the fire and cook the meal oh but I've got to send this invoice like there are so many seemingly dissimilar things competing for my attention and
00:30:03
Speaker
my two questions are how do you drop in and out of these states which feel like they have a different flavor altogether and then also when do you actually sit and design these days for yourself because i feel like if i just let my if i just followed my nose through the day i would actually have decision fatigue and i wouldn't know when to
00:30:24
Speaker
insert that bushwalk or when to sit down and do my tax. Like it actually takes this prior thinking and steeping yourself in what really matters and how you're gonna chunk that into your day. Like when do you do that and then how do you make those transitions without feeling like there is just too much to stuff into one human life?
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, we've had this conversation in the past and I love the examples that you just gave as to what your day looks like. Not many people would have such brilliant and diverse examples of what their day unfolds as. Oh, you're a gem. Yes, it is definitely prone to decision fatigue. I think
00:31:10
Speaker
For me, mine comes down to rhythm and sometimes that's a seasonal thing, sometimes that's just a sort of standard daily thing.
00:31:21
Speaker
So the minute my eyes wake up, I give myself half an hour or my eyes open and I'm conscious, I give myself half an hour while still lying in bed to mentally plan out what the day looks like. And often that happens in that really groggy, half awake phase that if I, it would honestly be the only part of the day where I'm not somebody else's. And I think for me, that's this,
00:31:46
Speaker
sacred pre-dawn time where it's completely quiet. Not even the birds have started to wake up and murmur. And I can plan it out in that. I don't know if you get it as well, but you know, when you're still not quite awake, everything has immense clarity. And so you go through it and think, oh, that sounds like a great day. And then I kind of have write my speech as if I'm doing a public talk or
00:32:09
Speaker
If I've got a challenging thing that I need to deal with my team on, I work it through in that really groggy, anything is possible frame of mind. And often then I then put my feet on the ground and I walk into the bush. And even if it's dark like it is at this time of year.
00:32:27
Speaker
The footfall, the rhythm of the footfall allows me to take whatever was a bit groggy but forming pretty strongly while my head was on the pillow and actually land it. And sometimes I'm better at just being in the bush and being really humbled by it.
00:32:44
Speaker
and feeling the enormous scale or it might be that it's just rained and the sensorial overload or overwhelm of the smell of the bush or the state of the mud on the ground. But mostly I use that as another little block of time to really pad out what the day will look like. But actually having those two things in as an unquestioned every single day of my existence reality is
00:33:11
Speaker
the thing that I actually cling to and use to perform the guardrails or the buffers on the blocks of time that I'm going to plan my day around. I've become exceptionally good at compartmentalizing.
00:33:25
Speaker
And I've also got this, so I've got this day rhythm. I've got a week rhythm. I've got a seasonal rhythm and I've got an annual rhythm. And all of those are pretty uncompromising because I can't control the weather cycle and I can't control the growing capability of the food that we've got in the ground or the harvest that we're pulling out of the ground. And so it sounds quite
00:33:54
Speaker
controlled and in many ways it probably is. I know that when I last season or last spring my off farm job with Sustainable Table had me away for about 70 days throughout spring and it was altogether discombobulating. I remember saying to someone after a 22 day stint away where I'd been in about six different airports and slept in about 11 different beds
00:34:20
Speaker
And I am at Melbourne airport and he looked at me like I had about four heads. I didn't know what time of day it was. I didn't know what season it was. I couldn't have told you what month of the year it was. And I didn't know where I was, which state I was in and which airport I was in. They all look sort of the same. And I got into the car that my husband was driving and said, you need to take me home and I need to take my shoes off.
00:34:44
Speaker
And I need to be on the earth. I need to eat food that has come out of the ground that I put the seed in the ground for. And I just need to be in one place. I think there are people who don't need that grounding in the way I do, but I am entirely unfunctional if I'm away from my deep patterns and my rhythms every day. And people who come on Woof with us, we have a huge amount of Woofers, which is how you and I met.
00:35:13
Speaker
They say to us all the time, the thing that I really want to learn is how you build your rhythm and how you plan your season. Lots and lots and lots of the big balls are already in the vase because we know if we haven't got our winter crops in by the end of January, we're not doing winter crops.
00:35:31
Speaker
We know if we haven't got our summer crops in by the start of December, then we're not doing summer crops. We know that we will be open and selling apples. Wow, look what that was. That was our goat milking bucket that just fell off the washing machine.
00:35:50
Speaker
We know that our annual grafting season takes us from the 1st of September until the 1st of October and if we're not in the ground by then then we will have missed the spring rains more than likely and we know that in spring that's no point bringing event and workshop attendees here because it's just too bloody cold and uncomfortable before the end of October and so lots and lots of those decisions have already been made. The bit that I definitely struggle with and that's just because
00:36:18
Speaker
Human is that sometimes I'm being the CEO of an organisation with a whole heap of amazing humans asking me to make a lot of decisions in a day and I just physically don't have the time to make those decisions in a really considered fashion and I have to dive deeply into my intuition and follow my gut in making rapid and decisive decisions for the sake of a team who need their CEO to make.
00:36:44
Speaker
those and I do often get to the end of the day and think oh I've just done 12 back-to-back meetings without even a tear or a wee break in between them and I've made maybe 500 decisions on behalf of other people today and I just need to turn my brain off and I need to move into my senses and I need to feel my body and I need to feel the earth under my feet
00:37:08
Speaker
And I find that getting naked is a really key part of that. I love having no clothes on. I love being in and with my body. And I struggle with that in winter because I'm covered in nine layers of clothing and I can't feel my skin and I can't feel myself from when I do my sensorial check-ins.
00:37:28
Speaker
you know, and I check through all of my senses and take deep breaths with each one of those check-ins. I can't quite tap it in the way that I can in summer and I haven't got so much cumbersome layering on. I don't know if I've quite answered your question, but it's definitely about the rhythm.
00:37:47
Speaker
Beautiful. Yeah, it's not about the question. The question is just a little tickle on your knee to see where you head. But I'm thinking of the, oh gosh, that feeling that you evoke in my body and on my skin of being out there un...
00:38:09
Speaker
Also brings to mind like in the city, everyone's daily rhythm is basically taking their dog out onto the nature strip to do a shit. They should all try that without clothes. The dog can wear its little jacket, but I have this vision of people just meditatively stepping out of their apartments with their fluffy little dogs on leaves, completely in the bath, coffee in the hand, just feeling the wet grass under their feet.
00:38:38
Speaker
All those bits set up. I didn't realise that it was illegal to take a bushwee in public, in public indecency. You have just, I didn't know that either.
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So Jade, you brought into that story, which was such a beautiful story. I want to hear more, more stories. You bought in the Sustainable Table CEO traveling around the country thread of your life, and then also that deep and abiding need to have your souls on the ground and to be connected to those seasonal imperatives, which I think is a really beautiful idea of
00:39:17
Speaker
having outsourcing a lot of those decisions onto Mother Nature and I think she's more than happy to help us organize our lives. So with that in mind I had written down a prompt to ask you about that incredible story that you shared and I actually think it's Huddle's conception story when you really truly landed in that friction and that discomfort that ultimately birthed the book.
00:39:46
Speaker
Do you know the story I mean about the airports and the credit cards and the phones? Would you mind sharing that? Sure.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, it did kind of land the final reason to write the next bloody book. And, you know, the very first book that I wrote was decided when I was sitting on top of the hill here in Blackbun Farm in the middle of the 2020 fires. Charlie was away and I had my skirt up over my head so that I didn't die of smoke inhalation.
00:40:17
Speaker
as i was turning the irrigation off and i thought i need i'm sick of the the mainstream narrative starting to point the finger to them whoever the faceless nameless them are to solve our problems we actually need the skills ourselves as a community from a grassroots perspective to actually consolidate who we are as a species and as a being and i i knew there was another book murmuring inside me but i didn't quite know
00:40:47
Speaker
what it needed to be about and how it would dovetail into or if it needed to to a future setting and
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah, it was actually not the big trip that I did in spring last year. It was the one just before it. And I was only away, I think, maybe for nine or 10 days. But I had been in WA at a conference that was in a place I'd never been before. So I was a bit out of my depth. I was particularly tired. It was the end of the year. And we had a huge work year and a huge growth year here at the farm. And so the two things combined had made me pretty fatigued.
00:41:23
Speaker
And we'd spent three days essentially being told by everybody that attended the conference that, you know, we were looking down the barrel of ecological collapse and that this was sort of spoken in a very accepted way and everybody in the room was sort of nodding but collegiately saying that's okay as regen farmers we've got this and it felt really safe and it felt like we would be okay.
00:41:53
Speaker
And then I drive the four hours back in my little hire car buzz box really late into the night, got into the city that I wasn't familiar with, found where I was staying.
00:42:04
Speaker
set myself up with my alarm on my mobile phone for a three o'clock departure the next morning and my alarm didn't go off for some reason that my phone charger hadn't worked properly in my phone and it didn't go off but my body knew and I sat bolt upright about 20 minutes after the alarm should have gone off
00:42:24
Speaker
And in the absolute scramble to get everything into the car I dropped in the dark in the gutter my mobile phone that had all of my credit cards and ID in it. Of course I didn't know this because it was dark and thought I'd thrown it all back in but then realised I didn't have a phone that was charged and so I just drove into the darkness in a city I'd never been in in the vague direction that I sought the airport
00:42:50
Speaker
had to be. I'd come from there only five days earlier and surely it was sort of in this direction. I drove thinking I'll just see a sign. I didn't know where I was. I was driving much too fast because I was trying to make up time. And finally did find a sign that said airport terminal two, whatever it said, but I ended up at the wrong terminal.
00:43:11
Speaker
And I got out and I was running to the building and someone said, wrong terminal. If you're heading via this particular airline, you'll need to go to the other terminal. So I said to a taxi driver, can you take me to the other terminal? And tried to find my credit cards, realized I couldn't. Fortunately had a bit of cash on me and got it. He then charged me twice as much. He said, well, it's not going to be $20, it's going to be $40. You can pay me cash. I said, thanks for nothing. You bastard. But he got me there anyway. There was actually an immense
00:43:38
Speaker
of relief that I wasn't driving into the abyss of unknown in a car that I didn't own and didn't know where the car park needed to be for me to dump the keys for the hire car. I was more heightened than I've been in a really, really long time. Finally got to the airport, couldn't get through the massive backlog of people trying to get through security because I couldn't prove who I was and I didn't have my ticket on me so no security guard would push me through faster even though I could hear my name being called.
00:44:05
Speaker
Finally got to the gate land and the woman said, sorry, you've missed your boarding call. You're going to have to wait.
00:44:12
Speaker
Then she said, oh, and I couldn't prove who I was. And so she wouldn't change my ticket. Finally, someone came who was much more human and said, let's, let's work this out. And she put me on a flight. And then the original flight actually had been delayed for some unknown reason. And I ended up being put back on that. But I got on that flight, um, and I sat in that seat and I just started bawling and
00:44:37
Speaker
I sobbed like I've never sobbed before and the girl next to me had these massive long plastic curly coloured nails and every time I looked at those nails I started sobbing again because they just in my mind represented everything that was wrong with humanity and on the back of the in-flight magazine was an advertisement for a multinational selling three dollar plastic bouncy balls and that also made me sob because I thought between these two things
00:45:07
Speaker
And I'm shoved in an airplane with 350 absolute strangers. They don't know my name. I can't prove who I am. They're not interested in my well-being. I don't belong here this far up off the earth. None of us do. This actually is everything that is wrong.
00:45:26
Speaker
with humanity and you know it was catastrophic in my mind because I was exhausted and overly emotional but as I looked out the window I looked down to see the edge of our continent go underneath us and what was left was this smattering of
00:45:45
Speaker
little tiny archipelago islands that my brother in fact had paddled in a solo sea kayak in probably 20 years earlier and I looked at them and in my mind they connected me to him which then again made me cry even more and made me long to be on the earth with the women and the people in my life who hold me and I mentally summoned them up in my mind and I took big deep breaths and I
00:46:11
Speaker
looked at those islands below me and I thought in many ways it's something bigger telling me that I need to let go of the edge of the earth and everything that I know and I need to make massive change. We all collectively need to make massive change but my small role in that would be not to tolerate this way of being anymore but to deeply connect with my place, with my people.
00:46:34
Speaker
We then circulated for a long time and it made me really sick and I vomited about four times in the bag in front of me. Not once did the girl sitting next to me ever acknowledge that I even existed and ask if I was okay. And then as we landed an hour and a half late, I then walked into the terminal and thought I think I'm going to be sick again. I need to get to the bathroom and I couldn't get there and instead I got to a
00:46:56
Speaker
terminal that was so shock a block people were shoulder to shoulder and I had to push through them to get to the nearest bin to make my last vomit attempt and a little lady came up to me and she said oh darling you look like you've been in the wars can I give you can I help you and I say can I just use your phone to ring I've lost all my credit cards including my company credit card I need to ring my bank
00:47:18
Speaker
And I rang my bank, who the bank manager is in my tiny community. And I rang and said, it's Jade Miles. And she said, oh, darling, how's WA been? And the fact that she knew who I was, she didn't need identification. And she knew I had been interstate with work.
00:47:37
Speaker
I hadn't even finished explaining my reality before she said, all of your cards are safe and canceled. Don't worry, new ones will be. I will deliver them to your house next week. Just everything about her ability to make my life work again just again unraveled me. And I thought, we just are not meant to operate across time zones, across landscapes that we haven't actually transitioned through.
00:48:04
Speaker
We are humans and we're supposed to operate at human speed as ecological
00:48:10
Speaker
Custodial beings that have minds and hearts and hands that have the capability to connect with each other and connect with our landscape, connect with our food, connect with our medicine. I need to be human. If I learn nothing from that, it's that I need to stop being a machine that is operating at a pace and in a world that doesn't acknowledge my humanness.
00:48:34
Speaker
and humans have failed and they're fragile, but together the collectivism of the many gives us the ability to be stronger than we ever could have been and perhaps have a crack at surviving the future that's hurtling at us. And so, I don't know, that story then felt altogether like a white privileged whinge. But it was my reality and it was very much a catalytic moment that made me think, no, no, I need to make change.
00:49:02
Speaker
It's a great story because I think we can all relate to that feeling of the catastrophe and the absolute calamity of being severed from these kind of
00:49:17
Speaker
fake technological trappings that say who we are and what we do and that we're legitimately here, but they actually aren't tethered at all to anything that matters. So feeling that and the obstructions and those, you know, being thwarted by invisible pseudo needs, like the need for money on a bit of plastic or a digital identity versus the deep and abiding bone
00:49:44
Speaker
shaking need to be in your place and with your people. And that contrast is a beautiful point of friction to spark a book like Huddle. And I want to ask you about Huddle before you have to scurry off and do your life things today, because I've had some back-end privileges with Huddle. I've been able to... You've had a lot. Look around in there.
00:50:09
Speaker
The privilege is entirely with the one who was in Swimming in Words and Miss Katie Payne managed to just never get a story that and bring the magic to the front. Well, it's so exciting to me because I don't want to say it's the book I want to write, but it is a little bit the book that I would love to write because it's filled with inspiration and prompts and activities and games and things that you can actually grab onto and apply to your life in a really meaningful way. So I would
00:50:36
Speaker
love to hear you speak about what huddle is, that concept of a huddle. What is this togetherness? What is this collective kind of possibility and these concentric nests that we can create in our place and with more than humans? And then also some of the things that are your favorite things from that book. And also Jade, one last thing, when the fuck we can get our hands on it.
00:51:00
Speaker
Well, I want to start by saying, if you wanted to write that book, you would have done a much better job than me. And so you just should. You should just find a way to cut. No, no, it's not bollocks. If I didn't have your magic in there that those very vanilla paragraphs would have stayed as vanilla as they were in my writing funk, you definitely brought them to life. And I would love to see you write Huddle Point Two.
00:51:22
Speaker
I'm a muddle. And still make it magic. So I guess when I write future studying, I was in this headspace that everybody needs fundamental skills. You know, we need to reconnect with the natural world we need to build ritual we need to
00:51:43
Speaker
know where our food comes from, we need to know how to preserve food, we need to think about you know our role in the world. But all of it was very much based on kind of individual skill, individual human undertaking their individual trajectory of life and I thought actually that's beautiful, it's a lovely foundation but until we then collectivise those efforts and we come back around and we learn how to rewrite our own story and we learn how to emerge out of what we
00:52:10
Speaker
have been enabled because of the abundance of fat, economic fat that we have been allowed through the industrial system. You know, it's not going to continue forever. We're sort of on the tail end of that fat now, and so we actually need to emerge from that, rewrite our story.
00:52:31
Speaker
rebuild ritual around it and find ways to genuinely be in deep cohesion not with one another just with one another but also with the ecological systems that hold us. And that means that there's no prescription for what this needs to look like because the language will be different, the culture will be different, the
00:52:50
Speaker
the landscape and the geography and our capacity even to apply knowledge around what will heal us in certain circumstances will be different. And so each of us actually needs to individually understand where we sit in this, build the skills we each need and then collectivise. And that's harder to do than you would imagine because it requires
00:53:15
Speaker
a patience and a level of compromise or willingness to compromise that we haven't had to do for a very long time, certainly not in our living memory, possibly in our grandmother's and great grandmother's living memories, but they may or may not still be in each of our lives to ask the questions of, how do you get through really difficult and challenging times when there isn't
00:53:38
Speaker
and abundance of anything and everything we could possibly ever wish for. Like how do we actually exist in a very simplified world? And ultimately it's by learning how to identify individuals magic and learning how to have conversations respectfully and learning how to face into the grief that comes with the end of things.
00:54:03
Speaker
And that is a cultural paradigm shift that we can't even begin to fathom right now. And in the process of writing the book, which for everybody's knowledge actually isn't
00:54:21
Speaker
It's not terribly earnest. I've kept it relatively light because you've still got the publisher saying, you know, we need to be able to make this book sell to a broad number of people. But in the process of doing that, I've read some absolutely breathtaking books like Earth Grief and Surviving the Future and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know. Is it to be true? No, Hearts Know is possible.
00:54:49
Speaker
I wasn't brave enough to write to the depth of these authors. I'm probably not capable, academically capable enough either. But I also don't think, you know, my very opening line at one point was, you know, we have a duty of care.
00:55:12
Speaker
towards building a tomorrow of togetherness because inevitably we are facing ecological collapse. And the publisher said, I don't know that that's going to bring many people on the ride for the rest of the pages in this book. I think you need to bury the reality of ecological collapse a little bit further back and you need to give people an understanding of how they can participate in this cultural reawakening.
00:55:37
Speaker
And I think it is a reawakening. I think we know this stuff. It sits in our ancestral DNA. If we're lucky enough to know or have known our ancestors as far back as you possibly could have, depending on how old you are and how tight your
00:55:57
Speaker
ancestors came, you know, mine came every 20 years, we had a new generation appear, so that's not everybody's reality, but I still know my grandmother, and I knew my great-grandmother, and my children know her as their great-great-grandmother, so we can still ask these questions.
00:56:13
Speaker
You know, they had skills that have passed on with us, to us, and they're in there. Our hands know what to do, our heads and our hearts know what to do, but we have to be courageous enough to let our hands and our hearts and our gut and our gut health lead us to some of the ways of being.
00:56:36
Speaker
that we've sort of forgotten about because we can go inside our gate and we can shut our door and we can use a ten dollar note to pay a bill and you know we don't actually have to interact with the complexity of humans because our current system has allowed us to just shut our gate and make it very comfortable but it also makes it pretty isolated and pretty lonely and pretty lacking in resilience.
00:57:02
Speaker
And so even the name of your podcast, reskillience. Yes, let's reskill, but not just in the tangible, hand-driven stuff, but in the heart stuff. Actually ask our hearts what it is that we need. And if we really listen, learning the art of deep listening is something we've all forgotten how to do. Some people are naturally better at it than others, but
00:57:27
Speaker
It's definitely something that we need to be actively building as a skill in all of us now. So I think to huddle
00:57:37
Speaker
is something that we have forgotten how to do but it's definitely within our deeply embedded ancestral memory and it's sort of time for the revolution towards being collective. Harder said than done so let's start learning and let's start practicing now so that when shit really hits the fan and there's not food on shelves reliably we've got the ability to fill the gaps.
00:58:05
Speaker
Yeah, nice call to action. I went into the belly of the beast a couple of weeks ago, which is Melbourne. And I, you know, rather than us huddling together like penguins, I was shoulder budging people as I walked down the street and they were blowing vapor into my face. And I was seeing it's wall to wall concrete. I don't know, you know, where to access the earth in that space. And I do just wonder, what is your vision
00:58:31
Speaker
of someone reading huddle in that urban environment and as a side note or a side thought or invitation, is it that all us back to the landers need to go back to the city and really try and work our dandest and hardest to weedify and wild those spaces? But yeah, how do you imagine reading huddle in that place and feeling like the work to be done is just overwhelming and nobody wants to huddle with you?
00:59:01
Speaker
No, I have exactly the same experience when I go to the city and I come home feeling like I've been vilified and my body just needs to return to a nourishing place. And I know that you have interviewed Claire Dunn who wrote Rewilding the Urban Soul and I would encourage everybody to just read that book. The other book that is a wonderful read along a similar story is
00:59:24
Speaker
Richard Powell is the overstory. I feel like both of those are really great places for us to work out where those little tiny wedges of wild are. And you said before, get your gear off and go and let your dog weigh on the nature strip. Well, don't get your clothes off, but maybe get your shoes off and start with bare feet on earth in the suburbs or
00:59:49
Speaker
you know, in the community gardens that are available to you in most inner city environments, start there and then find a tree. I don't know if any of you have or if you have read the India and I do book about her, what is it, Morton Bay Fig that represented her sister when she was in the depths of grief and her sister took her own life.
01:00:16
Speaker
You know, they are all very city-based reads, but they're taking us to the places that enable us to huddle through paradigm change. So even if you are sitting in a fifth-story apartment building and you rarely have the ability to put your feet on dirt or do what I do and get naked and swim in the dam, what about closing your eyes and reconnecting with your senses by taking five deep breaths and as you run your finger over each
01:00:46
Speaker
you hand over the finger of the opposing hand, you know, acknowledge what you can see, acknowledge what you can feel, acknowledge what you can taste and go through that process as a matter of ritual once or twice or three times a day and really reconnect with you as the human that you are. I had a beautiful conversation with a woman
01:01:06
Speaker
who said to me, she watched me do this process. Actually, I had my eyes closed at a conference and I was really needing to reconnect with myself because I was in a city environment and feeling pretty out of touch. And she was sitting really closely. And when I opened my eyes, she was sitting there staring at me and she said, okay, so that's weird that you just had your eyes closed for five minutes, but it's even weirder that I was sitting here staring at you. Let's just be friends and let's just start talking. So we deep dived into this conversation really quickly.
01:01:34
Speaker
She said, Jade, I feel like I might be in captivity and behaving like animals do in captivity, which actually doesn't reflect how they have evolved to act in the wild. We're behaving differently to the way our natural species should because we've got highways around us and Wi-Fi pinging around us and neon signs bouncing at us and
01:01:57
Speaker
you know the endless noise 24-7 and actually you can't behave as a human does in that urban environment and when I'm in captivity I'm not actually being true to who I am. But she went on to say but I've built my life in the city and so I have to actually find a way around that my health is suffering and I need to find ways to
01:02:19
Speaker
build time out. I've since heard from her and she has joined a local food co-op, she's joined a local garden community. She has now hosts potlucks really regularly with the people that are in her apartment building.
01:02:38
Speaker
She has changed jobs and she does get away as often as she possibly can from the city so that she can just sit on the earth and be in a calm place. But I think it's true to say that the vast majority of us aren't back to the landers, the vast majority of us are living in urban environments, but there are definitely ways to reconnect with
01:02:59
Speaker
with the natural world while you're there just listen for different bird sounds find a sit spot that might be a little way from home or at a different train station or bus station that you normally get off at but make that part of your your regular routine build it into your rhythm so that your natural rhythm actually finds actively finds time to build ritual around the natural world and reconnect with what that looks like and
01:03:26
Speaker
the pace or the place that it takes you to is at a much slower pace which gives you more patience to deal with humans in all their complexity because that's really where the challenge comes from is dealing with the people that are in amongst these stories and that even you know practice deep listening go somewhere with no intention of talking at all and just listen
01:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just watching two families of chuffs collide in the hazelnut grove. They're such hilarious birds. Do you have chuffs? We don't have them here. I love them.
01:04:02
Speaker
They're like puppies. They roll around in the grass like rabbit kicking bits of debris and they apparently they take hostages. Other birds hostage, which is just really crazy. But what I want to ask Jade is if there's a skill that you're honing or developing at the moment. Yeah. And this is part of a program that we're doing with work at the moment, actually. It's a really deep dive into regenerative existence.
01:04:31
Speaker
And this for me, the effective action or skill that I'm trying to build is something that has eluded me my entire life. But this exercise that we did even yesterday has told me why it's eluded me. And that is to learn how to genuinely be a listener.
01:04:50
Speaker
to slow, to find space for creativity and to genuinely be relaxed and calm. And the thing that has gone against this goal my entire life
01:05:06
Speaker
was probably seated as a small child and that's this core belief that I'm actually not clever and that I spent a bit of time not in classrooms as a kid because we had a fairly alternative existence and that meant that I was forever having to operate at PACE in order to catch up with everybody else's learning capabilities and so operating at PACE then enabled me to be valued
01:05:35
Speaker
and to be seen and to be considered worthwhile thanks to capitalism. That's great, I'm appreciative of that. That doing thing is what has defined me all my life and rather than being, I've really only pegged my value to my capability for output. And so
01:05:57
Speaker
relearning that skill sounds like it's not a skill at all, but a personality trait. But actually it is a real skill to have the confidence and the courage to say, I won't be minimizing myself if I don't do and do and do and do all day. It is actually okay for me to sit in my sit spot for an hour today, not just half an hour or even 10 minutes, because today my body tells me it needs it and actually listen to your body.
01:06:26
Speaker
you know, I've got my period and I just, my creativity is zapped, I feel pretty one, my body is telling me that on day one of my period I can go very gently and I should move within that cycle. I think all of those things are actually a skill, re-skilling ourselves to hear our bodies, hear our immediate community's bodies,
01:06:51
Speaker
you know as a mother you kind of have that connection to your daughter as well I really need to listen to her to help her guide I'm learning how to become an elder and the place that I'm doing that in my rawest most vulnerable place is with my daughter she doesn't want a bar of it at the moment but
01:07:09
Speaker
actually it would be of benefit to her and the broader human race if mothers could connect with their mothers and their daughters in a way that really honours everything that her woman's body is. You know, not just pushing through, but actually saying, no, no, I'm going to be brave enough in the community that I operate in to say, today I really am going to go quite slowly.
01:07:36
Speaker
That's okay, because in a week's time, I'll have a whole lot of energy and I'll go three times the pace and I'll make up for it. And on the balance of it all, it'll be the same. But today my body needs me to go slow. Learning how to do that as a skill, I think will take probably the rest of my life. But I think it's probably the most important thing I can possibly do.
01:07:54
Speaker
Absolutely yeah and thanks for sharing that um I guess that inadequacy that you feel around intelligence which is it's baffling from the outside but we all have those things that that eat us up that um is are really really hard for the outside world to understand especially when you present in such an extraordinary way
01:08:15
Speaker
But it's deceptive, isn't it? Those skills that feel kind of soft and subtle and vaporous. But actually they're deeply disruptive to the dominant paradigm and absolutely the thing that can bring it unstuck. The chicken bone and the cogs of the machine really going slower. So in isolation, it doesn't feel like much, but truly and profoundly that is the change and offering that to the next generation.
01:08:45
Speaker
is the work so yeah that's a really beautiful skill to be cultivating and and across all not just I want to be whole so not just in my home do I want to be whole and able to go slow I want to be able to bring that into my workplace and I want to be able to bring that into my
01:09:02
Speaker
I want to bring that new sense of identity to everything that I'm involved in because I think we've for too long compartmentalised who we are as individuals and when we're mothers
01:09:18
Speaker
you're not a mother when you're in the workplace or when you're a CEO, you're not a CEO when you're in the home environment because you've got a dominant husband or whatever it might be. I just I think there's compromise in all of that and complexity obviously but if we could just be whole and just find a network of people who appreciate our whole. Thank you so much Jade.
01:09:43
Speaker
Can you tell us when we can hear from you again on the airwaves and read you again on the page?
01:09:52
Speaker
You will read me on the page at about this time next year. So just in time for the turning, which will be beautiful. But actually in the process of writing the book Huddle, I did a whole series of interviews with a whole stack of people and 13 of those interviews are going live every week for all of April, all of
01:10:18
Speaker
May and all of June. So for the next three months there will actually be a future studying podcast series With the series theme being huddled Going live so I don't know whether there'll be another one after that and I'm not gonna make any commitments to it But I definitely feel excited about this one. It will be mildly compromised in sound quality, but we'll do it because I was recording for book interviews rather than Audio interviews, but we're doing our very best to clean up the files so that they can be shared
01:10:49
Speaker
So that feels pretty exciting given that the very last one I did was with you. And I just had so many people contact me saying it was so lovely to have you two in the room again together. But also I'm devastated that you're not actually doing any more. Please, please don't let it be the last few days. So it is not. There are 13 more to come.
01:11:06
Speaker
Okay. I'm really stoked to hear that. I'm looking for new audio to devour. So that is a very, very welcome opportunity to sync my teeth in. And I will certainly link to that. And it's just so lovely catching up with you and stacking functions in that we're also recording a valuable episode for folks out there, but such a pleasure. I know what a special treat. I drank my whole pot of tea while we were talking.
01:11:40
Speaker
I love your pots of tea when I was there last I was over I was oversaturated with dandelion and goat's milk tea which is my absolute favorite tea and not many other people get it that creamy combination of the goat and the dandy root is something very delicious indeed so I can't wait to come back and visit you soon
01:12:00
Speaker
Yo, I can't wait to have you here soon. Well, lots of love. Thank you for the chat. Thanks, JD Cakes.
01:12:08
Speaker
If you loved hearing from Jade Miles, I mean, how could you not? I've linked all her handiwork in the show notes. And get into the new season of Future Steading 2, which has just dropped. All right, I promised shout outs. I am just so chuffed by the engagement that Resculience is getting, the conversations it's generating, and your generosity in writing to me and sharing the love.
01:12:33
Speaker
In particular, I'm feeling grateful for Stephanie, who writes and broadcasts at Splendid To Be and the Australian Home School Stories on Substack. And Steph has been emailing me with top shelf guest suggestions and cheerleading, which I am super grateful for.
01:12:50
Speaker
Andy Wildman at The We Are Humans Project, who is a superb designer, essayist, pen pal and audio associate with a new podcast coming soon, has been a really beautiful sounding board. Joint first prize for iTunes Reviews of the Week go to Kayla Modra, who honoured resculients with official Good Egg certification
01:13:12
Speaker
and also Em Christian, who is Baradale Farm on Instagram, who fortified my fragile ego with her profoundly kind public pep talk. Recent Instagram messages from Possum Puddles and Eleanor Young really warmed my heart. And of course, everyone who tappity-taps the five-star rating on iTunes or Spotify or subscribes to Resculience, you have my undying gratitude.
01:13:40
Speaker
This week I'm interviewing three really exciting guests including Tristan Ghouli, who is the natural navigator, so there'll be some deeper exploration of hands-on don't cark it in the wilderness skills coming your way soon. I hope you're savouring this glorious turn of the season and looking forward to seeing you here at the same time next week for more reskillience.