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The Vision | Veteran Healing Through Nature & Community with Mark "Matz" Matzeldelaflor
129 Plays3 years ago
Guardian Grange is a veteran powered humanitarian and environmental regeneration project, founded by a former US Navy SEAL to protect natural resources, strengthen communities, and uplift veterans with a renewed sense of purpose. Our focus is facilitating individual and community healing through working in nature. We are growing a decentralized network of regenerative permaculture properties to build the infrastructure for a soil based economy, and serve as healing spaces for veterans and co-creative community projects that build deep-rooted relationships and inspire stronger sense of community for generations to come.
Hello friends and fellow humans, thank you for tuning in to the very first Guardian Grange podcast. I am your host, Mark Matzeldelaflor, founder of our non-profit mission and Co-creative Engagement Officer.
In this first episode, I'm going to discuss a little bit about myself, and my life's path from early childhood to becoming a Navy SEAL, combat experience, dealing with the tragedy of suicide and veterans mental health issues, experience with earth based sacraments (or entheogens, often referred to as psychedelics or "hallucinogens" with undeserving stigma) and reigniting my fire for life which is what lead me to start this nonprofit mission to facilitate veteran healing through working with nature... and why I've dedicated my life to building a regenerative permaculture network for food sovereignty and a community focused infastructure for a soil based economy...
We'll dive into the Guardian Grange vision, and chat about what our core team has been able to accomplish so far... where we're going, and how you can assist.
Finally, I'll close with how you can help support our effort (see links below), manifesting the Guardian Grange vision, along with some final thoughts...
Our mission at Guardian Grange is to uplift veterans, protect nature's resources and strengthen communities through humanitarian and environmental services dedicated to repurposing veterans’ skillsets for regenerative agriculture, holistic land management, rehabilitating public building projects, repairing ecological damage, and transforming distressed land into healthy ecosystems. By connecting to nature in a community setting to do good works, veterans can reignite passion and rediscover purpose to lead communities through service, protecting the land and people in new and honorable ways.
While we are a young organization, there is no shortage of work to be done, and we have been diligently building programs that will require significant resources and volunteer effort. Any contribution to our cause will greatly help us achieve our goals by funding veteran rehabilitation, land restoration, and other activities that support our mission.
Please stay connected to Guardian Grange on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and at our website www.guardiangrange.org to follow along with our progress as we help transform the world into a more beautiful, healthy, and friendly place one community at a time.
Guardian Grange is a registered non-profit 501(c)(3), EIN 85-3841605. Contributions are tax deductible.
Your donation supports our efforts to improve humanity and the environment by uplifting veterans to protect natural resources and strengthen communities.
Donations
Donate directly through our Donorbox campain here: https://donorbox.org/guardian-grange-donation
You can also donate through our website https://www.guardiangrange.org/ by clicking the "Support The Vision" button.
Survey Link
https://forms.gle/FJTTsdobTtp2mcDJ8 (Open til 15 Nov 2021)
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Transcript
Introduction and Mission
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, friends, fellow humans, and beautiful souls. Thank you for tuning in to this very first Guardian Grange podcast. I'm your host, Mark Matzell-Daliflor. Matz for short. I know that's a mouthful. I'm the founder.
00:00:17
Speaker
of our non-profit mission here at Guardian Grange and the CEO, which I like to refer to as the co-creative engagement officer because what we've got going on here is a true community effort. It's a lot of work and it's going to take a lot of teamwork.
00:00:39
Speaker
If you hear, I don't know why it's gonna come make an appearance here, but we're just out in nature.
Podcast Setting and Vision
00:00:46
Speaker
If you're watching the video, you can see the background. And my little dog Wyatt's snooping around, so he might make an appearance here. We're gonna test this out and see how the natural sounds work, because I'd much prefer to be out in nature doing these podcasts than in some kind of studio. Just feels right, feels better.
00:01:12
Speaker
So in this first episode, I'm going to discuss a little bit about myself and a lot of bit about our Guardian Grange nonprofit vision for veteran healing through regenerative agriculture, environmental preservation, and community building.
00:01:30
Speaker
I'll tell you what we've been up to, what we've been able to accomplish over the past nine months as a new organization growing in this strange social soil of our collective pandemic predicament we all find ourselves in. And finally, I'll close with how you can help support our effort to manifest the Guardian Grange vision, along with whatever final thoughts I have.
00:01:58
Speaker
But before I get into it, I'd like to read a little something I wrote, which I feel will kind of set the tone for an engaging first podcast. All right, here we go.
Transformative Ideas and Decentralization
00:02:17
Speaker
Modern humanity must shift its focus from extraction to exchange and move from creating destruction into creating synergy.
00:02:28
Speaker
If we intend to continue as a species, we must reimagine the system and manifest a well-balanced relationship with our humanity and nature. It is not only within our human nature to transform. Transformation is the highest natural order of humanity.
00:02:51
Speaker
It is divinely human to work creatively with the natural world as a partner instead of exploiting it in endless competition for hoarding natural resources.
00:03:04
Speaker
Instead of taxing the earth through egoic pursuit of exponential economic growth, as responsible human beings, we should seek balance by securing socioeconomic stability that lives and breathes with the natural rhythms and cycles of our local environments.
00:03:25
Speaker
The ego driven desire to control all of earth by small groups of people will forever lead us into mismanaged states of conflict because no centralized governing body can effectively manage any local environment that is detached from nor can such government honestly, respectfully and responsibly dictate how the communities interact within their social environments, within their local environments to support their way of life.
00:03:56
Speaker
Humanity will never truly thrive with nature by conforming to distant disconnected foreign governing authorities. Instead, communities should coexist with mutual respect for one another to lead themselves through their own local awareness and work in partnership instead of competition.
00:04:18
Speaker
Centralized micromanagement of human civilization has been an abysmal failure, always leading over time to empires being built and collapsing under their own bloat and reckless overconsumption.
00:04:32
Speaker
Responsible local communities invest their hearts and souls into their relationship with the land in which they live. And by networking together in a decentralized structure, a synergy can be achieved that empowers each with sovereignty while nourishing the local environment into holistically thriving states of health.
00:04:58
Speaker
This is the path I see toward a civilization of mutual respect and cooperation. This structure mirrors the wisdom of nature from the growth of a single tree to the ecologically cooperative system of an entire forest.
Soil-Based Economies and Environmental Health
00:05:14
Speaker
In order to manifest this reality, we need to create the infrastructure for a community-focused soil-based economy, one where food is grown locally and regeneratively in permaculture communities to create diverse food forests immune to devastation from disease by the very nature of their balanced composition.
00:05:39
Speaker
This system of soil-based communities with their own regenerative microeconomies will support balanced growth and perpetuity by keeping local communities responsibly engaged in their own food production, water management, and natural ecosystem health. It's not impossible, just paradigm shifting.
00:06:03
Speaker
As we guide people away from a centralized system of extraction towards a decentralized system of mutual exchange and creation, the fruits of our labor will become less destructive and more nourishing for both our humanity and this earth.
00:06:19
Speaker
This is a path to convert the wealth of our collective human energy into environmental synergy. This is how I see humanity creating and maintaining balance while thriving. This is how we can follow the divine wisdom of nature, which synthesizes and synergizes life. This is how I picture a more peaceful image of humanity.
00:06:45
Speaker
When human beings choose to truly see each other as brothers and sisters of being human and children of creation blessed to live upon this earth, such honest connections from the heart may open the gates of heaven on earth one by one. This is the highest path I see to connect our humanity to our true divine nature. And it is my intention to manifest this vision through honest work with honest people of like mind and kindred spirit.
Personal Journey and Nature Connection
00:07:20
Speaker
So that was the writing that I wanted to share. It's Monday morning, so we got some construction sounds in the background. We'll see how that sounds here. I'm just outside of a little town called Ojai, California. Little neighborhood. So we'll just roll with it and see how it goes. Test run.
00:07:46
Speaker
All right. So, uh, that is essentially my, my long-term vision goal for guardian range. Like, or, you know, that's the direction I'm, I'm going with this. That's where my vision's at, you know? Um, but before I get into that.
00:08:08
Speaker
I feel it's important to let you know who I am, how I got here, and why I've decided to dedicate my life to this work. This is what I'm gonna do till the day that I die. I'm not gonna stop. So, for those of you who don't know me,
00:08:35
Speaker
That was a taste of my writing, which is a massive part of who I am. It's how I collect my thoughts. I'm a much better writer than I am speaker. At least that's what I feel. It allows me to collect my thoughts with the highest clarity. It's my meditation. It's my therapy. It's my heart poured out into words. I'm a creator.
00:09:01
Speaker
I imagine things constantly, my mind's always creating, and this writing is one of my highest forms of art. What's up, buddy? Found a little stick. Why, it's chomping on a stick out there.
00:09:22
Speaker
So how I arrived in this space that I am is a long windy road, but I'll condense it down to some of the more notable twists and turns. But basically as far back as I can remember, I've always been just deeply connected to nature.
00:09:50
Speaker
My farthest back memories of being a kid is just rolling through the forest. I grew up in the woods of New Hampshire, climbing trees, hanging out, watching the animals.
00:10:03
Speaker
just sitting in silence, mostly alone, but I never really felt, you know, I never really felt alone in the forest. It felt like home, like I belonged more to the forest than I did to civilization.
00:10:24
Speaker
To me, there was nothing better than cruising through forests, rock jumping across rivers and streams, feeling the breeze on top of a mountain and just hanging out in the wild in nature and the raw and the real. That's real magic to me. Witnessing the wonders of creation, watching sunlight dance on a leaf. Listen to a symphony of birds and chipmunks.
00:10:55
Speaker
Flowing with the wind through the trees. Hearing all wide over here. Chomping on a stick and coughing every now and then. It's all part of it. It's all part of this beautiful world we live in.
00:11:13
Speaker
To me, as a kid, that's all I really saw was beauty and nature. And it was peaceful to me. It is, still is, always has been. The forest was my first love. I could climb a tree, spend all day sitting on a branch, literally hours and hours and hours just observing it all.
00:11:43
Speaker
It's more impressive in nature's creation, more impressive to me than any architecture or invention of man. And that's not to downplay those things, but nothing compares. There's nothing that I've witnessed, learned of, heard of, experienced that is more powerful and magical than just existing in nature.
00:12:15
Speaker
Deep in the mountains, you know, existing as just another pair of eyes in the years in the forest. That was my church. And it is, still is. It's unbeatable, man. We should... Yeah, it's beautiful.
00:12:45
Speaker
And you know, I never really fit in with what was considered normal. And I'm okay with that. I'm actually glad because it allowed me to see things in a much different light than a lot of people. You know, it helps shape my experiences and who I became as a man, as a human being on this earth.
00:13:08
Speaker
But even back as a kid, I never fit in. School was not my thing. I got decent grades. I had some subjects that I enjoyed. Math was interesting to me, but I never liked doing the work. I just liked putting the answer down and I'd get kind of
00:13:31
Speaker
graded poorly for it because I didn't show my work. Um, I liked biology. It was kind of interesting chemistry, you know, but you know, it just wasn't my thing. I always felt it was kind of a waste of time for me personally getting in the way of, uh, where I was naturally drawn to be, which was deep in the forest and the mountains.
00:13:59
Speaker
As I moved through grade school into high school, I eventually had to figure out my grand entrance into the machine and how I was going to pay the bills. That's what adults do, you know, get out there, you go through school, go to college, you get a job, you pay your bills, you pay your taxes.
00:14:24
Speaker
You have your weekends. That's kind of the traditional Western model of life. I just wasn't really down with it. It wasn't my thing. It wasn't my jam. It didn't make sense to me. Still doesn't really make sense to me. But anyway, that's where I was. That's where I was at in my own head as a kid. And I didn't really know what I wanted to do within this system.
00:14:54
Speaker
But I did know that I didn't want to work in any kind of office job whatsoever. I had out a few gigs as a kid working at a laundromat, did some DJ stuff.
Military Experiences and Reflections
00:15:12
Speaker
Painted houses did some construction like construction nothing crazy But yeah that office life white-collar Stuff did not appeal to me whatsoever. I Loved I did love the sciences, you know, like I said chemistry biology also physics I was really into physics got into quantum physics at a young age is just I found it fascinating
00:15:39
Speaker
I actually got to take a class when I was about a sophomore, senior, I forget, but it was a new class studying photonics, which is light, the study of light.
00:15:55
Speaker
And I really like that. And if I didn't go in the military, that's where I was seriously considering pursuing. I think I was looking at going out to Arizona for college, if I was going to go that route. But I really was not into continuing the traditional education path.
00:16:20
Speaker
You know the wilderness was just calling my name. I wanted to figure out something to do to keep me outside
00:16:30
Speaker
That was my medicine, my meditation, which is my life. It felt natural to me. It's where I wanted to be. It's where I wanted to spend my days. I started paying attention to what I knew of the military, mostly from movies. I always dug the Vietnam jungles, the jungle movies.
00:16:52
Speaker
in my imagination that, you know, the thought of crawling through a jungle was super appealing to me. I love forests and the jungle is just like a really lush forest to me with a lot more stuff in it, a lot more animals moving around, a lot more life. And I just wanted to be in it deep, you know? And so,
00:17:20
Speaker
You know, I started learning about the branches. I didn't have a lot. I knew about military a little bit, but I wasn't like super into it. You know, I didn't have, I had an uncle who was a Marine. Um, both my grandfathers had served, but it wasn't like a super like in your face kind of thing. Just something that was part of who they were. Um, my uncle being the most, he was a, he was for sure. He still is. He's solid dude. Um,
00:17:52
Speaker
military guy officer but you know for those military people out there he was very much an e-dog mindset from what I knew he was just a dude a solid good man as a human being good father good uncle
00:18:10
Speaker
And so through my uncle, I kind of learned about the Marines and I thought, hey, that'd be cool. They seem like they get after it. And that's what I was gonna do. I didn't know really anything else. And then I met some army ranger dude. He came to do a speech at some group. Might've been when I was in Boy Scouts or something. I don't remember exactly, but I remember,
00:18:37
Speaker
Hearing stories from this army ranger guy and I was like, whoa, that's cool, man. That sounds really That sounds really awesome. And then so I started looking into Different things that you could do in the military and what was out there in the different branches. I learned about special forces for those of you who don't know it's the Green Berets with army and
00:19:00
Speaker
you know, started snooping around, gathering the information, learning about what they did, what their mission was, what it was all about, kind of as much as you can from the outside. And eventually I learned about
00:19:14
Speaker
Navy SEALs, you know, and at the time there was a Discovery Channel thing out there about buds. I watched that and I just kind of consumed a lot of information. He was just really called to me, you know, there's just a fact of like small teams moving through any environment imaginable, cold, wet, sandy, land, sea, air, wherever, any means to get in
00:19:44
Speaker
clandestinely, secretively, sneakily, you know that was my jam for sure. And so I knew pretty much as soon as I
00:19:55
Speaker
As soon as I first heard about it, I was like, this is it. This is where I wanna go. And you know, I don't know when I told my family, my dad, and friends, I think it was mid-high school when I had made that decision. Junior, sophomore year probably, somewhere around then. And I was just, I already made my decision. There was no,
00:20:26
Speaker
changing my mind as some people, you know, tried to get me to like, Oh, what about college about this or that? You got all these opportunities in front of you. And I'm like, yeah, this, this is the one, this is my path. And so even when I walked into the recruiter's office, it was just like, they didn't have to do any recruiting. I researched everything I needed to know at the time you could do a
00:20:48
Speaker
SEAL challenge contract where if you pass the physical requirements and the ASVAB testing scores and you did your A school at the time you had to do and you pass that then you would have a slot at Buds and so that's what I did. They tried to they did try to pull some recruiter stuff and get me to go somewhere else you know hey no one no one makes it through Buds no one does this no one no one actually gets through so you're better off going to like the Nuke program or something because
00:21:18
Speaker
you know, once they think they see kind of a little bit of dollar signs, once they see like your score on ASVAB that fits a specific job, they were trying to push the nuke thing on me and I was like, not man, no, thanks. I'm here to
00:21:35
Speaker
Be a frog man, you know, that's what I that's what I came here to do and Probably the easiest one of the easiest recruitment things they ever had And so after after I graduated high school, I just was like a week later that I went to shipped off to boot camp and now boot camp for me man, it was just It was like school for me and it accepts
00:22:03
Speaker
way worse because it just felt like, man, this is really just wasting my time to get to where I want to go and just dealing with the whole drill instructor mentality. I'm not the most obedient person. I'm not obedient at all, actually. I'm my own person. I don't like authority structures too much. I have respect for them as long as they're respectful.
00:22:28
Speaker
And so I play the game obviously, but it was not it was the longest period of my life just because time moves so slow and It was just that was probably just the The most difficult time to deal with just from the fact of how
00:22:53
Speaker
Bland and lifeless it felt for me like I wasn't into any of it really I wanted to go to this warrior group over here and this stop did not resonate with me all the military stuff that was going on the the marching the Yelling at people and this and that you know, it's just like
00:23:15
Speaker
It seemed really silly to me. I get why it is the way it is. But again, I came in to be a warrior, not a sailor, not a soldier. That's what's in my heart. And so after boot camp, I went to an A school, Gunners made A school, which
00:23:39
Speaker
For the big guns on ships and stuff and missile systems, that's where everyone has to kind of go through armors to work on small arms. But mostly it's the shipboard systems. And so I learned about electronics and pneumatics and hydraulics and circuitry. And I actually did like that. I did enjoy it.
00:23:58
Speaker
I did enjoy learning about those things. That was up my alley, my curiosity alley. Did good through that school. And at the time, you know, we'd just continue to prep for buds, running, swimming. We'd have morning workouts regularly, cold plunges, you know, hanging around seals who were the motivators, the dive motivators who they were very,
00:24:26
Speaker
Very formative, like solid, just solid people. Whenever I was around them, it felt like, yeah, these are my people. These, their mindset, how they act, how they carry themselves, the discipline they had, self-discipline, and just the kind of the warrior, wild style, man, you know? They're, well, we now, but at the time, they were,
00:24:57
Speaker
Really inspiring, you know? And so I always looked up to them. I remember, I'll drop a name out there, Eric Hatter, if he ever listens to this, like you were always a solid dude with your sarcasm. That's another thing about seals and especially like in the instructor path, like the dry humor sarcasm and just shit talking is,
00:25:28
Speaker
Genius level it's awesome. It's always a good time. And so anyway, I eventually went to buds Classed up with 245 and You know was
00:25:47
Speaker
It was surreal to me because it was just like it's everything I want to do. I'm like, holy shit, I'm so like blessed that I have been able to do this thing to like have this opportunity to go to Buds and with these with these other like highly motivated, just fucking awesome people, man, like the best of the best people that I've met.
00:26:12
Speaker
as far as like have your back like down to fucking do whatever needs to be done for each other you know that that
00:26:22
Speaker
those types of people come to Buds. You'd get the riff-raff and whatever, but they usually filter out every now and then. One or two will make it through. But for the most part, everyone that makes it through Buds is solid, at least from my perspective at the time. And everyone before, all the guys that came before, they were solid warrior class, awesome.
00:26:49
Speaker
human beings and just real fucking warriors and I was honored to just have that opportunity and you know I was about 18 at the time because I just graduated high school so I was
00:27:07
Speaker
you know young I guess but a lot of the guys in the class were around that age we had some guys up to like the oldest guy I think was about 35 right on the edge and yeah we just had a good time man you know running everywhere getting beat for all of you know what we did our little
00:27:27
Speaker
our pre-phase, I forget what we call it now, in-doc, and we'd basically just run and swim and get beat and get decond and be cold and just always working, always doing push-ups, sit-ups, running, swimming, and then we'd class up, phased up, and just get, you know,
00:27:49
Speaker
just get beat down psychologically and physically i mean you do it to yourself that all the physical stuff is voluntary so you can quit at any time so it's really you uh just doing what what they say because you want to be there and putting yourself through you know just
00:28:10
Speaker
the physical process, which is what it is. It's cold often, but it's much more of a mental game as I'm sure there's so many stories and documentaries about Buds these days. I'm not going to just rehash all that, but I did pretty good. I had trouble swimming as far as in the ocean going straight.
00:28:32
Speaker
And that's what my biggest struggle was because I thought I was good, man. I thought I was just like, whatever, I can go jump in the water and I can swim. And I never really trained specifically to swim laps or other than the Buds prep stuff, but I never got my stroke down. So I was kind of a sloppy swimmer, so I wasn't efficient. And that was a struggle for me.
00:28:59
Speaker
But I pushed through, you know, it's humbling, you know, to not just be able to coast through something like with ease. Had to really work for that one. And in dive phase of that class, I ended up failing the tread, getting rolled back.
00:29:21
Speaker
which was really silly. I ended up passing it the way I would have passed it originally, which was doing these like kind of eggbeater kicks instead of the normal flutter kick. It just, how I work. And, uh, it ended up being really good because it allowed me to go where I went. But, uh, at the time, you know, it really was, it, it, it was beat myself up while I was demoralizing. It hit hard. I had to work through a lot of, uh, just,
00:29:51
Speaker
psychological stuff around like man I fucking failed that shit is bullshit like what the hell's you know all that stuff so I dealt with that and just kept grinding working on my weaknesses class back up with 246 and awesome class a lot of solid bros many of them are doing great things you know you got uh andy arabido with half-faced blades you get
00:30:19
Speaker
Will cheese Doing his canine stuff got a book out there Chesney Man just a lot of people a lot of people out there. Everyone's doing some some cool stuff, and it's cool to see Where uh where everyone went where everyone is And
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, so after Buds, the Buds story, went to team five, which was cool because you go to SQT, SEAL qualification training, and do some intermediary step training for getting to the team to prepare you, like CQC stuff, more weapons training things, combat swimmer things.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so before you graduate you got to choose like hey, where'd you want to go and My first choice was five and I forgot I was all West Coast I didn't want to go back to the East Coast, you know, I came from New Hampshire wasn't was not would not be thrilled to have gone back to Virginia Beach, which I had never been to but it was East Coast and I didn't want to go back to the East Coast and
00:31:33
Speaker
so I put down like five seven and three I believe something like that and Everyone everyone pretty much from our class, which is not normally the case But we all pretty much got to go where we went to wanted to go. There is Guys who chose STV guys who chose East Coast West Coast, you know that everyone got to go there where they went And so for us all of us who went to five there was about I think five of us Went to five
00:32:02
Speaker
We were jumped in towards the tail end of their workup So they were basically getting ready to deploy in like three months two three months somewhere in there and so we kind of got attached as this little bastardized group under Some solid bros will Spencer who's got a Warrior foundation that I'll put in the show notes description here
00:32:26
Speaker
And he was the epitome of a team guy. He was exactly what I expected of a team guy to be. And actually, all of five at the time was that way. Everyone there was just war machines, fucking warriors, honorable, just wild west.
00:32:51
Speaker
solid beast of human beings and So we were in this little cell We're gonna be like basically supporting all the teams on deployment that we were around and just kind of filling roles and doing some some sneaky stuff with with will there but um
00:33:13
Speaker
Along the way, there was a platoon, got restructured, reorganized, kind of broken up and spread to the wind for some disciplinary action stuff and nothing crazy, just more, they were party animals, you know? And so they're just like, you guys are too,
00:33:34
Speaker
the head shed, the brass, the officers, you guys are too. You're too much of warriors. We're gonna break you up, basically. That's how I saw it. Because they were solid motherfuckers, all of them. They were solid dudes. The exact
00:33:49
Speaker
bros that you want in war. And that was kind of my first taste of seeing the disconnect of officers, an administrative side versus the actual warrior class side. There's a saying, there's team guys and there's guys in the teams.
00:34:08
Speaker
And that was one of my first direct experiences of that. And so anyway, they pushed us all to different platoons and ended up deploying to Baghdad on that one. We did a RIP, which is just split. So we did like half deployment in Baghdad and then we went to
00:34:29
Speaker
the Asia Asian countries based out of Guam and in Baghdad we were doing at the time PSD which really put a bad taste in my mouth because that is not what
00:34:45
Speaker
what Frogman signed up to do really it's not it's not what I considered it's not warrior shit to me and I know like the reason we got that is because the guys at damn neck did a real fucking kick-ass job with the Karzai detail and and it just
00:35:04
Speaker
Gave us a good rep like everything we did as operationally as seals as a community we had good reps and so people wanted us to To do the work, you know, so then that became part of our mission set and actually before before going out, you know, we had done the only parts of the workup I did were combat skills, which is like CQC close quarters combat rifle pistol work working in urban urban
00:35:32
Speaker
Urban terrain call that Mount at the time now. It's South whatever just word games that they play And PSD the personal security details stuff like executive protection basically and so that's kind of was our role in Baghdad And I really was not into that whatsoever was not it was it was another experience around like it all right strike strike two for me and
00:36:02
Speaker
We ripped into Guam. Had a good time. I had never really traveled outside of the continental United States before, because I just came from high school. And so it was cool seeing another part of the world and went to Singapore, Thailand, South Korea.
00:36:29
Speaker
some little island that I can't remember we stopped over at and just absolutely had a good time but came back from that deployment got to go to sniper school which was
00:36:45
Speaker
bucket list, you know, SEAL and Sniper. That's the only school I wanted. And I didn't even have to ask for it. They just kind of threw it at me just because my rifle skills were, you know, good. Shooting skills were good. And so like, hey, you're going to go to Sniper school. I'm like, sweet.
00:37:02
Speaker
And I loved that school, man. It was at the time, it was a six-month school and it was broken down into three phases. You know, we had a photography phase called pick and then a scout stocking phase and then the shooting phase where all of it got wrapped up into one. And the reason you have the pick photographic capturing
00:37:27
Speaker
phase is because part of being a sniper is gathering data, surveillance, reconnaissance. And so I actually really enjoyed that because you have these big lenses on these cameras, these Canon, these D60s and a big telephoto lens that we'd work with to be able to zoom in and get facial IDs and license plates and whatever we were looking for. Um, and you had to be able to move around and camouflage yourself, camouflage that big lens, which glares in the sun. And I really liked that the field craft of it.
00:37:59
Speaker
memory games, Kim's games, all that stuff. I really dug it. And then the next phase, scout, just stalking, that was like the ultimate, man. That was my jam. That's what I grew up doing as a kid, just moving around the woods, hiding, sneaking around, and I loved that, and I did great. I absolutely loved it. Some of my best times in the teams were in sniper school.
00:38:27
Speaker
in those fields and You know the whole time we were just basically
00:38:35
Speaker
sneak around try to set up on a whatever a target would be and there'd be people there'd be there'd be people moving throughout the terrain instructors who were trying to identify us trying to catch us and if they caught you you'd fail and there'd be people down at the target with binoculars looking for us and at any at any point if you got seen you'd fail
00:38:57
Speaker
And then when you'd set up to be able to identify, there'd usually be some letters or colors or something that you'd have to identify, like description of what's going on at the target. You'd have to pass that information on.
00:39:13
Speaker
And when you did that, then they'd send a walker over next to you and the instructor would like glass your area and if they saw you'd fail and then he'd put his hand on top of your head, finger like this, just fingertip onto your head and they'd just stare at you with glass where your position and if they saw you, if they could tell there's a human there through binoculars, you'd fail.
00:39:35
Speaker
and then you'd have to take a shot or sometimes you take a shot first you know to signal that you were set up just kind of depended on the evolution but uh
00:39:45
Speaker
we take a shot and it would be with a blank round. And so when you shoot, they'd be staring at you and if they saw any movement flash from the gun blast or any of that stuff, you'd fail. And so I really liked that and it was, I felt...
00:40:05
Speaker
really good about myself just passing all that you know and just it was my element man you know land navigation terrain i would always like even coming out into nature i can move without a map i understand terrain like the back of my hand i know i just know that stuff and so i always liked land navigation and added stalking and sneaking and being on your own in the wilderness dude that was that was it i was like
00:40:32
Speaker
The the best it could get for me And then our next phase we went on to just shooting where you'd actually train like snaps and movers Different yard lines unknown distance just get tested on your shooting ability time calculating distances spotting for spotting other people's rounds and Yeah, it was cool. It was a really good time out there in Indiana at the time. We were doing that school and
00:40:59
Speaker
And so came back to Platoon and for our next deployment we went out to Ramadi after the fairly well-known at this point Team 3 Bruiser Platoon with Jaco and
00:41:17
Speaker
All of them, Kevin Lace, JP Donnell, they got the echelon front thing they're doing. Kevin Lace got a book out. Also, the Chris Kyle movie, American Sniper, that they did. And so that story's out there, and so we relieved that platoon in Ramadi. And to me, that was another pinnacle of
00:41:43
Speaker
the job. It's like being a professional athlete and then going to the Super Bowl basically. We got to go to the show and I understand that war is not good, it's hell, but sometimes it happens.
00:42:06
Speaker
I'm a fucking warrior soul spirit you know and just like all the bros were you know that was our that was our jam and so being out there was just
00:42:19
Speaker
Actually felt that peace in war You know every time we'd go on a mission, you know, I'd say my peace of God asked for protection and it was perfectly okay with whatever happened because I knew I was I was making those decisions to be there and protect my bros and they had my back we had each other's backs and we were doing some some solid work we rolled up a lot of
00:42:45
Speaker
Bad people, torturers, bomb makers, just not good people. Despite whatever your feelings are maybe on that conflict, I know in my heart and soul, everything that I did, I'm at peace with. Because we're doing real work, man, taking care of some bad people.
00:43:15
Speaker
That to me, that experience in Ramadi was awesome. It was really good. I loved it. Of course, we did have a couple bros get hit. No one passed on that deployment. We had Helly and Joe got hit by an ID where all of us were out there in a triangulated position.
00:43:40
Speaker
command deck clacked off this IED improvised explosive device for those who are unfamiliar and it was big black mushroom cloud from our position it was probably like three blocks away from from our my sniper position we were at and as soon as that explosion happened we knew like some some dad shit happened and so those guys got hit pretty hard they got evacuated out of there and we just absolutely
00:44:11
Speaker
did what we do you know we unleashed fucking hell on the enemy and yeah did what we did so we did a lot of
00:44:31
Speaker
We weren't calling them sniper ops. They were called like, I forget even what we were calling them. They always had some new names to deal with the politics of it all, which is ridiculous to me in war. And that was another red flag for me. You're not a red flag. It was a strike. It was another strike in my book.
00:44:48
Speaker
how the political administrative side of the whole military operation was going down was just It's not my thing, you know, so Although I had a good time. It was kind of just wearing on me and I was like, yeah I don't know if this is really where I want to continue to invest my time and make these sacrifices, you know
00:45:12
Speaker
So when I got back, I could have done another platoon if I would have reenlisted, but I wasn't sure if I was going to stay in. So I just did an extension. And because of that, I got to go to trade at because I wouldn't have made the deployment cycle. And so they're like, hey, you can go wherever you want to go and trade at. And so I chose combat skills. The only other place I would have wanted to go was maybe sniper, but there was no slots there.
00:45:42
Speaker
I chose combat skills, which was the whole close quarters combat, pistol rifle skills, and urban warfare. So I had a really good time doing that. A lot of great bros worked with JP Donnell out there, who's working with those guys at Echelon Front.
00:46:05
Speaker
A lot of good bros. And I did another extension there. I ended up doing three years out there, had a great time training. All the West Coast teams would roll through. And I was making my decision basically based on what I saw from the community in the administrative side and how I saw some guys being treated who would get in trouble, administrative trouble for something out in town or whatever.
00:46:33
Speaker
You know, kind of some of the issues that come up with that being dealt with and just to see the administrative system just fuck them over basically. Really put a bad taste in my mouth.
00:46:54
Speaker
At some point I just said, alright, I didn't know what I was going to do and it broke my heart. It was the hardest decision I ever made in my life was to leave the teams because there was nowhere else for me that I saw, nothing else I wanted to do. I didn't want any kind of job.
00:47:12
Speaker
money, income, any of that shit. I just wanted to do honest work that was true to me as a human being and it just wasn't it. It was close, it was there, the guys were fucking awesome. Really good people that I worked with but just the head shed structure, chain of command thing. It was not going the direction that
00:47:37
Speaker
that I wanted to be a part of, and so I made my decision to leave and kind of just, you know, floated around, figuring life out again.
Post-Military Life and Education
00:47:52
Speaker
The very first thing I did was sell cars, new cars at a Honda dealership, because I'm like, I got to get a job, I got to do something, you know, I got to pay bills, right?
00:48:01
Speaker
I went and did that for a couple months and it was interesting. I enjoyed it and from the fact of like, oh, this is what kind of people do out here because I never really had that experience. So I'm like, all right, here's a job. You're working seven a.m. to seven, eight or nine p.m. Six and a half days a week. So six days, one week, seven days, the other week, you'd get a day off every other week. And you know, after two months of that, I'm like,
00:48:24
Speaker
Yeah, this ain't for me. I got other things to do with my life. If you love car sales, nothing against you. It just wasn't my jam. And so I decided, well, I got this GI Bill thing. I might as well go to school, even though
00:48:42
Speaker
I had my military break, so I was kind of ready to go back and actually learn from school, like use school for what it is there for, college. And I went in and I had these thoughts, like I'm gonna go in to do a double major in psychology and economics. And so I just started going to the community school, because I didn't know, I didn't really research anything with college. I'm like, I'm just gonna start going to college. GI Bill, all right, here I am going, and I'll figure it out as I'm in it.
00:49:09
Speaker
And so as I was going through it, I didn't like set up my courses properly. And so I would have had to do an extra year of math to continue on that path. Although I was really good at math, I would have had to like get those credits. And I just didn't want to
00:49:27
Speaker
continue on with so much extra time and then I also had a little bit of time limits from my understanding back then to get that degree done so I didn't want to like push it and then I'm like all right I gotta just change what I'm gonna do and so I've kind of just read through all the descriptions of what was there and
00:49:48
Speaker
I chose to, I'm like, hey, if I'm gonna go to school, I already know I'm good with economics and psychological understandings of things, just naturally and just how I am and where my interests lie. And so I decided I should work on a weakness, you know, when I was not a good public speaker, very shy growing up, because I grew up isolated and stuff, and they had a communication major, and that was all about public speaking,
00:50:17
Speaker
oral presentation, debate, all those kinds of topics like human communication, nonverbal, all these things. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to go put myself into this uncomfortable situation and do this because that would meet my time requirement and I felt it would enrich who I am. Part of my philosophy is if I recognize a weakness, I want to build it up into a strength.
00:50:40
Speaker
And so I'm really glad that I made that decision because I had to do all kinds of weird stuff like spoken word poetry and you know I put myself in really uncomfortable positions for me like in front of a class doing poetry stuff and all these different activities. Some creative, some speech, some debate and it really helped hone my edge of who I am as a human being.
00:51:07
Speaker
develop those skills that are so important you know to be able to communicate effectively to other human beings it's one of the most important skills a human being can have if you're talking about interacting in the community and so I really like that and
00:51:31
Speaker
During this time, I also did some contracting on the summer breaks out in Yemen, helped pay the bills. I co-founded a tech company with a partner that's still going on. He was running it.
00:51:49
Speaker
Got some cool experience in the finance world through that just as far as like understanding how currency works The entire just the finance system and just seeing what a shit show it was and really understanding the mechanisms that work behind it
00:52:07
Speaker
We did some business plan competitions, we raised capital, we were chatting with angel investors, VCs, all this stuff. And so, did that while we were going to school. And during this time, I reconnected with a bro from team five, Guzo, Rob Guzo, solid dude, solid brother. And I went through a breakup at the time when we reconnected and we started just hanging out, drinking, and he's like, hey man, you wanna just move in here? And I'm like,
00:52:36
Speaker
Yeah, fuck yeah, let's do it. And so we had a little two-bedroom place out in San Diego, right off the trolley tracks in Mission Gorge area.
00:52:51
Speaker
Mission Valley, I guess. And yeah, it was a good time, man. We were both going to SDSU. He was going for kinesiology. I was going for communication. So at that time, I had transferred into San Diego State College from the community college to continue this communications degree. And man, we had a great time, man. Just being bros, man, hanging out.
00:53:18
Speaker
partying you know doing That life living that life School and partying man, you know after military it was a cool Break it's like man. This is all right. This is what people do traditionally I guess from High school, but it was different having like all the life experience that we had and he had even more because he had actually gone to college before the military and
00:53:47
Speaker
And now, you know, we're back. He was working on the masters and we're just having a good time, but, um, eventually he became a casualty to this war, this, this, uh, internal war that affects a lot of veterans.
Loss, Healing, and Nature
00:54:07
Speaker
And he ended up taking his own life when we were.
00:54:14
Speaker
roommates and I was in, you know, I was in my room. He was out in the main room and we had, there's a couple friends over, three friends. They had all been out earlier. I was somewhere else. I came in late at night and they were already like deep into drinking and stuff. And so I just ended up passing out in my room. Woke up to the news of, you know, everyone kind of freaking out and
00:54:43
Speaker
I always thought it was a prank. I went out and saw him laying on the floor and I was looking at him like, no. I'm like, hey bro, get up. This shit ain't ha ha ha. Because he was kind of a prankster. He was a big prankster. Life of the party guy. He was always getting into some stuff. There you go, buddy. Why, just knock the camera down. Hold on a second.
00:55:15
Speaker
We're almost done, buddy. You can just hang out. Went out there and he was on the floor and I ended up figuring it out eventually, obviously, that it wasn't a prank and
00:55:46
Speaker
just heart sunk fucking indescribable like the feeling of what that's like and I immediately knew like well I have to tell his family someone's got to do it and so I had fortunately met his father who was also a frogman Bob Yuzo prior and so
00:56:11
Speaker
you know, we had hung out before as bros, as team guys, as father of my good friend. And I ended up calling him up and saying like, hey man, it was I think like
00:56:29
Speaker
five or six in the morning, early, early morning. And he didn't answer at first. And so I left a message and I forget what I said, probably just something like, hey, call me back. And he had called me back and he's like, hey, he could kind of feel that something was up because it was so early, you know, and like, I never call him, you know, and so I called him and I said, hey, um,
00:57:00
Speaker
I didn't have words. I was like, hey, it's calling about Rob.
00:57:07
Speaker
He took his life, basically, something to that effect, not much more. I didn't know what else to say. And he was just like, are you serious? Is this real? And I said, yeah. He was like, all right, thank you. I gotta make some calls. And that was that. That was the phone call that I had to make for it. And so it obviously affected, he was,
00:57:37
Speaker
awesome human being wonderful light of the world spirit like he'd lit up the room whenever he'd come in and so a lot of friends from growing up from just our network everywhere he was a very well loved man solid warrior and it just really hit hard you know he had recently found out that he you know had a had a child
00:58:08
Speaker
and he was doing really good really good being a father it was awesome to see it was really cool really inspiring and it was just a caustic cocktail man that that kind of uh
00:58:22
Speaker
of everything, the mental stuff that went on, dealing with, that a lot of veterans deal with, and then combine that with the psych, just pharmaceutical medications that they put people on. It's like, hey, here you go, buddy. Have fun. Take these drugs and everything will be just however it is.
00:58:47
Speaker
You know, that just really threw me for a loop. I kind of just didn't give a fuck about anything. Like the company that I had started, I kind of just, everything. I just, school, I didn't want to go to school, detached. And so I just like emailed people. I'm like, hey, I'm not going to be coming in. Like here's what happened. And kind of just hung out with the family and friends and did the service for them.
00:59:14
Speaker
Floated around slept on a couch for a while. I didn't want to stay in that apartment slept on a couch for his Aunt and uncle for a while and then ended up moving on to a boat of a friend stayed on it for a while and And it ended up like staying in school and continuing on But I I
00:59:45
Speaker
I had a lot of stuff to deal with. I spent a lot of time just by myself alone, with people too, but I spent a lot of time alone.
00:59:55
Speaker
being out in nature, running, working out, walk around my dog, just like, just sitting in reflection, kind of like how I did as a kid, you know, just being with myself. And I hung out with people too and stuff and tried to like kind of drink away the pain and stuff and distract at times, but I sat with it too a lot, but it gets to be a lot, you know? And so eventually,
01:00:24
Speaker
I from living on the boat I realized like hey I'm gonna there's these boats here and I ended up buying some boats and ended up living on boats for a while still kind of detached unplugged went through school and had a couple jobs and contracts that I did started like fixing the boats up to be flipped you know to sell and
01:00:51
Speaker
I'd buy and sell cars and stuff on Craigslist and things like that to pay the bills, you know, get some jobs here and there. And towards the end of school, the last thing we did was this Euro trip, which was
01:01:08
Speaker
Really cool. It was cool. Went with a group of communication students to Europe. We went to London, Paris, Munich, Switzerland, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, and Prague. And that was a cool experience, man. Just hanging out, living life, bouncing around, seeing these cool spots. And it was a good reset. And I really fell in love with
01:01:37
Speaker
Lauterbrunn in Switzerland, man, that place is so beautiful. Just steep mountains, lush, well-balanced residences, you know, it's not like this sprawling metropolis or out of balance.
01:01:56
Speaker
Manufactured homes or something like that. It was just really had a lot of character had a lot of life the Really well balanced and that was like a storybook like man. This is like this is how human entity should be You know, this is like this is a cool way of living like so balanced I really dug it and
01:02:18
Speaker
Came back from that, did the whole job thing, sold some gear, but none of it was my thing, man. None of it was my jam. Went back into shooting instruction for about three or four years.
01:02:30
Speaker
Do it. I have the skills and proficiency, but it still was not like a passion, you know, it was not a passion for me. Um, as new as mortal life. And so during this time, I kind of, uh, connected to nature through a mushroom experience.
01:02:50
Speaker
And I never, I'd never done mushrooms before and it was a magic mushrooms, the psilocybin ones that everyone is becoming a lot more topic of conversation now. And so I had an experience with my friend. I'm gonna change position here a little bit. My joints are hurting. All right. So I,
01:03:18
Speaker
had this mushroom experience and deeply connected to it, deeply connected to the mushrooms and nature, earth. It was this familiar feeling like I had been there before.
01:03:35
Speaker
And I never had, you know what I mean? At least as far as I know in this life. I never took that natural substance. And for those of you out there who are unfamiliar, it's not a drug. These definitions that people place onto things that society places biases on and stigmas onto.
01:04:06
Speaker
The mushroom is a natural organism that comes from this earth, put here by Crater, and it's for us to use and to access. And I say this with great passion because it's helped a lot of my friends who could have gone down a similar path as Rob. It's helped them come out of it. Not saying that it's a cure-all, but it has, I've witnessed, seen, experienced
01:04:36
Speaker
hundreds of times over with veterans because they ended up doing, starting to do some work, which I'll get to in a bit, but like helping people out. But, uh, it just really connected. And so I started learning everything I could about mushrooms. I was just like, man, these things are like, what are, what is this? Like, where did this come from? Um, how is this here? Like, how is this even possible? These feelings is this state of awareness that you can get into. Um,
01:05:07
Speaker
And it was just completely fascinated me and put me back into this, reconnected me to the love affair with nature that I had. And so through the mushrooms, I learned about all kinds of things, like the soil, which I intuitively kind of knew as a kid, like digging worms and chasing lizards and like digging in the soil, like you knew what healthy soil was, but then just learning about it.
01:05:35
Speaker
from this other perspective, it reopened my connection to being a human being in the way we're supposed to be, or the way I feel I was supposed to be. It just felt right, and so I just pursued that, not knowing anything, just learned everything I could about it.
01:06:02
Speaker
Through that, I ended up working with bees because I went to learn from Paul Stamets up in Washington at his place, did a little course at his lab, and learned about his processes and mushrooms. Through him, learned about the relationship that mushrooms had with bees, mycelium with bees, to boost their immune system.
01:06:24
Speaker
I just started seeing all these connections, feeling the connections, being connected, and it just set in motion a new path for me that came basically in visions later on when I got deeper into this
01:06:52
Speaker
medicine work. They call it plant medicine, but I call it earth-based sacraments because there's more than just plants in this sphere of natural spirit medicine is what I'll call them. I'm hesitant to use the word medicine because it's been so co-opted by science to mean a specific thing that it's much bigger than that. I like to say earth-based sacraments
01:07:20
Speaker
Um, some people say psychedelics, but that's again, it's another, it's got a lot of weight to it. It's got a lot of stigma to it and it's not what people think of it is not what it is. And entheogen is a better term we could say, which is spirit medicine at the end of the day. Um, and so I, I got invited to, uh, an ayahuasca ceremony, which is a T it's a jungle brew from the Amazon. And, uh,
01:07:49
Speaker
had an awesome experience with that. First time I kind of just dropped right in, I was able to let go and really connect with that energy and drop deep into my own consciousness, connect to God in ways that are indescribable.
01:08:11
Speaker
Connect to this earth, connect to my humanness, connect to just extreme gratitude for being here, reignited passion. I started like working out again. I started eating healthy, all this stuff and just having like all this motivation, all good things.
01:08:27
Speaker
You know, through that work, um, I went in with a bunch of, uh, seals, like fellow seals and veterans, special forces. He has, uh, as mostly seals, but had some, some other people like from our backgrounds who had, you know, stuff to deal with. And just seeing the transformations that came out of that was fucking.
01:08:50
Speaker
amazing beyond amazing there's not a word for it because the modern medical system and its lack of understanding of the mind consciousness what it is it's it's it's disconnection from God creator and it's
01:09:07
Speaker
You know, basically denial of the spirit world, which is very real. I mean, whatever you believe is what it is. But I always say I don't have, I don't really hold beliefs. I just hold awarenesses of my experiences and I know what I know. And so I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes, but
01:09:27
Speaker
It is what it is and the positive impact that comes out of this work when done properly in a proper setting with good community and not medical. I mean, medical people, you know, you can do what you do, like the whole maps thing, like you're doing your scientific research, but there's much more beyond what the science can ever describe, way more.
01:09:53
Speaker
I ended up helping facilitate holding space for a lot of people as they did their work with these medicines and went on their healing journeys, which were healing themselves by using these tools.
01:10:10
Speaker
And I worked with Sonoran Desert Toad, Combo, which is a frog medicine, all kinds of different medicines, which maybe I'll talk about at some point, but don't need to get in too deep. Just the fact is that these earth-based sacraments are sacred and they should be respected. And I have a deep connection and passion to them and for the gratitude for what they've done for
01:10:37
Speaker
you know, my community, my people, myself, and other communities that I've linked up with, you know. The work has just been amazing. And so in my work of I do more journeys and, you know, there's a lot of healing. That's one thing that can happen with, I'm just going to check that we're still recording here.
01:11:09
Speaker
Yep. So there's a lot of healing that can go on, but that's not all that there is. You know, a lot of these communities, they kind of just go over healing over and over and over again. And for me, I mean, that's beautiful if that's the work you need to do. But for me, I was going into very creative spaces in my consciousness, spiritual connection,
01:11:32
Speaker
communicating with higher power in my own way. I'm not ever going to be able to describe that accurately for anyone, but it just is what it is. I just started getting visions of what ended up becoming
01:11:50
Speaker
the working model for Guardian Grange, this decentralized infrastructure for a soil-based economy. And it really drew from all the areas, all the experience I've had in my life, from understanding the financial system, understanding economics, psychology, knowing the issues that exist in the veteran community and just the environmental issues with pollution and
01:12:14
Speaker
Just industrialized chemicals toxin all this stuff that's being pumped into our environment and our system. That's making us fucking sick mentally physically emotionally and spiritually sick and I was just like man. This shit is just it's not cool. We need a something has to be done and so I
01:12:32
Speaker
This vision was so clear to me that I'm always like, all right, I'm going to make enough money to basically like self fund this somehow as a as a as a nonprofit. Like it just makes the most sense to do that. But I know I need money to get it started. But along the way, you know, coronavirus happened and
Challenges and Solutions in the Modern Era
01:12:52
Speaker
When that COVID happened, I was tracking on the financial instability of global economies for a long time, before the 2008 crash, just from the work that I did previously. I was aware of the fragility of the system. When that happened, I just really recognized we're not set up to
01:13:12
Speaker
to bounce back from where this can lead. Our food systems are extremely weak. They're centralized. They're industrialized. Communities don't have food sovereignty. And so why I'm doing this is because, number one,
01:13:28
Speaker
the veteran mental health crisis, that the Veterans Administration and modern medical system has absolutely no fucking solution for. None. They're starting to tap into these plant medicines or even things like MDMA. They're starting to play around with that, which have good results. But at the same time,
01:13:52
Speaker
they don't really know what they're doing. They get studies and data and they can describe things mechanistically, but from a spiritual consciousness side, the system is not designed to emotionally connect and bond and spiritually connect and communally connect, which is all
01:14:13
Speaker
extremely important parts of these healing processes. It's not like you just give someone some pill or some substance and then all of a sudden everything's great. It takes a lot of internal work, drive, determination, discipline, doing work outside of that in your everyday life, getting re-engaged with the community. And so that's number one.
01:14:40
Speaker
Number two is just the weak food systems and environmental damage that's going on and My connection to nature that I knew was healing for me personally and I know other people everyone loves like to go look at the Grand Canyon and these the redwoods are just hiking hiking nature and so I I That's number two and number three is this
01:15:09
Speaker
What I would call rapidly dividing social structure and dissolving of the fabric of society fueled by all kinds of things from Bullshit that I'm not going to get into things that the media does putting out fear and rage and just complete fucking bullshit. Sorry if you don't like swearing, but it is man and I just got sick of it and I saw an opportunity to create a synergy and
01:15:40
Speaker
to bring all those things together, to bring veterans back together in community, engaging with communities, getting these food systems up, working on the environmental issues.
01:15:54
Speaker
and just really starting to do work. The coronavirus motivated me. I don't have time to just wait to try to get all the money I need to self fund this thing. I just got to put it in, apply for the 501c3, get this thing going, start talking to people, and start cranking away. And so that's where we're at. That's where it started at. And to summarize that vision, it was basically
01:16:24
Speaker
a radical transformation for communities to become happy, family-oriented, naturally balanced, thriving expressions of human awesomeness, you know? And so now I'm just gonna get into, I mean, I kind of covered the vision really, but I'm gonna,
01:16:54
Speaker
talk a little bit about more of the nuance, like operational vision that I see going on. You know, that's, that's like the big picture, broad, broad strokes, but getting into it, like this regenerative model of permaculture design, which is creating food systems and water management systems in a way that is
01:17:21
Speaker
closed loop, not dependent on inputs, fertilizers, and outside sources. The goal is to become for each property to be completely self-sustaining, so all life could be sustained on it, everything you need from your food, your water, well-balanced nutrition. And at the same time, we're not monocropping the land, we're not tilling the soil, we're not destroying this massive
01:17:47
Speaker
environment this ocean the soil is like an ocean of life proper healthy soil and so tilling
01:17:55
Speaker
fucks that up. And getting it back to healthily, it could be a process. It can take like seven, eight, 10 years potentially, depending on how bad the soils are in an area, because we've got to get the life back into it. And so part of this regenerative agriculture model is reintroducing animals onto land, because animals have, it's a food web.
01:18:20
Speaker
Everything cyclical like the shit from the animals feeds the soil the saliva like from the the Bison they used to roam all over 30 60 million how Tens of millions of buffalo and these massive herds that used to exist in North America in those great numbers and
01:18:42
Speaker
that have now been kind of replaced by cattle, but not really, not in the proper way. But those animals, those creations of nature have a natural sacred relationship with this land. They know what to do. Everything from their saliva to their feces that works with the environment to keep the soil healthy.
01:19:03
Speaker
their ability to roam free on land they just do they maintain the land better than a human being ever could and where i see our role in things like that is to is to get back as close to that nature as possible on all these properties to allow nature to do his thing and to input in a way that creates a synergy so we're either gonna
01:19:31
Speaker
Let nature do its thing and if we can't improve it we're just gonna take care of it and if we can add some some things you know work with Food to make the soil a little bit healthier reshape some certain areas to help water management Potentially in a in a balanced way like these are the kinds of things that regenerative agriculture and permaculture seeks to do and so
01:19:54
Speaker
Through that work, we have opportunity to train up this massive disenfranchised base of veteran community who has high drive, motivation, determination, discipline to get work done. My vision here is to merge those two worlds and repurpose
01:20:17
Speaker
what's going on you know repurpose these things that are just out of sync the being the human veteran community and in nature and using both to heal each other like we'll heal ourselves through working with nature and in communities and at the same time build community around that because we'll be working in communities and it
01:20:40
Speaker
It just makes sense to get as much engagement and involvement as possible to really get to the pinnacle of where humanity can be.
01:20:55
Speaker
And we also, the veteran community, we have other skills, especially from my background as being a SEAL. We used to go out and do surveillance and reconnaissance deep in the wilderness, high risk evolutions. And so I see us partnering with maybe educational institutions in the future to help out with gathering data or maybe doing some reconstruction projects.
01:21:22
Speaker
There's a lot of adaptability we have that serves this role and fulfills this mission of healing human beings through our efforts to heal nature. And these regenerative properties that I'm kind of, I call it a decentralized network of regenerative
01:21:48
Speaker
agriculture properties to build the infrastructure for a soil-based economy. That's what we're doing at this grassroots level, and we're just cranking away to shift this infrastructure that
01:22:06
Speaker
isn't really working the modern industrialized infrastructure. It isn't doing that great. It has had benefits, but it has had a lot of costs, too. It's not like we have to just abandon everything we know, but we have to re-imagine
01:22:29
Speaker
in an honest way, not reset like this great reset bullshit where they're trying to re-centralize control and the same people who fucked shit up are trying to pretend they have the solutions for us all. No, I'm talking about a human reset within our own consciousness, within our own communities to say like, hey, we're locally
01:22:50
Speaker
individually and communally responsible for our local environments. And we don't have to solve all the world's problems from our little chair or think about that. We just need to solve the problems directly around us in our local environment. And that's where I think a lot of
01:23:11
Speaker
A lot of energy is just dispersed and spent in a way that is non-productive because everyone's focusing on the big global problem, but not so much the local problem. How many people will go to a rally for an environment but never plant a fucking tree or a bush or engage with wildlife or help manage water system or protect a natural environment or any of that stuff?
01:23:36
Speaker
There's a big disconnect there and I see I'm not into it. That's not me I'm here to do work and so that's who I surround myself with I surround myself with people who are also here to do work and I've been blessed to Be put in contact and in link up with some solid people some solid communities and
01:24:00
Speaker
And I guess that's where I'm going to go into like where we're at, the accomplishments we've made so far in these past kind of nine months of pandemic stuff. So along my plant medicine journey, I was blessed to meet...
01:24:25
Speaker
A lot of good people, a lot of good people. But I met a bro who's working closely, he works with our organization, Joe, up in the Bay Area.
01:24:39
Speaker
really instrumental to helping us grow this. And through him, met another solid bro, Carlos, of a decriminalized nature.
Community Projects and Support
01:24:48
Speaker
And through that connection, linked up with Shane Norte of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, the Paoka Chim, the original people of the land.
01:24:59
Speaker
in San Diego area on the La Jolla reservation and through that relationship we've we've done a lot of a lot of like deep healing work with people from our communities the veteran communities and the the native indigenous communities and
01:25:23
Speaker
It's become a really cool relationship. It's an honor to do that work in that capacity with real people in a way that's completely free of charge. There's no cost to anyone else and it's helped a lot of people.
01:25:44
Speaker
And we'll get into that in another episode. I'm not going to go too deep into that work here, but part of working with that church is the healing journey. Our missions are so aligned. The natives, that's just who they are as people, who they've always been on this land base for hundreds of thousands of years before this entire
01:26:10
Speaker
Machinery of Western society existed and so It's just a natural connection that we made and are we share a lot of the a lot and aligned vision not just a very aligned vision of Getting community back on track reconnecting people with creator you connecting people with the earth And just doing good work, you know honorable work and so that's one's really solid connection that that we have made that I'm
01:26:40
Speaker
proud to be a part of and just really gets me motivated. We're also working with some solid people, partnered up
01:26:53
Speaker
with Seneca, Bottoms Up community of Oakland, Okela. He's got a community garden in the city, doing fucking awesome work, growing crops. He's got goats, he's got chickens, just doing the work, man. Just getting done what needs to get done, the kind of bros we need, the kind of people we need to do this work.
01:27:18
Speaker
We also partnered up with the Neiman Shell Ranch out in Bolinas to get some pollinator programs going, get some restore the native plant life. Because the pollinators like monarch butterflies and other pollinators have been decimated through various reasons, pesticides, you know, it's a complex topic, but pesticides, radiation, all kinds of environmental
01:27:46
Speaker
damage that has just wreak havoc on them and in turn wreaks havoc on the native plant life and the health of the soil and all that stuff. So we're doing the work to help reinvigorate the natural plants on that land. So we got some projects around that. We're going to put in some
01:28:07
Speaker
some fruit some berry patches and also plant some trees and you know the native plants and also probably put some sheep on there at some point to help with the soil and uh working on a couple other projects that are you know on the table out in uh the uh
01:28:35
Speaker
Bay Area, down in San Diego. Oh, hi, where I'm currently at right now, behind me, working on some stuff here. It's still early stage, and then we have a couple brothers get some properties out in Texas that we're going to be planting some flags on and doing some work out there.
01:28:58
Speaker
And this has been all grassroots. We did get a couple of donations come in and some sponsorship, which I'll chat about in a bit. But for the most part, it's just been grinding work and building relationships. And now I am. We are at a point where the fundraising is we've got to kick in a
01:29:21
Speaker
and high gear as much as possible. It's not like, I shouldn't say we have to because we're doing the work regardless, but it would greatly help the mission to pull some funds in here that we could accelerate some of this work and help more people. So that's bringing me into our next portion, which is how you can help.
01:29:51
Speaker
Number one, you can share this message. I intended this to kind of just lay it out for anyone who's interested in what this is all about, this Guardian Grange vision, that they could listen to this and get it, and really see if it resonates with them, and if it does,
01:30:21
Speaker
awesome you know and you know if you can help in some way whether that's a donation whether that's volunteering whether that's providing some kind of skill set service tools whatever anything we need the help so we're open get in touch with us through our through our website at
01:30:48
Speaker
www.guardiangrange.org. That's guardian and Grange, which is like range, but with a G in front of it. So it's guardian, G-R-A-N-G-E.org. And that's where you can find
01:31:04
Speaker
So the links to our social media and we're on Instagram and Facebook and I got a Twitter I haven't been using but most mostly active on Instagram for now And we'll get more active on there, too So follow us there guarding range Send us a message. You can email me at market guarding range org also info at guarding range org gets to us if you have any kind of ideas or you just want to connect and
01:31:30
Speaker
We're big on collaboration with other nonprofits. We chatted with Xerces Foundation on the pollinator stuff. Again, we're working with Church of the People for Creative Mother Earth. That is Shane Norte's church that I mentioned before, the work we're
Gratitude and Call to Action
01:31:45
Speaker
doing with the veterans down there on the reservation, Morongo Band of Mission Indians, the Hoya Res.
01:31:52
Speaker
So yeah, we're down to collaborate. The bottoms up community garden up in Oakland, like we're already doing it. You know, Neiman Shell Ranch, we're just collaborating. We're doing what we need to do to make this happen. So if you got a collaboration idea, feel free to hit us up. If you're a veteran and you have a passion or you think this might be something you're into, send us a message.
01:32:19
Speaker
But yeah, for sure share this with as many people as you can who would have interest. If you have the means to donate and you feel called to, you can find that at the website as well. And also what will help us out is if you have ideas for podcast guests or topics that you want to hear, I'd love to hear them.
01:32:46
Speaker
you if you're listening to this on whatever podcast platform if you could which will help out the podcast if you could go leave a review on it that would be really helpful because those ratings kind of help rank the podcast or whatever and we're just starting out so if we get some some good ratings on there it would really really help us out and I'm also going to leave a
01:33:12
Speaker
survey up for the next 90 days so what is that so like November 15th let's say I'll get the survey up and if you could just go that service is gonna ask some questions like what you thought of this podcast and things that you could provide input on to kind of help us improve and if you'd fill that out it'd be awesome it'd really help us out so I'm just gonna leave that up for 90 days because I don't know how far this
01:33:39
Speaker
how many people this podcast is gonna reach since we're just starting out. But if you'd be so kind, it'll be a quick little survey. And I'll put the link in the show notes and I'll also have it on our website, social media. And if you can't find it, just send me a message and I'll get that to you. Because, you know, this is a community effort and your feedback is,
01:34:07
Speaker
It's everything. I mean, without without feedback from people, there's no community. And so we have our core group, our core team that's built. But we're growing this in an honest way and love to have you participate in whatever way you can, even if that's just like throwing comments back and forth on social media or whatever, you know, throwing ideas back and forth over email or or calling, you know, chatting on the phone, having a meeting, putting in touch with potential donors, all kinds of things, whatever you can think of.
01:34:41
Speaker
You know we're here to make some big changes and it's gonna take a lot of work and we're gonna need a lot of help. In my mind, I mean this is grassroots for sure but in my mind it's beyond that because grassroots is usually associated to some political stuff and we're not political at all. So I'm gonna call this forest roots because we're
01:35:03
Speaker
a community of communities working together to build this decentralized infrastructure for a soil-based economy. A divinely optimized way of being human with nature.
01:35:21
Speaker
And we welcome diverse communities, not just welcome to our growing forest, but encouraged to thrive with us as we grow. We're collaborative, cooperative. We're just here to do work. And there's not enough of us to get everything done individually, but together we can do a lot of good work and we can shape the future up.
01:35:46
Speaker
in a cool way, a really awesome way. That's pretty much going to wrap it up, but before I close I want to give a little shout out. I want to take a break.
01:36:02
Speaker
To thank Dr. Bronners, who has so graciously sponsored this episode and the first 10 episodes, actually. I'm sure you've seen their products floating out there in the consumer-verse. You know, they get the labels with a lot of writing on them. You should read them sometime. They're pretty interesting, good stuff on there. But what you may not be aware of is that their products are all-natural, ethically sourced.
01:36:30
Speaker
and behind the scenes they're doing great things like donating a huge chunk of their profits something like 45% to support causes they care about for instance us at Guardian Grange and
01:36:45
Speaker
To be perfectly honest, what I like most about Dr. Bronner's is how they defy the norm even in their corporate structure. They don't have to cap the top executive to five times what the lowest employee is being paid, but they do. I think that's a well-balanced
01:37:07
Speaker
way to operate. You know, they didn't have to make that commitment, but it shows just a healthy operating vision for both their community and the compassion they have for their employees who make it run. It just keeps the management team grounded in reality, and I imagine it creates a real sense of community beyond a typical corporate structure out there that's kind of just like, you know, taking as much profit as they can up the chain.
01:37:36
Speaker
So I'm not saying they're the best thing since sliced bread or whatever, but I do respect how they're working, how they function. And I am saying that they're part of a positive consciousness shift where we see successful individuals and corporations
01:37:52
Speaker
investing profit, not simply to drive more profit, but to create social return that benefits humanity and nature by supporting communities, families, and people across this planet and beyond the limits of time so that future generations will inherit a beautiful, abundant, healthy planet to call home.
01:38:14
Speaker
In my opinion, that's the pinnacle of human nature. And that's what we're about here at Guardian Grange to inspire positive action. So this is more than just a sponsorship to me. It's an approving nod from pioneers in their industry that they see a future in us worth supporting. And to me, that is truly an honor.
01:38:35
Speaker
So yeah, I think they're pretty cool and their products are nice and ethically produced with care. So pick some up the next time you're in the market for some soap with soul and be sure to read the label when you do. Also a special thanks to David, Les, Alyssa and Emily for being helpful.
01:38:56
Speaker
over this this time supportive during our birthing as an organization basically thank you for believing in the guardian grains grange vision it made a big difference it matters a lot um so that's that that's a sponsor for this episode check them out
01:39:18
Speaker
All right, this is going to bring us to a wrap up going on about an hour and 40 now. Um, closing on that two hour gap, but we're going to close out here in the next few minutes. Thank you for your time listening to this podcast and sticking through with me to the very end. Thank you for showing up and I hope to earn your attention again.
01:39:42
Speaker
Please share this with everyone you can think of who might be interested in listening or supporting our mission. It will really help us out. We got a lot of work to do and can definitely put any donations to work. Again, we're a fully registered 501c3 in good standing, so donations are tax deductible. You can donate by going to www.guardiangrange.org.
01:40:08
Speaker
and click in the support the mission button and you can also call us at 1-844-4GRANGE that's 1-844-4GRANGE or if you're into digits that's 1-844-447-2643 and it just basically rings me you know we're a small organization but
01:40:31
Speaker
I figured I'd have a good easy to remember phone number if people like to chat on the phone and get ahold of me that way. Also, you can email me at mark at guardiangrange.org. You can follow us on social media. Again, I'm going to leave that survey link in the show notes description on our social media to help get your feedback for this podcast. It'll be live until November 15th, 2021, and it'll really help us create better content in the future.
01:41:00
Speaker
If you have requests for topics ideas for guests or any other Feedback, please take this quick survey link in the show notes also If you'd like to sponsor an episode, please email sponsorship requests to mark at Guardian Grange org Until next time friends fellow humans and beautiful souls be well and do something good today Humanities counting on you. Peace
01:41:28
Speaker
Oh, and one more thing, actually, I'd like to send gratitude and support to the indigenous of this North American land base who have been fighting to protect the earth, water and air for a long time.
01:41:44
Speaker
forever, for as long as they've existed. They've been up against some hard infiltration of their sacred sites from Oak Flat to Line 3 and old growth forests. We'll talk more about that in future podcasts. I'd also like to send my condolences for the thousands of residential school deaths of indigenous children at the hands of the missionaries and Canadian US government institutions.
01:42:07
Speaker
From the 1870s through 1996 that have been recently discovered uncovered I guess they were known but they've been uncovered in and shown to a To be true, you know, not that it not that that needed to happen. We kind of already know the history here or we should
01:42:27
Speaker
And they'll continue to be uncovered. There's nothing more sacred on this earth than the lives of children. Nothing. Nothing at all. And not in my opinion. Not what I know. And these crimes against humanity are a scar on the consciousness of this land base and humanity. And I pray for the healing for all who are affected.
01:42:55
Speaker
I'm honored to be on native land and to be working with the Morongo tribe with Shane and the bros, Ish and Lou Dog and all the bros, man. We're doing good work, so peace out.