What if the most radical thing you could do right now is go gently?
That is what this conversation left me with. Not a strategy, not a framework, not a list of actions — but this nugget of advice — an invitation. Go gently. Tend what is in front of you. Trust that your bones already know more than your head gives them credit for. Root yourself so deeply in the place you are that you can feel the seasons change in your body before the calendar tells you.
Jade Miles lives this — her philosophy and daily practice — in the soil, in the shadows, in the quality of light on a cold north east Victorian morning, in the women's circles by the dam and the school groups sitting barefoot around fires and the 100 varieties of apple that fruit across six different months because someone paid close enough attention to plant them that way.
She is the kind of person who makes you feel, within minutes, that rootedness is not a retreat from the world. It is the most generative place from which to tend it.
Jade is a local food advocate and educator, author, podcaster, and regenerative heritage fruit farmer at Black Barn Farm in north east Victoria on Palanggang Medang country. She is the CEO of Sustainable Table — supporting the regeneration of food and farming systems across Australia — and the author of Futuresteading and the newly released Huddle, a book about the quiet, necessary art of coming together in the places where we live.
We recorded this conversation late last year, not long after Jade had returned from a vision quest — raw, liminal, and freshly cracked open, as she put it. What came through was some of the most honest thinking I have heard about what it actually means to belong to a place, what local food systems can and cannot do alone, and why the tools in our back pocket will never be enough unless we also learn to collectivise them.
We talked about Black Barn Farm — 100 varieties of apple, kilometres of berries, school groups arriving weirded out and leaving calm, women's circles by the dam, potluck dinners in the woolshed. We talked about growing up in Gippsland as a permaculture kid, about being locked outside by an eccentric artist father and eating cho
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This podcast is hosted by Morag Gamble, founder of the Permaculture Education Institute, where she mentors people to design and teach permaculture in their own unique contexts.
Morag has been asking a central question for thirty years: How are we to live? These podcast conversations are part of her ongoing attempt to think that through in public, in community, with people who care.
Morag is also host of the Ethos Fellowship, Ethos Foundation, International Permaculture Festival of Wild Ideas, steward of Fritjof Capra's international Alumni Network, and member of the Ecocivilistation Coalition.
Discover Morag's permaculture design and teaching courses here.
If this episode meant something to you, share it with one person who needs it. That is how good ideas travel.
Morag records from her solar-powered studio in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara & Gubbi Gubbi country.
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/
Website: https://permacultureeducationinstitute.org/podcast/
Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/sensemakinginachangingworld
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