Kyle Hayward

Mindful meditation...truly a Superpower. I do this every morning for 15-30 minutes and since I've started over two years ago my anxiety has almost disappeared and my ability to deal with it has been amazing. This is just one of it's many benefits I have personally experienced.

Any updates on any of the homes?

I hope to build a strawbale home near Taos, New Mexico, a place where they are more common, I mean it's the home of Earthships there.

Would like to hear more about your home especially Brad.

Have you tried Inaturalist...a smartphone app.

Starfires work great for long cooks, something like beans etc... without burning through your wood, they just have to be tended well.

I've heard some people have luck planting the seeds, or covering them up, with hot pepper spice.

Best of luck to you!
have you also considered making a part of your property open to Hipcampers,
(People who pay to camp on your land for a fee)?

https://www.hipcamp.com/en-US

Tess Misch wrote:I have to be out in Nature. Not just a 'local park' but IN Nature.  Surrounded by trees, sounds of birds & other critters, a river/creek/brook trickling near by.  We have a few nice parks with that to varying sizes.  But if I could actually get OUT in Nature everyday, just walk out my door and all is see are trees, mountains, and fields of flowers that is my joy.

Mother Earth is the only place I KNOW I heal.  So being outside is my home, my space of safety.  I take what I can now, the larger 'foresty' parks, until I can get my own bit of paradise to call home.  --Tess

Exactly, this is how I connect with my spirituality and serenity as well.
The forests, deserts, canyons and rivers are my holy cathedrals.

Also recently read about Awe, something I experience every time I take my dogs for a walk and am outside and how expressing and feeling it creates a positive feedback loop that helps us mentally and physically.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10018061/

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

—Emerson (1836/2009, pp. 3-4)

weed

I powerwalk my dogs at least a mile per day during the week and then 3-4 miles per day on the weekend, always on trails in the state park behind my house-summer lake swimming included. they are also let out supervised to run free on our two acres...and also have a large penned area they spend the rest of their outside time in.
I always try to remember that I am their guardian AND their world is only as big as I can make it and so always try to enrich their lives in all ways.

Crisp breaths of icy winter air, sharp and minty and invigorating.

The quiet solitude of sound muffling snow that covers everything and sticks to the tops of every branch three inches deep.

Short winter power walks with my rescue dogs when my cheeks freeze and then coming back into a warm welcoming home, makes me appreciative of what I have there.