I spent most of my childhood outdoors in Topeka, KS. Pretending to be engaged in working with the earth for sustenance. When I was 16 I moved just past the westernmost line of the Eastern oak-hickory forest at it's intersection with the prairies of Nortern Missouri and Central Kansas. There I started to feel very connected to the land and felt more and more drawn to live outdoors, which I did in Kansas and in Northern California for a few months. I met my wife in 2005 and we went traveling with the renaissance festival until we landed in Virginia in 2006. In Virginia i began to learn the art and science of arboriculture, a study I continued when we moved back to Lawrence in 2007 to prepare for the birth of our first child. I've spent the last 41/2 years managing a tree service, raising a family and reaching towards a life enveloped in Permaculture values.
My introduction to Permaculture, when I was about 14, was Ben Laws 'The Woodland Way,' shortly thereafter I read David Holmgren's 'Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability,' and then Gaias Garden. I don't think I'd ever been in a room with a person thinking or writing about such ideas, yet this knowledge just seemed so well matched to my internal reality. I still managed to not get really engaged in the Permaculture movement until graduating a PDC course this last Summer hosted by the Kansas Permaculture Institute and Kaw Permaculture Collaborative.
My wife, 4 year old son and 18 month old daughter, dog, cat and I are back in Virginia now and I'm hoping to establish a firm planting and cultivating Permaculture landscapes and harvesting and recycling (vegetables, compost, firewood, mulch, biochar, lumber, medicine, nuts please! fruits please! etc..) plant products, as well as using some of that compost to begin brewing and applying compost tea. Interacting with trees and mitigating their relationships with their human neighbors has made me realize how much we neglect even just the little pieces of Earth we directly inhabit. I'm very inspired to help people manage their natural relationships in a way that positively benefits the environment from the soil life, up to the moods of the people passing by and the glorious food ripening on the trees. I'm also very interested in working with communities and farms to increase their self-sustainability...and just plain helping out where I can.
See ya'll further down the trail.