You know what, we freaking LOVE the fact that crypto ain't doing so well right now! What it's really shown us is that WE DON'T CARE - the awesome people are staying and engaging and having a grand old time because we're learning from each other, sharing our lives and being in this crazy life experience TOGETHER. And if that ain't medicine for the soul, we don't know what is.
@thetreeoflife came out of the woodwork (see what I did there?) to interview @nateonsteemit. Nate is super active on Steemit, posting his daily chicken posts and getting into #ghsc, the Global Homesteading Collective - and more recently @naturalmedicine. He was one of the first customers supporting @sagescrub's Homesteading Co-Op buying one of @mountainjewel's amazing tinctures, he's always supporting new members with delegations, giving away steem and creating and entering contests... - man - we're so glad he is here. Enjoy the interview - we did!
TOL: Hi, @nateonsteemit! Nice to finally sit down and chat. You've been on steemit for a while I think, but relatively new to the Natural Medicine Group. I love your permaculture posts, and we are digging your natural enthusiasm :-) Something about permaculture and natural medicine go really well together, I think. What inspires you with natural medicine and permaculture?
NOS: Ooh! Lots of stuff. First, my good friend turned me on to permaculture a little over a year ago when I was talking to him about my goals for a property to buy. He recommended it from an anarchistic food production model, and my original goal was to have my property help pay itself off by using it to decrease our grocery budget.
TOL: That's a great reason to get started! Nothing like self-sufficiency to help the budget!
NOS: Yeah, exactly! As I learned more and got deeper down the rabbit hole, I became more interested in the agorist movement of gray market, unregulated free trade. Permaculture fits that bill perfectly. Not that it's a political movement, it is more a way to do just about anything you need. Like Geoff Lawton says: "all the world's problems can be solved in a garden."
TOL: It's so interesting how it always starts out as one thing and then as we explore our new way of living and being, we find new things about it that keep us inspired to continue learning and growing in our new environment. I love that quote by the way! And I'm not entirely sure that self-sufficiency in general or permaculture are not political movements. Not to go too far down the rabbit hole on it, but there's a certain sense of freedom that we achieve when we do things ourselves and take care of self and family!
NOS: Absolutely. It's one of those universal values that spans any personal philosophical standings. A uniting force, if you will.
TOL: Well said. So what got you interested in natural medicine?
NOS: Same things mostly. The more I learn, the more urgent it has become to learn and apply that knowledge base. Doctors are expensive! And (whether they're to blame for the paradigm or not), their practices are killing a lot of people by propping up and patching the holes in our collective health that are caused by big ag and what adds up to their complete disregard for natural order.
And I put that caveat in there because I'm not sure big pharma or big ag are individually responsible for our collective decline. Growing enough food to feed the world is definitely not an evil notion. Neither is healing people. My mom is a nurse, and there's no way I'm going to tell her or anyone she works with that they're not doing the right thing. There's absolutely a place for that in the world. But if I can do something to avoid being on that table, I will. It's not any single person's fault that our health is in decline as a culture. It's just sixty years of decisions that our society might do well to reconsider.
TOL: Yeah I agree with that completely. I myself work in the medical field, and I don't often see ill-intentioned people. Complacent people maybe but not poor intentions. I appreciate you bringing up that the medical industry does seem to me patching holes for big Agriculture and big Pharma. It's a lot of symptomatic treatment without much concern for the holistic basis of illness, either in individuals or in the collective as a whole.
I also appreciate that thought of not wanting to be part of that system but still in a way not completely taking yourself out of it. I feel like people like this have a lot of ability to enact change on a bigger scale just by being good examples of what we can do with a more self-sufficient lifestyle were a more natural holistic way of thinking and being and living.
Like, we're not saying you know this is wrong or that is wrong, we're more just living and saying, yeah but we can be a little more open-minded and look at the bigger picture in relation to our own actions and choices.
NOS: It's all about balance. I think our modern convenient culture has forgotten balance. Got a cold? Go to the doctor (who we often know can't do anything at all about it) instead of drinking some echinacea. In an abundance of caution, he'll get you some antibiotics you don't probably need. Your gut is already off because of the glyphosate in your food, and the antibiotics are going to throw that off more, and teach your immune system that it doesn't have to fight things so hard. Eventually things compound and we get where we are. Then again, I'm not going to rub comfrey on a compound fracture. That's why I say there's certainly a place for modern medicine.
TOL: Haha, definitely! I'm glad you bring up the topic of balance. I think that there's a lot of room for Western medicine and an integrative approach. In fact, I'm pretty excited to see how integrative forms of medicine really evolve.
NOS: Absolutely. Unfortunately it's going to take a lot of learning because what's happened so far is a lot of forgetting. Culturally we don't know that balance and have largely discarded natural approaches. But it'll be cool to see someone using modern medicine to open-mindedly research the effects of natural medicines. Open-mindedness on both sides, too. A lot of folks in our camp are very closed minded to that possibility, and I imagine a lot of modern practitioners are a bit averse to someone being able to cure themselves from their own back yard.
TOL: That's a pretty fair point! We can all learn so much from each other, and the world sure wouldn't hurt for a little more open mindedness.
NOS: And if anybody knows folks that are doing that kind of open minded learning, let's spread that word around. Like Paul Stamets with his antiviral mushrooms that can cure smallpox and the flu. Maybe we'd be better off taking a fungal supplement than paying a couple hundred bucks on a round of Tamiflu.
TOL: I love Paul Stamets! Agreed. There's a lot of enthusiasm starting to spread about mushrooms and what we are capable of accomplishing with fungi, too. I think a lot of it is going to come back to individuals making moves to help get people enthusiastic about holistic and integrative mindset again and get a little energy behind both learning to work together and also relearning some of the knowledge that we seem to have lost. Speaking of that, you have this new permaculture deck initiative on steemit :-) there's a lot of energy I see in going through those cards and helping people learn more about permaculture, while helping yourself learn more about permaculture, getting people excited about it! Can you tell us a little bit about this recent project?
NOS: Sure! It's kind of an experiment in spreading the word and a learning experience for me in the steem interface. There's a lot of goals I'm working on there. The deck of.permaculture playing cards (go check out the link here love @riverflows!) was given to me by @papa-pepper, and the first thing that popped into my head was a series on steem. They've each got a different permaculture principle, approach, or practitioner on em, so there's 52 easy posts that I can work in.
At the same time, it gets the word out there. Maybe someone can latch onto an idea in there somewhere. A little permaculture goes a long way.
Then, I figured while steem was cheap I'd buy some and power it up. But my blockchain buddy @senstless pointed out that using a vote selling service like @smartmarket can help stretch that steem by 10%, which makes sense for efficiency. Perhaps that is selfish, but if I can stretch my money, then I will. At first I thought it could also serve to increase publicity by getting posts trending, but then I saw that those posts are STILL hitting $400+, so I gave up that hope lol...Of course, it's a learning experience for me too because I'm working in steempeak to make those posts more efficient by making them on a template, and maybe eventually some post scheduling. And there's a WHOLE lot I still don't know, so I'm reading through these things like a book with their little gold nuggets of fresh knowledge.
TOL: Haha you never know! It would be pretty rad to see permaculture info trending anywhere.
NOS: Yeah, that would be super neat, but there's not much I can do to buy more votes than those folks. Whales have a bit larger budget than little old Nate. It's kinda weird because vote buying has such a negative connotation in the steemisphere, but I think it can definitely be used for good, and I'm experimenting with that ability.
I did a stint of vote buying back when I was posting about politics, but swore off it because I had an uneasy feeling over it. Now I don't.
But the cards are really cool. To help spread the word, I put some contests into it for a total of I think 31 shares of steembasicincome. There's names of a bunch of permies hidden in the cards, and if folks point out the name on a card, it's worth 1 share. Whoever made the deck also hid a picture of a needle. Idk where the heck it is, so it's worth 5 shares. Hopefully that'll draw folks in and increase some engagement.
Hint hint, there's one in the food forest card from yesterday that nobody has gotten!
TOL: It sounds awesome! Everyone here loves contests and any excuse to engage.
NOS: Yeah, especially now. I've noticed that when steem is down (yikes, it's under a quarter today. Gonna have to buy more), the folks that are posting are the ones that really believe in the platform and want to be there. Quality is WAY up right now. It's hard to keep up.
TOL: I know it! It's like, when the chips seem down, the truly passionate people come out and engage even more. It's pretty darn inspiring.
There's certainly no slowing down in the natural medicine group, that's for sure.
NOS: Nope! Lol ...Can't keep a good idea down I guess!
TOL: Indeed, good ideas and good medicine seem to be here to stay. Well, we are super stoked about your initiative and projects, Nate, as well as how you engage on the platform. People who are as enthusiastic as you are so key for keeping great ideas alive. Thanks for sitting down with me for a bit and having an awesome conversation! Any parting words of wisdom for the steemiverse today?
NOS: Sure! I like to end all my posts by telling folks to "stay relevant." Same applies here. If we stay relevant to our culture and the morality of the unregulated free market, we'll find success no matter what. Now maybe more than ever, these ideas are relevant. This stuff can heal the world, probably in more ways than we can even know yet. There's hope, there's healing, and there's progress. Stay relevant.
TOL: That's an excellent outlook and mindset, @nateonsteemit. You will find many here who agree with that, for sure. So, friend, same to you, energy towards relevance! Yes.
And with that, @nateonsteemit went off to play cards with his chickens, and @thetreeoflife went to hunt down another victim to interview - IS IT YOU??
