210. Spirit Farm: Listening to Navajo Diné land with James & Joyce Skeet

The Navajo Diné Nation is the biggest First Nation in the US, crossing Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. There we connected with Diné elder James Skeet, and his brilliant wife Joyce - descendant of award-winning Mennonite farmers in Pennsylvania. Together, they founded Spirit Farm, and the educational non-profit Covenant Pathways.

Spirit Farm is a demonstration and experiential farm focused on healing the high desert southwestern soil, and the communities living there. They do this by weaving insights from modern holistic management and regenerative agriculture, with the ancient wisdom of dryland farming and Native American cosmology. And they’ve created a suite of incredible value-add enterprises that importantly don’t perpetuate the commodisation of food, land and culture. While their education and employment programs bring others along with a range of experiences on the land, such that they’re now called upon around the country and the world. Which is part of where this conversation culminates - with the extraordinary sharing of spiritual stewardship with an African American community, and the profound implications – and inspiration - for all of us.

We sat down together by an ancient spring and sweat lodge for this. And close with something special from the following morning.

This episode has chapter markers and a transcript, if you’d like to navigate the conversation that way (available on most apps now). The transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully provides greater access for those who need or like to read.

Recorded 27 May 2024. With thanks to podcast member Chris Diehl for introducing us.

Title slide: Joyce & James Skeet at Spirit Farm (pic: Olivia Cheng).

See more photos on the website, and for more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.

Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.

The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).

Chapters

• 0:00 Music, Preview, Introduction & Supporter Thanks
• 4:58 Reconnecting With Ancestral Lands
• 7:00 James & Joyce coming back to the Farm - & others feeling the pull too (Joyce takes the dogs back home!)
• 9:50 Indigenous fractals
• 11:50 James’ way back from linear thinking to the ancient ways
• 15:51 How the elders have reacted to what’s happening here
• 18:00 How have the stories survived & evolved?
• 21:20 The enemy within
• 22:50 (Joyce returns) Why it matters to be doing this at a time of collapse?
• 26:00 How Spirit Farm started & how Joyce came to feel part of Navajo land
• 28:50 How Joyce’s upbringing as a Mennonite Christian in Pennsylvania plays into her life now
• 30:50 Regeneration at Spirit Farm, even with drying climate and other degradation
• 34:30 How they avoid the commoditisation of food when growing enterprises? (James gets tea)
• 38:50 And in the face of barriers
• 42:20 (James returns) Helping other Indigenous peoples – and other cultures - to regenerate culture with livelihood and dignity (when ag doesn’t pay)
• 47:20 From shame to regeneration to nurturing a community again
• 51:20 Granting spiritual stewardship to an African American community
• 55:40 Is it worth mobilising finance to this end, or letting that colonial train crash?
• 57:20 A cultural story of time and working for our salvation
• 1:00:20 Learning how to let go and receive things
• 1:08:10 Have you each felt a dose of healing in this?
• 1:11:20 Closing with a special story and piece of music
• 1:15:58 Morning Invocation at the Farm

Transcript

Joyce: 0:00

First thing that I had to do was to see myself as equal, and to do that, james used to tell me for a while he goes, you need to talk to the plants, you need to listen to the plants, and me I'm like how the heck do I do that? But I didn't question him. It was just I began praying about it, and one day and this is probably after two years of praying I went down to a wild field of amaranth and I just sat there because I wanted to pick some of the amaranth seeds and I just began thanking them and appreciating them and this overwhelming gratitude from the plants just came on me. It just made me start crying and it just I don't know. It was such a strong, strong feeling and it was then that I understood that coexistence.

James: 0:42

And that's where I think the sharing, the bartering, the exchange, all those are covenants that we have to remake and those covenants are broken right now. But you can mend those, you can complete the circle, you can adjust yourself to time in a different way. You can walk about, you can enter in this space of nomadicism that we were told to walk on the earth.

AJ: 1:37

G'day, m y name's Anthony James and this is T the RegenNarration, the stories that are changing the story, new and very old, ad-free, freely available and entirely listener supported. So thanks a lot to old friends from my days in G guatemala, L lucy and I rini, and your beautiful families now, for such enormous support of our journey in new mexico and just over the border in el paso texas. If you're also finding value in all this, please consider joining Lucy and Irini, part of a great community of supporters. And if becoming a subscribing member is your cup of tea, members get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes stuff from me tip-offs, news, chat space and more. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com forward slash support and thanks again Well, here I stand in 100 degrees in the shade in Albuquerque, new Mexico. I'll have more from here on the pod soon because, after five episodes in California, we headed inland through some incredibly special country. Subscribing members have heard a bit about our visit to Joshua Tree and Grand Canyon National Parks already. I'll post some news to email subscribers soon. Then we were on to the Navajo Diné Nation, the biggest first nation in the US, crossing Arizona, utah and New Mexico. And thanks to podcast subscriber Chris Diehl over in Tucson, arizona, we connected with Diné elder James Skeet and his brilliant wife of 30 plus years, joyce, descendant of award-winning Mennonite farmers in Pennsylvania. Together they founded Spirit Farm and the educational non-profit Covenant Pathways.

AJ: 3:34

Spirit Farm is a demonstration and experiential farm focused on healing the high desert southwestern soil and the communities living there.

AJ: 3:44

They do this by weaving insights from modern holistic management and regenerative agriculture with the ancient wisdom of dryland farming and Native American cosmology, and they've created a suite of incredible value-add enterprises that, importantly, don't perpetuate the commoditization of food, land and culture, while their education and employment programs bring others along with a range of experiences on the land, such that they're now called upon around the country and the world, which is part of where this conversation culminates, with the extraordinary sharing of spiritual stewardship with an African-American community and the profound cultural implications and inspiration for all of us. We sat down together by an ancient spring and sweat lodge and we start with James, as Joyce took some heavily panting dogs back home. We get solo time with Joyce later when James ducks out for a cup of tea and, incidentally, listen for the sound of the wind throughout. It was the first thing I noticed when we sat down and right through to the end. James and Joyce, thanks so much for speaking with me and thanks so much for having us here. Let's bring the listeners in to where we are.

James: 5:00

We are at a place called Dishchiyatoh. Dishchiyatoh means underneath the pine trees there's water, and back in the ancient days before me and then, part of my understanding was the wagons would come in here and water their flocks and wash their clothes, and there was a wagon trail that came down in through here. This is one of the few places that has continuously run water. Spring Water is very important out here, so that was one of the things that in managing their flocks, they would. They would come in. Now it's somewhat abandoned. I think we're the only ones that come, come through here and uh, it's a good place where we take people and they enjoy themselves. Kids like to play in the sand dunes.

AJ: 6:04

Why has it become abandoned? Is it because it's drier now or other factors?

James: 6:08

just removal from lands, even yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the detachment.

Joyce: 6:15

I'll go walk down there with him and then I'll come back up.

AJ: 6:17

Cool.

James: 6:22

That's a good way to get out of the podcast. Well, there's been a lot of colonization, urbanization that's been going on with our tribe. A lot of indigenous people have moved into cities and it's a little bit more convenient Out here. You have to haul water or do things more or less the ancient way, and I think a lot of people don't want to do that anymore. But in reality, I think what's happening is what I call the boomerang effect. People are starting to migrate back into these areas of indigenous, original ancient lands.

James: 7:00

We are on land that I cannot remember when we have not been on here. The stories go way back to not just my grandfather, but his father, and his grandfather inhabited this area, so it's very ancient lands for me and it's a privilege to be back listening to the elders through the rocks, through the trees, through the sand, through the plants. So I'm very Joyce and I are very happy that we now are close to it, and for years we've been wanting to get back to this land. But in the last 10 years we've been brought back and we've been able to manage and start a farm as a result of that.

AJ: 7:46

So you two had had a life away.

James: 7:49

Yes, we did a lot of things that most folks do. We moved into urban areas, we we work with corporations, educated ourselves and then eventually, one of our deep desires was we've always been in the woods, wilding ourselves, hiking, backpacking. I worked as a guide for a number of years and I've always wanted to get back to our ancestral lands, and so now in the last 10, 15 years taking care of my folks as they aged, they told us to come back and live on the property that they had also come back to. So in a way, it's kind of a journey back to our center, coming back to our ancestral lands, and I think that's the journey that many people are taking right now. They're coming back to their homes and you know where they originally came from and what that means to them and how it benefits them spiritually and physically.

AJ: 8:56

And this is some of what you felt too in coming back. Yeah, so it's been 10 years now since you've been back. When you think back or reflect back on the 10 years so far, how does it feel?

James: 9:07

It's a grounding. It's coming back to our homeland and being able to sit on lands that our ancestors have been at for a long time.

AJ: 9:17

It's a tremendous amount of grounding and balance, and harmony, and you're finding this is happening for other people too.

James: 9:25

Yeah, I think it's happening to a lot of people. After COVID, people are starting to migrate back to their center and in doing that, they're going through stages of you know what is life? There's a pause in life, so they're meditating and they're anticipating you know what should they do for the future? And in that process, I think they're coming and they're anticipating you know what should they do for the future? And in that process, I think they're coming back to themselves.

AJ: 9:50

Because you were saying even pre-COVID, no one else cared much about what you were doing. Yeah, yeah.

James: 10:00

I think there's a journey back to center and that part of that journey back to center is a lot of young people are starting to ask who am I? What am I? Especially Indigenous people. There's that spiritual tug that's taking place and our farm has become a place, an oasis, where people are drawn to what I call Indigenous fractals. And those indigenous fractals has to do with things that are very nature-driven. Nature cycles, nature's image and we're built that way.

James: 10:33

I think we're closer to being human and in this decolonization of centuries and centuries of people being drawn into consumerism and capitalism, I think they're now questioning their purpose in life. I think they always have. For Indigenous people, we are migrating back to that center and in that migration there's always been a migration and in that migration there's always been a migration which I call Dreamtime, a movement nomadically moving across the land. But in these last couple of decades we're cutting up land and demarcating it and then limiting that access to that walkabout or moving through time and space on the earth and no longer are we really understanding the images and the wildness of the earth and being attached to it, being connected to it, and that connection is sort of a magnetism that's drawing people back to that, that basis of where they originated from and who their identities are it's really interesting to hear you say all that I recall that you were saying last night.

AJ: 11:59

You yourself regarded your thinking as quite linear at one stage. What was that path for you from there to be thinking in terms of Indigenous fractals that you just mentioned.

James: 12:09

Yeah Well, that's kind of in the works of a lifetime perspective. Originally, up to grade seven, I didn't really know how to. I wasn't literate in this so-called Western education and in that time my grandfathers and my parents all taught me things of observation, of Indigenous lenses, perspective of worldview, and so up to that point I was moving in what we now call indigenous intelligence. But I didn't know that, you know. And then when I became educated, I began reading books after books and things began to flatten out and become linear and getting educated, getting consumed by a living, you know, a wage living, and using my education as a way to create a job or what I'm supposed to be doing in life. But in that sense I think it was during that time, during different stages I call it the cosmology of our people the wounded warrior, the maturing male, and all those different stages are stages that I entered into and I realized that my perspective wasn't adequate enough to move into that area of what I am, to be a man. So much of what I learned I had to unlearn and the things that I was learning was taking me back. So decolonization is a description or interpretation of taking our history and making it our future, and I really feel like that's how we decolonize ourselves as indigenous people. And I really feel like that's how we decolonize ourselves as indigenous people. I can't speak for other nationalities or ethnic groups. I just know that for us it was a way in which we can ground ourselves and come into balance, which the Navajas call hojo, which means being in balance, walking the beauty way.

James: 14:29

When you say that word, it circles around the earth and comes back to where you're at in that one word. It's like a Tibetan chant where, if they hit all the octaves in their chants, you can hear a bell. It'll ring, and in that way, I think nature has a secular sound that it emanates and it vibrates with our insides just like a drum. When you hit a drum, that vibration will impact your humanness, your spiritual humanness. So there's things in nature that I think grounds us and puts us back into this balance, and we've forgotten about that because everything is artificial, everything is synthetic, everything's based on consumption and capital gain. So I think we're missing so much of the indigenous fractals that I talk about, which is there's no straight line in nature. Everything is in a wonderful imaginative pattern that repeats itself over and over, like a snowflake or a leaf or, you know, pine needles or rocks in their formation. There's a lot of things that emanate that beauty, yeah.

AJ: 15:51

And it sounds like you had some really beautiful encounters with elders in your family alone. When you came back here and at moments, the way you started to talk to them, they'd feel like you had finally reached their understanding of the world. Is that something of your experience where there's been a connecting back to the old stories that the elders could then see that you had done?

James: 16:20

Yeah, I think now, since we're running the farm and we've moved from demonstration to experiential, we're seeing some elders really react to that and they always refer back to when they were children or when they were growing up. So there's that sense, but I don't know if it's that idyllic.

James: 16:41

I wish it was so we can to how to access it and how to move into that space. I think it's been um sort of a knee-jerk reaction in life that I think allows us to step into those things, uh, serendipitously. I'll give you an example. My grandpa and I we did a lot of things together when I was young and and I was foolish enough, after he had been cutting wood, to split his feet with an axe and so he was injured and he wanted to go into town, which is about 30 miles into Gallup, and so he tried to get some of the grandkids to help him out and I just said, grandpa, I'll do it. What do you need me to do? He said go down into the floorboard of the truck and press the gas. When I tell you to press the gas, press the brakes when I tell you to press the brakes. So we drove all the way 30 miles into Gallup so that he can get his groceries, and we did things like that which we partnered with.

James: 17:53

But when he came back from town there was always this sense of meditation and this sense of who he was and what he was as a man, as a head man. I mean. It was just being around him and having that access to his legacy and his lineage, and there was something going on there that I couldn't really interpret as a kid. But now, looking back, it was those beautiful moments and beautiful times that we had together in time and space, which we tied ourselves to each other in that way. And I think of my grandson too. He comes to visit now and then and him and I are always getting in trouble and Joyce is always asking us hey, what did you guys get into? And it's because we have this deep, deep soul relationship.

AJ: 18:46

That's beautiful. It makes me think about the broader Navajo Dene story and you've mentioned before. Yeah, the cosmology is foundational. How has that story evolved over the centuries and, I guess, how those stories survived?

James: 19:02

yeah, you know, I think it's happening all around us, in families, in Navajo families, the Diné families. They keep that sense of community together, even though, with the onslaught of colonization and capital, you know marketplace and they don't have access to the, the just sort of the um, what do you call it?

James: 19:29

inequities and yeah um, they continue to roll in that and never really sell their souls to the devil, so to speak. But inside them, when you start peeling away, you realize that these are people of community. These are people that have the integrity. They have a sort of a meekness about them that is not meek, it's powerful, it's their sense of humility and their concern is humility, not so much trying to climb a mountain and capitalize on it. Trying to climb a mountain and capitalize on it.

James: 20:08

And that was one of the discussions that Brad Pitt had with one of the Tibetans seven years in Tibet and he was saying you know, what do you think about us climbing these mountains? And the Tibetan person responded he says you know, it's not so much we're interested in climbing mountains, it's we want. Our biggest goal is really to get to the lowest point in the ground with humility. That's really our energy, not to climb some mountain. You know, approach to life that has stayed within the culture as much as possible in kinship, kinsentric views, kinsentric ideals. They're supporting one another. But it'll also destroy families because if you get sort of individual interest in there and self-gain and ego, what you have is really a dismantle indigeneity which moves into nativeness and you know, they become native, but they're not really indigenous.

AJ: 21:19

It's been interesting traveling through the large expanse of.

AJ: 21:23

Navajo country that you call reservations here still, and feeling a sense of all that and also a sense of the I guess the part of what you described that I don't know is independence, even the word Resistance. Is that even a word Like? There was a strong sense of we are not even when the United States became what this came to be called, and you were being affronted in those times all over again. There was a strong sense of we are not, even when the United States became what this came to be called, and you were being affronted in those times all over again, that there was a holding on for which you paid a price. But it seems to be a strong thread of. Is even pride a?

AJ: 21:58

word that that culture has been maintained throughout.

James: 22:01

I like that word affronted. I think that I like that word affronted. That word affronted is very much in the context of our struggle and our struggle has stayed consistent and the consistency oftentimes will break down if it implodes from within and we are a worse enemy. We've figured out who the enemy is, but when we start taking on the indulgence of capitalism and individual ethics, we're going to implode from within because we're going to move away from this concentric view nature's intelligence, nature's uh intelligence and we'll we'll separate ourselves and become a society and a culture that is based on self-gain, egotistical perspectives.

AJ: 22:56

Welcome back, come in. Do you want to flip your mic back on while we've got that chance choice, and then I'll pick a moment to weave you in. So that's interesting because, while that strong meekness you talked about can keep you connected and can power the work you're doing, for example, that biggest colonial system has powered on, but there's a sense amongst a growing number of people and we're amongst them, obviously that it's demise is imminent, that it's eating itself. Essentially, how does that sit in the context of what you're doing here? How do you think about how that will play out and why it matters to be doing what we're doing?

James: 23:40

I think that's the deeper question. You know, how you look at life is going to be important to how you treat living things. Do you control them or do you coexist with them? So in the larger context, we are up against this complexity of nature and in understanding the complexity of nature, we have to move away from reductionism and linear science and move back into fractals and metaphysical things and, philosophically, I think we have to shift our paradigm more on how aboriginals' perspectives, worldviews, indigenous worldviews, these are ancient knowledge. They knew and moved within this space in time and space. That in itself, I think, is so deep and so wide that when we enter into that, it forces us to change into a new human being or a new creature. And we now coexist with things that are all around us instead of trying to control it.

James: 24:55

You know, with pesticides, fungicides synthesize health into medicine that really has so many side effects. You know and we talked a little bit about that, you know that holistic medicine. There's so many things involved to that and there's ancient knowledge all around us. But, like I said, you know before in one of the when we showcased our perspective, what I saw was that you look at elder knowledge when these elders die, that's a whole library. What I saw was that you look at elder knowledge. When these elders die, that's a whole library. When 70% of the insects are gone because of the way we do agriculture, there's something that should happen in our hearts and minds to react to that sense of mourning, you know. But because we're, we're, we've risen above that emotional ties, we just kind of roll in this convenience of consumption.

Joyce: 25:57

yeah, I think we often see ourselves when we are in that colonial system. You view things from outside, not like you're a part of the whole system of nature, and so when you start seeing yourself as just one little tiny speck in the whole system of nature, then you can begin to coexist. But when you're outside of it now you can do what you want to it for the listeners, we'll disclose that you've been hounding dog.

AJ: 26:23

no, I'm not hearing guys chasing dogs to get them back to base, because the panting was a bit ferocious into the microphone. So welcome back, joyce. It's great to have you joining the conversation and let's keep following the thread for a while as to how you came to be together and came to be here.

Joyce: 26:41

We always wanted to be on the land, but it was always a struggle or something was holding us back, and it was after his parents died that the place opened up here, and it was right around then also that we began being exposed to the microbes in the soil healthy soil because I know growing up.

Joyce: 27:03

I didn't understand the microbes in the soil healthy soil Because I know, growing up I didn't understand the microbes in the soil. They even existed. It was just planting, you know, or working with the animals, and so that became front and center for us and so this became an oasis for us and it was. We never dreamed we'd be on the land here, but when we got here we were just so excited and that we were able to begin to exist with nature on the land. And for me it was a journey, because I had come from that outside and to move to the inside was an interesting journey for me.

AJ: 27:39

No doubt Can you tell us a bit about it, how?

Joyce: 27:41

was it for you? Well, I think the first thing that I had to do was to see myself as equal. And to do that, James used to tell me for a while he goes, you need to talk to the plants, you need to listen to the plants, and me I'm like how the heck do I do that? But I didn't question him. It was as I began praying about it, and one day and this is probably after two years of praying I went down to a wild field of amaranth and I just sat there and stood there because I wanted to pick some of the amaranth seeds, and I just began thanking them and appreciating them and this overwhelming gratitude from the plants just came on me, it just made me start crying and it just I don't know, it was such a strong, strong feeling, and it was then that I understood that coexistence. That was my start.

AJ: 28:30

Wow, I'm curious when you say praying and we've talked a bit about Denae cosmology For you, was praying tapping that, or was it another spirituality?

Joyce: 28:43

No, to me nature is spirituality, so it was praying, tapping that. To me, that's the creator, that's God that embodies it all.

AJ: 28:55

Yeah, and it's interesting to hear when you said you weren't thinking of microbes and so forth because you had come from a farming background. So what was that like growing up?

Joyce: 29:05

it was. It was some conventional, quite a bit of conventional, of monocropping and tilling. We tilled a lot but we had a two-acre garden and because of my Mennonite background it was for self-sufficiency, you know. So we were doing a lot of preparation, food prep, freezing, canning, dehydrating, things like that, and even with the meat. You know, we pretty much lived off the land so I knew how to do it so there was.

AJ: 29:31

Even without that sort of scientific knowledge, there was. There was still connection, oh yes, and respect, oh yeah yeah, it was, but it was surface.

Joyce: 29:40

What it was surface, and it was from the outside in right being on the inner, inside, with nature that's interesting.

AJ: 29:46

That is that part of why you drifted away oh yeah yeah, yeah, I wonder still, because it sounds like there is ways in which that upbringing has contributed to you the way you do live today, some things that you do appreciate that did ground you. Is that true?

Joyce: 30:03

Oh yeah, a lot of things, even just how you live in a holy more righteous way and how you connect with people. Your ethics are really strong and that carried through really strong with me. And, of course, then just being self-sufficient in terms of food preparation and things has been huge, and you've almost at that point here too, as I understand.

Joyce: 30:27

Yes, yeah, we're very pretty much right Almost there. Every year is a little closer, like we're playing around with the medicines plant medicines this year, and we've got a dairy cow now when she starts milking. So there's things. Every year we're getting a step closer.

AJ: 30:45

And this is in a context of dry country and changing climate, which is making things quite difficult. So how have you gone about it and what have you observed over the 10 years?

James: 31:00

We live in an area called. It's a brittle environment, and what is it? 8 to ten inches of water a year, which is similar to a lot of places, but they're not farming the way we're farming, or gardening, whatever you might call it. So we draw on that ancestral hunter-gatherer concept of agriculture, and then also modifying the soil so that it will hold water, making sure that there's enough of the bacteria and fungi present in those things that we do, and then also using the most efficient way in which we can water drip lines mulching. 70% of the water is kept within the soil if you mulch. And then also recently, in the last three years, our gardens become very robust based on covering our garden with garden cloth. This year we've been able to put a lot of solar panels and then growing underneath it.

James: 32:08

So what I think needs to happen? Because of the brittle environment, because of the climate change, many of the lands that used to be very fertile and wet are now becoming brittle environments. So the technology that we're creating around our farm just that moderation of temperature from from the highs and lows, will keep those plants very, very robust, and we've seen that and we've been able to grow a multitude of annual crops. Now, like joyce mentioned a little bit, is that we're moving into preannuals, which is deeper roots and more medicinal plants, more nutrient dense plants than annual crops. We're also looking at indigenous seeds that seem to carry higher density, nutrient dense plant, the seeds then then conventional, what we get at Home Depot or you know places where you would, you would buy seeds. So and also a revitalization of that, that seeds that have been gone for a long time, we're starting to see it migrate back into our garden and we're harvesting them and we're learning how to prep them and prepare them the way our ancestors did, you know.

AJ: 33:27

Yeah, wow.

Joyce: 33:28

I also think composting has been huge and the reason we got animals was to have manure for composting, and so all the animals on our farm contribute to the compost, contribute to the garden, so we have this secular system going on.

Joyce: 33:45

But the compost has always been really key for amending the water, because so much of our water is out here whether it's really low wells that are mineralized, or city waters are full of salts or high minerals and it's impacting the growth of the plants. And so we have this pump we call a dosing pump, and it pulls up compost extract into the drip lines, or you can just put it in your spray and water from a bucket compost extract and it just makes a world of difference. But there's been a couple secrets that have all come together, and I remember when we first started growing I couldn't grow anything on pennsylvania where I grew up, I could grow whatever, but the day he dumped a bunch of compost on and we just saw this go crazy, it was like a mind game changer for us so the the, the end product is what scares me, the end product being do you capitalize on it or is it for the community?

James: 34:45

Yeah, and people come here and they learn the composting stuff and even the amendments of biochar in the compost which we're doing the last year and a half two years. The last year and a half two years because biochar puts it's a heat sink, water sink, nutrient sink. It charges up tremendously and it's about a thousand-year half-life. The qualities of that has always been manufactured by indigenous people prior to 1491, implemented in these large scale cities as a load bearing necessity for those large populations.

James: 35:31

But because the pandemic annihilated 90% of indigenous people in the Americas, in the Western hemisphere, we don't have that knowledge. But the problem is we get a lot of techie white guys that pick up this information and they try to sell it and try to manufacture it on a very technical base. When it's just simply pyrolysis before it gets to ash and it creates compartments for the fungi and the bacteria to move into, based on the charges, and when you have it in your soil, what you have is an ingenious nature's way of getting the fungi and the bacteria from the beginning of time to start working in that kind of indigenous fractals, I call it. That starts the motion of how the earth originated, how it became very fertile, how it probably, you might say, when Adam was told to cultivate, he was using biochar, I don't know. Get some tea here.

AJ: 36:43

It's funny what you said before, joyce, because I was just thinking I wonder what's excited you most about what you've seen. And then you came out with that aspect of the compost and I wonder then, knowing that you've got enterprises developed like products that are coming out, how that squares with not falling into that capitalizing, that commoditizing trap. How do you guys think about it?

Joyce: 37:07

the first thing is I've learned so much is you have to follow your heart, because if it doesn't feel right, don't do it. And I've done stuff. We've all both have done stuff that didn't feel right and it just didn't work. Or if it worked, it just was icky.

AJ: 37:21

Really.

Joyce: 37:22

Yeah, and so following your heart is huge. So one of my things I was been wanting to try to do this year, I wanted to take the garden to the next level and I thought, well, let me do some market gardening, but that just rubs against me.

AJ: 37:36

Really.

Joyce: 37:37

Yes, because now I have to means I got to sell stuff Really. Yes, because now I have to means I got to sell stuff and as much as it would be nice to try to do that, it's going to take me out of the context of working with nature, because now I have to work to push to grow things instead of letting things grow naturally. You know where, on some of the value add products, like I should say, they're coming out of stuff that's growing naturally. I'm not pushing it and it's just happening. Um, so some of the things are coming out like even we're utilizing the fats and soaps and body butters, you know. So I'm not growing raising pigs for body butter, you know. It's just a byproduct, you know, and a lot of our herbs, what, what the land gives us, what the plant gives us, that's what we use, not not me or us controlling, saying, trying to force the plant to grow.

AJ: 38:28

We grow with the plants that's beautiful, so much in that it's a way of saying that it's land first. Yes, yeah, yeah but you do still build what we've called today an economy. That language has only come up in relatively recent times too, but so you've still got enterprise and economy.

AJ: 38:47

We can use these words, but it's a whole different paradigm whole different mindset approach to yeah, yeah yet it must be working for you again just pulling out a modern day economic term to be viable, to have livelihood I quite like that term more actually to have livelihood. Here You've obviously got that self-sufficiency, and then you've got a bit of extra on top. I suppose with these value-add enterprises, Is that how you see it Is?

Joyce: 39:12

that how it works? Yeah, totally.

AJ: 39:14

And that sums to being able to function, because I hear many people say I mean there's obviously land access barriers and set up barriers, but also then how you, in an era where farmers are so squeezed because it's viewing land and farming in the same way as just bleed it for whatever you can commoditize it that you guys have found a way for it to work.

Joyce: 39:39

Yeah, yeah, even our meats. You know we've got clean meats. But the way for it to work yeah, yeah, even our meats, you know we've got clean meats, but the way we get to our clean meats in the desert is totally different and it's and um. So we just kind of stumbled on. People all know about fermenting foods or grains or whatever it is for your chickens, but we took it up to the pigs and the cows and the sheep, you know. And so we were able to buy trash beans, trash popcorn that we know has fertilizer on it because it comes from a conventional grower and we get it for $65, $80 a ton. And so now we ferment it and it removes the toxins and it increases the bioavailability, increases the probiotics, the microbes in the whole meats.

Joyce: 40:21

And so when we tested the meats or the pigs, our pigs were um, meats were healthier than pigs grazing 50 percent of the time, because we don't have grass to graze. So we have to find alternatives and that's, I think that's the really. That's what's been. So key here is how do you find alternatives instead of grumbling and complaining about your deficits, you know. So, even with the water, our lack of water, that's how we stumbled on to having to neutralize the salts and the chlorine using compost extract, because when our rainwater runs out, we have to haul water from Gallup, you know, from the municipality, and it just was so detrimental to our plants.

AJ: 40:59

That's so interesting, isn't it? And the other products that you have come up with that have sprung up from the relationship with the place Mint tea.

Joyce: 41:08

A lot of teas are starting to pick up. I mean we have another product line called Flavors of the Hogan. That's not so much from products from the farm, but we wanted to start a business making some of the native products. A lot of the recipes come from his mom and so it was funny because his mom, james, didn't want to be a part of it, but although he was a key part of it, we would.

Joyce: 41:34

I sat down with his mom and his dad and his mom doesn't know English and I don't know Navajo, but his dad would translate and she didn't measure, so she would just pour a bunch into a bowl and we would measure how many cups or teaspoons. Dad would interpret it and then we would figure out the recipes and that's how we came up with it. So several of the recipes are his mom. But the key thing behind it was is how do we create more jobs for the community? So every time we go to do these mixes, we hand package it. I will not, we will not go and create, go to a manufacturer to do it, because we want it to stay locally. So we have 10 people that come in and hand package these mixes um whenever we put them together in a in a certified kitchen in gallup. So it's about the community and just really giving back to the community in that way.

AJ: 42:25

Yeah, brilliant, I'll mic you up again, James hey. We've just gone back on with what you left us with the capitalisation.

James: 42:33

Oh yeah.

AJ: 42:33

And how you don't succumb to that while you do enterprise. Yeah, that makes me think, then, about your work with other Indigenous folk and other people like people in general, but you're finding other Indigenous folk increasingly interested in coming back to this too, I believe, and how you go about that regenerating culture in tandem with these job opportunities and I guess it's opportunities really across the board. But when did that start to be developing these sorts of training programs? Is that how you what you even call them, and what have you seen sort of come of that?

James: 43:11

yeah, oh boy, I think um with Joyce she's, she has that, what they call the gift of um. I don't know, it's not hospitality but a gift of mercy. Yeah, I guess a gift of mercy that she has this, she's brought this to the culture and I, you know, in a sense, don't really care, but she slows me down and says we need to care here.

Joyce: 43:45

He cares, but it's in a different format. You know. He's super supportive, you know. And the one thing we're really careful because there's so much dependency here. We do not want to create a dependency, but how do we create that dignity, you know, and we got people knocking on our doors to work where so many other places they can't. They can't find anybody, but it's how we treat the employees flexibility or or expectations, you know, and things like that and working with them where they're at, instead of trying to force them into a box.

Joyce: 44:19

It's like working with like we were just talking about working with nature. How do you work with community?

AJ: 44:24

yeah, how do you do it?

Joyce: 44:28

um, for one, one of the keys has been in people. A lot of people don't want a full-time job, they just want two, three, four days a week and we do pay a step above of what the local other employment force here is paying and we've learned. We want to provide flexibility so people can do things with their families when things come up or appointments. We don't want to put them into an eight to five type of a job so that's the commoditization model to do yes so.

Joyce: 45:01

But we have found, like we kind of have to create this almost like a period of 90 day probation in a way, to to for them to um build into that and to see if they work into that regimen, and then we just really back off. And so they let us know hey, I need this off, I need this, and and you, just you work together on what works with them, and so there's got to be discipline, there's got to be accountability on their part as well, but on our part of flexibility yeah you give.

James: 45:34

We're gonna give if we give you yes, most of the most of the work work that we do is to raise funding and salary, because agriculture doesn't pay. It's an enslavery in this country.

AJ: 45:50

Yeah.

James: 45:51

And it was brought over by European serfs and slaves. And then the first thing they do is they steal property and they squat on it and then private land is established and then from there what you get is more of a European concept of agriculture which enslaves everybody else the migrant workers. So, looking at agriculture, it has to be redefined and it has to be not a regenerative economy but a nurturing economy. That regenerative is mechanical, but nurturing is something that benefits the local communities and we really try to push that, because we did try to do community, we did try to do regenerative and we realized that these are very mechanical concepts. The regeneration we found is based on taking things that are defiled and you start from zero. Like for land, my grandfather plowed the land and destroyed the ecosystem, so to speak, with the microbiome, and coming back 60, 70 years later, when we approached the land, it was nothing but prairie dogs and just desertified land that hardly had any vegetation. When we moved back, we really felt almost ashamed to be on the land and to look at that every day and we really felt like we needed to do something about it. It was the guilt inside of us. So it's really just a process of understanding. You know our sensitivity, that can we change it? And so when we got into soil science with Elaine Ingham and Dr Johnson and all these other gurus, we learned a lot from them and we implemented them and we saw the results and that's what took us into a different level of remediating the soil and that's really been our key approach.

James: 48:04

We didn't intend to become activists or regeneration regenerative farmers. It's just because you know this was just what we need to be about. And when we understood what we need to be about was when we leave this earth. We wanted to, you know, have this land in better shape than when we came in. So far, we're seeing that. We're seeing birds appear, we're seeing animals, we're seeing vegetation that didn't exist, we've seen corn that I hadn't seen when I was a kid. Yeah, and come back to Spirit Farm. So I think it's been very regenerative, but it shouldn't stay there. It should be becoming a nurturing community access, you know, so that people can be nurtured by the high-density foods that we're putting out.

AJ: 48:59

I wonder how you see that sort of agriculture coming on. We talked at the start about Indigenous folk and others certainly not being able to see a way that they could get back to this.

James: 49:14

Yeah, it's because the colonization has created this kind of environment. It's not because the indigenous people wanted to do that.

AJ: 49:22

Yeah.

James: 49:22

But with indigeneity. This western hemisphere was very populated. It had some of the most prolific and most abundant sources of annual crops, peppers, which was introduced to the Asians. Russia wouldn't be Russia if it wasn't for the potatoes. You know, pizza from Italy, tomatoes came from this western hemisphere.

James: 49:52

So there's no acknowledgement, there's no reconnecting the history.

James: 49:57

It seems like history always begins with the oppressor and so in that, in that perspective of history, we're losing a lot of 40,000 years of ancestral agricultural knowledge that has always been present in this western hemisphere. Just saying that I think there are pockets of Aboriginal peoples, indigenous peoples, native people, subsistence people that do subsistence, hunting or farming. They've always known this, that there's a delicate relationship that's there, but it's when conventional farming, when the few will get the resources that they create by enslaving people, large pockets of land are being taken up by just a few guys, you know, and then enslaving everybody else to either farm or ranch it, you know, and that's what's happening in New Mexico. So I'm sure it's happening all over the world. But we've got to call it for what it is. Call a cat a cat and a dog a dog. The complexity we're starting to hit, the complexity in science, when we should be using lenses in the general systems model, the closed system. Instead, we're continuing to throw synthetics and linear science, which is a myth of control.

AJ: 51:24

I note then in that context that you're doing a lot beyond Spirit Farm now in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. It really captured my imagination what you had just been not too long ago I believe doing in Cleveland with African American community there. Would you share that?

James: 51:41

story with us. Sure, that's a beautiful story. They're just doing it with us, we're not doing it with them. It's just a connection that they've already created. Their origin story, within that context, of what was a really bad place, is now an oasis, and we dig that, you know, and we love that we we're connecting with people all over the world that are doing similar things that we're doing and in that connection it's it's almost like um a michael, a michael reiser fungal, um relationships that we're connecting.

James: 52:16

So it's not. It's not just, uh, spirit farm doing that and then sharing it with others. It's not just Spirit Farm doing that and then sharing it with others. It's that people are coming together and they're dismounting from this tower that's been built called colonization and capital currency based economy and moving into what really feels good to them their migration back to their hearts.

AJ: 52:40

There was a moment in that and I guess this speaks to the what's the way to say it the importance of First Nations everywhere in all this is there's a moment in what you were doing together with that community in Cleveland where you said you passed on spiritual stewardship of the country they were on.

James: 53:03

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a beautiful thing. I've always had this tender heart towards immigrants that have been brought over without their rights being denied, forced into slavery or brought here by unrest unrest in their own country, which is every, every one of us, you know, but more so with the enslavement, and that's that's really what touches my heart is that as indigenous people, we don't we don't have that trauma in a sense, unless we're taking off the off the land and dispossessed or stolen in some cases from their lands. But for Indigenous people we hold the spiritual stewardship which hasn't been looked at. We've looked at stewardship for more a mechanical husbandry kind of pastoral focus, but we haven't really dug deep. My professor, alfonso ortiz, used to say that once the white man starts sparing his, his, his, ancestors in the land, they'll become reattached to the land because there's there's some skin in the game.

James: 54:14

But, that being said, I think for them. They were brought over in slave ships, nobody welcomed them and they've been floating on this land for a long time. And just for our sensitivity that we have leaders come and their leaders come together in ceremony tribal leaders, so to speak, rural tribal leaders and what indigenous people do from that indigenous Americas was to welcome them and say you are now welcome to this land, you are now owners in the right protocol, not the protocol that a lot of settlers have entered into. We're still living on lands of the spoils, we're still living on stolen lands, and that's not been acknowledged. You know, that's not been reckoned with. There's no ceremonies that have been done. It's still people floating on top of the earth, abstractly, not concretely, abstractly, moving through space and time. And this aggression is starting to come out more and more each year because you know the the, the limited supply of resources that are all over the world is, you know, um on based on capitalism and consumption yeah we got to stop that.

AJ: 55:30

You know it's a train going down the road that has no pilot is it important in that context I mean, there's a lot of work going into trying to mobilize finance, into helping, for example, young Indigenous folk access land to do some of this. Yeah, how important is it to try and do that, versus perhaps let that train crash and bring up something else or indeed return to something else?

James: 55:56

Well, that's probably. The tragedy is that that's beginning to happen in climate that's beginning to happen in small pockets, the unrest, the things that are happening all over the world is really a result of lack of resources, you know, lack of areas where people can farm, you know.

AJ: 56:16

I wouldn't be surprised.

James: 56:17

That's what's happening in the kibbutz there in Israel. You know, I wouldn't be surprised. That's what's happening in the kibbutz there in Israel. You know how the Zionists have moved in and pushed the Palestinians out. You know, because they're trans-nomadic people. You know they moved on the surface of the earth. I don't know if there's any point in time that we've seen the Israelis having any kind of land. You know it's biblical history, you know. So there's a lot of things that I think are being generated by the earth land. You know it's biblical history. You know um.

James: 56:42

So there's a lot of things that I think are being generated by the earth. You know the things that are dying, things that are moving out. You know um and that and that area of spirituality. We haven't done ceremonies for those. We haven't done, we haven't acknowledged even the number of people that have died in COVID. We haven't done ceremonies. We're going to soon forget Ceremonies. Allow us to have those ethics intact. We're very moral. Moral means you do it in front of people, but down deep inside, when you're alone, what generates your ethics, what establishes your ethics within that context? And sometimes it means you know using plastic bottles three or four times, where you toss it in and in the trash uh, it's, it's stopping and saying hey, listen, you know, maybe I need to settle down from this terrible system of of uh corporations and breathe again, become wild again, you know, so to speak.

AJ: 57:44

I think about that when I think of what you said before, joyce around you know what we've called part-time work, but that it just sounds a lot healthier in this sort of a way. I wonder, does that even hark back to older stories? Does it, james, that you wouldn't work? You know, work in that sort of a way all the bloody time.

James: 58:06

Yeah, yeah, and that comes from the Protestant ethics of working for your salvation.

Joyce: 58:14

I remember the story this one older white guy was telling when he first came out to work with on the native american navajo reservation and and he went out to help a navajo family and he went in there ready to just put all his energy into it and they said okay, what do you want me to do?

Joyce: 58:33

he goes oh, we need our outhouse painted. So he paints the outhouse. Comes back now, now what? And then Navajo gentleman goes relax, you're done. He wanted to keep working. And it's that work mentality, totally yeah, and we get so caught in it.

AJ: 58:50

I was brought up in it. It's such that and I've seen it in myself, but also many other people, and maybe even in some ways more in people who are working with not-for-profit organizations and so forth yeah, Because there's an expectation, like there's such need, you've got to burn it. Yeah, and burning it is your status piece. That's what makes you okay in there. But yeah, wow, it's a whole again, a whole different way to look at it.

James: 59:18

Yeah, it's the idea of time. Greek perspective says penetrate time, seize the moment and you're you're penetrating time and space. And what we're talking about in indigenous view of time is time rolls on us and are, are we at peace, which is a very shamanistic perspective. Also, you know and um, that space and time is is really key to receiving rather than seizing, and you see it in the animals too. You have a predator that's siloed with a pupil that's round and it's wanting to extract, whereas when you have you look at sheep lenses, you know the pupils of sheep it's horizontal, it's looking from side to side. So, in those two concepts of reduction of science and then one of observation, those two are necessary. You know, those two are at times necessary. You have these predators that are keystone predators, keystone species. They help control the system. That's very much within that.

James: 1:00:30

Natural fractals. In the same way, I think I call a lot of indigenous people, land people, ancient, historical, keystone culture. That is missing. Uh, it's, it's flipped in the pendulum. I always see it as a pendulum. It's swung all over into conventional farming, controlling nature, putting synthetics in there, and the pendulum is starting to swing back to more the indigeneity, the organic, the, the natural things, that, the natural ways in which we live, how we coexist with nature, within nature, and and those kind of concepts. I think it's starting to move itself back into its context and its meaning. Uh, how we've been described as very animistic.

James: 1:01:20

Yes, we are we are very, we are alive, yeah and that was, that was something that I had to relearn, you know really because that in education you always try to be you know, um, uh, very much, uh, logical and straight line.

James: 1:01:38

You know Euclidean mathematics and then had to unlearn. You know how to let go and receive things. It's one of the hardest things when we have white people that come here to receive something from us and that gift giving is not a transaction. It's because the culture is telling you you're worth that gift and what does it do to you? You know it's, it's not, but if you exchange, um, you know, monetary currency, it's more of a transaction.

AJ: 1:02:13

It becomes really flattened down that's what hits me about that cleveland story. Yeah, the gifting of spiritual stewardship to others doesn't strike you as a loss of your country. Yep, you're the spirit. It doesn't strike you that way. The gift strikes you as. What is the meaning?

James: 1:02:33

of it. Yeah, you're trying to bring them to the party. We've been trying as Indigenous people trying to bring people to the party. There is an anthropologist that did a study on the trampoline that they were doing at one of the ceremonies and the trickster came in. The trickster is the opposite, does the opposite, it's kind of like a cultural shrink. So he was doing some things and there were a couple tourist couple that came in and they kept doing this and everybody was laughing. They were going nuts over what the trickster was doing and finally around the evening, 3 or 4 o'clock in the evening, the couple that came laughed and then they started the ceremonies. Then the party began.

James: 1:03:25

Yeah, and that's what I'm saying is that we've been available and very much hospitality has been key to it. And the reason why the land has been taken is because we've considered it as commons, as everybody has access. And it's this private land that has been the culprit to the destruction of our people and that's calling a cat a cat and a dog a dog. You know why the hell should we have private land? You know, if we coexist with nature, everybody partakes of it.

AJ: 1:03:56

It was a real moment for me. I told you, I lived with Mayan people in Guatemala 20 plus years ago and I started to and I was learning Spanish and some Kekchi but that was very difficult for me Got Spanish eventually and I started to write some stuff in Spanish at the time and it really hit me. I'll never forget it. I literally remember myself at the desk at night, late at night, so I'd really followed the train of thought right through till I found myself in a moment where I was writing about this and I looked up the term privar in Spanish, expecting it to say to privatize or something like that, but it said to deprive. I thought there it is, there's Catacat.

AJ: 1:04:44

It makes me think so much and I've spoken to some people on the podcast about this. There are people now who are just saying and in the baby boomer generation, even alone who are saying I have private ownership of this land, even capital, even just money. It's come from the same extractive system. I've got this by virtue of these ways and systems that aren't right. I'm going to give it back into the commons. So, again, I'm not losing it.

James: 1:05:18

It's so similar.

AJ: 1:05:21

There's some people, from other cultures even, who are saying with the same ethos I guess I'm going to give it back into the commons the way it always was. How can I be owning nature, you know? All these things, all these rationales, and with a sense of legacy, this is my legacy. This is a much greater, of much greater meaning to do this and to think that that's possible, that amongst all the complexity and complication of the systems we've created and abstractness of the system, it can boil down to just give it. It can be that simple again.

James: 1:06:02

Yeah, when a fly flies around a bowl of sugar, it's not his until he gives it away. It's not our richness. Until we give it away, then it's ours. Otherwise it's just around us.

AJ: 1:06:19

And when it's just around us, you keep grasping for more yeah, yeah and and lying to yourself, yeah.

James: 1:06:27

And that's where I think um, the sharing, the bartering, the exchange, all those are covenants that we have to remake and those covenants are broken right now.

James: 1:06:40

But you can mend those, you can complete the circle, you can adjust yourself to time in a different way, you can walk about, you can enter in this space of nomadicism that we, we were, we were told to walk on the earth. And when we stop and just put ourselves in compartmentalized apartments and, you know, hoping that somebody will feed us, and when we deny the rights of folks that should have access to their giftings in terms of relating to life and you know, I think there's a lot of things that are broken in this world Part of the energy should be into healing, mending those broken circles, reestablishing covenants so that, because you're big and bad, it's the smaller tribes that would always go to the bigger tribe and cut a covenant so that the bigger tribe won't come in and destroy them. But when the big guy cuts, cuts the covenant and don't base anything on that, those ethics, then you have somebody that's self-intended self. You know, self-propagating himself in a very ego context.

AJ: 1:07:55

You know, we become distracted by our egos know we become distracted by our egos as we come towards the close guys. I wonder have you felt each of?

James: 1:08:07

you a dose of that healing? I think I have. I think joyce has taught me a lot about healing because she's she's a natural healer. Um, I think coming back to the land here has put us in a position of balance again. Um, it's not the initial healing. I think it's walking in balance and and understanding that you, you will have, uh, the disruption of, or chaos, or disruption, and your whole purpose is to really just keep keeping peace and chaos in check and so walking in that pattern. I think I would have to say we should have done this a long time ago, but we had to unlearn a lot of things. We still are. I mean, one of the things we want to do is indigenize our farm so that all the animals have buildings and places where it's indigenous to their intelligence. Your turn.

Joyce: 1:09:08

For me, just being here is just really healing in this place. I remember this is one of the first places he ever took me when we met, when we first started dating, but it was also a place that used to come. Remember, I went through a time of a lot of pain three years ago and when you go through really intense pain you begin to heal, hear and see things that you never did before and I would come out here and I remember I used to hear the wind. Now I can listen to it and in that listening and in the breathing and in the observation and in the taking in, that's where a lot of the healing has come for me.

AJ: 1:09:56

How would you describe that sense? This might be an unanswerable question, but I'm so curious about it. The listening has just it might be the biggest threat that's come through a couple hundred episodes or so of this podcast. How would you describe that sense of listening? How do you get told stuff that you're listening to, if that's another way to put it?

Joyce: 1:10:23

um, I think everybody's a little different. For me it's a heart thing and um, and it's in quiet, quiet, non-verbal voices that you hear. But your heart has to be at peace, your heart has to be still. You know to hear that and to see, and you have to be able to want to listen and be and ask the questions. You know the plants, the trees, they're, they're waiting for us, they're, they're waiting for us to take time with them, to appreciate them. We're so busy or we think we're better or don't have the time and stuff.

AJ: 1:11:01

Thank you guys. It's been magnificent speaking with you here and visiting you and seeing what you're up to. I really appreciate it, and I mentioned last night that we talk about music to tail out, and you told me, james, that you actually make drums and have done for some time.

AJ: 1:11:18

I'd love to hear about that too. And if there's a song, anything at all in the realm of music and song that's been significant in your life and it doesn't have to be from your drum making. But I was curious if there was something, given you've got such a passion for that.

James: 1:11:34

If there's something in there I have such a passion for music. She doesn't. Is that right? Uh, you know, she, she, she just will drive in a vehicle and not have the music on to have the music, yeah but my boys they'd say yeah, is dad drinking coffee and is he listening to music?

James: 1:11:54

I enjoy it, but yeah it's just so much a part of me and the sound. Joyce was mentioning the sound. For me, the completion of listening is you hear the breeze and the trees here. That was my first awakening to life here on earth. Was my mom making tortillas over the stove. I saw the light come in from from the east, because we always have the door from the east streaming in a little bit of smoke there and those lines really straight, and listening to that sound of the, you know the wind hitting the trees and just that beautiful sound.

James: 1:12:32

So it's just, you know it continues to bring me back to to, um, you know that being young, I think, is we, we just draw back to that, we just draw back to the things that really stimulated us in in that context. I love the sound of my wife's laughter too, when she really gets all like yeah, they're right there and I, I love the sound of you know the, my grandson laughing and you know those are sounds that that I listen for now, which I oftentimes, you know, just totally, totally ignored. But it's now becoming very clear that, um, the more you heal, the more you are hearing things that were present and uh, and then the completion of that is in a long about roundabout way. I came back to, you know, listening to the trees when I come up here. So it's real meditation and the force of nature and the breeze, the spirit that's there, you know, involved in that. So it's really a beautiful context and rootedness and from there, you know, comes the beautiful way in which we live.

James: 1:13:45

You know, and I see that in people and you and you and you partner with that and you, you love to connect with that. You know, and there's a lot of people that are on the face of the earth that understand. We had a bunch of hippies come last week and, oh man, were they teaching me how to, how to eat, how to listen, how to you know, how to love them. You know, um and and just be respectful. In a sense that you know. And I think of my marriage too, the one thing that I think sometimes you know, the sensual things go away, but in a way in your marriage you see, a lot of the thing that carries you through the longevity of it is respect and honor.

James: 1:14:30

And we have not done that amongst cultures and we haven't done that begin to surface. You know, as we speak about these things of healing, that the end result really is honoring one another and having that drum in the background and you know singing those songs of community and relationships and partnerships and covenants.

AJ: 1:14:53

Well, I've long said and felt that this humble thing is an honor project above all else. JS: Yeah. AJ: A nd I'm feeling that in spades right now. JS: Cool. AJ: T hanks, guys.

James: 1:15:04

Yeah, thank you.

AJ: 1:15:06

Thanks.

James: 1:15:07

You bet bro.

AJ: 1:15:08

Yeah, thanks Joyce. T hat was James and Joyce Skeet at Spirit Farm on Navajo Diné land in the state of New Mexico. See the links in the show notes, as always, and a few photos on the website, with more on Patreon for subscribing members, with great thanks to James and Joyce for the warmest of welcomes and, of course, to you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible. If you'd like to join us, just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thank you, and thanks also for sharing the podcast with friends. Well, the morning after this conversation over his famed enchiladas, james did pull out an incredible drum and eventually let rip with a chant which he's kindly given me permission to include here. It's a morning at the farm so the house is a wash with activity, but this still brought the humans in the room to a profound halt. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.