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 chook pellets during the hungry months and not knowing until much later that this was actually an extraordinary gift. We talked about what it means to land in a place that is not your ancestral homeland and slowly, through community and seasons and the length of the shadows, come to belong there anyway. We talked about the vision quest — the ritualised death of the maiden, the emergence of what comes next. About the part of Jade's life that had been keeping her in her head when her bones knew something different. About the moment she stepped into the sacred circle, took her clothes off, and said out loud: take me home, mama. And we talked about urgency — the question I carry and I suspect you carry too: is what we're doing enough? Jade's answer is one I want to keep close. She goes to the bush. She has two sit spots — one by still water, one by running water — and she lets the noise become quiet. She redefines what enough looks like. She has compassion for herself. Because without that, she says, you are not in a generative way of being. You render yourself useless. You cannot do even what you are already doing. Go gently. Even if only for the next hour. Take a deep breath. This conversation is for anyone tending something — a garden, a community, a food system, a family, a vision — and wondering how far the seeds are actually travelling. About Jade Miles Jade Miles is a local food advocate, educator, author, and regenerative heritage fruit farmer at Black Barn Farm in north east Victoria on Palanggang Medang country. She has spent 25 years watching the agricultural heartbeat of her region slow — and has been quietly, persistently rebuilding it through food coope I'd love to hear from you. Text me here. Support the show _____ MORAG GAMBLE Founder, Permaculture Education Institute Morag's CoursesPodcast BlogPodcast on YouTubePodcast InstagramLinkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness. In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be? This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care. This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country. If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
