#56: Magical Garden Shambhala Living

In this episode, we gonna be talking gardening and magic and nature...

This was an email I wrote in preparation for call with Sam Powers, a friend and Australia’s top magician and illusionist who I was seeking advice from. I am considering making my way back in some fashion to my own magic career and exploring in what capacity I could bring some ideas together.

Some background of the why and what I’m looking to achieve. As you may or may not know Ace McDermott (r.i.p) was my main inspiration to begin a career in magic. I met him when I was 17 (26years ago). It lit up a spark that I had as a boy when I deeply believed in magic and would religiously get the magic kits at the royal Easter show and watch any David copper field I could. I was convinced it was real and always dreamed of being a magician. However as a teenager my belief in magic faded and or I ‘grew up’ learning that it was not real just like I had learned about Santa and all other wonderful and magical realms. That is until I saw Ace up close and within minutes my whole world of magic came rushing back and the world lit up again with wonder and delight. This led to working at the prop shop and a satisfying decade of bringing this magic to many others. Still I longed for more, to go beyond the art of illusion and peel back the veil of perception.  Eventually my practice of martial arts, yoga and meditation led me on an inner journey. This opened the doors to the concept of Shambhala, which to me was a magical way of living. I read books about the ancient concept and even traveled to Nepal to find out more about this place or way of living. In the end it led me right back to where I started, back in the here and the now and seeing that all around us.

Magic really exists. In every sunrise and every plant, in every aspect of nature was magic. I realised it was not a place but a way of living with a sacred view upon the natural world. This concept coupled with becoming a parent and moving to QLD and wanting to provide for my family I wanted to learn more about nature, health, food, plants. This is when I met a local farmer and saw food growing in abundance and it hit me just how miraculous it was for food to grow straight out of the soil. I stared to learn just how precious and magical the soil really was and also just how precarious our situation was in regards to how we humans were treating our soil. I started to peel back the curtain of our unsustainable food system and realised that our life giving Soil was dangerously disappearing and found that not many were talking about it and even less taking action to regenerate it. I set out to buy my own farm (a 12 acre organic farm) and called it Shambhala Farm as a way to bring my love of magical living and soil/food life together. For the past 10 years I put on the regenerative farmer hat and got my hands dirty learning how to regenerate the most valuable resource that gives life for our human civilisation. I learned that our fast ways of living are harming it and are causing a chain of devastating events that if we don’t take immediate action could be catastrophic for humanity. It’s the mega industrial food system that is causing the problem, in an effort for efficiency it reduces diversity from thousands of species down to single mono crop species which devastated the soil life on mass scales and turn the living soil to lifeless dust. The good news and the solution I learned comes full circle back to community and magic. 

The good news and the solution I learned comes full circle back to community and magic . In every single seed contains the blueprints for generations of forests and diversity. In a single teaspoon of healthy garden soil lives over a billion different diverse microscopic organisms that are essential for life to thrive. Every garden becomes a magical wonderland filled with the most amazing life supporting properties that stitch together a global tapestry that gives hope for the ge