Why We Changed Our Name ... Again!
Thoughts on change and how we are undergoing constant expression at the moment
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Welcome new subscribers and old friends! This is not your typical post but I promise that we will soon (Monday in fact!) resume as normal.
A quick reminder: if you live in Central Texas, I will be teaching a 1-day Sacred Ecoliteracy Course on August 10th in Lockhart (outside of Austin). We will be talking with and communing within the Animal and Plant Nations, finding ourselves in the wild (what I call the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are) and enjoying wonderful community together. Click here to learn more!
Now to my point…
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“I didn’t think authors wanted to hear our thoughts.”
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Two. We changed our Name … again.
Yes, those who have been here with us the longest will remember when this community was called, Denuding the Illusion. Then, it became The Wildland Chronicles. Today, it is simply: Unshod.
This journey has been a journey of turning inward. But, to understand this final transition, we must understand my evolution.
In 2015, Morgan and my professional lives as farmers began. We started farming full-time. We were swept away by the opportunities presented to us to reawaken the agrarian ethic, rebuild the local food system, regenerate the land through agriculture and the like. We learned Permaculture with Geoff Lawton in New Zealand / Australia. We studied under Joel Salatin here in Virginia.
In 2018, we together co-founded the Robinia Institute, the Mid-Atlantic’s Savory Institute Hub. We worked all over the country teaching, consulting, and monitoring on all things Holistic Management and Regenerative Agriculture. All told, our work touched over 300,000 acres of farmland during this time, most of the farms being no more than 50 to 150 acres. We were busy. Very busy.
But, by 2021, with the publication of my book, Wild Like Flowers, we began to realize that the “regenerative agriculture” that we were experiencing in our own lives was not the ethos popularly regarded as such abroad. It was here that Denuding the Illusion was born—in the confused haptics of realizing that a dangerous Illusion was progressively munching on what we believed, at the time, mattered most. Greenwashing is what you can call it. We saw it as an Illusion. We wrote scholarly articles, filmed unscholarly videos, and keynoted conferences on this subject until we were blue. And we turned blue.
Come 2022, we were losing friends by the handful1 and by 2023 it was clear that we needed to lose some more. I wrote Stagtine: Kincentric Rewilding, Science, & A Tale of Letting Go, which, although supported and praised by folks like Fred Provenza (who wrote the foreword) and The Weston A. Price Foundation and many Indigenous mentors and friends, the hoards of those yet under the illusion continued onward.
And then we realized. This is not about changing your mind. It is about exploring our own. It is about meeting our hearts. This is not about denuding the illusion that you have found yourself within. It is about telling stories, waking up, meeting ourselves for the first time as mammals and not modern and chained people, about throwing off the shackles of what we perceive separates us from the world around us (our shoes) and running Unshod within the flaxenhaired fairyland that has been patiently waiting for us.
Unshod is not about changing the world. It is about leaving the right kind of prints in the clay for our grandchildren to run in. It is for those who come after us to know how to pick this up, the life in the ruins, after the collapse. The ruins and the collapse of what? Not Earth. She is fine. Not the Great Spirit. They are fine. Civilization—that mucky bog holding hostage some damn fine soil.
Both our podcast and this community which hosts the podcast are now called Unshod. This is why. Now you have it.
P.S. Robinia is no longer a Savory Hub. We won’t bring this up or mention it again.
One fella, the largest thought leader in the regenerative agriculture space wrote me an email arguing that “You are single handedly ruining the regenerative movement!” Ha. I have two hands you bugger and I am using both of them.
“Unshod is not about changing the world. It is about leaving the right kind of prints in the clay for our grandchildren to run in.” This fills me with hope. Thank you.
more than two hands as you have people alongside you - allying with you - and therefore we dont have mane arms we have locked arms that build strength in our binding - not locked that nothing passes through - for many things must pass through.. but locked in their braided commitment to the footprints ...