My Life Manifesto - Realizing My Dream of a Permaculture Healing Community Center

I grew up in the redwood forests. I was an only child, and because of this, I spent the majority of my time in the woods talking to deer.

I think they used to talk back to me, as did the trees. I am currently rediscovering those conversations with nature.

I also grew up in a high school that was socially oppressive except for their outdoor education program. I spent countless weekends in the backcountry on 3-4 day backpacking trips.

I learned how to fly fish for my own dinner after an exhausting 10 hour trek up and down the boulders of Desolation Wilderness.

I was shown how to forage for miners lettuce to add to our handmade calzones cooked over a makeshift campfire grill in the windy embrace of the Lost Coast.

I spent three days alone in the Californian desert, learning how to tell the time from the position of the sun and what voices could be found in the midnight howls of the wind.

I have spent the past 22 years of my life learning from nature, and I will forever be a child of the earth and a student of the earth.

And now, I hope to become a healer of the earth, and in doing so I hope to heal myself and the communities around me.

Over the past four years of my college career, I’ve spent searching for my path in life. Slowly, without force, it came to me. I did not need to intern at 10 different companies to test out the perfect job. I did not need to write resumes for 4 weeks straight in hopes of an answer. I did not need to take online surveys to tell me what job would suit me. Rather, I just needed to sit with myself for those four years and listen.

And over that time period, my dream came to me. My dream found me in meditations, at the end of a long hike, while falling in love, when enjoying a delicious meal, when joining together with friends in ceremony, and when traveling and pushing the very fibers of my being to the farthest stretches of the human imagination and the deepest center of the human soul.

My dream is to create a permaculture healing community center. I was beyond blessed to be raised on a beautiful 3.5 acre piece of land that my parents will so generously pass down to me some day. I want to honor this land and keep the integrity of the native redwood forest. I want to make sure it is never parceled up and sold for housing developments. I also want to gift the land back to the community. I want to gift it back by creating a center for the community.

My vision with the land is to first create a permaculture farm. I want to make it an education-based permaculture farm. It will offer field trip programs, after school programs, and home-school programs so that the children of today can be inspired to become the farmers of tomorrow. It will offer community tours and demonstration workshops so that permaculture is accessible to city-slickers as well as rural livers. Perhaps it can also one day host Permaculture Design Courses.

I would like to integrate a healing center and community center on site. In a yurt in the redwood forest, I will hold sound healing therapy, community yoga, women’s groups, men’s groups, cacao ceremonies, reiki, and many more gatherings. In such a “successful” community, we have overvalued the individual and undervalued the community. We have privatized our material wealth, and in doing so we have also privatized our hearts and souls. I hope to be a part of the abundance economy, where we recognize that there is more than enough for everyone and we base our exchanges on sharing, collaboration, and a sense of gratitude. The first place to begin with this shift is in connection with other humans. I want to create a space that facilitates and offers genuine connection with fellow beings.

I would also like to create a health kitchen that is also a youth job training program. I would like to salvage fruits and veggies that would otherwise be wasted and create preserves, jams, pickled veggies, and more that can be offered back to the community in farmers markets. I would like to hire youth in the community who are “at risk”. Why? Because we cannot have environmental harmony without having social harmony.

I would also like to create a side project of “Food not Lawns”. This project would also be a youth job training program for at risk youth in the local community. We would offer community members a service where we could convert their lawns into a thriving food forest. The service would be on a sliding scale, because access to healthy food should not be just for the privileged elite.

Why do I want to do this?

I believe that as a society we are deeply disconnected from the Earth. This disconnect has caused a multitude of social and environmental problems. I believe that one reason we have been disconnected from the Earth is because we are disconnected from our food, which is our life source that is gifted to us from the Earth. Most kids think that their dinner comes from a grocery store rather than from the soil and cannot tell the difference between an eggplant or pepper in a garden.

I hope that by creating a permaculture farm where people can reconnect to the source of their food, they will also be able to reconnect with the source of their life - the Earth. And in doing so, hopefully gratitude for our home will grow, the feeling of interconnectedness with other humans and living beings will grow, and the seedling for inner peace can be planted or watered.

I also will not be doing this alone. I want to give a large thank you and deep gratitude to people in my life who have gotten me to this place and who will be co-creators of this dream. My parents have created a beautiful home and beautiful family. How they did it is beyond me. My father grew up in an orphanage in Alabama, and my mother grew up in deep poverty in Communist China. They both never had stable parent figures or environments. Yet, somehow they were able to gift me with this beautiful life. I want to thank my younger brother, who we adopted when he was 6 years old. He has shown me that inner love never dies, even when life does everything possible to stomp it out a hundred times. I want to thank my ex-boyfriend and first love, Victor Lucas, who has taken the past four years to journey with me “pushing the very fibers of our beings to the farthest stretches of the human imagination and the deepest center of the human soul.” Our love is an endless source that I am forever grateful for. I want to thank Sita StarChild (@sitastarchild), who has moved in with me and has given me the strength and inspiration to co-create this beautiful farm - she will be the multi-dimensional healer offering community sessions in the yurt. I want to thank Brooke Loving-Bagwell (@brookeloving) for showing me the value of community and for bringing me into hers, and for showing me how beautiful life can be when you lead from your heart. I want to thank the future WWOOFers who will be joining us soon to co-create the space, and I want to thank the future community members who will one day be a part of this dream and hopefully find peace on the land and in the people.

The dream has taken root!!! You can find us at cozybonesfarm.com :-) Peace and blessings to everyone.