Just Inroads

I am chronically ill since childhood. I know what it's like to be bedridden for too long. I move around now, no matter how much it hurts, because I know what it's like to not be able to move. I used to sleep for 16 of every 24 hours. It did not seem to matter how restrictive I got with my diet. I would fast all the time to try and feel better. It would take days of not eating to find any healing and the positive effects on my energy were short-lived once I started eating again. I was trying to figure out what I was allergic to and it seemed like the answer was “all the food.” I do know what is happening in my body now because I healed my gut lining. I only figured out how I had to go about healing my gut because of not understanding what “GAPS” meant while watching homesteaders on youtube. The place I found your YouTube channel was a hopeless, dark place for me. I had terrible vertigo and an 8 month old baby so I could not move around very much at all. Stuck in basically one place for about 6-weeks, I went through all the vlogs from The Great American Farm Tour. I really only knew everything wrong with the industrial food system before that. I didn't know any of the ways that I could possibly make things right for my body, or at least for my children, without better food. Yours was the first voice of hope out of that place. A practical solution existed, and bonus, it can be executed by someone living with chronic illness! Even if it was out of physical reach in those moments, the existence of the lifestyle mattered the most. And watching your family continue to build for your future constantly helps to remind me of how much more hope I have in mine. Because the intersections of my life that made me chronically ill at a young age are genetic and inherited. I feel my body’s malfunctions coming for my children; my future. Or, at least, I did until I started thinking with an abundance mindset.

I did not copy your lifestyle to be where I am right now. I do not have nearly the roots or foundation you have in terms of land or people who wish you well. But seeing how you think through things absolutely helped me find ways I could help myself and my family. "Every day and every way I am getting better" is not your mantra by rights, but the voice in my head that says it is your voice. "One percent improvement" is sometimes all my heart/soul has to convince my body to move. Your lifestyle has vouched for choices that my family would otherwise consider crazy. Starting with the part where the number of things I have decided to grow is infinite compared to what I was growing before the first time I heard you say "just plant." I had only a piece of why my body could not function before I started listening to you and the people you amplify. Now I have all the pieces. Finding those pieces started and ended with truly healing my gut lining. I believe anything is possible with patience and intention applied. I intend one day to develop land into a homestead including a permaculture food forest. Until we get there, I am gratefully making do with what we have.

In fact, I have found healing without any real roots or land in two main ways. The first is to unapologetically think about starting and sustaining other lives, especially lives that feed my family. No apologies and no fear about making my own food because you can't feed people with regrets or stories. This attitude is the basis of my mental health stability in these times. Just grow things because there are plenty of ways growth can be stopped, but I don’t have to be one of the ways.
The second is by shrinking down into microscopic worlds. I have a few examples but the pinnacle is with tibicos SCOBY. I am growing my own concentrated probiotics. I don't have pastures, but I can raise billions of single-celled organisms in a bottle of juice over the next 12 hours and consume them while they are alive in higher concentrations than exist in anything I could buy. The SCOBY for tibicos (also called water kefir) alive in my gut has given me the ability to be awake for 8 hours more a day.

I know all to well how much stress disrupts the immune system and also how stress can restrict a person’s desire to try something new. I usually spend a few weeks bringing people bottles of already fermented tibicos. I vary the flavours and give them a chance to experience the effect of incorporating this living food into their diet. Eventually, I have to teach them how to make the tibicos themselves because they have developed preferences and can serve themselves better than I can or they want to drink more tibicos than I can make. I like to provide people with their first experience consuming tibicos because I can vouch easily for my own ferment and I enjoy asking and hearing about their experience. But, most of my friends and family are scattered across North America, so I have also worked on methods to share tibicos without traveling. Now, the best way for me to share tibicos SCOBY with anyone is with Tibicos:ins.

The research interests in tibicos SCOBY have increased exponentially in recent years because it is so helpful to human bodies and fighting disease. I believe access to this SCOBY is a human birthright, as we all have ancestors who lived with an abundant version of tibicos in their diet, although it was called different things in different parts of the planet, the microbiome is the same. The benefit to gut health is the same. Drinking tibicos is a true return to roots of evolved digestion and immunities. The food/pharma companies have no incentive to highlight the self-perpetuating, abundant version of the tibicos SCOBY. I want to convince every human to grow tibicos SCOBY themselves before any special interests can add barriers and promote versions of tibicos that convince typical people it is not accessible to them without lots of money.