Tour of My Simple and Sustainable Home and a Full Life Update

Welcome to my home! I’m grateful to share a tour of “The Hermitage” where I’m living simply, sustainably and closely connected with Earth. I also share a deep life update including my transition from the Non-Ownership Experiment, my upcoming year of foraging 100% of my food and medicine and the possibility of putting down roots in my homeland.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Tour of My Simple and Sustainable Home and a Full Life Update.

Hello Dear Friends, Welcome to my home. Yes. My home. Welcome to my home.

Today I am going to give you a tour of my simple and sustainable life at this place that I have come to call The Hermitage. I’m going to tell you about how I ended up here after owning nothing during my experiment of non-ownership in California, and about my simple and sustainable life and share about this transition from the experiment of non-ownership to my life here. I’m also going to give you an update on my life: what I’m up to, what I’m passionate about, what I’m going to be doing and throughout the last few months. So I am embarking on a year of foraging every single bite of my food and you’re going to see a lot of that here today … my foraging life. And I have just launched the One Million Community Fruit Trees initiative, where we’re going to be planting one million fruit and nut trees through a very grassroots collaborative effort across the United States. So I’m excited to bring you to my house, to introduce you to my simple and sustainable life, and just give you a heartfelt update on what I’m doing today. Come on in, friends.

The first thing you’re going to see inside of my home is food! Food. And more food. And more food and more food. This is all foraged. I have my wild rice that I’m about to bring to the processor. This is all herbs drying on the rack. These are bags of hazelnuts. I’ve got, up here, pears from a nearby feral pear tree. And then lots of apples. Vinegars brewing. Apple cider vinegar. Dyes. This is dyer’s polypore for natural dyeing. And over here, these are all herbs that I have stored up from the summer: Basswood and stinging nettle and wood nettle, and monarda and chaga and reishi and all sorts of sustenance here. As I shared, I’m embarking on a year of foraging 100% of my food and some of you might be saying, “Well, Robin, haven’t you done that?” What I did in the past was, I did a year of growing and foraging 100% of my food. So this means no garden. My food is all coming from “nature.” Not grown by people but from the forests and from the lakes and from the streams and from the fields. I’ll be foraging probably over 200 species of foods: plants, animals, fungi. And that will make my entire diet, down to the salt, the oil and the calories, the spices, the sugar, the medicine … everything that enters my mouth for the entire year, I will be foraging. So, I’m really excited to be sharing that journey with you over the year ahead, and I’m three weeks out from that. I jumped right into talking about the food, but a lot of you are probably wondering, “Well, what is this space that you’re in, Robin?” “Where are you?”

So, I call this The Hermitage and this is actually a sauna right here. A very large sauna inside here. And then, this is the sauna hangout room. And so, when I arrived back in my homeland here in Northern Wisconsin, I decided that I was going to put down some roots here. To explore some long-term projects. And, I came across … I met a man named Roy. I came over to his place for dinner with my friend Jeff, and after just a little while of being here, I just started to feel a really nice connection with Roy. And I actually asked him, after just knowing him for about an hour, if he was open to exploring the possibility of me living here. And we talked, and we got together and he looked at my website and such, and he found me to be what he called a “traveling monk.” And he found it to be, basically, his duty to host the “traveling monk.” And so, it’s a beautiful relationship that Roy and I have formed.

This is a home … or this is a space that he built by hand. This is all local wood for this place. And the second Sunday of every month, they have a sauna, so I have to actually move a bunch of my stuff out in order to make this space into their sauna, which they’ve been doing for forty years. So, this is Roy’s space, and I am so deeply happy to be calling it home, to be nurturing it and stewarding it. But not owning it. This is just a place that I am a loving human being stewarding the spot. I arrived here in the summer and I’ve been here about two months. And this has been just a beautiful summertime space to be. As you can see, it’s all screened windows here. No cooling or heating has been needed. Just being in the natural rhythm of the temperature of the Earth, with some pretty cold nights and some pretty hot days, but it’s a really ideal situation. So, this is really a three seasons living quarters: spring, summer and fall. It does have the wood stove in the sauna, so I’m going to be experimenting with seeing how warm I can keep this place through the winter. And you can check back to see how that’s going. But these … they do have windows that I will put on. Roy and I are really in alignment with our desire to live closely connected to the Earth. And so, there’s no Wi-Fi down here and there’s no electricity either. This really is a little hermitage in that regard. For electricity, I have this small solar lamp that charges, as well as a headlamp. That’s my lighting for now. With the long summer … long summer nights. So far, this has been what I need. With the winter, things will be different. But I’m only here now at this moment. So, I do have my computer as well. And I have a few electrical items and those I charge up at the … up at the house up there. And I’ll show you that. So, no Wi-Fi down here and obviously I have no cell phone for ten years, which means when I’m down here, nobody in the world can reach me. And, I was hoping to be even further into the woods and removed, but this is what I came across and what’s come into my life, and so I’m happy to be down here, at least with no Wi-Fi or electricity down here right now. I love all the natural design there is. The trees that come right from the land, the rough edges. Nature just being nature, not having to remove all of the little pieces, but instead, having a house full of character. Now I don’t really have many physical possessions that I am sentimental about. And everything that‘s decorative is gifts that I’ve found from Earth. So, little bird’s nests and feathers, and this is a red-tailed hawk tail, for example, from a red-tailed hawk that was hit by a car. And over here is the wing of a barn owl. And so, I decorate my place with the gifts of Earth that I can pass on and give as gifts to others, or, if I’m done having them in here, simply return them to the Earth, to break down and turn back into soil. But really, my decorations are my food. That’s what I’m really here for. That’s what this place serves as, as largely a place to store food, prepare food, to eat food, as I’m embarking on this very immersive project. So, I’ve continued to keep this place in similar design to how it was when I arrived here through the building.

So my friend Otis and I built this shelf from leftover wood. And this is my shelf for storing my foods and my medicines. This is my pantry. I love using these alder pieces from some alder that I was clearing to make some more opening in here. And, so, this serves for me, my food, really for me, serves [takes a drink] … apple cider vinegar … serves as my nourishment to life. It brings me so much contentment, so much connection. And so, I don’t really find myself needing much in the way of material stuff, because I feel such a strong sense of purpose and meaning and contentedness in this with these items that I don’t feel a need to add many other items. So this place is largely here for food. I’ll show you a little bit more over here. This is a drying rack that my friend Otis and I created and my friend Brent helped finish it off. So this is where I’m drying a lot of herbs. I use an electric dehydrator as well, but a lot of herbs can go into these shelves. And then this section is all food that’s in the process of being worked with to preserve and to store, like the applesauce, for example. And I just released another video that has much more detail on that that you can watch if you’d like. So coming over to here is the kitchen area.

I’m off the grid down here, which I absolutely love. And so, for cooking, I have a propane stove that hooks up to a propane tank which I have here in this little box that also serves as a seat and a box for me to cut vegetables. So, this is how I cook over the propane stove down here. I’m living largely outdoors here and that means I have a lot of animal friends. And one of them left me a present this morning in my bowl and that is some mouse poop. I’ve definitely been having a challenge with the mice, but I’m also embracing them. They live up in the roof of this place. When I first moved in, this place smelled really bad of mouse poop. Fortunately, I managed to clear that up and I’ve kept the mice at a pretty reasonable level by kind of working on some of the roofing, but the mice have been a little bit of a challenge. At the same time, I don’t want to live anywhere that doesn’t have animals living inside. Because if there’s no animals inside, and I’m not talking about domesticated, but wild animals … that means I am far too cut off from the Earth. So, I always welcome some mice. There’s flies buzzing around. Here’s one right here. You might hear these as we’re filming today. And sure, sometimes they can be a test of my patience. But it’s absolutely worth it. I like to wake up and hear the mice chewing up there because I’m a part of life. And sometimes I’m a little annoyed, too. But I absolutely love it. Let’s go outside.

This is my cold plunge pool. And I get in here just about every other day if I’m not in Lake Superior or one of the creeks nearby. Whoo! The water temperature comes out at about 48 degrees. Ooh! I just filled this up this morning, so it’s in the low fifties. It’s quite chilly. It’s for me, water is life. Cold, clean water is the essence of my being. So deeply important to me. It’s my medicine! In so many ways. And so, I’m really grateful to be on this land where we have a well that comes up from 198 feet and comes out at 48 degrees year around. I have no hot shower here. I haven’t gotten into a shower to my recollection for months. And I’ll continue to cold plunge through the fall absolutely, and in the winter, too. I’m going to enjoy cracking through the ice to get in here at times. Absolutely.

Now, I’m going to show you where I wash the dishes. I have a very simple system. That’s just this little trough of water here. I’ve got my biodegradable dish soap. This is Dr. Bronner’s, which you can get nationwide. But you can also find a local soap company. And this is grey water soap. So when I wash my dishes in here, this water I can just pour and it returns directly back to the earth. I don’t use any products. In fact, I don’t think I’m using anything else but this soap right now, as far as anything that would go back to Earth. But anything that I am using can actually feed and nourish the soil, not pollute it. And that’s the design that I always like to have. All of my water goes back to the earth and anything that’s in that water is not going to harm the earth. And, as far as laundry goes, I just wash my clothes in this as well, and then I hang dry them on the roof. So I’ve pretty much broken free from the washer and dryer. I don’t recall putting anything into a washer in quite some time.

My home would never be complete without a compost toilet. So this is a simple hand-built compost toilet. It’s a five-gallon bucket system. So I poop into it just like you would a flush toilet, but instead of flushing it away and turning it into someone else’s problem, afterward I put a handful of sawdust in there and, once this bucket fills, I dump it out into the compost bin where this will break down, just as other compost does. And it’s a process called humanure. If you’re really interested in learning about this, you can read The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, who also goes by “the Duke of Dooty.” And, it’s an incredibly powerful book. So, this toilet: I actually built in a little squatty system here. And the idea of that is that our body is designed to poop with our legs in a squatting position, not sitting down like this. So I have this right here. The sawdust comes from a local mill, so this is sawdust that is a second-hand product. It’s free, often it’s going to get thrown away. Now, in some of my previous homes, you’ve seen me having the toilet paper plant: the Plectranthus barbatus, or the blue spur flower. Just this ideal plant. And, up here, I don’t have my own toilet paper growing, except that there’s toilet paper growing all over in these woods. I’m using alder, and that works really well. And then I also just use scraps of paper as well. So, this is a closed-loop compost toilet system. Nothing is needed to be bought. There’s no waste. It is all returned to the land in a very safe and effective way. And that soil can actually be used to grow food, rather than creating a problem of polluting our waterways, of using vast amounts of water, electricity, chemicals. None of that is needed with the compost toilet system. For one year, I am not going to use a flush toilet. I’m only returning my poop to the earth via a compost toilet or being in a place in nature where I can return my poop and pee to the earth. And so, I’m three months in and this is a year-long challenge, and it’s a pretty big step forward for me in breaking free from that system of destruction. So for me, I’m very passionate about waste or really, not creating waste. In permaculture we say, “Waste is just a resource out of place.” Nature doesn’t have such a thing as waste. So, this is the amount of garbage that I’ve made in about the last week or so. I’m creating some garbage … mostly plastic, but pretty minimal garbage, and one of the reasons for that is I compost everything that I can. So this is the compost bucket from my kitchen and I’m going to take you to the compost bin.

So, everything that I could possibly put in here that returns to the earth goes into here. Cardboard and paper, food scraps, hair. Anything that comes out of the human body. The poop goes into a separate bin, for humanure, but everything else is going into here. So, I just love being a part of the natural rhythms of the Earth, the natural cycles of the Earth. And doing that in a way that happens through my every daily action: the food I’m eating, the water I’m drinking. Every plant and animal returning to the earth. I don’t have many absolute rules, but if I was to create one for me, it would be that I’d never put a friend in the garbage. And I’m friends with all the plants and animals, so I would never throw away any plant or any animal. It always returns to the earth. That, for me, is living in reciprocity. That, for me, is having a dignified relationship. So, I love having a compost bin.

There are so many mushrooms popping up around the hermitage right now. And, I don’t know who this one is. And I don’t know who THIS one is. And, there are numerous edible mushrooms, I know it, that are growing right now. This might be a Lactarius. This might be edible. But, I don’t have time right now to identify new mushrooms. Fortunately, I’ve harvested probably about sixty pounds of mushrooms that I have stored away. And I have a good amount. So, I’m just grateful to be living in a place where mushrooms are growing right outside of my door and where I get this daily interaction with getting to see the growth and the development and the changing and the being. So, thank you for being, mushrooms.

Here’s the hose and this is where the water comes out. Usually. Heh. Ha ha. That’s never happened before. So, this is where the water comes out. Again. From 198 feet in the ground at 48 degrees, and this hose comes over from the house on the property, which I’ll show you in a bit. When I think about sustainable living, I think of five key colors: food, water, energy, waste and transportation. We’ve talked about food, water, energy, and waste.

And transportation. This is my bicycle, and this is my main way of getting around although I get in cars plenty. More than I would like to, but I do a lot of my life on this bicycle. So, for me, the key is having a rack on the bicycle. And these are called panniers, or bike bags. These allow me to do a lot of foraging, a lot of errands. I can get around and bike twenty miles or so with everything that I need on the bike. I bike barefoot and right now I’m putting on some leather covering to make the pedals a little softer. And this is a great bike for just meeting my basic daily needs. I bought it secondhand for, I think, $850. So, it was definitely an investment, but with the type of biking I do, very worth the investment. As many of you know, I got rid of my car about fifteen years ago now and my driver’s license about ten years ago. And I’ve been without a car since then. And for those wondering, I still do not have a form of ID. I got rid of my passport three years ago, birth certificate, social security card and driver’s license. So, still continuing to live very simply outside of the system in that regard.

I’d like to take you to one of the most peaceful spots: the roof. Come on up. I hang dry my clothes on this simple rack and this is solar energy! A lot of people think you need solar panels to harness the energy of the sun, but there’s so many ways we can harness the energy of the sun, including drying our clothes or all of my dehydrated herbs. Over here is a spot that I have not spent much time in, because you will rarely find me just sitting and not doing anything. I’ve been busy. Between the year of foraging ahead, the One Million Community Fruit Trees campaign, the upcoming Fall Tour, managing a team of people and doing community initiatives, I keep myself very busy. Often from 7 a.m. ‘til 9 p.m., I’m actively doing something. But I’m going to make it a little bit more of a habit to get up here and see it and be in the sun a little bit because I really, really like this spot. So, there’s Roy’s home you can see behind the trees over here. It’s less than a one-minute walk down this pathway.

So, I’m going to show you my little outpost of electricity over there. This is my little electricity and Wi-Fi nook. I’ve got a deep chest freezer, which is storing my food for the upcoming year of foraging all of my food. And you’ll see a lot of plastic in here. I am using more plastic than I have in the past and I minimize plastic from my life everywhere that it is really feasible. There’s some areas where I’m embracing it as far as effectiveness, efficiency, and saving many, many hours. But I’m not liberal with it and I’m very conservative how much I use and just where I need it. And not where I don’t. Or just where it really makes a really big difference. I have minimized my involvement with technology, but I definitely have some electronics. So, I’ve got a pressure cooker and slow cooker combination pot. I’ve got an electric food dehydrator. I’ve got a blender. An electric kettle. I also have a few other small electric items. So, my relationship with technology is one where I minimize my usage of it, and I use it only in the areas of: 1. allow me to be more effectively of service; 2. allow me to accomplish some of my daily tasks in a much more time efficient way. Now, there’s a gray area there, of course. You could go into having hundreds of gadgets to help with time efficiency. But, I have a very small, select number that make a really meaningful difference in my life. And then, I have my computer here. This is a 2013. So, twelve years old. And, this is a new one. I bought it online for, I think, $60? is what it cost to get a 2013 Macbook. And so, that’s what I have, and this is what I use for getting messages out into the world, working with my team. I will say that I’ve gotten my life dialed in where I hardly waste a minute on here, watching unnecessary videos or things like that. It really has become a tool of service and, when I did my multiple months offline doing my experiment of non-ownership, that’s one of the things that stuck with me the most: I have really created a healthy relationship with this. I’m on it more than I’d like, but almost all of it is effective usage of time in service and accomplishing what I’m trying to do. So, pretty high quality.

And then, just another note about my relationship with living on this land. You’ve seen me in the past do work exchanges where I set up a tiny house in someone’s backyard with a clear work exchange. With Roy? We don’t have an exact agreement. What we have is a very heartfelt and deep … well-communicated agreement that we want to be mutually beneficial to each other. Where we’re both learning and growing and accomplishing what we want in life, and that is a non-monetary transaction. There’s myself, Roy, and many people like us who have learned to demonetize our life and make our life much more based around relationships. And that’s what we have. He has extra resources. A lot of the things that I have borrowed from Roy. I have extra resources — not so much material — that I share with Roy, but really getting him involved in a lot of these … in the project and foraging, in what I’m passionate about, and for him … it’s really important to, as he said, host a traveling monk. And so, we have a really, really great relationship and I’m absolutely grateful to have Roy in my life. In the cold months, I’m going to be down in the hermitage as much as I can, but that room up there at the top? That’s my little sleeping nook if I’m not quite making it down here, since this was not designed for winter living.

So, let’s talk a little bit about “stuff.” Look at all these buckets that I have. I have a fair bit of stuff right now. And I’ll talk about that. But first, let’s see what’s in these buckets. Okay. This is food processing. Those are the plum seeds, which will get planted to make more plums. Here, we’ve got a rust bath. And this is for a natural dyeing. I’m glad to see that’s looking nice and rusty. We’ve got black walnut dye. That’s the dye that made this shirt that I’m wearing, brown. What’s in here? Oh, this is some mordant for natural dyeing, as well. I haven’t actually opened this for awhile. Owl feathers from an owl that was hit by a car. And then, here’s more owl feathers as well. So if you see me in person this year, you may get an owl feather as a gift and it will be from this owl that was hit. I found this owl on the interstate traveling from foraging school in Minneapolis back to here, to northern Wisconsin. And, for me, this is a way to honor the owl. I have a hard time leaving my friends dead on the side of the road on the concrete. And, to be able to remove the owl from the road and give it a dignified return to the earth and to be able to have these feathers and share them as a gift of the Earth and a gift of the owl? I love. What I love to do is give gifts that aren’t monetized, but that I have a real meaningful connection and relationship with and to share that meaningful connection and relationship with others through the gift.

More buckets, for storing food, storing medicine. Mostly that’s what the buckets are for. Over here, there’s more food stuff going on. This is evening primrose, and then here’s apples for feeding the deer for hunting a deer. Let’s hope.

Now, a lot of you know that, at one time, I had simplified my life down to having just 44 possessions. They all would have fit into one of those five-gallon buckets during that time. And then, this year, I simplified my life down to owning absolutely nothing. I gave away every single thing that I owned, down to the clothes on my back and my computer, and I existed in Griffith Park in Los Angeles in this experiment of non-ownership.

So, after leaving Griffith Park, I was on a speaking tour for a little while, and then after another month … so, four months in the deep experiment of non-ownership, I began accumulating some possessions again. So, that started with a backpack of basic camping gear. And one of my dear friends and supporters named Dan, out in Sebastopol, took me to a camping store, as well as his own garage full of stuff and managed basically get me the basic things that I needed in order to get into Glacier National Park and be alone in the wilderness for a bit, which I write about in depth on my website. So, basically, I started off with about $600 worth of possessions, all of which were in my backpack. And, that’s a tent and a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, water purifier, pot. All the basic things. And so, that’s how I got started, back into the world of owning some things. I’m very grateful to Dan for supporting me in that way. It was … again, some people might hear that, oh, he’s getting something … taking … but, man, I’ve just seen that often one of the greatest gifts is to be able to give, and, my relationship with Dan … he has shared with me his material wealth, you could say, to some degree, but I’ve brought so much wealth into his life as well. So, there’s a beautiful balance in that navigation of many of my connections and relationships.

One area where I was a little bit torn was my four months in the experiment of non-ownership, of owning absolutely nothing, that really wasn’t as long as I would have liked. I would have loved to have done two years of traveling the country, owning nothing and having those deep discussions. It was a very powerful place to be, very meaningful, and I could see a lot of people in my life were really feeling the message and finding more wholeness and completeness within and dissolving more of the unnecessary parts of self, and dissolving the ego and really finding that deeper relationship with the Earth through deep simplicity. And so, I would have loved for that experiment to go longer. But the experiment absolutely continues. And it will for my entire life.

So, I’ve come back into a place of ownership and I was surprised at how much work it took to get the material possessions. It was something that I underestimated how much time it would be, even with how little I have. And I’ve seen that our physical possessions can be our trap. Some people say our possessions own us. We don’t own them. And I’ve experienced some of that already. Most of what I have in this house I don’t own. It’s stuff that’s existed here already or that I’m borrowing from people in the community. And, there’s no need to go out and get something new when there’s endless quantities of almost everything that we need already in creation. A lot of it sitting in storage sheds. And so, I choose to share. I share so much of myself, and I ask others to share with me as well. So, my life is very much designed around non-linear transactions. There’s not always a clear, “You give me this, and I give you that.” It’s much more of being in a mutually beneficial relationship. And, I give and I take, and there’s a whole balance of that with all of my different relationships.

So, certainly some of the stuff in here I own, but a large, large portion of it is borrowed, and what I do own, as I’ve shared, is largely to hold food, to process food. That’s what makes up a large portion of this. I also have a bookshelf over here and this is mostly foraging books. That’s my focus right now. But also some books that are really, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Thich Nhat Hahn. Books that are really designed to focus nurturing of our relationship with Earth. And then, these are my bags that I bring out with me every time I go out, and these have different … I have my foraging tools in here, and this is actually a bag of bags, so that for all of the things that I find, I have plenty of containers to take them home in. And I always carry my pruners and a couple of tools. And then, a lot of my possessions, as I’ve shared, are items from the Earth, and I have a dream of living in a way where I have a meaningful relationship with every single thing in my living quarters. I know where it came from. People that were involved. The way in which the harvesting of it potentially affected the Earth, for positive or negative. I want to have a deep, meaningful relationship with all of my items. Not just be buying these knickknacks from the store to supposedly add value to my life. So I look at all these items and I remember this trip where the barn owl came from. And that’s the way that I want to be.

My clothing. So, right now, I’m returning to 100% homemade, natural fiber, naturally dyed clothing. So, my clothes are on this shelf. I have very minimal clothes, a small wardrobe. And, all of it is homemade, natural fiber, except this plastic poncho. And this shirt is natural fiber, naturally dyed, but it’s from a small company, not homemade. But otherwise, I’m back into the natural fiber, naturally dyed, homemade clothing. And I am going to be continuing on that path. And I feel a strong, meaningful connection with my clothes. With the black walnut dye. With the sheep that the … that’s the color of the sheep. And to know that every piece of these clothes will return to the earth at the end of their cycle. They won’t go into the trash. They won’t go into a landfill. And then down here is all stuff for natural clothes. I have fiber, fabric, wool, cotton and linen and wool yarn. And different materials in here. Let’s see what else there is. I love this little wooden desk. Just a few things in here. I have a sewing machine as well that I’m using to sew my clothes.

Now here is my money. So, I have $3000 cash, which is right here in this little paper money container, and my total possessions are worth … added up to about $5,500. So, my net worth – everything that I own – is under $10,000 right now. Which is what I’ve kept it at for the last ten years. I’ve made a lifetime vow to earning less than the federal poverty threshold per year. And how I’ve earned my money this year was … a supporter named David gave me $3000 personally, which, in the past, I didn’t accept that, but I’m very happy for people to be able to share that energy in that way to allow me to spend my time being of service, rather than earning money. And then, I earned about seven or 8,000 dollars teaching foraging schools, all of which were available on a donation basis. Anybody could come regardless of any financial contribution. And so, I’m very happy with my livelihood. And I’m continuing to earn under the federal poverty threshold. I have been for the last ten years, and will continue that for as many decades as I am alive. A lot of people who watch my social media and see me with a ‘blue’ check mark and all of that … they assume I must be raking in the dollars from social media, but my social media, my YouTube, is not monetized. I don’t make any money from it. And any collaborations that I’ve done in the past that brought in funds always is donated to nonprofits. Grassroots, nonprofits, mostly Black and Indigenous-led organizations that are doing this work for the Earth. So, I’m in this for the Earth. I’m in this for the plants and the animals and the people. I’m not in this to make money. And those who follow me really can see that. Those who just see me in passing in a short viral video, they don’t see that. But, my life is deeply demonetized and I’ve made a substantial list of vows to keep me living in the service of the people.

So, this is my bed. Aww … I’m so happy to be here! Aww … gosh! I really love this little home. So, this isn’t my dream bed. I was, hopefully by now, going to have made one out of cattail fluff, but instead, it’s just a foam mattress. I think it came from inside of a sailboat. But, I do have my wool blankets and my cotton sheets and my feather pillow, so overall, this is a great place to be. And I wake up and I look out into the sky and I hear the animals throughout the night, including the mice up in the rafters, and I love this little spot. Underneath it, there’s more storage. And I’ve got some kitchen materials, tarps and sheets for foraging, camping gear, mostly foraging stuff down there.

In my experiment of non-ownership, I learned how little I really need. And I have held that with me. And one area that has changed is my personal hygiene. So since January 26th … it’s mid-September, so I think that’s eight months … I have not used a toothbrush, toothpaste or dental floss. And this is my tooth twig. This is a plant called Myrica gale, or sweet gale. And I’ve used different twigs. And, it’s been working very effectively. And I use different grasses and pine needles for my floss. And that works quite effectively. And I also have a little nut pick that I use as a tool as well for a little bit of a deeper clean.

So I am experimenting … and I have been for quite some time already, but continuing to deepen the experiment of this belief that I am of the Earth, the Earth can take care of me. I can meet all of my basic needs through relationships with the Earth. Not needing a lot of these consumer goods that are basically being pushed on us, telling us that we aren’t complete unless we have this, and we’ll never be enough unless we have this. So, I’m taking it to a pretty deep level. And, well, if it ends up that I lose all my teeth, I have really good news. And that is that Gandhi was pretty influential. He did a lot for the world. And he didn’t have many teeth. So I’m not too concerned. This is the lavender essential oil, which I also learned that I don’t need anymore, but, ooh, that one’s still nice. I still go for the essential oil. And just a few items. I do have some body balm and some coconut oil. So I am swishing my mouth with coconut oil. And I’ve decided that during the year of foraging, if I’m going to do that, I have to make my own coconut oil by harvesting coconuts down in Florida. So yes, that’s just a little bit of my personal hygiene. And, of course, anything here can return to the Earth. There’s no poisoning of the Earth around me through my personal hygiene.

For those of you who came here for a tour of a tiny house, and are not particularly interested in my life, now would be a fine time to stop watching this video. For those who are really interested in my purpose, my passion, my desire to be of service, my deep work to exist in a state of harmony, then I very much invite you to stay here now with me, and I’ll probably share for, perhaps, twenty minutes. Maybe ten. For more of an update on my life and what’s alive for me right now and what’s going on since my last substantial update.

So, I just mentioned my vows. I first made my vows in 2015. And I make them every four years. I do that in alignment with the presidential election cycles. I’m happy to say that my vows are all going very well. I don’t even think about my vows on any given day, or even any given week or potentially even any given month. They are so deeply my standard. They are just my normal mode of operation now, that I don’t have to think about them. Now, one of my recent vows was non-sexuality. Not having sex or romance with people, humans, human beings. And that is just a six-year vow. It’s not a lifetime vow. It may turn into a lifetime vow. And the way things are going, I’m leaning toward that direction. But I want to share just a small update on that. I’m almost three years into practicing non-sexuality and non-romance. And it has been very, very impactful on my life. In only a positive way. No downside really at all. And it just freed up so much time to be focused on what I want to be focusing on. I have learned … I only have so many hours and minutes in a day. And so many days in a year. And to step outside of that has freed up so much more of my time to be able to be sharing with you, to be effectively of service, to be immersing in these deep projects, to be deepening my relationship with the Earth. And so, ultimately, the reason that I feel such a level of confidence in continuing that vow of non-sexuality is the gains that I have gotten over the last three years have been deeply, deeply worth it. And one of those is my love for the Earth. And my love for everything. I don’t lean in on the love for a particular woman anymore. I lean in on a love for everything. So this would be, for me, the practice of interconnectedness and interbeing and, for me, this is connected to deep presence. You can be in a romantic relationship and still be working on all of these things. No doubt about that. But, for me, I’m really able to even more deeply work on all of this when I have removed that aspect of romance from my life. But I would say that my romance has increased greatly in the last three years, and that is my romance for the Earth. For the plants and animals. I feel such a strong love. Such a deep love that was not there before.

At the core of my objective is to live simply so that others may simply live. That is a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, who has been one of my biggest influences and inspirations over the last decade. This is a lot of what I’m talking about today and showing you … it’s about living simply. And so, what that means, live simply so others may simply live, is that especially now, in 2025, we live in a time where our lives have been so filled with consumer convenience, so filled with cheap, throwaway living, so filled with technological fixes, and technological control of our own minds, you could say, that through almost every daily action that we take, we are involved in systems of destruction, exploitation, and oppression through our food, our water, our energy, our waste, our transportation, our money, everything. And so, to live simply is to opt out of that and to say, “I am not going to meet my needs in a way that exploits and pillages and takes from others. I am going to meet my needs in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.” And so, some people see living simply … and they don’t see the depth. But voluntary simplicity is the essence of the depth of nonviolent existence, of working to topple these systems of oppression and exploitation. And to some it may seem passive, but some of the greatest leaders who have ever existed have focused on living simply as a means of resistance, and that is at the core of my strategy for how I am living my life and the messages that I am choosing to share with you.

And so, there’s so much power in the simplicity. And another part of that power is finding wholeness and completeness within. That’s what a lot of this space is for me. This is the space that allows me to have my basic needs met, where I can put that extra time into becoming a whole and complete human being. Because my belief is real simple. If we become whole and complete human beings, we cannot be exploited. If we are whole and complete, we cannot be tempted by systems of destruction and systems of exploitation. If we are whole and complete, we will not put up with taking advantage of others and exploiting others any more. So, becoming whole and complete also is not passive. It is a very deep strategy for overcoming these systems through building peace and contentment inside. And so, the experiment of non-ownership … that’s one of the deepest aspects I got from it — just more of a sense of daily contentment, daily joy, daily peace. When I was in Griffith Park with nothing, it was easier to experience that. Now, I barely ever have enough time in a day to accomplish what I want to.

And my biggest challenge right now is that I’m busy. There’s a lot of moving parts between the foraging and the processing and the preservation, making all of my clothes, creating videos, writing, managing a team of people, planning this upcoming tour, the Million Fruit Trees initiative. It’s a lot. But I have managed to hold onto, in a very concrete way, to hold onto that peace and contentment and that joy. And sure, I haven’t been present in all of this, and I’ve often been thinking about what’s next or what I still need to complete, but the work is paying off in just being in a much more overall state of balance and harmony and I hope to bring that to all of my relationships. I’m still practicing Nonviolent Communication or Compassionate Communication and sharing that with everybody that’s in my life through the daily practice and speaking about it. So that continues to be a pillar in my life.

Well my friends, it is a deep relief to record this video for you. I have been hoping to record this for a month or two and, in a sense, recreating my physical life from scratch was a much bigger task than I had planned. Speaking of recording the video, I’d love you to see Patrick. “Hello. As I try to avoid this bumblebee. It’s quite nice to be here in nature. It’s very organic. And you are so authentic. It’s kind of like a meditation just being out here. And the bee is finally gone. So I can relax.” I hope …. Well, let’s all say ‘thank you’ to Patrick. Patrick is volunteering to be here and helping me to share this message in a very grassroots way. So let’s give a big ‘thanks’ to Patrick. And I’m glad to hear that, for him, it’s like a meditation to be here and I hope that many of you are getting that through the video. Although you’re on technology and on the screen, I hope that this helps you to deepen your connection with Earth, to deepen your connection with yourself, to deepen your connection with the plants and animals and with your community. That’s really my objective.

And so, I’m feeling really, right now, I’m feeling very excited and hopeful and inspired. I’ve just gotten my life to a place where I can finally start producing videos again, and finally start writing. I’m kind of to this foundation where my basic needs are set for now and it’s time for me to be able to put many more hours into being of service. So, what’s coming next is my fall speaking tour. I’m just doing a one-month speaking tour from Portland, Maine down to Richmond, Virginia, with New Haven, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Philly, New York City, DC, a couple areas around DC; and then, I may be missing a few spots, but the website has them all; and then from Richmond over through Ohio, Cincinnati and Columbus, through Chicago and then ending back up here, which, by the way, I’m in Ashland, in my hometown, and I’ll talk about that in a moment. So, if you want to come out and you want to see me in person, then that’s where you can. You can go to robingreenfield.org/foragingyear. If you want me to come to your community, you can fill out the form on there, sharing your interest and your desire, and if you want to host an event to bring this message to your community, that’s what I’m going to be doing.

This winter, I’ll be in Florida for a couple of months. And so, I’ll be doing a lot of events in Florida, and between Wisconsin and Florida. And then, in the spring, around May, I may go up to Southern California, and I may go all the way from Southern California up to Washington on this foraging tour: foraging speaking tour, connecting with people and connecting with communities. So, there’s a lot of opportunity to get together, to share a hug in person, and I’m just so deeply hopeful that this year of foraging will be a powerful tool in helping us to see that the Earth provides us with everything that we need. And that through a relationship with the Earth, we can find peace, contentment, joy, harmony, happiness. And I’m feeling hopeful, excited, invigorated and I know a lot of you are as well and I’m so grateful to be here with you.

The last note that I’ll share is that where exactly I am is, I’m outside of Ashland, Wisconsin, which is where I grew up, in the countryside about ten miles from Ashland and about five miles from Washburn. And I am exploring the possibility of putting down roots here in my homeland long term. I’m interested in creating a simple living center where people can come and live to a large degree similar to this, but in community and learn all the basics to be able to go back and take this home with you. The inside and the outside aspects of it. So I’m exploring the possibility of creating that center in Wisconsin and that’s really the impetus for the possibility of setting down roots long term. So, I’ll keep sharing possible updates for that. And if there’s anybody in the area who has a large piece of land who would like to see that come to fruition, reach out and that could be a possibility.

So, there’s so much to share and I hope that wasn’t too much for those of you who are still here. And for those of you who want more, there will be more. There’s so much more that I would have liked to have shared, but I am happy to have been able to share this deep update on my life, what I’m passionate about right now, what I’m doing right now, and what I want to be doing with you in the next year ahead.

So, I love you all very much and I’ll see you again soon.