Cultivating Resilience: Finding Security and Happiness Through Permaculture and Natural Living

The modern world often prescribes a narrow path to security: climb the corporate ladder, acquire a larger house, and accumulate material wealth. But what if true resilience, abundance, and happiness could be found by turning away from this script and rooting oneself deeply in the earth? This is the core philosophy explored in a recent episode of the Less House More Moola Podcast, featuring natural living advocates Jesse and Johanna Boudreau of Chimayó, New Mexico.

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Transcript

Less House More Moola Podcast (00:01)
Hey friends, Laura here. I wanted to jump in before this episode and just let you know a little bit of the backstory here. I have done some foraging walks in the past and was really excited to get out into the mountains here and learn more about the plants that are around me. I feel like learning about the food and medicine that's growing on the earth around us is going to be a really important part of our resilience for the future.

So I jumped in on this forging walk with Jesse and Johanna of Zia Elemental Permaculture here they're over across the Espanola Valley from me in Chimayo, which we'll talk a good bit about in the podcast.

And so we hiked around in the Santa Fe mountains and identified plants. And I realized that plants are just like people. It takes you like seven times to see the same plant before you actually recognize it and know what it is and know what it's for and know how you can bring it into your life. So it was one of those opportunities to get to know some things, maybe not ⁓ perfectly, but just some exposure to the beautiful

plants that are growing in the mountains here. So it's like, I should definitely record an episode with Jesse and Johanna. So I scheduled some time with them. I went out to their home site and wouldn't you know it, it's a really challenging sometimes in Northern New Mexico to get some good enough internet signal in order to record a podcast.

but I did get to spend a bunch of time with them. I got to see all of the work that they've done on their land over the past 20 years. And it was very inspiring for me and the work that I'm doing here on our land, not that far away. So it was a great visit. And then I said, well, we'll just record virtually when you all can get some good signal. more weeks went by and I finally got them on a recording a couple of weeks ago.

And of course, it wasn't perfect. So the audio is gonna be less than perfect this time. But definitely they have some really great things to say about incorporating different forms of resilience in our life and how we root ourselves in communities that maybe aren't our own. And so I think their wisdom is super beautiful in this moment in time. So make sure you...

Stay with it. Audio is not perfect, but their words are. So thank you for listening.

Less House More Moola Podcast (03:24)
Well, Jesse and Johanna, welcome to Less House, More Moola podcast. So good to have you.

Jesse and Johanna (03:30)
Thanks for having us. Great to see you. Good to be here.

Less House More Moola Podcast (03:36)
It's so good to be able to do recordings with my, not exactly neighbors, but just across the valley there to spend time with people who I know locally, who are doing amazing things and alternative living. And it was good to connect with you on our foraging walk back, gosh, months ago. So thanks for being willing to talk about your life and the home that you've built for yourselves.

Jesse and Johanna (04:03)
Of course it's fun. It's like our pleasure and our joy. This lifestyle, think ⁓ for a lot of us, part prepper and part like this is just the way we want to live in. So, it's fun to be in community with you.

Less House More Moola Podcast (04:17)
So if you would introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the home that you have and how you've approached that from a permaculture lens.

Jesse and Johanna (04:28)
My name is Johanna Boudreau and gosh, I grew up in Chimayó, New Mexico and moved away briefly. And then when Jesse and I got married, we eventually ended up back here in Chimayó where we home birthed our two younger sons. Our oldest son was born in Santa Fe, also at home. And yeah, we've just been, I guess,

really focused on natural life and natural living the whole time we've been together. Foraging was a big part of ⁓ that as well as music. That's how we came together mostly playing music and dreaming of living a natural life and shared, know, that had those shared interests as well as like interests and sort of occult wisdom and stuff.

For myself, my name is Jesse Boudreau I grew up in Los Alamos, which is an interesting place to grow up. know, 10,000 indigenous people used to live there and then it became the birthplace of the atom bomb and et cetera. So ⁓ it was interesting because we were always outside, playing, hiking, climbing, snowboarding,

And I just fell in love with nature and some of my early experiences with like, shamanic plant use ⁓ kind of got me around to this revelation that human beings aren't bad for the earth, but our way is bad for the earth. And I was just that those experiences motivated me to seek out a natural, simplistic, healthy.

life. That's been my focus since I was like maybe 18, 19. I went to an expanded permaculture school called Ecoversity it was like a two month deep dive into permaculture plus like six months apprenticeship. And then along the way I started to have health issues.

with gluten and casein And so we started with sort of the leading of my wife and some other friends started to explore. At the time, I started exploring raw food and that got me ⁓ interested in herbalism, which I was already interested in. Then Hanna and I got really passionate about that foraging a lot and went to the School of Evolutionary Herbalism with Sajah Popham

and have been studying and practicing herbalism now for about 10 years and doing permaculture for about 20. I grew up with a lot of herbalism and my family's been in Chimayó for 14 generations and they would gather plants for medicine, for food, and also for using as plant dyes for weaving because my family's ⁓ weaving family. So yeah, the Ortegas.

for nine generations, including myself, have been weaving here in Chimaeno specifically. yeah, herbalism is just something that I grew up with living with the land and in community in extended family. And his interest and my interest combined have inspired us to just build what we have now.

So that's been a whole another journey of our homestead here. like she mentioned, we came about, I guess, 24 years ago. 23, actually. Tomorrow will be 23 years since we moved into this house. It was my uncle's house first, and we moved into it a month before our son Jeremy was born. So we're here in Chimayó northern New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, and we've been developing

food forest gardens here and cob buildings and offering workshops. So it's fun.

Less House More Moola Podcast (08:32)
Tell us a little bit more, unpack that.

for us a little bit. When I visited your home, you told me that when you had first come there, that the land was all just scrub and hadn't been used for growing So tell us about the history and the evolution of your home and kind of how you use that piece of land in that place to follow this path of ⁓ permaculture and herbalism and all the things that you

study and that you teach others.

Jesse and Johanna (09:01)
Well, yeah, it was pretty much a blank slate when we came here, just cactus and grass for the most part. Lots of goat heads. Her uncle had planted a couple fruit trees and there were like two or three here. But before that, this was like horse pasture.

so it was pretty much a blank slate. after, studying permaculture and I've also been installing, rain water harvesting, food scapes, ⁓ and sort of native meadow gardens and stuff in the Santa Fe area and Los Alamos and such. ⁓ so I got hip to the whole thing of perennial agriculture.

centropic agroforestry and how you can grow, Mollison challenges as students to grow eight acres of food on one acre by layering and growing ⁓ mostly perennial plants. They get larger and larger every year. They work in guilds in sort of synergistic communities when you, appropriately design, so we've been installing rainwater harvesting

Hügelkultur swales and infiltration ponds and then planting out these layers of like, the herbaceous layer of things like mint and raspberries and nettles and a lot of herbs that we use for our herbalism business, and then, the next layer is going to be, your shrubs and things like, we have like sea buckthorn and nitrogen fixers and all these things. then,

The next layer is going to be like your semi dwarf fruit trees and then your overstory. And so in that way, you have this layered system that it takes less and less work. just maintain pruning and weeding and then harvest, and doing chop and drop to build the soil. So. And the mushrooms, can't forget the mushrooms. We, ⁓ brought in as much, ⁓ organic material as we could on site as possible.

in terms of leaves and straw and wood chips and we make biochar and throw it in to our chicken coop ⁓ so that they can populate the biochar and with wood chips and stuff and then we gather that stuff and put it out in the... So trying to combine, a lot of things like Korean natural farming and biodynamics, into centropic agroforestry and then...

we, we put a lot more work into it at the beginning, but as time went on, we found ourselves needing to make more money making gardens. ⁓ so garden for other people now, but luckily it's this thing of like, as time goes on, have less time input that you have to put in. So it's been a nice sort of growing together. Our families are growing with the land and our business and interesting the way.

things work out in timing, you sometimes to amazing benefit and sometimes to not to amazing benefit. But that's basically been the process, I guess.

Less House More Moola Podcast (12:08)
And it's a prep.

And it's a practice in long term commitment to building something too, right? It's not instant gratification. It's really a commitment and a patience that it takes to build that. You mentioned to me when I was there before that you were that you've been working on this for 20 years, right?

Jesse and Johanna (12:29)
Yeah, yeah, a lot of people don't have that kind of ⁓ the option for first of all the land access to the land and Then the stability because a lot of people if they're employed they might have to move for their job So yeah, we really did commit to just being here and being part of the land in service to the land Yeah, it's kind of a thing when your wife has 14 generations deep roots in a place

I mean, ideally we would think more long term in that way, beyond even our lives, to the lives, that will be here beyond us. ⁓ And I just love the practice of life cultivation. I find it to be just therapeutic to, nurture plants, nurture soil, you know, grow food, you know, bring food and herbs to people, help them heal. It's just, it's fun for me,

And it can be a whole lifestyle that you can just embody and then all you get is, creating benefit and receiving benefit all around. ⁓ So I think that's the natural sort of synergy that we have with the earth and the true source of abundance and the true foundation of security is actually our security with our skills, with each other and with the land, so.

I can't imagine investing in anything more important with my time and energy as my family and my land and myself. So that's kind of the philosophy.

Less House More Moola Podcast (14:04)
So you all

have really taken a...

So you all have really thought differently than the mainstream in terms of how you build your resilience and your security by working with the earth and creating what I really think about as a built capital in terms of the buildings and the way that you've worked with the earth to actually build that resilience that's going to serve you and the generations yet to come. So tell us how you came to a different mindset

Why is it that you think so differently than the prevailing culture does about security and creating resilience for yourselves?

Jesse and Johanna (14:47)
For me, it's just how I grew up. you know, it's not that there's ⁓ the absence of, let's say, poverty consciousness there. But, you know, when your family is living with the land for so many generations, that's just what I was born into. And so that's, for me, it's just this need, this deep need that's in my ancestry for connection with the earth, with your surroundings.

in gratitude for what the universe provides. For myself, I'd say it was like the malaise I experienced I grew up in Los Alamos, which is pretty affluent. We were never worried about money or food or anything like that. But what I found was just spiritual hunger, hunger to be connected.

So I just reached for that, you and that it's that kind of thing of like, realizing how much of my life has just been me trying to figure out how to regulate my nervous system, and even all this with, with permaculture and everything. just saw that there was a study Finland did was they prioritized well-being

in such ways as like encouraging people to get outside more, same in Japan, they have forrest bathing and stuff. There is a very tangible, very real physical benefit from being in touch with nature, and so I view it as just part of my whole overall physical and psychological healing I've been going through since, growing up in the system that is in my view, sort of a trauma machine,

because of the complete disconnection and separation mentality and materialist, uh, paradigm and thinking, we've been successful, I would say in that we have stayed true to ourselves, to our core values that we have great health. were able to raise three beautiful boys. You know, there's, they have challenges, you know, too um,

But it's not like our way of life comes without its traumas and challenges versus the disconnected materialist life. But something we've always sought to do is actually build our security in tandem in the material world. I've personally felt a lack of skills and just needed immersion in it for decades to the point where now I'm thinking

more, especially I'm getting older, like building in both realms, then you have security in both ways and you can go back and forth what we're working on right now is we built this, food forest sort of homestead paradise that we love, but we want to share it with everybody. So we're building an Airbnb, with our cobb buildings and a yurt and stuff. And we're hoping to copy and paste this in other locales to

be able to explore, to try gardening in new places with new challenges, create wealth that way that we can then, it also serves in the community and that then there's this place that serves as demonstration site, creates food and medicine, et cetera. And, we can go to our kids, we could, offload it to someone else who has this interest,

just want to center our wealth around health, healing, land, permaculture, because otherwise it's way too easy for our minds to get distracted by that shiny coin, know, the golden carrot dangling in front of you. we do ourselves a lot of trouble as a human race, ⁓ not really serving ourselves in a deeper way for the generations.

By being with creativity, with our natural human ⁓ ability to, to live from our inspiration and our imaginations rather than, like what we're taught in school is to forget about all the, connection with what I would call reality. because there's this different reality that we're asked to live in.

when we follow the materialist paradigm. But yeah, it's to be a creator, that creative process. And that whole thing of like your imagination is your superpower. We can we can create whatever we can imagine, and believe we can do, so and we really don't have any limits except for the ones that we put upon ourselves. so collectively, we can totally solve this quagmire of a situation.

we're living in, there's tools already in hand of, permaculture human beings, think are extremophiles. And I think we're extremely adaptive too. And that that's part of this whole process, getting into your creativity, being imaginative, being adaptive, developing a skillset that you have inside of you that someone can't take away like a job, but that gives you, stability gives you resilience and health,

everything we do all day is a biohack inadvertently, just by being out barefoot, in the garden, we're grounded, we're out in the sun, you we're getting probiotics seeping into our hands and then into our feet through the soil. You know, we're gathering up fresh, delicious food and making that, working with herbalism, and all the, all the kind of things that are in the biohacking industry we can have direct access to.

through nature and through a naturalistic lifestyle. So that just thrills me. It's an empowerment on a different level.

One that can't be taken away.

Less House More Moola Podcast (20:26)
Yeah,

Jesse and Johanna (20:26)
away. It's something that's, it's something you built inside of you. You can transport it anywhere, you know. And you can take that creativity and that ability to nurture life and just grow a garden everywhere you go, you know. It's fun.

Less House More Moola Podcast (20:47)
I think there's so many different ways for us to compile and, to use a finance word, diversify our resilience. And I love the idea that you all are trying to both have one foot in the real and inescapable world that we're in, in terms of money that needs to be there to exchange for things that maybe you can't produce yourself, but also creating

as much health for yourself and as much nutrition for yourself and as much mental health and lifestyle that that feeds your human self. There's so much more that we can do as individuals than just the one very boring script that we're given in terms of, getting a degree and climbing the corporate ladder and

trading up our houses as many times as possible until we have the ultimate luxury car and luxury home. We, there are other ways that we can build safety, security, and frankly, more happiness for ourselves. so helping people think about that is really the work that you all are doing all the time with folks. And I wonder if there are some certain key messages that you're trying to get out in the world when you lead foraging walks or

when you gather people on your permaculture site, what are the key messages in this moment that you are trying to get across?

Jesse and Johanna (22:22)
I think for me it's I guess bringing people back home, helping people remember, like we talk about the members of our body, you know, if we can collect these, we're so dispersed right now and not even really aware of who we really are as a species and just helping people remember that we are

part of the earth, we are a part of nature, it's not separate from us. And just that alone, the remembrance of our connection and our purpose being here on this planet. And you that can, you can go down the rabbit hole and what that means to just any given person, but...

When people have the opportunity, we witness this in our classes all the time, especially, you know, whether it's on our farm or out in the field in the forest, we witness these people just feeling like they finally have the permission to surrender and connect and feel like they are home, like they can feel whole again.

And we get people crying in our classes, laughing, smiling, coming back again and again, and just really appreciating the new things that they learn that are sort of a remembrance from our lineage that we've always known, we've always had this connection, but in the world we live in today, it's not so common anymore. And I think people are very hungry for that to remember where they come from, who they are.

I think I would add to that just the empowerment, from there, from that remembering that we can create whatever we want, we can take care of this world, we are fit to it, and we can grow in these ways, to mature, I would say more in these ways, beyond, sort of narrow-sightedness of

money and immediate pleasure. Pleasure is different than happiness. pleasure is momentary. Pleasure is, while you're eating that, chocolate truffle or, smelling that rose, it's wonderful. It's beautiful part of life. It is part of the fulfillment. But there is a deeper fulfillment, developing a loving heart. And like you were saying, from integrity, and from

connection and from that peace, the gold is really within. If we could enshrine our inner feelings, our well-being as an empowerment, then there's this, phrase, I'm a Buddhist. So Buddha talks about if we could all just make one person happy and that was ourselves. And if everyone just did that, we would have world peace. So

That's ⁓ what I'm hoping for. And in our classes, it's just to empower people to realize that they're not bad for the earth. It's this reappropriation and remembering of our connection.

Johanna and Jesse (26:26)
that's where knowledge becomes wisdom, is when you put a rubber to the road and do the thing. So that's what's fun about our classes is getting people out and showing them how much is wild food or medicine and how they really can understand and

see and find food for themselves and that food is always around, even that alone, just to relax our root chakra. think this whole culture has us stuck in sort of root chakra thought of survival and sex and money So we can't get into our hearts and into our crowns, into the higher forms of consciousness that we can embody.

as we're able to relieve these stresses by these sorts of empowerments, because we need solutions, we're right now faced with the news that AI may be replacing millions, of jobs, and our whole self-worth and identification is with our careers

but what if we just identified as being a natural being, on the earth and in connection with the earth and seeing your creative power also in doing permaculture, seeing that you can create a forest, of food in 20 years, And be part of it in the process, not disconnected as, the mechanistic AI.

would be. Yeah, and in New Mexico, it takes 20 years, but many other places you can see things turn around in a couple of five years, and it's really, really just, I'm just fond of empowerment in general, because I think we're all, in my view, enlightened beings in our very core. If you actually do what gives you joy and fills you with love and all the things, then you

become a Buddha, essentially, you become an awakened being. And so that's, that's my question. Like, what I would like to wish for all beings, is that the causes and conditions of happiness and health. I think that empowerment of art is key in terms of developing knowledge into wisdom.

Less House More Moola Podcast (28:43)
And to your point, especially in this moment where we all feel like things are changing very dramatically and that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns about the future rooting ourselves in our own.

empowerment and in our own ability to care for ourselves is probably really balancing for folks that are feeling a lot of chaos and a lot of uncertainty right now.

Johanna and Jesse (29:13)
That's why I'm doing it.

Less House More Moola Podcast (29:18)
So I'm reading a book right now that talks about,

The growth of a system that is created when we lose connection with place and when we lose connection with our traditional, say, village or heritage, our belief systems, our social structures. And so it really contrasts people that

or societies that grow up with a place-based belief and culture versus the modern ideal of really focusing on being connected to, say, the economy and the systems that drive modern life. And it really makes me think of you two because you all, as much as modern people can be, are really rooted in your place.

based and your cultural based and your lineage based life. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about how people who maybe feel disconnected from that. I, for example, have some mix of heritages that I don't really have traditions from and I don't really have a close connection with. I'm so many generations of

mixed up lineages and didn't grow up where my family came from. so for folks like, us that don't have any roots or connection, it seems like the rootedness can be really a healing and important part of human happiness. And I wonder if you have any thoughts.

for folks that you work with about how to feel more rooted in a place where perhaps they didn't come from.

Johanna and Jesse (31:09)
I loved that question. Yeah, I think that, you know, to me what comes to mind is in permaculture, there are different zones. And, you know, if you think of the idea of like zone zero being your yourself, your own heart, your own life, zone one is your house and zone two would be just immediately outside your house and so on, expanding, you know, farther and farther away from you. ⁓ And

I feel like it's important to honor each individual ⁓ where they're at. Even whether you have connection to your lineage or not, you still have a lineage. You still are an earthling from someplace, ⁓ whether it's a country across the world that your lineage comes from or like myself, a lot of my family.

part of it is here in Chimayó for 14 generations, but my father's from Austria, so I have this lineage in Europe as well. And then there's the melting pot of the US itself that, you know, none of us are really ⁓ just from one place. So really just tapping into your own self as that zero point and ⁓ remembering that no matter where you are,

No matter where you come from, you do have roots and where you are is where you are. That's where you get to be. I love that. And I love the thoughts of, know, that's been healing for me because my roots are in Panama and in like Ireland and Scotland. So I've been connecting with those indigenous traditions and foods and stuff like that. So that's one way. But another way that comes to mind to me is to ⁓ try. ⁓

to become of the place in the ways that you can. Get out on the bare earth and touch the earth and hike around the land around you with your bare feet and feel the land around you. And imbibe the native plants, even if there are things that are non-natives that are growing around you like dandelion.

or something like that. Like just be in touch with like what's around you. You know, get out in the sun and sun gaze and have the energies of the sun, sort of wake up your biology in the morning and wake up, your consciousness and hug a tree, hug a tree, know, sit by the water, grow a garden, eat food that's grown from here. Like you can make your body out of this place, become indigenous that way,

connect in with the Indigenous traditions of the place you're in. Like, I am totally enamored of all the Native traditions around us. My whole life just found them to be completely awe-inspiring, mystical, beautiful ways of being, you know, to sort of go to the Pueblo dances and to, go to the ancient places and, sort of pay respects to the people of the place,

try to support indigenous people around you. ⁓ There's so many ways, I think that we can, like she said, we're all indigenous. We're all indigenous to the earth. But there's a practice that can also be sort of naturalizing, we'll say. Yeah, it's important not to compare ourselves in, like we've heard it said before, comparison is the thief of joy.

And so if we're saying, that person has a lineage here and I don't, then we're sort of separating ourselves to begin with. And just, I feel like, you know, if you feel that disconnection, there are, like Jesse was saying, the ways that you can reconnect, whether it's with the people around you or as we like to call them, our plant-cestors the plants, the minerals, the mushrooms.

the trees, you know, they all have something to offer and people naturally feel that connection. I think it feels, know, being a tree hugger has become a derogatory term, but anyone who goes out and hugs a tree is going to benefit from it. And every kid will hug a tree completely unabashed. Yeah. I don't know what these days.

Less House More Moola Podcast (35:49)
Beautiful.

Those are beautiful thoughts.

⁓ Jesse and Johanna, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us about your home and about your passion and about how you think that we can bring some of these principles into our lives right now to build more resilience and more comfort and more safety in these times where we feel so uncertain. And I really appreciate all of your wisdom. Tell listeners where they can track you down.

and if they're in the northern New Mexico area, maybe attend one of your events.

Johanna and Jesse (36:29)
Probably thank you for having us first of all. It's been a pleasure always to be with you connect with you. Super fun. ⁓ Love these conversations. Probably the easiest place to connect with us would be our website, which is just ziapermaculture.com. Yeah, that's it. Ziapermaculture.com. have our, ⁓ you can sign up for our newsletter there, which ⁓

If you receive the newsletter, you'll see our event schedule. And we're on social media as well, which I think you're going to plug the details into the podcast. But ⁓ yeah, ziapermaculture.com is the best place to reach both of us. You can also email us at ziaenergeticsllc@gmail.com. ⁓ If you want to just send us a note directly.

Less House More Moola Podcast (37:22)
Wonderful. Well, thank you both again for your time and all of your wisdom and living the example of how we can be closer connected to the earth and connect with our roots there. I really appreciate you being here.

Johanna and Jesse (37:36)
Thank you, Laura. Our pleasure, Laura. Much love, sister. Blessings. Have a beautiful day. Thank you, everyone listening. Cheers. Hope you got something from this.