On the border of my 35th birthday, I find myself in a near-complete Portuguese luxury resort doing very unresort-like things: collecting cow manure from the fields, shovelling this into an attempted 18-going-on-30-day compost heap and cooking wild plant gourmet food with a tribe who "joined forces" during a permaculture design course in Turkey's Istanbul in November 2010.  Our ethnic backgrounds resemble the diversity of a permaculture paradise, our educational backgrounds the rich humus and our passion the nitrogen that fuels any exciting adventure.

This adventure reminds me of a "back to the future" movie. I don't know what happened since I came crashing into this alien, yet familiar world. All I know is that I found something so meaningful in permaculture and sustainability that makes me wonder why I didn't catch onto this sooner. Yep, I know why - because the first time I heard about sustainability was at university when my best friend dragged me to a "Students and Sustainability" conference.  First, I had to look up the word sustainability, then go to the conference in Queensland (Australia) only to end up at a doof party (also a first) amongst a bunch of hippies and not understanding a word they were saying.

"Suddenly", fifteen years later, I'm thrown in the midst of this world again where people's vision is a sustainable and currency-free world with open-relationship-experimentation and local food consumption. In most cases, currency is still needed, as is a faithful and monogamous partner and the occasional reliance on the capitalistic system to bring us salt from the Himalayas...but we are improving!

I feel our main purpose is one of evolution rather than revolution. I feel that the "I" becomes "we".

We are the ones who care for the state of the earth, so we are the ones who are creating and propelling this movement and these communities.
We are the ones who are making it so much fun that everyone else will want to join the party.

Money? We have a better idea...

Living alone in a small apartment in the middle of a city?
Try living in small communities on gorgeous farms, breathing in fresh air and cleaning brown dirt out of your ears rather than black soot. 

Receiving a pay-cheque that doesn't compensate for the exchange of your soul in an office with nothing to show at the end of the day?
We've also completed various levels of conventional education in mind-numbing institutions and worked in drone-producing jobs. It's just that we've all said "pass" to a life-less-style in favour of a life-full-style that has nothing to do with convention and everything to do with invention. We're the slash kid generation, a crowd of engineers/anthropologists/carpenters/producers/graphic artists/permaculturalists/etc - a generation of people skilled at a myriad things, favouring diversity rather than mastery with a lot to show for our day's work.  We're making chicken tractors, building herb spirals, nurturing our food, harvesting our work and documenting it so that we can share our knowledge with others. We're using everything we've got to create everything we've dreamed of. Best of all, we're having the time of our lives.

Call us the tribal stream; the stream of consciousness for a tribe that aims to embody the ethics of permaculture and sustainability and has a burning desire to share how we connect with that tribal part of ourselves that knows the truth.

We feel very much at home (finally) and we feel enormous gratitude for being part of this community. We are redesigning our lifestyles in every way possible and we invite you to (re)ignite that part of you that knows there just has to be a better way to live, laugh and love.

Tribal T