Between Xmas and the New Year coming in, I'd like to present to you @mountainjewel
The blog is maintained by Ini and Wren.
And I could tell you things all about them but I think it's nicer if they'd tell you themselves!
ENJOY!
Q&A
| Who are you, anything and everything you want us to know |
|---|
We are Ini and Wren a homesteading couple who met on an island in Canada. Wren had ridden her bike up from LA and was visiting intentional communities along the way. Ini was the garden manager and educator at the intentional community on the island. She arrived sweaty and ruddy and he knew at first sight that she was a woman worth pursuing. So after a tour in the gardens, he asked her to eat a worm. The dreams and visions started in that first week when both of us said, What? You Too! After a year of being apart after that, we reunited and started traveling around the US looking for land to start landing our dreams. We traveled coast to coast, living in North Carolina and New Mexico before we finally settled in Missouri. We are currently honing, developing, designing and implementing our dreams of a productive and diverse edible and medicinal perennial ecosystem. That means a lot of fruit and nut trees, rare plants and a lot of hard work! We live in an octagonal cedar cabin built by the Raney family (and many other hands) for a Discovery Channel show, homestead rescue. We were realizing the other day that we have a circle (yurt), square (solar shed and composting toilet), trapezoid (screened in gazebo), dome (sweat tent)… and now we want to build an oval sauna and a pyramidal Root Cellar and place to store Wren’s tinctures and future wine (which we’ll make from our vineyards). A big part of what we’re doing is creating something bigger than ourselves in hopes to share with and inspire humanity. All of this has been done before, but it’s our deep dreams calling so we need to answer too!
| What makes your heart smile? |
|---|
My heart smiles when Ini makes me delicious drinks for breakfast. One morning he made me a mango smoothie with cardamom and cashew. I love it when he surprises me with little things like that.
| How did you get onto steemit? |
|---|
We got onto steemit when one of our mutual friends (@lauralee) suggested to us that we would love it. We waited a couple months to take the leap, but we’re eternally grateful to her!
| Where do you want to die? |
|---|
Lying on the earth at home, perhaps under a tree
| When’s the last time you cried? |
|---|
Reading The Painted Drum by Louis Erdrich. The story was evocative and touching in a deep, inexplicable way. Check her books out!
| What’s something you don’t like about this new technology? |
|---|
I don’t like how it absorbs us so easily. It is so easy to spend incredible amounts of time tunneling here. I also don’t like how, though it has the capacity to bring us together in so many ways (and it does), it also takes us away from the present moment quite easily and therefore ourselves and each other
| What mistake do you keep making and why? |
|---|
I keep making the mistake of not slowing down enough. I need to be more careful.
| What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten? |
|---|
I think I’ve gotten this advice in a myriad of ways from many different sources, some not even humans (trees, places, plants, rocks included here), but I feel it boils down to this: listen to your intuition, which I would call a deep knowing from within that has the potential to guide your life beyond one’s wildest dreams. Following this thread, which has been encouraged time and time again in my life, things have taken turns that are manifesting things that are beyond me. This is what my human life is for, I believe!
| If there was something you could undo- what would it be? |
|---|
Genocide coupled with the sicknesss that causes people to act so horribly towards others.
| Imagine ability to be kept alive without sleep, what would you do with all extra time? |
|---|
Spend more time meditating
| What's the stupidest thing you’ve done that actually turned out pretty well? |
|---|
I left my bag out of sight at a very large music festival and returned to find it stolen. After the fact I wandered around hundreds if not thousands of abandoned tents and without realizing it at first, literally tripped over it. Haha!
| What makes your belly ache with laughter? |
|---|
Goofing around with each other and talking in weird voices. Super Silliness!
| Tell us about one significant event in your life that really made you who you are |
|---|
My grandma’s death. I was living with her at the time and her death had a huge impact on me. The week before she suddenly died, we had a conversation in her library that I’ll never forget. I asked her what she hoped to do before she died, what her bucket list was. She had traveled extensively, gotten her degree late in life, had a successful job that she had loved and was proud of, but she still had quite a few things on that list. After she died, it instilled in me this feeling to not wait. It was a catalyst for me to do the many things that I felt afraid to do or held back in doing. It was super impactful for me and steered the course of the next 5 years of my life wherein I feel I really got on my life’s path in earnest.
| What would be the scariest monster you could imagine? |
|---|
Who are the Harry Potter creatures who suck your soul out? The Death Eaters? Something like that that eats your soul!
| What does steemit mean for you? |
|---|
I see it as a platform, opportunity and a channel to create a new foundation for human interaction. I see it as empowering humanity to come together and one another!
| What would you like your last meal to be? |
|---|
Deer tenderloin, seed cheese, baked squash with mole negro and sprouts and heavily buttered toasted sourdough bread (with dark dark chocolate and soft dates!)
| If you could change your name, what would you change it to? |
|---|
Finnigan Quercus and Wren of the North
| If you could be an animal for a day, which and why? |
|---|
Dolphin – they have recreational sex, they play, are super intelligent and swim through the oceans like champs!
| Which person inspires you the most and why? |
|---|
Lately it is this guy
https://www.summerhill.bc.ca/Story/The-Pyramid
Who made a pyramid at his winery that is as accurate as the one at Gaza and is really clarifying human potential in incredible ways. Check him out!!
| What are you insecure about? |
|---|
Being good enough.
| Describe your ideal life. |
|---|
I think we’re pretty much creating it (we still need a sauna and root cellar!) The only thing I miss is also going to the ocean easily! We also hope to have interns and apprentices and gatherings at our homestead to make the circle complete and share life with more people!
| Have you ever saved someone’s life? |
|---|
One of my friends in college had taken some pills- I found her and called an ambulance. I don’t know if she would’ve died, but I know it changed the course of events drastically that I found her!!
| What do other people think is weird about you? |
|---|
A lot probably! Perhaps our obsession with plants and how hard we work.
| What do you think is one of the best things about you? |
|---|
Kind hearts. We both are openhearted, open to what life brings us and open to receiving feedback about how we can be better humans to ourselves and the people in our lives.
| What’s one responsibility you really wish you didn’t have? |
|---|
Having to take library books to the library on time (we live about an hour away from it and never seem to get them back on time haha!)
| If you had a personal flag, what would be on it? |
|---|
A tortoiseshell background with the sheen of ocean waves as it rippled in the wind. Oak leaves, fungi and large shining quartz crystal dug from Arkansas.
| If a genie granted you three wishes right now, what would you wish for? |
|---|
Shifting the consciousness of all the people that hurt themselves and others. This would hopefully solve all the problems on Earth.
A golden wand sparkly that could do physical labor for me and others
A magical black smooth river stone that could transport me wherever I wanted to go at a moment’s notice (and enable me to fly)
| What do you think about when you’re by yourself? |
|---|
Bees, trees, buildings, human suffering and how I can make a difference in the world
| What would you want to be written on your tombstone? |
|---|
My trees outlived me!
| Who is the person you trust most? |
|---|
My mom
| If you had 25 min to do anything you wanted, without external consequences, what would you do? |
|---|
Get the genie at my side and utterly disrupt the current Republican scheming in the USA creating a chain of events where all unfair rulers and dictators would step down and admit the error of their ways.
| Who is your fav or one of your fav steemians and why? |
|---|
@sagescrub. He’s someone we’ve met on here that always leaves suuuper thoughtful and insightful comments and has similar vision as us and interesting posts!
| If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family assume you had done? |
|---|
Streaking (public nudity!)
| When you looked in the mirror first thing in the morning, what was the first thing you thought? |
|---|
I need to drink some water and I love you.
| What’s the most ridiculous fact you know? |
|---|
The lower legs of cold weather ungulates contains anunsaturated fat that will not freeze. This is what Neet’s foot oil is made from, a commercial leather conditioning product!
| What is something that you just recently realized that you are embarrassed you didn’t realize earlier? |
|---|
That I take myself so seriously sometimes people think I’m joking!
| What is your nickname? |
|---|
Wren (my birth name is something different) ; Ini (same here!)
| As a human of steemit, how do you contribute to steemit? |
|---|
We are really putting ourselves out there, sharing what we have done on our homestead in hopes to inspire, teach and engage others to be more connected with the earth. Mountain Jewel: Center for Earth Connection shining through the interwebs! We hope to spotlight things that have worked for us (and things that haven’t) and learn and boost others as well. We want to bring vitality and kindness as well as thoughts around human evolution.
Fun Crazy Steemit Thing
Look at these two goofin' around during Christmas in two amazing onesies!!!
### Ini and Wren, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse into your world and how you think!
I believe what you are doing is amazing!
It's beautiful to see how you are SO dedicated to your dream and making it happen.
Thank you for showing us a bit of the ideology behind @mountainjewel
Thank you for being goofy and expressing that via video.
Thank you for being so deeply authentic to yourself and manifesting that into the world!
Thank you for participating on Humans Of Steemit!
Go follow @mountainjewel and see for yourself all the pretty damn amazing things they do!
If you want to be featured on Humans of Steemit to combat the botty world online and to show your heart, get in touch with me!
@ashleykalila on steemit.chat and Discord.
Or send me an e-mail : [email protected]
If you want to support Humans of Steemit, please hit follow on this blog, upvote this post and if you really LOVE it, resteem it!
(But really only do that if you REALLY REALLY want to! I believe in a life where we only do what we want to do!)
Humans Of Steemit believes in You.
And so do I!
I had help with editing by the lovely @deadsparrow. He is a good dude.
You should go talk to him.
BIG love,
Ashley
@ashleykalila is my blog just in case you'd be interested to see what I write about!
Made by the wonderful @stellabelle
My LoveProject is @humansofsteemit! Featuring the humans behind the Steemit usernames!
Great interview! Such an inspiring couple. Loved starting my day reading this! Thank you. :)
Indeed good way to start the day :)
congrats ini and wren!!
I loved your post amazing <3 Thank You for sharing such an exciting post!
Wow! Very well put together. An amazing story.
Such wonderful couple! So lovely and I can feel the love between them.
Intuition and meditation two good things in life! Great ideas and thoughts💜
Another fantastic episode of the #humansofsteemit show! I just love #homesteading posts, and @mountainjewel is a rockin' awesome newbie.
Thanks man :) <3 <3 <3
It's very nice to meet you! Thank you for sharing, it warms our heart seeing there's people living the way the want to, so naturally and beautifully!