​Living as an intern is like jumping into a swimming. There's lots of spontaneous interactions in a short period that lead to down many pathways. It's impossible to know beforehand which road will unfold as a dominant theme or energy for my experience. However, it is this potential and versatility of being community that I believe is what allows so many different personalities to thrive and voice find their language of experience.  

How do I share an authentic heart-space with people over an extended people without jumping on a repetitive intellectual hamster wheel of what's most familiar to me?  


Before coming to Songaia I had never really been tested in a thorough daily routine to share and express this outer reality with other folks in community. Finding and creating Love in Public became the primary focus for me because as an intern you don't really have a lot of private space to retreat back into. 

There was a song Anita shared with me that we sang loudly with the refrain "We may not have it all together, but together we can have it all". This conviction about happiness and radical simplicity was also important to me during my time at Songaia. That when there is a quorum of love and friendship. It is easier to show up to my day knowing that what we have together is enough.

I learned a lot about harvesting and cooking with new herbs like chickweed, nasturtium leaves and doug fir tips. It is like be a painter and discovering it's possible to eat with several new shades of color that had not previously been available. 

At the Bastyr Herbs and food festival I learned about foraging for many new foods like young oregon grape, stinky bob, and indian plum. It is really empowering to walk through a forest and start to gain confidence noticing how to eat and identify more plants. This speaks to the movement that happening of rewilding and of sharing identity with the earth that was strengthened during my time at Songaia. It has been healing to shift my story and energy to feel more strongly that I belong to the earth and that we belong to each other.    

I thought Susie Fox did an awesome job of sharing new tips and tricks in the kitchen. I learned about making fire cider and other shrubs to add apothecary medicine and flavor to salad dressings and sauces. The potential to add more plant medicine into our foods here is very exciting to me.

Elizabeth, Helen, and Anita also taught me a lot about how to nurture living things in the garden. Many of them are little details that filled in my knowledge about how to care for living things. 

For me Music and the Earth are the two most potent love languages that bond strangers and community members together. The space they occupy has a timeless quality that does not rely on intellectual belief system. The mirror and vessel they use helps me see myself and others with a kinder and more universal lens.  

 
Many of my favorite memories at Songaia involve the interaction of these two elements. Spending time in the garden. Finding connection, silence, and grounding with life giving energies. Then coming together with music to find a playful chorus that expresses delight in the connection of being together.   

I remember when Jacob showed me how to play dandelion as a trumpet during the festival of the earth as one of the spontaneous moments that shifted my perspective 180 degrees. It was right around sunset, and we went from a mindful contemplative garden walk talking about plant medicine and healing old traumas. Then Jacob stopped and picked up a dandelion and made a high pitched buzz. Moments later I gave it a try and we turned into a squawking flock of ducks running around and tooting to our own rhythms. Olive, Anita, Brian, and Misty Dawn joined us at different points that week to partake in the experience. And just like that the heaviness from our conversation lifted and we were in a very different kind of feeling in our hearts.

Songaia helped me dream of the future. Of the new stories and shared experiences being held by children and babies. My parents are aging and there is no story of regrowth from this new movement of people who are influenced by the great turning. Psychologically it is very difficult to keep telling a story that does not involve these types of new beginnings. How we dream and the source of our creativity our deeply influenced by our subconscous perceptions of how the village and our peers are changing into something new from what's existed in the past.   

I was also exposed to so many new ideas that are still fermenting in my experience...

Ian's deep awareness of bacteria as medicine for plants and people. Misty Dawn's perspective on personalizing a theatrical reality to help catalyst personal transformation. Elizabeth's generosity in teaching me about the ukulele. There are countless more examples that I keep going on and on. Little seeds and feelings that have left me curious about the potential for me to reclaim and remember some missing or forgotten part of my personality. Oh yeah! I can be feisty and tender and contemplative and musical all in one day. It was really positive to feel that there is a surprising amount of wiggle room for my ego's personality could adapt to a new setting, so long as there is a shared story of care and concern being nurtured. 

​Hey There,


My given name at Songaia is Lucas Brightwater. I am a resident intern for the 2019 season at Songaia. Please note that my legal name is Brian Steyer in case there is some confusion. 

Bio:  I grew up on Bainbridge Island, WA. Growing up I traveled to China and lived Japan which were the coming of age experiences where I felt my identity and voice where shaped as a young person.

During my last semester of college at the Univiersity of Washington, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. This radically changed my life - diet, career, and life path that I could reasonably pursue. It is greatest teacher and highest mountain I've had to climb to take back control of my life. It's been a long journey, but now I live a healthy and active life where about 90% of my symptoms stay in remission during my day-to-day life here at Songaia. 

For myself, I feel that the Taoist approach to health most closely mirrors the principles of regeneration and synchronicity that is also present in permaculture and mycology. Returning the earth or my own vital energy back to an original state of health before the trauma or disease was able to take hold. 

Coincidentally, the best Qi gong school I could find in the Seatte location is also located in Bothell. I started practicing Qi gong here in 2014 when it became clear that I needed a better form of self care to heal from the lasting trauma that had occurred when I was really sick. The Qi Gong school I am most active with is called IQIM (https://www.iqim.org/ ). They offer training to health care practitioners at Bastyr to release any extra energy from their clients. My mentors have in this school have healed themselves from lupus and lymes disease, so I had a model of individuals that had taken this journey themselves. Currently they are doing scientific studies to show that you can permanently reverse diabetes (Type 1 and Type 2) by empowering the pancreas to become more sensitive to insulin. 
 
During this past year I have also learned some computer programming doing front-end web development as a practical way to make an income. My long-term vocational goals would be to find cool heart-centered projects where I could help build website or software applications.

Over the long-term I would also like to focus more on creating an educational curriculum for mushrooms and soil health that I could use to be an educator and advocate for the health of the planet. However, at this stage I envision that being a meaningful side income that I would grow slowly over time. Whereas, the programming provides the stability and security from the get-go to begin living an independent life which is essential for me to write the next chapter of my life. 

Right now I am looking for more clients to do my first few pro bono portfolio website projects that I could use on my website -- http://briansteyer.com/ -- so if you know someone who wants to work on a free custom website with me let me know and we can discuss the details.  

Why Songaia?

I first became interested in Songaia in 2015 when I first visited Songaia to attend a permaculture workshop with Jessi Bloom and Cameron Whithey. This exposure influenced me to coordinate a rite of passage for myself in the summer of 2015. 

​I applied to this internship as the elective of my dietetic internship with Garden to Table Nutrition.  There are a lot of different places I could have done this elective, but I have always envisioned myself in a community that works together to be more sustainable.  As a Bastyr graduate, I feel that whole foods are the key not only to proper nutrition and health but a quality life. Now I’m taking the next step by getting some experience living in the kind of community I would like to be part of some day. It is my plan to participate in a community garden after this experience and to start my own garden once I am working as an RD if I am not able to find a sustainable community to live in.

Some of the skills I hope to acquire include fertilizing, planting, harvesting, canning, and permaculture of course. I am also very interested in the food forest concept which Songaia is incorporating as well as sustainable agriculture.  Lastly, I’m hoping the Songaia garden will teach me many things about the process that food takes from garden to table. I’m hoping my onsite living experience will give me a sense of how to organize a co-housing community. As an intern at Songaia for two months, my passion to learn this process will help to give me a solid foundation in this process and an idea of how I would apply it to my future goal of connecting my clients to food in a natural setting.

​

Some others things I like to do beside learning about food and nutrition include cooking, hiking, taking pictures, and reading.  Some recipes I have been experimenting with lately include pumpkin and blackberry pie. The pumpkin pie is dairy free and made from fresh blended pumpkin I cooked and froze myself.  I also like to experiment with food and herbs as medicine. For instance, boiling ginger, chamomile, and oregano together can take away cramps. ​

Again, I’m looking forward to joining the Songaia, sharing my knowledge of nutrition and cooking and learning more about gardening and community to become a more well-rounded person.

​

Ian Thompson
Intern blog week 4/15/19 - 4/20/19

April is finally here, and the summer internship 2019 has started! We have done so much work in the garden already and everything is looking so great! There is so much excitement and anticipation in and around the garden. I am the only intern as of now, but that will soon change when Flower Star joins us to help next month. However, all of our helpers have been busy busy, especially planting in the green house. Now is the time when the tiny plants get tucked safely in their beds in the garden, or so we hope. The beautiful onion plants Helen and I started in February with so much love only lasted a few days in the garden before some hungry critter came through and had a feast, half were lost. We covered the rest in a garden fabric and hope for the best. But yet there is still a mystery as to why the hungry critter targeted the onion; It's supposed to be the one green leaf that deters pest like rabbits and deer. So we are keeping a close eye on them.

Since starting the internship, we have gotten a lot done as well. Like the other day, Anita and I made some potato cages. The hopes is to grow these potatoes above ground in a cage to keep the rat population from eating all our crops. We built three of them in different sizes from scrap fencing and other materials found in our barn. We wired them together with a fenced in base and put them in the garden and filled them ¼ full of soil and compost. Then it's just as simple as tossing them in and covering with another few inches of soil. They will then flower up above the soil and we will just bury them. The potato leaves will then die, then something amazing happens. The potato leaf node will then start to grow roots, and produce more potatoes! This is very exciting, because not only does everybody love potatoes, but it seems that the years previous, the large amount of potatoes that were planted, were decimated by rats, and some were even lost. 

Friday was also a very busy day that yielded some pretty sweet results. It started out with Anita and I creating and designing a most detailed compost tracking method. We made these pretty cool spreadsheets that have spaces for date created, materials used and dates they were turned and by whom. They even all get personalized names. :) We then went to go get them laminated so they can be kept outside and not get ruined by the rain. On our way we procured a truck load of wood chips to be spread on Saturdays harambe. When we arrived back to Songaia, we had a delicious lunch and afterwards had a meeting with community member and good friend Douglas R. about the forest and possible plans going forward with it's restoration. I would personally like to see more curriculum involving different ecosystems integrated with the garden internship. There are so many ways that a garden can be looked at, and in a system more closely integrated with nature could yield different results than what we currently have. Our garden can be looked at as a closely controlled system of creating just the right conditions to produce only what we desire to grow there. Everything else is considered a weed and treated as such. It's a proven method for creating a reliable and measurable food source, but falls short of being sustainable or regenerative. It could not exactly be called a permaculture garden, but more of a market garden. Which isn’t necessarily “wrong”, but simply a particular way to look at how to grow food on the land. By trying different methods and working closer to how nature acts in the real world without so much human manipulation, we could quite possibly find better methods to producing food and becoming closer with the land.  But all philosophy aside, I would love to learn more about food systems and how we can improve them in a human dominated ecosystem. Then we flipped compost.

I am extremely satisfied with the first week of the internship. I have high hopes and am very excited for the future and what it holds. There is so much knowledge here in Songaia and only time and experience will present these learning opportunities. I am very thankful for the incredible opportunities and guidance I have received. I will never forget the kind nourishing nudges towards learning and discovery of the world around us. I am very thankful for Songaia and everyone here. I love you all! See you all next week.

​

Hey, guess what?

The internship started last week!! And I started my second "growing season" as Garden Steward here at Songaia. Man oh man. Last year, I set the intention to mindfully implement the first principle of permaculture--Observe and thoughtfully interact. This principle posits that you have to take the time to step back and observe, or cultivate an intimacy with place, before you are able to design a sustainable, resilient, and regenerative system. Simple, right? Here's a beautiful musical representation of the first permaculture principle by the glorious Formidable Vegetable Sound System, introduced to me by Brian when I was an intern:

What I was surprised by in this last year, was how much the very last verses of this song rang true.
"The problem is the solution,
it just depends on your perception.
Gotta change yourself before the world. 

Take a look around,
On the inside and the out.
Cause when you observe yourself,
you'll see everything else.
Make good use of it now."

Despite the fact that I was learning multiple systems--the garden, the community, this position--his past year really became about cultivating an intimacy with myself. Mid-summer I fell into a bit of low spot. I was discouraged, tired, stretched thin between my homes, and feeling the weight of expectation from the community for a yield of food, the interns for a yield of experience, and the garden for a reliable drink of water.

Pause for gratitude for garden elder Helen Gabel, who held me and guided me throughout this past year. Gratitude for Brian Bansenauer who invited me over often to "have cookies" (laced with community wisdom and therapeutic laughter). Gratitude for Nancy and Diane, who helped me lean into the "problem is the solution"---just said with different words. Gratitude for Laura Klepfer, who is a great listener, a devoted piglet, and a loving friend. Gratitude for Elizabeth Dequine, who sees disconnections and chooses to act in love, and who has invited me and Olive to share a home with her. Gratitude for my dear friend and beloved intern, Ian Thompson, who has inspired growth in me by both accepting and challenging my conditioned beliefs about the world. Gratitude for Brent, Nartano, Mary, Susie, and so many others. You have all inspired me to find and grow from my edges over this past year, allowing me to see that cultivating an intimacy with ourselves is at the foundation of sustainable, resilient, and regenerative systems, because it allows us to see past our conditioned beliefs about what's possible and enter a truly creative and abundant space.

This brings me to my intention for this coming year, which includes story-telling, and two permaculture principles:

Principle 3: Obtain a Yield
and 
Principle 11: Use edges and value the marginal

More about this next week. 

Here's a little about what moved this past week in the garden:

Tuesday: If you look very closely, you can see little squirming earthworms, thriving in our compost pile. Ian and I flipped the compost and made a new pile out of community kitchen scraps, rabbit poo from a neighbor, green material from clearing garden beds, and leaves raked last fall on property (likely by community member Art Morton--thanks Art!!). Lots of planting happened in the garden by Elizabeth, Helen, Selina, and Oluwa this day! It was so fun to have former interns Oluwa and Selina out for the morning before their classes. After Lunch, Ian and I went to get more rabbit poo from our long time supplier, Carrie. We've been using the rabbit poo in our compost, a good nitrogen source with a 12:1 C:N ratio.



Wednesday: On Wednesday I worked alone, because Ian had come down with a cold and our other Piglets were busy with community and personal responsibilities. It was a great day of observing myself, the garden, and my relationship with it. I met with Bee Elliott in the morning and we hammered out the details for the upcoming Restoration Work Party here in the Songaia Forest on Sunday April 28th from 10:30-3. Bee is a student at UW Bothell, deeply involved in shifting our larger cultural narrative by acting locally. She will be bringing members of the UWB Outdoor Wellness Club to this work party. I am excited about this partnership!

I spent the day drifting back and forth between garden work and administrative duties, getting a bed cleared by the end of the day and setting up a small experiment in the garden. Last fall one of our beds was colonized by perennial white clover. Throughout the winter, this bed resisted invasion by our dear friend buttercup, unlike many of our other beds (even those that were intentionally cover-cropped with other species). What I want to test is whether or not we can just plant directly into the white clover, leaving it as a nitrogen-fixing perennial cover crop, with occasional chopping-and-dropping to keep it from overtaking food crops.

After establishing which area I wanted to leave covered with clover, I needed to figure out how to mark off the area so it wouldn't get cleared by someone else, and I needed to mix soil to start some seeds for the experimental bed. I went up to lunch and thought about how to mark it off. While eating lunch, Doug R came in and told me he had removed the oak planter that had been sitting outside the Common House for quite some time with no plants in it. He expressed his uncertainty about what to do with the wheelbarrow full of soil and large rocks. The problem is the solution!!! Well, his problem was my solution. I sifted the big rocks out of the soil, used the soil to start seeds, and used the rocks to delineate my experimental plot.  

Thursday: Ian was a bit better on Thursday, so we decided to make potato cages! Two years ago, when I was an intern, Tater Mater Tom gifted us with 25 different varieties of potatoes. My Irish roots reveled in the diversity of potato varieties, and I took it on as a personal mission my first year here to care for said potatoes. We had two rows, which I dutifully photographed at (somewhat) regular intervals, mounded as best I knew how, and observed the process of growth. By the end of the season they looked marvelous! Above the surface...little did we know, below ground, the rats had discovered an absolute smorgasbord. Last year, in an attempt to get a yield of potatoes, I had the interns plant the potatoes we were able to save from the previous year scattered around the garden. We actually went through with mapping where each variety was planted. Like a pirate's map to delicious buried treasure. The idea was that if they were scattered around the garden, they would not all get plowed through by the rats. Good plan...except they turned out being harder to find in the fall than we thought...it's very possible there will be many potatoes coming up all over the Songaia garden this year. Good thing I still have that map of our "buried treasure".

This year, still determined to obtain a yield, we made potato cages. Something I derive great pleasure from, and I learned Ian does as well, is creating something useful from salvaged materials. We found wire fencing in the magic barn that was stapled to some old rotting wood, and transformed them into beautiful potato cages! We buried three varieties of potatoes in these cages and filled the cages to about 8 inches with soil and compost. As the potatoes grow, we can continue to add soil and compost (or other material) to the cage, increasing the production of tubers off the stem. We ended the day with a planning session--deciding how we wanted to design a simple, effective way of tracking which piles of compost were turned when.

Friday: 
We got SO much done on Friday. We started the day on an expedition in IAN'S NEW TRUCK! Our mission was to get our new compost system sheets laminated and to pick up another load of woodchips from Dennis and Cyndi (Thank you!!) to prepare for the Harambe on Saturday. We mounted the new sheets and ended the day with compost turning (3 piles!) and blog writing. 

Saturday: I was sick and missed the community meeting and harambe, which I was very sad about. Seems like those chips we brought were put to good use though. Thanks team!

Not mentioned here is all the work that went into the garden while my eyes where elsewhere--I know Helen and Elizabeth have been working away--and it looks amazing out there. 

I intend to continue to share in this way throughout the season. It may not be as detailed as this in the future, but I see such value in documenting our weeks. I feel so anchored and accomplished after reflecting, and I am really able to integrate what I've learned. To obtain a different kind of yield from the growing season! 

Yours in Garden Stewardship,

​Anita