This video is about how I learned to become self sufficient. I share stories and photos from childhood, watching my self sufficient parents figuring out how to do everything all on their own. I've carried this desire to always be self sufficient into my adulthood and I often build and repair things all on my own. I believe that any skill can be learned if you have the desire to learn it. And I've learned a lot over my lifetime.

I've been bitten by the organization bug and have been going wild, organizing every single thing I own, so I made a little story about it. Hope you enjoy!

Back in September of 2020, I took a hike to one of my favorite alpine lakes in Colorado. I filmed the whole way up to anonymous lake, because deep inside, I had a desire to make beautiful videos and put them on the internet. I never let myself put all that footage together, though, because I didn't see any purpose behind it. Today I'm sharing that footage, along with some thoughts on creativity.

This summer I had an overabundance of mint choking out my garden, so I dried some mint leaves for tea, made a mint extract and mint ice cream. I took all the footage in the summer and just put the video together today. I hope you enjoy it!

It's pretty deflating to arrive at the end of the year, review everything I set out to achieve and realize that despite all of my efforts, I've achieved absolutely none of it. I can definitely celebrate the steps I took toward achieving those goals, but even that can be kind of deflating, because I see all the effort that I put toward something, but with no outcome in return.

Back in mid-October, I took a road trip up to Maine with the intention to see the colorful fall leaves. We saw some fall leaves, but not in Maine, as mother nature wasn't following along with this year's leaf color predictions. It was still a nice trip where I saw lots of beautiful things and parts of the country I'd never seen before.

I've been thinking a lot about change and transformation, lately. And not just because of the change in seasons. I've been working on transforming myself over the past 16 years and it feels like things are finally starting to shift.

I quit all of my social media accounts (obviously other than YouTube) several years ago. Since that time I've noticed that I very rarely document my life anymore, other than in video — and that's only select things. I love looking back on photos that I've taken. They're fun reminders of my life —usually just little things that I'd typically have forgotten, had I not taken a photo. And there's been a serious gap in photos since I stopped posting on Instagram and deleted my account in 2021.

Throughout the summer I buy flowers for myself to brighten up my house. They unfortunately don’t last very long in the heat, though, so toward the end of the summer I usually start to give up. I saw these beautiful flowers at the market yesterday, though.

The beautiful fall leaves have mostly all fallen this past week. It got super hot out, baked the color out of the leaves on the trees, then the wind picked up and blew them off, and then we had a freeze.

My whole life I’ve been a pretty fearful person. Most people don’t know it though, because I’ve done a lot of things that many people tell me they're too scared to do. I have a lot that I want to experience in this lifetime and I know that if I allow my fear to hold me back, I won't ever get to experience it, so I push through.

Fall is officially here. I mean, the autumn equinox happened over a month ago, so it's been here for a while now, but it feels more official now that the leaves are changing and falling. I get super motivated to get out into nature when the leaves start changing, because I know it doesn't last long, and the winter isn't very beautiful here.

I went to an edible park today, and it’s making me think about why we don’t have more edible plants and trees in our local parks.

I can pretty easily find myself stuck in a rut in life, and unfortunately, it generally takes me a while to even notice that I'm stuck. For some reason, though, when summer is nearing its end, I feel a giant universal kick-in-the-pants, alerting me to look at my life and see where I am, because something needs to change.

I had to say goodbye to my big baby Frida last week. I know that some of you have come to love seeing the dogs in my videos, so I wanted to let you know. It was one of the saddest things I've ever had to go through, but I'm doing much better than I expected I would be. Little Maggie is doing well too.

Summer's filled with a special kind of magic. Thunderheads fill the sky in the day, and the warm summer nights bring out the fireflies. It's a time filled with beauty and abundance...and cute baby animals. The light and the heat from our beautiful sun have my garden exploding with herbs at the moment, so this week, I've been doing my best to process and preserve them, so they don't go to waste.

In today's video, I'm showing you how I repaired a bird feeder that was destroyed by a bear last week. I really didn't want to throw the broken bird feeder in trash, because there's way too much crap in our landfills, as the modern day human has a habit of throwing things away, rather than repairing them.

I decided this weekend, that as much as I love feeding the birds, I'm going to wait until winter to continue doing so - at least while I live within Asheville's city limits. The city bears are not at all afraid of humans or dogs. I ran out onto the deck to see what Maggie was barking at, and there was the bear, unflinchingly approaching, so I grabbed Maggie, headed inside, got my camera gear and just hoped it wouldn't get too destructive.

Let's embark on a journey through nature's beauty together. The temperate rainforests in the Appalachian mountains are inspiring, to say the least. Spending time in the natural world makes me yearn for a massive shift in how humans live and how they build up and treat the environments around them. We haven't been heading in the right direction for quite some time now, but I believe we have the ability to change direction and re-build the natural world around our pre-existing spaces.

Without access to a grocery store, or a restaurant, most modern humans wouldn’t have the first clue as to how to go about feeding themselves. And when you really think about that, it’s kind of mind blowing. I grew up in this system, so it’s something I never thought about until March of 2020, when the US went buck wild for toilet paper. Which has absolutely nothing to do with survival. My grandma grew up on a farm in Missouri and this is what they used. We can survive without toilet paper, people, but we can't survive without food.