Hello friends.
On this heavy, scary week, I’m sure a lot of people are fantasizing about escape in one way or another.
Have you ever dreamed of going back to the land?
Living in a more sustainable way, a simpler life, stewarding the earth, building your own house with natural and reclaimed materials, surrounded by nature, drinking pure water, breathing fresh air, singing around the campfire?
Well, my sister did it! And things got really real.
Today I’m bringing you really beautiful conversation with one of my favorite conversation partners in the world, my gorgeous, one and only sister Kezia Vida Kamenetz.
Kezia has a master's degree in counseling. She studied ecopsychology and she's worked for many years with people's dreams through what's called Natural Dreamwork. And she writes a Substack that you should subscribe to called
.And in this conversation we also get into the fact that she is living the dream or at least many people's dreams in that she lives, for the most part, on the land.
Her and her husband’s project, All You Need Institute is a 111-acre nature conservation area, campground, retreat center and revillaging project in the heart of the Gulf South, Lumberton, Mississippi, about 90 minutes from New Orleans. She writes:
Starting in 2018, facilities for up to 100 guests and residents utilizing sustainable, regenerative building practices for visitors to minimize their ecological impacts were built from the ground up with a minimal budget. We have hosted a wide range of events to learners from all over the country and the world including Natural Building workshops, forest school programs, and nature-based healing events. Ayni also engages in consistent, wide ranging conservation practices and research to support the burgeoning populations of endangered and threatened species in our ecosystem including the gopher tortoise and the black pine snake.
In 2025 the Burrow Nature Center was established as a non-profit with members of the AYNI community to support the conservation and nature-based education aspects of the AYNI mission. You can follow along their progress or support the work @allyouneedinstitute or @bnc_mississippi on Instagram or visit www.allyouneedinstitute.com
So we'll talk about that dream and the reality of it and much more. It's a juicy conversation.
Tell people where you are right now.
I am in my little cabin in Lumberton, Mississippi. It's a nine by 12 room that my husband and I used to live in with our dog until I was eight months pregnant, but now it's my office, which is great.
What's Jordan (my brother in law) doing right now?
He has been cleaning out the shed today.
He was working really hard on that grant I think I told you about. He spent the last two months kinda getting that together and it was very in the bag, 'cause we had like a sponsor for it, and now it's very not in the bag because of what our government is doing. I mean our understanding in general is that a lot of the Inflation Reduction Act grants involving climate are basically not happening. It's really hard to get information though.
And what were you guys gonna use the grant for?
So the money was specifically for longleaf pine restoration. Taking our forest from where it is now, which has like a lot of different kinds of pine trees, and doing a lot of prescribed burning, culling the forest 'cause they're really transforming it into the savannah. So trees being, you know, 10 to 15 feet apart. But also taking out a lot of the pine trees that are there 'cause they're not longleafs and planting longleaf and other native grasses and plants to support that ecosystem.
So this is about returning the ecosystem of the land that you're on to a sort of different, earlier stage.
The longleaf pine ecosystem was, as far as I understand…when Europeans arrived to the southeast of America, this is the majority of what they saw.
There was these large, expansive savannas that had bison. That had a much greater diversity of plants and animals in general. And the Indigenous people would regularly do prescribed burns to keep the land that way.
I think sometimes when people think about conservation, they think about just letting it be. But this was them very intentionally tending to it in a very specific way. The understanding now is that that was the ideal based on it allowing for the greatest diversity of things to exist and coexist.
Including humans.
Right. Exactly.
Can you take a step back and explain what the place is that you're living on and what the original idea was for you guys when you first got there?
So the other night, I was reading back in my Google drive of things that I've written, and I had a piece that I wrote in 2018. And it was all about Donald Trump and my reaction to that.
Our intention was to be able to live on the Earth in a way that was the least harmful … living as lightly as I can or living in right relationship is another phrase, but just this idea of having my day-to-day life be a lot less damaging to the ecosystem that I exist in.
And I felt like in the urban environment I was in, New Orleans, that wasn't possible just on like some basic levels, both for my own personal health and then also for the, the health of the ecosystem in general. Like not being able to know where our water was really coming from or being constantly bombarded by all of the ways that our urban life can make it feel like we have to consume material goods or foods or all of that kind of thing. Just feeling like, oh, if I go to the land, I can live in a house that I build so that I'll know that it has, I built it in a sustainable way and I can grow my own food. It's easier to compost. I can drink water from the well. I'm gonna be able to live in a way that is more in tune with my values in that sense and feel like I'm doing like my part, in terms of how I want humans to live and how I wanted to live.
And then, alongside that as a mission, there was always the sense that that should be done in community. We weren't really ever interested in doing that by ourselves. Just trying to harken back, I guess to a reference point of like the village … living on land together and being able to provide for each other's needs in ways that are not extractive or exploitative or harmful, but are actually regenerative and give back to the land and get back to each other.
A very idealistic view.
What do you see as being the roots of your holding these values to be so important?
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, it's something I question in myself. like, why is it that I held it so dearly?…
It feels like when you're a kid. You're taught oh, money doesn't really matter. Like you should do like what your passions are. What's important is like your relationships with people and how, and your integrity.
And I feel like I, I took that really seriously. ... Like, I am not very realistic. Like I'm very idealistic.
My experience with Katrina and then even like graduating [college] into the collapse of the economy, like in 2009 and getting really involved with like, Occupy. There's these points along the way that I felt like there were collective moments where I was like, oh yeah, people are on board. But, yeah, it's a good question. 'Cause I, I still question it, you know, in a lot of ways.
I'm just wondering if there was a moment in all of those experiences in you know, post-Katrina or post-graduation, or in Occupy, when you were like, this is how the world should be and I'm gonna make the world like this.
I don't know if there was like a singular moment. Like when you read about people on their deathbed. they'll always be like, I wish I spent more time with my family, or I wish I didn't like sacrifice this or that. Like whenever I read something like that or hear something that like, I'm like, yeah, that's right. You know?
But now I'm at a point, I guess, where it's like realizing so, so in all of it, it wasn't just like, oh, I'm willing to stand out here by myself and like do my own thing.
Like, it was always like, I'm part of something that's growing and it's gonna happen. And as I've gotten older, I'm like, oh, I, I might just be out here on this thing for like, the rest of my life or forever… that makes it feel a lot different actually, because I'm like on a limb.
…it feels like more of a personal sacrifice…so maybe that's why it's harder for me to answer that question where I'm just kind of like, is that worth it? Like what makes it worth it?
So can we be a little more concrete? Like, tell me about what you've accomplished on the land since you first moved there and also what you didn't accomplish, what you hope to that didn't quite get off the ground.
I think at the core of what we've done is we have built an environment for humans to experience living in good relationship with the land.
Like we built all the buildings with a lot of sustainable building practices and we have a campground and we have tended to the land very carefully. We've done prescribed burns. We have removed invasive species. We've done a lot of wildlife tracking. We have a lot of endangered and threatened animals and plants on the land. We've documented that and created an educational trail for people to learn more about the ecosystem here.
And we offer educational programs for kids and adults to connect with the land and with nature. And it's been wonderful. We've hosted other groups as well to utilize that space and we feel proud of being able to offer a retreat center in nature that is, again, like a little bit inconvenient, I would say.
It was built with the idea of like, how could we have people here in a way that. impacts the land in the lightest way possible.
But we always felt like, oh, we need to have partners in this project. We don't wanna just live here ourselves. We want to live with people and have them invested into this project with us to create that lifestyle of like intentional community or villaging where we have long-term residents who want to grow with us in that way. I've had people say like, you know, starting an intentional community with somebody else is like marrying them, starting a business and starting a nonprofit.
Mm-hmm.
And that was it. That's completely true. It's like a very high level of commitment. And so we've had a lot of false starts with that.
And I think there's different potential reasons for that. One thing being the longer that we continue to be the main people investing our time and our resources into the place and kind of forming it to our needs or vision, maybe the harder it is for people to come in…
I still very much crave, you know, the village and like in a really deep way like living together and raising kids together and sharing resources like at that very core level.
Yeah.
Right now I'm not putting a lot of energy into that anymore. Because I have other things that I wanna work on. And I also just feel like, it was just very draining.
Yeah. It sounds super draining. I mean, you decided to set your life up in a way where everything takes more work.
Yes. It's a very inconvenient life. That's kind of at the core of it.
And haven't, you also experienced people being very grateful for this land existing?
Oh yeah.
And that's interesting, right? Because I think the thing that you've been working on is such a universal dream. And I think, almost everyone who might listen to this experiences the reality of what you're saying, that the systems that sustain our way of life are not sustainable. And we need to disengage, decouple, and stop participating in them, and that we need to create an alternative.
And we've all, imperfectly in different ways, tried to do that. And you tried to do it in a really big way, and so the notion that it would end up being lonely is, is a harsh one, I think, because in theory everybody wants to do this. In theory.
Yeah. I mean, is there a question in that?
Well, I guess, do you feel like people don't do it because they don't really understand what it's gonna take? Or do you think that if we all held hands and jumped together, it would be achievable?
I definitely think if we all jumped. Then yes, it would be way more achievable. I think at the core of our struggle has been just the simplicity of like a lack of resources. …[And ] the core of what keeps people from coming is like this real big fear of the commitment.
Another reason why I think people don't do it long term is just a very similar reason to why we still have capitalism when so many people don't like capitalism or like aren't benefiting from it. There are so many reasons why it would be make sense to have an alternative, but the alternative still presents something different and something different presents fear.
I always say to people, there's gonna be another storm. I'm in Mississippi, there's gonna be another catastrophe in my lifetime. I don't know exactly when. And I think that'll change the equation for everyone.
Yes.
There's places within 35, 45 minutes of me that are gonna be underwater. And that's gonna cause a migration. And I think that's gonna cause an attitudinal change as people see that some of the ways of life that they are used to aren't available to them anymore.
So then something like this is gonna look nice. I have to wait.
I [also] think a lot of the people who consider a lifestyle like this potentially are more urban oriented.
And so the idea of living in a rural area is a really big, just like social leap.
I think one of the things that comes up for me in response to what you're saying is yeah, the thing that urban areas have is people, easy access to like-minded people in large numbers.
Whereas what you get in the rural environment is land. So, I can hear the sense of disappointment, but from my perspective, it's like, you're solving for a lot of things that are big, big, massive problems across our society. How we get our food, how we get our water, what we do with our waste, how we spend money, how we live together, loneliness and a sense of security and planning for the future. These are big problems.
We're failing at them on a society-wide level. The idea that you would not succeed immediately in your own experimental alternative way is sort of to be expected, don't you think? Like, we're gonna have to keep trying, we're gonna have to throw a lot at this problem. And you're succeeding in some ways, right?
Yes. I don't see what's happening now as a failure by any means. The dream of a deeply rooted community here is still very much alive and I feel like will happen. It's like a reorientation from trying to make it happen in the next 10 years to trying to make it happen in the next 30 years.
And I will say too, you know, when it comes to the urban piece, like I really strongly feel that people in urban environments can and do achieve a lot of these things. You don't have to be in a rural environment to live in a communal way with other people and even live on the land that you live on in a more positive way.
There's probably a community garden like 10 blocks away from you that needs your help and that you could get a lot of vegetables from.
And then the other part too, I'll say, like there's of course the whole like trad wife strain of like people who are actually kind of isolationist…There are a lot of people who don't wanna be around people and that's why they come and are like, are engaging in these projects.
But I think they get lonely too.
Yeah. I mean, they wouldn't be posting so much if they weren't lonely.
I know, right? [laughs]
How has your viewpoint on this stuff changed since you became a mom?
I would say the, parenting aspect has been some of the most beneficial and, and like, heartwarming. It's been so, so positive for my son to live here. And I see the benefits of it. I see how, just like the way that he is and the ways that we've been able to be with him because of this environment being so different from the city. That's probably one of the more heartening places.
I just think it's so, so beneficial for him to be in nature as much as he is. And also like when he was a baby, it was like, so nice for me as a mom because we did have a lot of people living here at that time. We've had a lot of people staying here for different amounts of times and invested in our project in all different kinds of ways that have been so, so beautiful.
And having him as a baby here, it's like I didn't experience the kind of isolation I feel like moms do sometimes. Even in urban and community environments, like you might know a lot of people nearby, but you have to like call them and make a plan and when you have a baby, it's like hard to get outta the house and I could literally just step outside and there's somebody there and now we're just hanging out.
Since becoming a mom, also, though, I felt more motivated to have even greater economic stability. I felt like, it's one thing for me to take the certain risks that I have, but it's another thing to put him into that same boat. So, I did start my grad school program, like right when I had him with kind of that in mind, like I don't know how much more financial risk that I can take on having him.
Absolutely. And it's really impressive that you did that. You got a graduate degree while you had a baby. And do you wanna talk about your studies and your practice and how that's fitting in with all of this?
I got a degree from Prescott and I'm working on a certificate in nature-based counseling, which involves a lot of like study in ecopsychology. … I was pretty involved with Occupy movement and when eventually, you know, like all the other encampments, New Orleans got broken up by the police and cleared out and I remember I got a text…I had already been gone from there for like a week and a half. I had already had my heart ravaged and broken by, not by the government, not by the police, but by the other organizers and the degree to which people were not able to communicate with each other at all in any kind of respectful manner. Just the fighting the drama, like it was so intensive and I was like, holy crap. Like we talk about these ideals of things that we want to have happen, like alternative ways of governing or, you know, providing education or providing food, and we can't even relate to each other, like on a very basic human level, like at all.
So that's silly. And so that was one of my first like turns into like, okay, I don't need to do as much political organizing. I need to help and try to understand how to help people like relate to each other in a positive manner.
Mm-hmm.
Becoming, you know, like a actual mental health professional … is kind of its whole other thing. Mm-hmm. But, just this idea that at the core of our organizing has to be a deeper understanding that like how atrophied and deficient we are at relating to each other and relating to ourselves in a way that allows for like, love and connection to flourish, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And there's no way to like get out of this or to like go towards what we want, I think in the world without like a deep reckoning with that.
And in that time from Occupy to now, I've seen a lot of progress and work on that. Now everybody's in therapy or like, people wanna like, reflect and like spirituality is allowed in organizing spaces.
Aand just one more thing on that and I know you might have some questions for me, but a question that I have about, you know, nature based counseling and thinking about, like, you sort of talked about like the germ of your idea to go and live in right relationship to the land.
And I feel like, and we've talked about this, how sometimes it feels like in traditional psychology, nature is like a palliative. Something that you infuse to make people feel better.
Right, right.
So I'm just curious like how, how you think about nature based counseling and what that means.
If you're gonna take people out onto your land, for example, and talk to 'em about invasive species and the flood that's coming, where we're gonna be a, you know, in a place of refuge here, but there's gonna be an incursion someplace else, like how does that benefit people's mental health, I guess?
I guess for me what's been really helpful in studying ecopsychology is putting like better terms and verbiage to what I think is just a reality actually, which is that our psyche is not an individual psyche and we aren't really individuals in the way that western psychology conceives of us as being, and the ecos psychological view, which of course is also very much in line with the Indigenous worldview, to the extent that you could say that that is a universal thing, certainly in North and South America it's very pervasive to consider us not as again, individuals, but in relationship to everything else around us and that is actually us, right?
So the same way you would think of a cell in a body.
And so, another big piece I guess of my work has been with dreams and dream work, and to me that is sort of fundamentally about shadow work and acknowledging the parts of ourselves that we would rather suppress, deny, or avoid.
And, understanding that these things that arise in us are not like, I mean, what's the quote? Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. There's pieces of ourselves that we want to put away or deny or avoid 'cause we're trying to succeed or be healthy or like whatever it is.
And just having that really much more expansive view of who we are as individuals and embracing that as fully as we can. So when I think about bringing people onto the land, it's not really about trying to feel better necessarily as much as it would be to acknowledge, that the extent to which they're experiencing discomfort, anxiety, pain, agony, distress and all these things that this has been well and alive in the land for a very long time.
'Cause we've been having a very destructive, abusive relationship with the land that gives us life. This is not some problem that we have that we need to figure out and, and solve so that we can have a better life. This is an ongoing relationship that's very damaged and you're just waking up.
And acknowledging that you're experiencing that and it's bothering you, and that's a good thing. Like, welcome.
Let's do this together. There's no world or reality where pain, grief, fear, tragedy, drama, these things aren't gonna exist.
But I think that we can live in a much more visceral, present manner where we can actually respond to our lives.
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