A Day in the Life of Robin Greenfield - Living Simply and Sustainably

Good morning dear friends. Today I am going to take you along on a day in my life. Although it is just me in this simple wooden structure, I am not alone. The walls are open on all sides and I wake up to see my relatives. A cherry tree to my right, oak trees with sister ivy growing up the trunks. I look to my left and I feel grateful for the food in my jars, much of it the product of my relationship with earth and my great love of harvesting the abundance the earth provides. It is around 7 a.m. I am not in a rush to get out of bed. I have no phone and I have no wi-fi here so I have my mornings to myself. I generally don't speak until 10 a.m. and today is no exception. Getting dressed is easy since I just have five green t-shirts and a couple pairs of brown shorts and pants. I shake out my body and stretch for a bit to loosen up both my body and mind. I see what kind of critters might have visited me in the night, like mice and raccoons. Sometimes I see them scrambling away when I stir. They can't get at my nuts though, those are too precious. I poop in my compost toilet, returning my nutrients to earth and wiping with some of the softest leaves that I grow right here at home. It doesn't take long for me to get right to chores and tidying. I sweep the house and shake out the cotton mat and put away some dishes. I check my ferments. Right now my pickles are bubbling quite substantially. I put out the food I'm dehydrating. Right now it's salt, fruit leather, and cherries. Today I'm putting away herbs that I have finished drying and by now I've definitely taken a swig of apple cider vinegar or fire cider. Before the day has gone on too long, I care for my body with my simple natural personal hygiene. I brush my teeth, sniff some lavender essential oil, and possibly do some swishing with coconut oil. No deodorant, cologne, or toxic chemicals here. I generally stay at home until at least 10 o'clock so I can have a slow yet generally quiet and productive morning. I get on my computer to do some work to be of service to earth and humanity. Never until after 8 a.m. and don't get onto the wi-fi until after 9. Here without wi-fi I'm doing work that I will upload later when I connect to the internet. Because I don't have a phone it means that I'm unreachable for much of each day. This is part of my practice of mindfulness and presence. I will often start to make breakfast around 9 30 so that I can eat at 10 after 16 hours of intermittent fasting. Today breakfast is locally grown oats with freshly picked lamb's quarter and tomatoes with apple blackberry sauce that I made this summer and some local duck eggs which were a gift from a friend. Today is a bit of a different day because I have a cameraman here to show you a day in my life. But this is pretty normal. I do a lot of media interviews. This week I have vice and 60 second docs coming over to share my story. One of my most connective moments of the day is going to the spring to fill up my water jugs which is about a five minute walk away. I find that my mind slows down here and that I'm able to take this mindfulness and presence with me throughout the day. And wherever I am I take opportunities to connect with the earth and with my plant and animal relatives. I'm in the communal space of Wild Abundance the community where I am staying and here there is internet. What I do is very diverse and I won't sum it up for this day in the life but most of the time I'm on the computer I'm in service to earth and humanity. I do still waste some time on the computer but after my vipassana which is a 10 day silence meditation I find myself watching a lot less clips of the office on youtube. It's mid-afternoon and it's time for a swim. My swimming hole of choice is about a five minute bike ride away. Wherever I am I try to get in a swim. Lakes, roaring rivers, tiny creeks or ponds, swimming is my shower and my time to connect with earth. I do struggle with anxiety a fair bit and many of my practices throughout the day are very helpful with this. Swimming resets and re-centers me. Today I'm staying in but on many days I go out and if I do go out there's a good chance that I'm looking for food. If you're in the car with me you'll notice I'm rarely looking at you in our conversation. Instead I'm keeping my eyes out for food and there's a good chance we're stopping and you'll be learning something. You've probably noticed that I've been barefoot this whole day and I pretty much go barefoot everywhere I go. At home, walking in the woods, bicycling, walking through town and into the few stores that I go into. I spend a lot of time alone and over the last year have managed to get in a lot of silence and solitude but when I do go out there's a good chance that I'm talking to people. It's pretty commonplace for people to recognize me on the streets and I've made a lot of new friends this way. I love eating and I eat a lot throughout the day. Often lunch and dinner kind of mix together and I'll make lunch and that will be my same thing that I'm eating for dinner but today I didn't have lunch so now it's dinner time. So this is wild rice, lamb's quarter greens, chicken in the woods mushrooms, lamb, sauerkraut and then apple blackberry sauce with a couple of tomatoes on here and different herbs and spices. Right now I'm eating a 100% non-industrial diet so all locally grown and foraged foods and this meal represents real well what I'm eating in a day. Generally I try to finish eating by six o'clock so that I can get in my 16 hour intermittent fast but it often ends up being more like seven and it's actually 7 30 right now. This meal took me a little longer than usual. As much as nutrition is important to me so is delicious food so let's see how this chicken in the woods is. Very very happy with it. I wish you were here to taste it with me. In the evening I like to wind down and get myself ready for a good night's rest so usually the internet is off by seven or eight o'clock and then the screens all screens are off by about eight o'clock and put away for the rest of the evening so that I can reduce the stimulation and get myself ready for bed. I like to have a evening herbal tea tonight. I'm not making that happen and then ideally in bed by about nine o'clock if not nine then ten o'clock. I'm generally going all day and often late into the evening but on my really good days like today I have my evening wind down and I get myself into bed pretty early. Every day there's a balance of living in service to earth and humanity and taking the time for myself. My goal each day is to be the change that I wish to see in the world and to live it out loud and at the same time be living simply and sustainably. All of this takes a lot of time but one of the big lessons I've learned over the last decade is that a quality existence takes time. Each day I practice some compassionate communication or non-violent communication and after a year of practicing it has very much become into my flow as we call it non-violent NVC consciousness. With this practice of NVC and many other practices over the last few years my big focus has been overcoming the dominator culture that has been ingrained into part of me. Racism and sexism and the belief that humans are superior to other animals and so a lot of my day and a lot of my time and energy goes into that just the the self-work and the growth to overcome what this dominator culture has ingrained deep inside of me. I haven't accomplished nearly as much as I've been hoping to in the last three years. First there was COVID which stirred things up a little bit and made it harder for me to do my activism and with the murder of George Floyd about three years ago as a white man I definitely had a decent amount of shaking up of it's time for me to step aside and de-center myself and to use the platforms that I have to bring in other voices and so I have been doing that for a lot for the last three years just listening and learning and so that's one of the reasons that you've seen a lot less of me here online but after the last few years of doing this like I still have a lot left to learn but I'm feeling like it's time for me to center myself a little bit more bringing myself back into these platforms online and continuing to make sure that I'm using them in a way that's bringing other voices in so that our society is moving towards equity and justice. I have over the last years come to find that in most days I'm not able to accomplish what I want to in a day and I've had to do a lot of figuring out what is my best gift and my best service to the earth and what what do I focus on that allows me to be productive and successful and effective while also not burning out and I've been learning a lot from Anishinaabe culture which are the you know the indigenous people of where I'm from and particularly the robin bird as I've been returning to robin from rob robin is my birth name I've learned from pichi or opichi in Anishinaabe and one of the lessons that I learned which was so powerful for me was do not aspire beyond your scope and your own being and that's the lesson of the robin one of the lessons of the robin and it was so powerful for me to hear that and that's really one of my things that I'm taking in deep right now is do not aspire beyond your own scope and your own being I'm really joyful to have taken you along on a day in my life people have been asking me for this video for a very long time and I've been hesitant towards it because a day in my life well my life is so different it really depends on the different activism project that I'm doing I do so many different immersive campaigns that my life widely varies depending on the activism that I'm doing but here what you saw today this is a tidbit of my life at the age of 36 about to turn 37 living here in this little shack for a temporary piece of time and so I'm elated to have invited you in to this little slice of my life I love you all very much and I'm so grateful to have spent this time with you and I look forward to seeing many of you in person and sharing a hug