It's an unpredictable timeline that we find ourselves in, unpredictable in a way that defies logical, rational explanation. The only way I can make sense of this madness is through spiritual understanding, by scrolling way, way out, to see the current moment as just an aspect of a much bigger story of human evolution, and at that resolution, I can make out the vague shape of purpose, a necessarily dark period of time, which catapults us into a new way of being.

Still here in the moment, there isn't much to love about what's happening to us. Nearly all of us have been programmed since youth for lifestyles, which simply don't make sense anymore. There's no safety in the status quo. Extremist ideologies are commonplace and common sense is labeled as extremism.

Everything is upside down and we're ill-equipped for it. Those of us who see the metaphorical shit about to hit the fan face the choice to either hunker down and shelter in place, hoping that the negative vibes of the last few years blow over, or to GTFO to escape, to exit and build. If you're convinced that everything is normal, nothing remarkable happened in the last few years and there's no reason for concern, then this probably isn't the podcast for you.

But if like me, you're trying to wrap your head around how to set your family up for success in the decline of Western civilization, then you're considering taking part in what I call the Great Escape, a mass exodus from mainstream society and a return to a natural, spiritual, and place-based way of being in the world.

The Great Escape is a human migratory event, but it's not taking place in a particular location like other similar events in history. Instead of crossing geopolitical boundaries, these refugees are escaping ideological ones. Of course there are concerns of war, food and water shortages, energy crises, and so on, but liberty and the pursuit of happiness are really the core issues here. Urban environments will suffer the worst of the coming shortages, violent crime and techno fascism. Centralized supply chains will fail as will central banks and centralized governments. It won't happen suddenly, of course, but we've already begun the slow decline.

Extracting yourself and your family from this madness should be your top.  to exit and build is a bold choice and a brave one. It's not easy. I know because my family has already made our exit and is well on our way to building our better future. My wife and I and our two dachshunds moved to Mexico in July of 2021.

We got a residency visas and we promptly started looking for land on which to build our sanctuary, that is, our future homestead, spirituality and wellness center and permaculture food forest. It's taken a long time to realize as much of this project as we have, so far about three years now. Based on those experiences, I've divided our escape process into eight stages that I think that anyone who's following a similar path will inevitably have to go through on their own journeys.

I have a variety of thoughts on each of those eight stages that I'm ready to share, more or less with the benefit of hindsight, as well as relevant stories from our own experiences and the various types of spells and magical workings that have supported us along the. I have, as a matter of fact, a lot to say, so I broke this episode up into two parts, and this is the second of those parts. In the last episode, I talked about some of the motivations behind our little adventure into the jungle, about the eight stages of the escape process, and a few relevant experiences from each of the first four stages of our own journey.

In this episode, I'm gonna wrap up with the final four stages, our experiences in them and the magic that we use to get through them successfully. And I'll summarize the most important takeaways from both episodes right at the end, so stay tuned for all of that.

Welcome to episode four of Postmugglism, the podcast that talks about magic and postmodern times when the empire is in decline, consensus reality is fractured, and personal liberty is up against the wall. In last week's episode, number three, I started sharing my thoughts on my family's escape from mainstream society and our sanctuary building project in the jungle here, a little south of Cancun, Mexico.

And I talked about our motivations for doing so, the challenges we faced along the way, and how magic and magical thinking has been essential to our success. I've broken down the escape process into these eight stages: one, the early phase, going from a vague desire to a grand plan; two, putting that plan into action; three, making a move, relocating; four, getting settled, building community, and setting up your supply chain. And this is where I ended the first episode, so we'll pick back up with: five, acquiring land, and the order may vary here, and continue on with six, building, sanctuary, construction, renovation, and so on; seven, growing, protecting, and maintaining what you have; and then finally eight, investing into the future and, and I mean your future, your family's future. We've already covered a lot of ground. If you haven't listened to the first of the Great Escape episodes yet, I highly recommend that you pause here now and you do that first.

The content of this episode will make a lot more sense if you do, but in any case, I'll briefly review some of the more notable concepts from the first four stages that we covered in detail and last week's episode. When you first realize how badly you need to get out of the city and move somewhere with more freedom and less oversight, it's overwhelming to think about.

It can be very difficult to plan when you probably don't even really know what you want, only what you don't want. So seeking inspiration is the first step in your journey. Inspiration and guidance, but that's only half the solution. Spiritual guidance is often very confusing to interpret and can be quite unreliable. To make sense out of it so that you can take action requires keen discernment and oftentimes divination.

Learning how to get specific actionable responses from your tarot deck is an essential practical skill for the aspiring escapist. Moving from thinking and planning into acting and sometimes reacting, kicks the ball rolling. And the end of this stage marks the no turning back now point in your adventure. This is where all the ugly details and damned facts have to be squared away.

It's not the fun or the adventurous part or the part where you get cool stories to tell your friends. This is the part where you get your stuff packed away, your papers in order, and you cut ties to the things that you can't take with you. Regular, energetic cleansing, combined with magic to stay focused and to bust through any roadblocks will serve you well at this stage. Once your wheels are up or they're rolling, depending on your travel plans, the dreaming and planning take a backseat to the doing, and practical concerns take precedence over theoretical ones. In particular, safety is a top concern, so protection magic is a top priority.

Likewise, moving long distances introduces a lot of potential volatility into your life, and at a time when you're more vulnerable than usual, so it only makes sense to double down on travel magic with astrological talismans and working with Hermes. If you're also crossing international borders, it's worth adding in some favor from authority style workings to ease your way through checkpoints, customs, and other potentially sticky spots. After arriving in the area that you want to call home, whether that's into a house directly, you lucky dogs, or, like us, setting up shop and temporary housing for a while, you're finally able to start living your dream at least a little.

It's time to make new habits, make new friends, make new connections in your local network, and to get comfortable for the long haul of your bigger. Ease your way into local society with the blessings of Venus, with talismans for attracting good people into your life and petitioning for the specific resources your diet and lifestyle require.

And that catches us up on everything that we discussed in the last episode. Now we turn our attention to the final four stages of the escape process, as I see it anyway. Depending on how your own journey unfolds, you may find that the order of these stages moves around a little bit. Your mileage may vary there, but, order aside, everything else that I'm talking about here is essentially universal. So perhaps you find your future homestead property before you move, for example. That might make sense in the US. In Mexico, that's a lot less straightforward and there's no like online listings or anything, so it wasn't really possible for us to begin our search until we were here on the ground in Mexico, so it just depends on your situation. Let's say for the moment though, that you know the area that you want to live in, very generally, but you're not sure about anything else just yet. It may not seem like that's a lot to go on, but that's all that we had, and honestly, everything has worked out just fine.

The most important thing is that you're very clear on what you want. How to get there is something you can figure out along the way.

Building sanctuary, probably in the form of a homestead, is the most essential aspect of the escape process. It's the build part of "Exit and Build". A homestead complete with chicken coop, market garden, orchard, et cetera, this is the end state of the personal resilience journey. Somewhere that come what may, you can feel secure, both in terms of physical safety. and more importantly, in terms of the sustainability of your most essential resources.

Obviously, you don't have to move out of your country of origin to pursue the homestead life. Most places have ample rural zones where land is still roughly affordable and the state has not yet imposed most of its control, and all of the same practices are equally as valid if you choose to remain in familiar territory.

But if you're the kind of person who like us, felt a powerful urge to escape, then you're signing up for what is even more of a challenging journey to realize your homesteading dreams. It was an easy trade for us. The Yucatan Peninsula's 10 plus month growing season, and paradise-like weather and temperature conditions, and the ample availability of affordable land, far outweighed the challenges that we were signing up for by building our sanctuary here.

Everyone's sanctuary looks different. Everyone has a different idea of what paradise looks like, though I'm personally convinced that this place would be paradise to anyone. So there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to where you choose to build your life. Every place on earth is beautiful and magical, and most are also habitable and nourishing.

If you're in the right place, the rest sorts itself out. Finding the right place is the trick. I spent most of my life in the wrong place, though it was probably the place that I needed to be at the time. But none of the other places that I've lived held any sort of special place in my heart. None of the cities where I grew up, certainly, and not Dallas either. I've visited places that fascinated me, that stuck with me and so on, but I've never managed to live in a place that made me feel that way before. My father visited Mexico frequently for a number of years in my young life as part of a church missionary program that was, for the most part, pretty benign. They didn't do the gross stuff like evangelizing, but mostly focused on handing out candy and providing basic medical care to the extremely impoverished native Mayan Mexican population building churches and other facilities and and so on.

But in any case, he loved his visits so much that when my brother and I were old enough to appreciate the international experience, we both got, uh, taken to Mexico on separate father-son bonding trips. My trip happened when I was 16, and I've been on a boomerang course back here since then. I remember, very clearly, standing on the cliffs at the Tulum Ruins and looking out over the ocean in my youth and experiencing an unfamiliar gut churning sense of deja vu -which I've since identified as stepping out of time after similar experiences on psychedelics.

There was a very physical sense of purpose and importance in that moment that I never really shook off in the decades that followed. When we started looking for a place to escape to, Mexico was immediately on the short list and quickly validated by our divination. It was obvious. It made sense. Though it only made sense to me at first.

Sarah took some convincing, but she is now as in love with this place as I've been for years, and that's interesting data to me, and I think it's useful maybe to hold that in tension with what I'm about to say for perspective because it should be obvious, maybe not at first, but once you've researched, visited, explored, and otherwise gotten to know a place you should already know if you belong there -it may even call to you from a distance.

Long before I ever visited the Caribbean, I was fascinated by rainforests, remote, tropical paradises, pirates, and so on. The Pura Vida called to me undeniably, and I think this place still has a lot more planned for me. During the forced downtime we "enjoyed" in the summer of 2020, I spent a lot of time gardening and daydreaming about escaping to Mexico and disappearing into the jungle, and a fair amount of time eating magic mushrooms and talking to spirits. During one of the really, really good trips that I enjoyed that summer, I experienced another time shift, and thanks to the mushrooms, physically experienced being in two timelines simultaneously. It was fairly hazy, also thanks to the mushrooms, but I could make out enough details that I got a pretty decent feel for what the vibe of our future life would be like. A few minutes later, I chanced a look in the mirror and rather than the harsh reality check that that sometimes induces, instead I was given a remarkably clear if somewhat a scanner darkly vibes vision of my future self. At the time I had short hair, a leftover cutt from my time in the corporate world, and a pretty sizable collection of sports jackets. The me in the mirror, however, had hair past the shoulders like where mine is now, dusty shorts and sandals, from working outside, and a very healthy tan. I was in better shape and clearly living my best life.

I looked so much like a pirate that you might expect me to have a parrot on my shoulder. Jungle me has been a guiding star as I've navigated the decisions that I've had to make to get from there to here. I'm grateful for that vision, and I'm pretty sure just going through the events which eventually will culminate at the other end of that time loop from the mushroom trip.

So what I'm trying to say is, do mushrooms. Well, okay, maybe not. There's a right way and a wrong way to go about that experience, and that's a conversation for another time. However, I tell that story because the mushrooms were just a conduit for the spiritual awakening that started my transformation from marketing executive to jungle shaman.

Once you've committed to even the vaguest intention of changing your place and your life, and you call upon spirit to guide you, the universe immediately begins to communicate and collaborate with you to those ends. The tricky thing is that you may be the only one in your family who's stricken with the burning desire to GTFO, to "get the fuck out".

This was my experience at first, until the pandemic happened and the great erosion of personal liberty began. It didn't take very long for Sarah then to get on board with the idea of escaping to paradise, but it was a very long time until she could see her place in my vision and very little that I've tried since then has worked to help her find her rhythm and purpose.

She makes her own progress in her own ways, but the transition has been challenging for her in very different ways. And not so bad that she would change anything, of course, but it's nevertheless part of the challenge of this grand undertaking. If you are the one with the burning desire to live in some special place, remember to be patient with your loved ones and to make the transition as compelling and as exciting as possible for them. Just recognize that you may need to advocate for your dream for a while, and to keep making sure that they're enjoying the experience along the way. Sharing in the magic with all its syncs, and journeys, and divination, and spirit communication, allows your loved ones to experience the enchantment, to see fate weaving the path ahead of you, and to experience wonder at your mutual good fortune.

Maybe they'll think you're crazy. Maybe they'll get pulled into a relationship with place as well. Who knows? But our crazy, uncanny adventures are the best part of the experience for both of us, and it just makes the whole thing better that we can share it. Finding our way from general area to specific place to our future neighborhood, and eventually our property, was an entire adventure unto itself; starting with our first wild ride into the jungle in our surprisingly resilient Altima and culminating with a series of extremely magical land spirit encounters. And since we've started visiting our little neighborhood in the jungle, it's really been our adventure rather than just mine.

Practically speaking, finding the right piece of land to cultivate and inhabit is less about seeing a ton of properties, though you probably will, or its natural resources, though every resource is valuable. Instead, if you start with making a spiritual connection with the land, and by this I mean the area that you feel drawn to live in, even generally, you will find yourself guided to certain locations, and even specific lots.

Fair warning, this process is anything but straightforward. So expect your share of confusing messages, course corrections, and uncertainty. Yet if you keep at it humbly, and without trying to influence the outcome with your preferences or assumptions, you'll find your way through the confusion soon enough.

In our case, we landed in the Caribbean in July and had already put down earnest money on our property by October, so we hardly wasted any time finding our future jungle sanctuary. Not that it was easy to find. I mean, it wasn't even marked on a map or by a sign, and there were no roads to access it. It's just a square of jungle, a hundred meters from the nearest road.

The area was recommended to us by our real estate agent, so we started leaving offerings at a quiet little crossroads in the jungle community, which as it turns out, it's not a very hard thing to find, and bought some dirt from the same crossroads to start working with on our altar. Then I journeyed, prayed extensively, worked magic and so on to find our place.

One particular journey, and a follow up tarot reading, yielded the final clue, a vision of myself walking down the main dirt road all the way back to the cenote at its end. When we went there physically though, there were no signs, no indications that this journey was meaningful, but it certainly felt that way.

So Sarah suggested doing a tarot reading to find out if there was something we'd overlooked, like a property listing in all the research that we'd done. 

And sure enough, there was a property that we'd overlooked, and it was only a hundred meters away from the entrance to the cenote at the end of the dirt road that I walked down in my journey. Later readings validated that this was the property.

So I moved forward with some degree of confidence and I told the seller that we'd put in an offer if we could just first get access to walk around on the property. Doing so though meant hiring a survey team to cut and mark the border of the property because it's just all one  big jungle. And so we hired a survey team and they blazed a trail onto the lot, literally with chainsaws and machetes.

Immediately afterwards, we were very eager to get on the property physically so that we could, well first apologize for cutting down a bunch of its trees, uh, but then also introduce ourselves as applicants for potential roles as the stewards and custodians of this piece of land. Because that's what homesteading really is when it's done in right relationship.

And I believe that is essential to the success of any project like this. Approaching the matter from this perspective places the greatest importance on the autonomy or the will of the land in the arrangement, and rightly so. If you believe in magic, you better believe that the spirits of the land will wield influence over anything that you hope to grow or raise there.

You need them on your side. Right relationship is all about knowing your place in the more than human community that you exist within and evaluating what you take and how you contribute. They describe it in different terms, but permaculturists hint at this approach when they talk about taking a year or more to get to know a property before attempting to fully cultivate it.

The land has plenty to say. It has opinions about how it wants to flourish and express itself. All your efforts will yield better results when you work with the land to achieve collaborative. I have dozens of stories of taking some question that I was facing at the time to the land, leaving offerings and saying little prayers and then quickly finding the solution, sometimes even before leaving the property. It's not exactly a conversation, but I would definitely describe our interactions, the land and I, as a dialogue of some kind up back and forth between us. It's not all that different from trying to talk to the locals, working on the neighboring properties. Most of them don't speak particularly good English or Spanish, and so our communication channels are a little limited.

There's a lot of pointing and implication involved in any of my interactions with them. And you know, the land spirits are honestly very much the same. It's unlikely that a hundred percent of the conversation makes sense to either side, but you know, we get by. Everyone gets the gist. Don't underestimate the value of simply conversing with the land or praying to it, if you prefer. Either way, attempting dialogue with the spirits of place where you want to live is essential, and if you don't have a specific property in mind, you can just buy some dirt from a crossroads in the general area and get to work, sending it your intentions. As we honed in from the region to the area to our specific lot, we kept acquiring dirt and I kept after it trying to communicate our intentions and interpret the impressions I got in response with Tarot.

Eventually I created a contract that embodied our agreement with the land, signed it, and put it in the jar of dirt that we keep on the altar. One of the terms that I agreed to in the contract was providing regular tributes or offerings. Another thing I committed to was to get their blessing over any major updates to the property.

And I've kept my word because the last thing that I want to do is to offend the aluxe, the Mayan version of The Good Neighbors or Fae. I do this because stewardship is a sacred bond, an agreement between flesh and spirit for the care and improvement of land. Place calls to us and its spirits can help pave the way from where you are to where you need to be.

Starting out with offerings and prayers sets the tone for this negotiation with spirit that taking on a custodial relationship with land really is. Buying property and possessing legal title doesn't guarantee that your project will be successful. But doing so after negotiating with its spirits and while keeping to ancient and universal traditions of land spirit appeasement, that's a strategy proven by time. Depending on how much you have to spend and what's available in your area, you may be able to find a place that has some of the structures and resources you want, like chickens, pens, storage sheds, and so on, in addition to a house. But you're gonna pay for it. In our case, the sale of our previous home in Dallas enabled us to buy both land and to have just enough to build our future home just outside of Puerto Morelos, Mexico.

And this strategy is cool because we get to design everything and have influence over every aspect of our property. However, in many ways, that's as much of a responsibility as an advantage. And of course, it means that we're starting from scratch, like no water, no power, no road, middle of the fricking jungle, starting from scratch.

Interestingly, construction is commonly discussed in ancient magical grimoires. In particular, the Picatrix's  two sections on lunar mansions, book one, chapter four, and book four, chapter nine, include "to strengthen buildings" as one of the various qualities of certain lunar mansions. Image magic is long-lasting, or at least it has the potential to be, and it's activated by adjacency or ownership, such as someone wearing a talisman or burying it in the area that they want affect.

Creating a talisman to bless and strengthen any significant structures or work that you're doing or having done is good policy. And you can think of this kind of like an insurance plan. Saturn talismans also work very well for this purpose. Claude LeCouteux's excellent book, "Demons and Spirits of the Land", discusses many ancient and enduring practices for working with local spirits, and in particular the acquisition of land and the blessing of construction on it.

The rituals and traditions it details include seemingly universal techniques like finding land by divination, marking the bounds, or the borders, and the sacrifice of a living being in exchange for the right to build peacefully. This sacrifice is sometimes done by the practitioner, but in many cases, the animal selected, often a chicken, is simply allowed to be the first to cross the new threshold dedicating its life for the purpose of consecration. Then, presumably, the animal will die of apparently natural causes sometime shortly after. I cannot recommend LeCouteux's work enough if you plan to be constructing in wild places.

I've been adapting the rituals covered in this book for my own purposes, and it seems to be going very well, and you can be sure that we will be careful not to step foot in our house or allow our pets to do so until it has been properly consecrated with a live chicken, because the alternative is to risk offending your local spirits, Faye, good neighbors, et cetera.

There is undoubtedly a sense of presence in wild places. Genus loci, which react to your intrusions as a whole, as if the forest has a hive mind or like a real-time surveillance system wired through every living being. If you engage with such a presence, respectfully recognizing it for what it is, you'll quickly find yourself in dialogue with spirits of place, whatever you call them.

Wild places open up themselves to you gradually like a new acquaintance, warming to your presence, developing trust and rapport and so on. And in the absence of respectful engagement, cold austerity tends to be the result instead. Humans build lots of things without the blessing of local spirits, of course; it's clearly not slowed human progress much. But I think there are strong arguments that our progress comes at a great cost to the environment, et cetera, obviously, but also to ourselves: our bodies, minds and spirits. The Fae, local spirits and so on, they typically act as guardians of nature and wild places in particular, and incurring their ire may result in mishaps, accidents, bad fortune and separation from spirit -disenchantment.

Suffice it to say, as magicians, we would be crazy to attempt to cultivate more of earth's wild places without the blessing and support of all your spiritual neighbors and authorities. It requires a relatively low amount of effort to sufficiently appease the spirits of a place, if yoiu approach your construction project in the right way. You can't simply decide what you want to do and do it.

You have to work with the land through sensing and listening exercises, journeying with it, thinking under trees, and so on, to reveal what the land wants you to do. Just spend time in the wild, let the ideas come into your mind without force, and you'll quickly find that place has lots to say. Being receptive is a crucial, magical technique.

Messages from spirit can take many forms, but the most common, and I think the easiest to accomplish for the spirits, is just simply to float an idea into our awareness. And if we're honest with ourselves, we can hardly claim credit for our own ideas. They appear from nowhere, like unexpected electrical surges in the brain, depositing something of definition and value where there were only fragments of thoughts and last night's television.

Ideas do come from somewhere, and that somewhere is of course the world around us. Not every thought is spirit communication, of course, but it becomes fairly easy to distinguish the difference with a little practice, because when unbidden thoughts arise, the best policy is to treat them as potential messages from external sources.

And in my experience, when you make an offering, share your intentions genuinely from the heart and ask for help or response of some kind, that response tends to come fairly directly. Many of our most fortunate wins in the process of acquiring land and beginning the construction of our jungle sanctuary occurred directly after engaging our local spirits for support, including: finding the right lot in the jungle to build on in the first place, finding a sacred place on the property to engage with its local spirits meeting and befriending our neighbors with whom we're now sharing the cost of road construction, electrical transformers and poles, and other expensive logistics meeting and befriending their workers who've taught me a lot about how to conduct myself safely in the jungle.

And discovering various features and beautiful places on the property with potential for our sanctuary project. There is a clear pattern which leads to these sorts of revelations and moments of good fortune through regular engagement offerings and so on. I've built rapport with the local spirits, and then when I need something, I simply ask for it while I'm out in the woods at our sacred spot.

Inevitably a short time later, and sometimes immediately, I'll discover the answer to my question or the solution to my problem without effort, and the results will simply fall into place. And this happens quite regularly, reducing the headaches, costs, and challenges of undertaking a project of this complexity and risk profile.

I go out into the jungle by myself where there's no cell phone signal and no one could hear me calling for help. And I machete my way around jungle so thick with vines and undergrowth that it's impassable. The potential for injury is real, particularly as I cut clean and gather, brush exposed potentially to snakes, bugs, uneven ground and random, sharp things like rocks and the trees I've slashed with my machete.

It's not exactly safe. Yet I don't get injured and regularly have near misses and well, I'm glad that worked out, moments where I avoid some kind of injury. It's just part of working outside. And you know, you know this, if you've ever had the opportunity to put in a real day's work, sitting in offices, working on whatever, tedium, corporate life demands is a padded, safe experience, but clearing space for your home in the jungle is not. Modern life has elevated itself artificially out of the chaotic relationality of life in the wilds, and since we grew up in its confines, we never learned the importance of working with nature. Everything we fear about nature, all its many dangers, are manageable to those who know how to live in relationship to them.

This becomes immediately obvious as I compare myself to my Mayan neighbors. When I first started going into the jungle, I took the advice of expats living in the jungle, and I dress like an amateur beekeeper covered head to toe by hot. Long pants tucked into knee high socks and that sort of thing. Out in the jungle though, I met some locals working on neighboring properties and befriended them, getting high with them and trying to understand what they said as they tried to teach me how to be in the jungle. They're almost always shirtless, in sandals, and have fingertips calloused to stone from tossing around the razor sharp limestone rocks that litter the forest floor. They showed me how to use a machete properly and how to avoid injuring myself with it, how to use fork sticks to move piles of brush to avoid snake and insects, and how to use the many deep holes that pockmark the limestone, like swiss cheese, for burn pits to prevent sparks from catching fire to the vast amounts of tender on the forest floor. And of course, I ran into these very hopeful folks immediately after petitioning the local spirits for help on the project.

And I'm sure both the locals and the spirits had a good laugh at my expense. When it comes to construction, there are two main opportunities for magical intervention, strengthening buildings, and potentially timing their construction astrologically and communication with spirits of place for their support, protection, and inspiration throughout the process.

Additionally, there are some ancillary practical considerations that may be worth magical workings as well, such as acquiring affordable construction materials, finding trustworthy builders and contractors, favor from authorities when applying for permits and so on in protection of yourself, your materials, and your workers, and typically for one-off magical workings.

My approach is to find the most suitable upcoming astrological election, usually lunar mansion, and to perform a simple paper talisman ritual.

We've now reached the point in the escape process where my family is at currently. So while I can see the next two stages on the horizon, and my family is thinking about the mon earnest, I no longer have the benefit of personal experience to share unavoidably that's gonna make these next two stages of the escape process a little more theoretical.

But nevertheless, you can dream with me about what's to come. When it comes to growing your own food, raising chickens and other animals, and generally living in relationship to land that is dependent on its ability to produce for you, one of the most important considerations is where your nutrients come from.

See, we get so focused on providing for our own needs that we often neglect the needs of the underlying supply chain that we draw upon, the plants that grow, the fruits and vegetables that we consume also need to eat to have water and access to minerals and sunlight . Our animals need much the same, though they get most of their chemical requirements from eating plants.

We primarily eat the animals, and a few plant-based foods, translating the nutrients from their bodies into our own, the nutrients themselves though are just chemical compounds which pass from one body to the next being reused and recombined in various chemical processes. They're consumed but never destroyed.

The entire supply chain shares the same basic chemicals. So if you really want to be resilient, you can't ignore the needs of your suppliers upstream in the supply chain, it all starts and ends with dirt or more precisely, soil dead, dirt doesn't really help much, but rich living soil is essential to the distribution of nutrients.

It's the foundation upon which the entire supply chain. Within the soil, fungi play perhaps the most essential role of all the filaments of their hyphae, connecting the entire community of local flora in a mesh network, reminiscent of the fiber optic network that we call the internet. As growers, we must intimately understand the cycles of life, and particularly the necessity of death and the reclamation of energy.

Death is necessary to regeneration, as we can see in its annual manifestation in the seasons, which allows winter to become spring again. Likewise, the reclamation of spent energy: dead leaves and branches, the bodies of last year's insects. Animals cold by the winter and so on, decay, petrify, and become hummus, or compost, to fuel the new growth to come. Fungi act is nature's pyschopomp, connecting the land of the living and the realm of the dead. They invade, breakdown and dissolve into base chemicals, all the dead and dying things so that the energy within them can be absorbed into the nutrient resource network that connects all the local flora who then begin the process of channeling those nutrients downstream in the supply chain, in the form of fruits and vegetables, berries, nuts, and so on that provide food for animals, and then those animals provide food for us as growers. As custodians of the land that want to feed ourselves, we have to first learn to recognize and support this resource network so that its other benefactors are equipped to produce the productw hat we rely on for our survival. Learning to appreciate the relationality of this system; that we're all connected and all dependent on each other is another essential truth to understand. Without caring deeply for bugs, fungus, slim, old worms, and other unappealing contributors to the cycle of life, without pricing the value of nitrogen rich chicken shit, any attempts at resilience fail in ignorance of the bigger game that's afoot. Growers are nature's assistants, facilitating and expediting her various functions, but allowing nature's own creativity and expertise to inform and inspire our efforts. Our various projects and efforts bear fruit, or don't, according to her designs. All the science in the world has only produced inferior, less nutritious, less resilient species of edible plants, most of which disturb delicate natural balances and cause systemic issues that threaten life on a global scale. Humility and restraint are key skills of successful growers; to which you can add perceptive intuition for the magically operant.

A wonderful book by the title, "Thus Spake The Plant" by Monica Gagliano, details a hybrid, scientific and, well, magical approach to gaining plant wisdom that I think we should all take notes from. In this excellent book, she describes how her fairly famous experiments that unlocked many secrets of plants were actually inspired by plants with ideas literally popping into her head because of the time that she spent with them. And what's more magical than that? The practice of being with plants applies equally to animals, people, and places as well. You gain understanding by spending time with observing and, well, vibing with other beings in the broadest animist sense of the word.

But there are also very practical, magical techniques which you can employ for the day-to-day stewardship of your land, such as helping your plants grow, protecting your crops and animals and property and so on. We've tried many little spells for things like this, such as blessing and placing rose quartz and other healing or nurturing crystals in our garden beds, making talismans for increase, and so on.

But I think what I've seen slash felt to be most directly effective isn't the traditional magic of Western Esotericism, but instead it looks a lot more like energy healing. Sending Reiki to plants, for example, is a great practice for gardeners for all the same reasons that you might talk or sing to your plants or otherwise send them good vibes.

When I use reiki in my shamanic healing practice, I do so because I know that sending positive energy to living beings helps them heal by regaining their internal balance. It's well established that positive intentions help people heal more quickly, and in the very same way they can help plants grow more quickly and improve their resilience.

I would encourage everyone to take a Reiki one class where you learn the basics of sending energy for healing purposes. Even basic reiki is helpful for personal healing, helping your family and friends, and even your pets heal, and, as I mentioned, for improving the health of your plants and any animals that you raise.

It's a universally beneficial skill that you'll find many uses for once learned, and you don't even need to be physically with your subject, so you can be anywhere, visualizing your garden or crops or animals or whatever, and sending positive energy, regulated by your breathing and the reiki meditations. Particularly right after planting, or in other times when a plant is stressed, sending positive energy to it, even for only five minutes, for example, will result in marked improvements in the plant's condition over the next two to three hours and beyond. Regularly sending positive intentions to your plants results in faster and more robust growth, plus greater health and resiliency.

If you managed to make it this far in your homesteading sanctuary building adventure, then good for you. You've made it. Now all you have to do is keep this going forever. Right? Well, no. That might have been the plan for Westerners back in the colonial days. maybe...uh, yeah, pop out a bunch of kids to work your farm and then retire as a patron or a matron.

But that's probably not so much what it looks like adjacent to a modern society. Instead, the personal sovereignty adventure is just a part of life, like a career or having kids that's always with you, but may not always be as present in your day-to-day life after its time. Homesteading in the modern age isn't about colonizing foreign lands, really, let's, let's not do that again. But it is about escape, survival, and making the best of a really shit situation, but with a positive mental. It's about building a better future, sure, and perhaps we even mean like for future generations. But honestly, on a personal level, I'm just trying to guarantee my family the best possible experience at this very shit moment in human history.

We're not even having kids. This isn't about the far future, it's about our future. So let's talk about future planning a little bit from the perspective of a magically operant homesteader, or a chicken wizard for short. There are few times in history where land is not a good investment and, on a long enough timeline, say a few hundred years, it always increases in value.

Not to mention you can't grow food or raise animals on your treasury bonds while they acquire their value, but you can certainly do that on almost any bit of land. Disclaimer, I'm not an investment professional, obviously, and I despise stocks and Wall Street, so I'm not telling anyone what to do with their money, I'm just saying what we are doing and why. When the markets are tanking (and they are), and credit is scarce (it is) and currencies around the world are in jeopardy (and you know, if they're not yet, they will be in a couple of years), investors flock to commodities are precious metals and land to store their wealth.

Commodities are highly volatile, and the prices can be influenced by geopolitics which are beyond your control or even your awareness. Precious metals and art are difficult to acquire and difficult to store safely, and occasionally are seized by governments. Land, on the other hand, is productive, difficult to steal, at least in representative democracies, and is one of the most stable investment vehicles in our economic system.

We're putting the majority of our resources into land and then improvements to that land, which include things like our home with a private well and various food production systems. Our business, a spiritual center for energy healing workshops and more, a biodiverse sanctuary for tropical flora and fauna, and then probably onsite bungalow camping for multi-day retreats.

This isn't the typical diversified retirement portfolio that a mainstream investment expert would recommend for you. But as I said, I am not an investment expert. Since we began the purchase process on our land a little over a year ago because it takes a long time to do things in Mexico, the value of the surrounding property has increased by at least 30%.

And we've heard some crazy asking prices on some lots that are significantly higher than that, and at least on the average price lots, uh, you know they, they can't stay on the market. Savvy Mexicans 15 years ago bought these hectare size lots for the equivalent of about $15,000 us, and they're selling now for $65-$85,000 a hectare minimum.

And this is just undeveloped plan that we're talking about. Just crazy, thick, inaccessible jungle with no utilities, no roads. So if you're thinking that it has no room left to increase in value than you're looking at it the wrong way. Rural areas in general, but rural areas in developing countries, especially, are huge investment opportunities in this market. Industrial agriculture is so destructive and its products are so deadly that people are waking up to the fact that they really need to prioritize their food sovereignty. And when food shortages intensify (and they will)m there's going to be a tremendous demand for cultivated land outside of, and by that I mean protected from the mainstream system, which floods, petrochemical fertilizers, and carcinogenic pesticides, into the soil causing erosion and poisoning both the food and water supplies. You know, the ones that we live on. Investing into your future with the sweat off your brow now rather than just blindly following manipulated market investment advice and trusting the system to provide for your future is the way of the better future.

That better Future always requires more responsibility and demands greater personal sovereignty and independence. Allowing others to make our fortunes for us has made them wealthy and us poor. Part of your homesteading plan should be an exit strategy or at least, a, "what happens when we're too old to do this anymore" strategy.

And I don't think that requires a ton of thought or research or anything. I think merely it's a perspective that you just always keep in your mind somewhere. You're not doing what you're doing for right now only, but you're also doing it for the future. If you can't pop out 10 kids to manage your farm and provide for your family when you're too old to work it every day, then you need another plan, even if it's only an, in case of emergencies, backup plan kind of thing.

But really, I challenge you to at least consider how to position your plans now to allow for bigger, better dreams in the future. It's extremely important in your escape planning that you're always running to something rather than running away from something because fear is the mind killer and there are lots of intimidating, scary things to consider.

Like what happens to currencies over the next decade, where to store and how to grow your wealth, or simply how not to lose what you earn immediately to hyperinflation and so on. Economics was never simple, but it's gone way off the rails now and, and markets aren't behaving in ways that we can control or anticipate.

We'll be investing as much as possible into owning and improving land because you can live on land, live off the land, and eventually sell, trade, or share the land. This gives you a tremendous amount of optionality at a time when the avenues for growing your wealth are mostly narrowing. It's essential to keep in mind that we're never on our journeys alone, that our spiritual partners and allies are as invested into our projects as we are, and the whole thing works better when we collaborate with them, rather than trying to make all of our decisions on our own. We're very good at doing physical things, which spirits can only influence indirectly. Let's call those things our job. The living, breathing, planting, growing, nurturing, loving, witnessing, experiential parts of being -those are for us. Seeing how it all fits together, where it all ends up, and how to position ourselves to have the best experience of life. We are less good at those things. There are obvious opportunities for collaboration between spirit and flesh, and I think we get the best out of life when we focus our energies where they're best suited.

Working with spirit, nurturing our relationships through recognition and collaboration, by listening to and engaging with them in decision making, we gain the benefit of their elevated perspective on time, and we can relinquish the burdensome responsibility of having to figure out everything for ourselves.

Magic has long been used to wrangle wild inhuman places into wildly productive places for humans. And while my commitment to living right relationship demands that we not leave it there, I can't overstate the growing urgency for the mass exodus that I call The Great Escape. Our efforts to build a better future will ultimately fail anyway if we do so out of right relationship, if we keep to the imperialistic, extractive proclivities of our past. But we're new to this and nature will be patient with us, if we approach this endeavor with genuinely good intentions, and open, receptive minds, we can learn how to live regeneratively through on the job training, and learn how to build long-term futures for ourselves as well.

But first, we desperately need to get our escape plans in place in the here and now. Most of us just need to get the hell out of the cities and find quiet places to sit out this stage of humanities learning curve. Mainstream society is nothing but corrupt, centralized systems like the supply chain, the media, extractive industries, soulless entertainment, and the student to indentured servant pipeline that we call education.

To be free of the influence of these monstrosities, we only need to separate ourselves from them. If only it were that simple. Modern society encourages us to grow complacent against its hegemonic influence by giving us just enough convenience to make it through life without examining the illusory world that's been constructed around us.

It's not just a prison, it's a laboratory experiment and one that no one can accurately predict. We're the lab rats in this experiment, and sadly, this isn't the, you know, American experiment or anything like that, but an iconic attempt to redraw reality within reductive and purely rational terms when it's anything but. This prison of rationality, however, is a purely mental construct. By definition, it can only exist as an idea. And when we choose to believe in some other idea, like the infinite weirdness and unpredictability of our beautiful universe, for example, then this mechanistic, reductive worldview peels back like a thin film of reflective coating that obscures a much deeper and much less comprehensible reality underneath.

When we talk about escape, 99% of that transition happens in the mind by peeling off an uninspired worldview that doesn't suit us and replacing it with a more beautiful one that does. That remaining 1% is still important, that's the taking action part of your story. But it's important to realize that no matter where you go, there you are, and some version of the hegemon is right there with you.

The archons are everywhere. We have to be able to escape to a place that calls to us and live according to our values, adjacent to the very system that we're fleeing. The Great Escape is a mass migration out of the surveilled and controlled urban environments away from smart cities, artificial intelligence, and techno-fascism.

It's an escape from this transhumanist, technocratic future to one that's integrated with nature and unreservedly magical. Escape is a process, not an event. It takes shape over a series of evolutionary stages where you take the emotional need to get out to protect your family and your way of life, and you gradually develop this and refine it into a grand vision of the future that you want to build.

One that's based on joy and fulfillment instead of fear. Next, you put these dreams through a vetting process, validating your ideas with prayer and journeying and divination, and filling in all the little details required to turn the dream into a plan of action. Employing magic to support you every step of the way you put your plan into action.

Working with road opening deities to bust through roadblocks, cutting and clearing away old stuck energy and self-limiting beliefs, and greasing the wheels of bureaucracy to get your legalities in order. And when the time is right, you move. You relocate your family, armed with a battery of protective magic, and as much luck boosting travel mojo as you can muster.

When you arrive in your new home, you set down roots, build networks, and integrate into the community. Relying on the blessings of Venus and other favorable astrological influences to help you make friends more. And as you integrate into the community, you acculturate and adapt your diet and health regimen to the local biosphere to bring you into closer relationship with place.

Maybe you were able to find a home before you moved, but the further that you relocate, the more challenging that that becomes. Either way, at some point on your journey, you're gonna need to find your way to the perfect place for your project, and the best way to do that is with the help of the local spirits in that area.

Visiting and leaving offerings and buying dirt to work with on your altar are the key tactics of this part of the process. Using the same techniques that you use to refine your dream in the first place, journeying and divination, you can navigate your negotiations with the often confusing and capricious spiritual guardians of the land that you seek.

And keeping to ancient traditions of working with land spirits, you move your project into the construction phase, blessing that work with astrological magic, talismans and protective wards, and you learn, you begin spending time with place day by day, becoming more familiar with it and it with you.

Finally, at long last, you can focus your attention on the issues that drove you to make these sweeping changes in the first place, food, health, security, happiness, and fulfillment. You can grow your fruits and veggies, raise chickens for eggs, maybe a few goats for dairy -the dream is starting to come together.

Magic in this phase is all about providing support for natural processes, sending positive intentions to bolster growth in your plants, to keep your animals and your family healthy, and to aid in the mutual flourishing of all life on the land. And it's a time for listening, sensing, and collaborating with its spirits as the human stewards of the place that you occupy.

And now that you've become very successful in your venture, you can set your sights on the next horizon knowing that you're working hard now, but you won't always want to. So you begin considering an exit strategy, a retirement plan. And obviously retirement looks very different in the future, but you've had the opportunity to build some impressive assets by this time, your land, your home, the improvements you've made to it, and the world looks different too.

So keeping a careful eye on the future and always keeping up your positive intentions and long-term magical workings, you're able to position yourself for success as the world evolves and the situation changes. It also requires some major shifts in thinking; how we've been programmed to live within society doesn't function very well, even just a little bit outside of it.

Reframing our perspectives, opening our minds to new possibilities, and wiping away as much of that preconditioning as possible, it's critical to enter into this process with a healthy measure of faith in the universe, and a desire to strike a new balance with nature. Beyond approaching this process with respect, humility, and diplomacy, we can best avoid repeating the sins of our past by prioritizing right relationship and spiritual equilibrium by working with the land, it's people, it's flora and fauna, and its spirits as partners and allies in co-creating the future. And all along the way, we'll face challenges of every variety imaginable, political, social, legal, environmental, financial, and, of course, physical. Each hurdle presents another opportunity to operate from within a new and more inspired framework of mind and belief; that we are not alone, that we have spiritual allies and magical technologies that enable us to overcome or to recover from any hardships that we face.

Magic can help keep us safe, keep us fortunate, keep the money flowing, to see the dangers ahead and avoid them, to divine the best path forward, to sweeten relations, to travel safely, to keep in the good favor of authorities, to heal, to grow, and to learn; among many other advantageous uses. If you plan to participate in the Great Escape, you'd be crazy not to reframe your rational mind with irrationally optimistic thinking -with magical thinking.

The kind that manifests the improbable positive outcomes you need to make real your dreams of a more beautiful future. To bring into being what isn't likely but is possible. Dream of this more beautiful future with me. Plan your escape, harden your resolve,, and put all of your intention into becoming irrationally successful at this crazy venture. Shine on your crazy diamonds. I'll see you in the next episode.