If you didn’t get a chance to listen yet, we wanted to take a moment to highlight this interview with Executive Director, Marissa Percoco’s on The Ground Shots Podcast. This show is a fantastic audio project exploring human relationship to ecology through conversations and storytelling, featuring experts from around the country that share their experience with wild-tending, herbalism, farming, nomadic goat herding and more. Host and producer of the podcast, Kelly Moody has spent years on the road teaching and interviewing at Earthskills gatherings across the country.
Join these two wild women on Marissa’s porch as they dive into stories from both domestic and nomadic life, the pros and cons of life in wilderness areas, and a journey that eventually landed Marissa into the heart of the Barnardsville community and The Firefly Gathering. Listen to Marissa through the link above, or find it on The Groundshots Podcast Page.
In this conversation with Marissa on The Ground Shots Podcast, Kelly and Marissa talk about:
- Rural Appalachia dynamics and gentrification in a valley outside of Asheville, NC
- Moving from the bay area of California to the rural south in the early 2000’s and what it was like initially, the culture shock
- Shifting from years of nomadism to mainly tending one small place in community
- Farming in west climates vs. arid climates
- Tending tropical plants in a subtropical four season place, and pushing the edge of what is possible during rapid climate change
- The perspective gained from travel and having an awareness of the plants in those places
- Marissa’s time in the Gila wilderness and its plant life
- The pros and cons of isolation living in wilderness areas, codependency, addiction and depression wrapped in idealism, and how can we contribute to society living ‘out there?’
- Marissa’s mead brewing practice on the road over the years, capturing place through brewing plants
- how facing the immediacy of death changes perspective
Like what you hear? You can support Kelly’s listener funded work capturing stories from the Earthskills community on Patreon!
About Kelly Moody: Host and producer of the podcast, Kelly Moody has lived in western North Carolina for periods of time over the last 12 years but mostly has spent years on the road studying plants and writing botanical research articles for her blog Of Sedge and Salt, teaching at and attending Earthskills gatherings across the country, doing long crazy walks gathering native seeds and replanting them, photographing people on the land and more. She now works with the Marketing Team at Firefly in addition to running her Blog and Podcast.
