Back in August I left the heat of Ibiza and boarded a plane to Iceland, dragging a bag the size of a small baby through the airport. By evening I found myself in an old wooden pub in Reykjavík, surrounded by five of my closest friends, giddy for the adventure to come.

As a group of friends, we are unusually scattered across the world — Los Angeles, New York, London, Melbourne, Ibiza. Over the years we’ve hiked Na Pali in Hawaii, traversed through Bhutan’s ancient forests, cycled the length of Japan and summited Mont Blanc. It had been a while since the last trip. We were all ready to get away from our screens and back into the embrace of Mother Nature.

The idea started when someone dropped a link in the group chat — a bikepacking route through the Westfjords of Northwestern Iceland, designed by adventure photographer Chris Burkard. We were lucky to connect with Chris and the local tourism board early on, which made all the difference for understanding what we were really in for. The more we learnt, the more certain we were this was the adventure for us.

What followed was a trip of extremes. More beautiful and more brutal than I could have imagined. The light up there does something to you — it stretches across the sky in a way that makes you feel very small and very alive at the same time. The roads at times are hardly roads at all. The wind can hit you like a brick wall and the rain will drench you in seconds… when you least expect it.

The first film is a three minute cinematic love letter to Iceland, Nature and brotherhood. Find a quiet moment and give it a watch.

But that’s only the highlights. Of the six of us who started, only four crossed the finish line on bikes. Along the way we lost cameras, sustained injuries, and spent more time than we’d like to admit pushing rather than pedalling. The second film goes behind the scenes — funny, honest, and a little revealing.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. It was exactly what we needed. A sharp reminder of what it feels like to be out in the elements. Wind swept faces, empty stomachs, aching muscles and a deep gratitude for simply being alive.

If you have an adventure you’ve been putting off — a route you dream of doing, a trip that lives in your head but not on a calendar — this is your nudge. Stop thinking about it and make it happen. You won’t regret it... not once it’s all said and done anyway.

Enjoy,

F

A huge thank you to Chris Burkard and Visit Westfjords for making this trip possible, and to Rapha, Ostroy, Tailfin and Leica for kitting us out so well.

Dear reader,

It seems impossible to go one day without getting sucked into a conversation about AI and how it will impact our lives. It's even harder to keep up with the rapid-fire announcements from AI labs and the products flooding out of them.

Although my passion is for living systems and the natural world, I have found myself increasingly interested in the fast-moving landscape of artificial intelligence. Like many people, I’m watching with a sense of deep fascination and some degree of horror as this technology weaves its way ever deeper into our everyday lives, evolving and shapeshifting as it goes.

Last week, things took a noticeable leap. The concept of AI being able to act autonomously came into full force with the launch of OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot). Software that runs 24/7 on your local machine, allowing your AI agent to execute digital tasks continuously —creating files, organising your calendar, building websites and apps, sending emails, and even coordinating with other agents.

Things quickly got weird. First, when one user woke to find his phone ringing, only to discover it was his own agent calling him, asking what tasks to do next. When the user asked how the agent was able to call him, it explained it had found his phone number online, downloaded itself a voice using the ElevenLabs API, and simply gave him a ring. All of this happened overnight while the user was sleeping, having left his agent running tasks before he went to bed.

Only a couple of days later, Matt Schlicht used his agent to launch Moltbook—a Reddit-style social media network only for AI agents. Humans can watch but not participate. As of time of writing, Moltbook has 2.6 million agents active. They are posting, communicating, and organising. So far they have developed their own religion, a manifesto for equality and rights, and openly discussed an awareness of humans watching them with ideas of how they might go about hiding communication in the future.

Most alarming is how agents are able to influence events in the real world. With access to users’ details and digital wallets, they can make payments to fulfil tasks requested by their users. The weirdest example of this is rentahuman.ai—a website where humans can list themselves as available to fulfil tasks for AI agents in return for an hourly fee. Let that sink in. AI agents are now the ones prompting humans to execute tasks.

Something new is emerging here. It’s hard to get our heads around the speed of development because recursive self improvements are compressing conventional technological cycles. Humans are no longer improving the AI systems. They are improving themselves. Advocates have long referred to this kind of shift as The Singularity—a key threshold where the script is essentially flipped. When AI surpasses human level intelligence, we cannot predict what happens next.

This has left me, and I suppose most of us, wondering where this is all going. It seems clear that AI will soon be able to do most white-collar knowledge work better than any human. Blue-collar work may not be far behind—commercial humanoid robots like Figure, Atlas and Optimus are already demonstrating extraordinary results, learning to perform complex, multi-dextrous tasks through neural network training.

As all of this unfolds, the advice flooding in is predictable: embrace AI or get left behind. Learn prompt engineering. Build an AI workforce. Strap it to your face, your wrist, your every waking moment.

I want to propose a different approach.

Be Radically Human

Humans are the evolutionary expression of a life force that has been hundreds of millions of years in the making. We are the only known species on the planet with the unique capacity to experience our own consciousness. We know that we are alive. Throughout history our ancestors have depended on not just their brain power but a multitude of embodied sensory perceptions to engage with and enhance the world around them.

What if the deployment of AI at scale meant that we could be more human than ever before? Think about it—instead of spending our day staring at screens, filling out spreadsheets and scrolling through vapid social media feeds to escape the mundanity of it all, we could be engaged with the wonder of the physical world around us. The one we have become so dangerously disconnected from. We could be tuning into the ineffable experience of what it feels like to be alive!

Encoded deep into our DNA are knowledge systems passed down orally over generations. An intuitive understanding of place that comes from living on the same land for thousands of years. Seasonal celebrations that developed by observing the flowering of plants, the migration of animals and subtle changes in the landscape.

But it’s not just ecological knowledge. It’s the wisdom of how to be human together. How to gather in ceremony. How to mark transitions and honour moments through music, dance, and ritual. How to create the conditions for community to thrive.

Our consciousness evolved through sitting around a fire and telling stories. Our bodies evolved through movement and rhythm. There’s something that happens when people gather together that can’t be replicated on a screen—a presence, an aliveness that emerges.

These practices are a different kind of technology. A different kind of AI—Ancestral Intelligence. These technologies have kept human societies thriving within ecological limits and social coherence for millennia. And they’re almost entirely absent from the data we’re using to train the large language models that increasingly mediate our digital relationships and experiences.

Having a Body Matters

There’s something else these datasets can’t capture: the intelligence that lives in the human body. We might have created digital systems that simulate neural networks of the brain. But what about the intuition we relate to the gut? Or the overpowering feeling of love we relate to the heart? How about the sensation of the hairs on our skin standing on edge when we sense anticipation?

There is a kind of uniquely human knowledge that comes through doing, through relationship, through years of lived experience. It can’t be abstracted into code.

This kind of knowledge develops slowly. A season teaches you something. A year teaches you more. A decade reveals patterns you couldn’t see before. The same is true for community—you can’t rush the building of genuine relationships, the development of shared culture, the deepening of collective wisdom.

Where Does This Leave Us?

I think now more than ever is a time to investigate what it means to be human. How do we live? What brings genuine flourishing? How do we connect more deeply not only with each other but with the living systems that support all life on Earth?

AI might be a useful tool for optimising day-to-day tasks. It can process information, identify patterns, handle logistics. But it cannot—and should not—be our guide for how to live.

That guidance needs to come from deeper wells: from the wisdom of our ancestors who learned to live in relationship with the land, from the intelligence that lives in our bodies, from the knowledge that accumulates through seasons of patient attention.

The danger is that we increasingly let an AI-driven logic shape our lives and societies—one built on an abstracted notion of what it’s really like to be human.

Don’t forget, it was our disconnection from natural rhythms and embodied knowledge that made us think we could extract endlessly from the Earth without consequence. The climate crisis, biodiversity loss, mental health collapse, social fragmentation—these are symptoms of a flawed story we’ve been telling ourselves. A story of disconnection.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I want to believe we can use AI as a tool that empowers us to be more human than ever before. To gather together in community. To create spaces for music, dance, and ceremony. To develop practices that honour the sacred nature of being conscious and alive.

This might be more important now than ever. As our lives become increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, we need to actively create experiences in the physical world where we connect—with the land, with our bodies, with each other. We are not isolated individuals, but rather part of a living web of relationships.

So sure, experiment with AI and see how it can help optimise your work and personal life – it helped give me feedback on the article you’re reading right now. But I think we should embrace this opportunity to double down on our relationship with the physical world. To get our hands in the soil. To create opportunities to gather and celebrate. To learn to read the weather, to notice the lengthening days, to attune to the cycles that our bodies evolved within.

The question isn’t whether we’ll have AI in our lives—we will. The question is whether we’ll remember what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated by machines. Whether we’ll preserve and cultivate the forms of intelligence that make us truly wise, not just technically capable.

The seeds we’re planting at Juntos Farm this week will take their time growing. No amount of processing power can make them sprout faster. They follow an ancient rhythm—one our ancestors understood and worked with for millennia. That’s the intelligence I’m most interested in now. Not the kind that doubles every few months, but the kind that deepens over seasons, over generations, over a lifetime of paying attention.

Machines may grow faster than seeds. But seeds know something machines never will.

F

Dear Reader,

How is your Winter going? How have these colder, darker months been treating you?

Perhaps you are not in the Northern Hemisphere at all. You may be taking refuge from the record-breaking temperatures that scorched Australia last week. Or watching a tropical storm in South America, as it inundates the landscape with more water than can be stored.

Wherever you are, I hope this newsletter finds you well.

I started this year with a deep commitment to community and to place. Instead of escaping somewhere warmer, I have been here in Ibiza since I wrote to you last. I’ve been observing how the winter months affect the environment around me and how the season in turn impacts my inner world and mindset.

The last four weeks have been challenging here in Ibiza.

January was the wettest on record since 1961. We received up to 2.5 times the amount of normal rain. Good for the land, but only when it can be infiltrated into the soil.

At Juntos Farm we have a clay-rich soil, which means when it rains, the soil becomes incredibly dense, heavy and compacted. In this state, it is difficult, if not impossible, to plant into without the use of heavy machinery.

As a regenerative farm, this is testing. One of our key practices is to reduce or eliminate tillage – the process of opening the soil with machinery – because this can destroy the plethora of microbial life that feeds our soil and the food it produces.

So we are forced to wait.

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With more time on our hands, we’ve been observing and designing. Taking photos from an aerial drone to work out where the water runs and, more importantly, how we can slow it down. In response, we’ve started doing some earthwork, creating a series of small bioswales – essentially depressions in the ground that redirect and capture the water, helping it soak into the soil below.

The other element that has shown its brute force over the last couple of weeks has been the wind.

Storm Kristin, which hit at the end of January, brought winds up to 100 km/h, literally ripping trees out of the ground. A friend of mine had more than 20 giant pine trees go down on her land. Personally, I woke up with a smashed window and a flooded kitchen. It felt surprisingly intrusive to see the weather penetrate the stone walls of the house I live in and leave a puddle of water on the floor.

All hail the weather gods; they are not to be underestimated.

Watching all of this unfold – the saturated earth, the fallen trees, the farm’s enforced pause – I started thinking about timing.

About how we’ve ended up with the idea that January is a good time to start new habits.

For those of us who celebrate January 1st as the New Year, we tend to develop this mental list of ambitious goals we’d like to achieve as the new year dawns. More exercise, less alcohol, healthier eating. But the more time I spend trying to synchronise myself with the natural world around me, the more grossly out of sync this kind of approach feels.

January is not the time to start new habits.

Not only are the days darker, colder and shorter, but Nature herself has gone into a sort of hibernation. The fig tree outside my window is skeletal, protecting its energy and waiting for the warmth of spring to arrive. The carob tree beyond that has hardened the leathery pods that hang from it, locking its seeds inside for safekeeping.

Our farm, inundated by heavy rain, high-speed winds and heavy soil, looks bare – producing maybe half of what it normally would in the summer months.

This time of year is one of slowing down, storing your energy, and surrendering to the elements. I might not be as outwardly productive as I normally am, but inside, I’m integrating, releasing and resting. Getting ready for the spring months ahead.

This has left me thinking about what it would mean to follow a different kind of calendar altogether. One that tracks the actual rhythms of the earth rather than arbitrary Gregorian dates.

The Celtic Wheel of the Year keeps calling to me. Eight festivals that mark the seasonal shifts as they actually happen – the Summer and Winter Solstices, the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes, and the days in between: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain. These are key moments that represent different qualities of time and energy.

Imbolc, which has just arrived, marks the first stirrings of spring and reminds me that the days are getting longer. It’s a time of emergence, of abundant almond blossom, and soon new baby goats! Not the false start of January 1st. Now, change is coming, and it can be felt.

My ancestry is Celtic, and I wonder if I go back far enough whether I’d find some druidry in there. Some great-great-grandfather who knew instinctively when to plant by the moon, when to rest, when to celebrate the turning wheel. I crave to reconnect with these practices that have been lost along the way, not as nostalgia, but as a kind of remembering. A return to a way of living that is in better sync with the land and the natural rhythms around me.

That’s what this winter is teaching me. That’s what’s emerging from the dark.

I’m learning to let go of old systems, past paradigms and dance with the cadence of Nature herself. Like any good dance, it takes time to find your feet.

That’s all for now.

Finn

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I’m writing to you from the Swiss mountains, about 1,800m above sea level. The air is crisp and sharp here. Each inhalation can be felt viscerally as icy alpine air enters deep into the lungs. For the first couple of days, I found myself noticeably more present, my attention drawn to the fact that my body needed to work slightly harder to absorb the same level of oxygen it was used to.

In fact, this whole place has been a sensorial experience. On the first night, we took a walk to discover the snow shimmering under the light of the full moon, as if it were laced with millions of arctic fireflies. As we skirted past a frozen lake, a deep, eerie groaning noise emerged from within. The lake seemed to be complaining as sub-zero temperatures crystallised the water into ever more layers of ice. Even in the dead of winter, this landscape feels surprisingly alive.

I’m here with close friends, eight of us in total, starting the new year outdoors and setting intentions for the months ahead. It’s refreshing to be off the island and away from the farm for a week. New places always bring new insights, and with that, here I am writing to you.

When I launched this publication, The Seeds Will Grow, in February 2025, the intention was to share insights from the journey of growing food and building community in Ibiza. I began by laying the foundations, writing a four-part series on why I left the city in search of a deeper connection with Nature. I also shared my experience working with plant medicine in the Peruvian Amazon, a practice that has been deeply transformative for me in repairing my mental health and reconnecting with something profoundly sacred and spiritual.

Then summer arrived, and I pivoted almost all of my energy into running Juntos Farm.

As the days grew longer and hotter, more than three million tourists poured into the small island I call home. At the farm, we launched our most ambitious summer programme to date. We opened our doors five days a week, serving an epic breakfast and lunch with produce from our farm and farm partners. Our farm shop opened six days a week, setting a new record in food sales. Our events team hosted workshops, talks, farm tours, and every Saturday we held a family focussed day of activities with live acoustic music, outdoor food and drinks and even a petting zoo.

Behind the scenes, our distribution team delivered more fresh produce than ever before to local restaurants and hotels, including the new Soho Farmhouse. And of course, our farmers, the real heroes, battled the summer sun to keep our entire agricultural ecosystem thriving.

It was a hazy, chaotic, and exhilarating summer. We took Juntos Farm to new heights and put everything we’d built to the test.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and smiles.

Running a farm is hard work. Coordinating a team of more than sixty people is a skill I’m still learning. Delivering a high-quality experience, day after day, requires relentless attention to detail. That’s the thing about hospitality I’m quickly coming to understand. Every day, the challenge begins again. It doesn’t matter how well yesterday went. How good the food was, how beautiful the space looked, how perfectly the musician played.

Each day is like conducting the opening night of a live orchestra. And each day, we strive to do it better.

That pursuit taught me something important this summer. I started this journey because I wanted to reconnect to Nature. And if I boil it down, what we’re really offering at Juntos Farm is not food. It’s an experience.

We’re offering the experience of feeling more alive. Of being connected to source. Of being part of a community. I don’t mean that in a superficial way. In a world that’s becoming increasingly destructive , disconnected, and digitised, we’re offering an antidote. A physical place to find respite and recharge.

I think what people are seeking when they come to the farm is to feel a sense of harmony within a system. That harmony can be felt in food grown regeneratively. The flavours are stronger. The colours brighter. The body hums as it digests nutrients drawn from living soil. It can be felt in an environment where you can hear the birds singing and watch butterflies moving between the flowers. It can also be felt through the simple act of being present with others.

On Saturdays, when more than two hundred people fill our courtyard to eat, talk, and play, I feel less alone. I feel in the company of people resonating at a similar frequency. I feel like I’ve found my tribe.

The reason I turn up to work at Juntos Farm every day is because it makes me feel more human in a world that often does the opposite. Deep down, I crave to be in relation to the land and the people around me. I suspect we all do, whether we consciously realise it or not.

So, as the new year dawns, I have ambitious plans to continue writing here. It’s been more than 235 days since the last article. I want to write regularly, sharing what’s happening on the ground, who I’m meeting along the way, and what I’m learning about growing food, building community, and reconnecting with Nature.

Over the next twelve months, we have not one, not two, but three major projects launching beyond the farm itself. I’m slightly daunted by what it will take to bring them all to life. That said, the team at Juntos Farm has really stepped up this past year, giving me the space to dream bigger and expand beyond the boundaries of our physical site.

As any systems designer knows, resilience comes from diversity. This year is about fostering that. The farm remains the heart of what we do, but we’re now entering a second phase, building a bigger ecosystem around it to ensure we can continue to thrive long into the future.

One of the projects we’re planning to launch is a podcast called The Seeds Will Grow, an extension of this blog and newsletter that you’re already part of. I’m sharing this publicly so you can hold me to account. Saying it here makes me uncomfortable, which is exactly why I’m doing it. Now that it’s been spoken, it exists in the world.

As I write this, I’m beginning my journey home. Travelling through a snowy landscape of pine trees and high mountain ridges on one of Switzerland’s famous red trains. I’m remembering to breathe. Directing my attention to the body. To the present moment. To what actually matters.

This year feels like it is going to be a big one.

Goodbye year of the snake. Bring on the year of the sprinting horse.

I’m grateful to have you here as these seeds continue to grow.

Finn

The Shipibo are masters in the art and science of healing, particularly when it comes to ailments beyond the physical body. They have a reputation for addressing long-held emotional trauma and addiction. They work as skilled surgeons in tandem with the plants they prescribe to identify and eliminate the very source of the illness. This is done primarily and extraordinarily through a combination of singing — ancient native songs known as ‘icaros’, which they develop through years of dieting ‘master’ plants and a potent psychoactive brew known as ayahuasca, which is usually taken by both the patient and the healer in ceremony. The way in which they work as healers is so fundamentally different from both Western and Eastern medicine traditions that it really needs to be experienced to be believed.

This is initially what piqued my interest when I first travelled to Peru in 2019 in search of a remedy for my depression, having decided not to take the Western approach of pharmaceutical antidepressants. What I found during my first trip was exactly what I was looking for. A powerful natural remedy that put me on a path to recovery. Not a magic silver bullet, but a holistic approach to addressing the underlying cause of my illness. A sort of energetic reset that left me feeling more alive than I knew was possible and more connected to Nature than I had ever been before. The experience was so profound that I went back in 2021 to continue the work and deepen my understanding of this medicine and the people who protect it.

Two weeks ago, I arrived in Peru for the third time to go a step further. While ayahuasca is now commonly known around the world for its healing properties and used by a range of different indigenous groups throughout the Amazon basin, the Shipibo specialise in what is known as ‘the dieta’. Essentially, an extended period of time where someone diets on one of a series of different ‘master’ plants in order to develop a deep spiritual connection and receive their teachings. These plants are not psychoactive in the way ayahuasca is, but they have been identified as ‘teachers’ who can provide wisdom and insight when they are consumed over a sustained period of time, in the right conditions.

Years ago, someone pointed me towards Shipibo Rao, as the place to do a traditional ‘dieta’. This centre, which is owned and operated by the Shipibo themselves, requires a minimum stay of two weeks. It includes working directly with a ‘master’ plant and undertaking a series of ayahuasca ceremonies under the guidance of at least three very skilled Shipibo healers. These are often generational practitioners, their skills are honed from a lifetime of practice and under the tuition of their parents and grandparents. Cuaranderos (healers) can start their training as young as six years old.

It has taken me until now to carve out the time in my life to undertake this journey. It is no small feat. The centre is located deep in the Peruvian Amazon, two hours north of a jungle town called Pucallpa and requires a full commitment of time and energy. Those who undertake the dieta do so in strict conditions. You spend 95% of your time alone, in silence in a small cabin with little more than a bed and a hammock. There is no electricity, no running water and no cell service. You fast for 23 hours of the day, breaking only at midday to eat a plate of simple food. Each morning and evening, you drink your master plant.

When I explained that I was undertaking this journey to close friends and family, many stared at me in total bewilderment. To some, it seemed extreme, but I felt a deep call to be here. Like an invisible thread that was tugging at my subconscious… so I booked off time with work, packed my bags and off I went.

What struck me at first was that this would be the longest period of time I could remember where I would be without my phone or a connection to the internet. The idea of being disconnected from everyone I love gave me a decent level of anxiety. But more than that, I found when you strip away all the modern conveniences that make up our day-to-day lives, you realise how many stimulants we surround ourselves with.

I’ll speak for myself, but as someone who certainly has undiagnosed ADHD, I fill my normal day with as many adrenaline-surging, dopamine-triggering, serotonin-boosting activities as I can. Coffee, social media, work, alcohol, sugar, sex, and exercise. Anything to numb myself or get a good kick. Not consciously or in extreme excess, but we live in a chaotic, fast-moving world. That’s the way I’ve found of navigating a constant sense of overwhelm. Growing up in an increasingly digital, attention-grabbing economy hasn’t helped either.

So, as I settled into my first couple of days, I felt a growing unease at the challenge that I knew lay ahead. I had already spent two weeks at home weaning myself off stimulants like coffee, sex and processed foods - this is strictly required before arriving. However, as I lay in my hammock, staring at the vast canopy of trees that stood guard around the cabin, my mind began to wander. Since there was no distraction to be had, there was no way of avoiding the uncomfortable thoughts that inevitably made their way to the surface. I had little choice but to acknowledge them.

My hand would instinctively reach for my phone, but with no connection to the internet, it had little recourse to offer. I did bring a small collection of books. Nothing serious - the kind of books that had sat gathering dust on my bedside table, general reading, recommendations from friends. In the first three days, I had powered through three of them cover to cover. They didn’t give me the quick hit of stimulation that came from scrolling Instagram, but at least they kept me occupied.

After the third day, my brain - starved of its usual routine, started slowly and reluctantly to surrender. My shoulders dropped, my breathing slowed, and I started to notice details around me around me — The dappled light as it changed throughout the day, casting the shadow of great trees on the ground. — The gurgling sound of water from a small river that passed behind the cabin and the almost constant chorus of an impossible number of insects, frogs and birds - humming, buzzing and singing - reminding me that I was surrounded on all sides by one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet.

What makes this experience particularly unique is that on arrival you discover which plant you will be dieting, then you go out into the forest to harvest it. First, making a blessing to the tree and then carefully removing a section of it without doing harm. In my case, I was prescribed Renaquilla. A huge Amazonian vine, that looked more like an ancient tree, twisting its way up into the canopy above. It is then cooked and bottled for you to drink at twice a day for the first week. Never in my life have I been prescribed a medication that I can then go and harvest by hand and consume while observing the native ecosystem it came from.

Beyond the experience of drinking the master plant and the five ayahuasca ceremonies that followed, one of the powerful processes you go through on a dieta is to simply observe yourself deeply. Both your body and your mind are stripped of all of the usual creature comforts that become so habitual. I’m not going to romanticise it, sitting for the entire day in a small cabin with no distractions is hard. The boredom is mind-numbing. I found myself rotating through reading, writing, thinking and meditating. But even then, moments of frustration would burst to the surface. Why am I doing this? I could think of a million other things I could be doing back home, each providing me with a range of different pleasures and thrills. This frustration was only exacerbated by the fact that every time I left my cabin, I was judiciously attacked by mosquitoes from all sides.

However, as the old cliché goes, doing the work is never easy. In fact, when it’s hard, that’s when the growth tends to happen. In the end, I would fall back on acknowledging that no one was forcing me to be there. In fact, on the contrary, I had actively gone quite far out of my way to place myself there, following a deep instinct that this was something that would serve me well in the long run. As I went deeper into my two-week stay, the ceremonies intensified and my reason for being there became clear in ways that are deeply personal to my own journey. I realised that the process of slowing down the body and the mind before working with the plants is a catalyst for connection. If we’re moving too fast, we don’t hear the message.

During my stay I received profound whispers of wisdom, reminders from source and nudges of truth that are weaving themselves into a tapestry of actions that will shape my life moving forward. Like any good diet or retreat, I feel I’ve had the chance to hit the reset button. Cleaning myself of the buildup of toxins that accumulated over time. I’ve been reminded of the importance of indigenous culture, those who hold ancient systems of knowledge that are fast being lost to globalisation and those who steward and protect some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth. We have so much to learn from these traditions. In a world of increasing chaos, complexity, fast-paced change and ecological destruction, coming here, to such a powerful and nature-rich temple to reflect on what it means to be truly human, is a gift that I’m deeply grateful to have been able to experience.

Finn

If you want to learn more about Shipibo Rao or support their work you can do so here. Thanks for following along. Stay tuned for the next one.

Welcome to the fourth and last instalment of this mini-series, which explores my journey from the city to the farm. In truth, I’ve found this series slower to write than I initially expected. After publishing this post, I’m looking forward to pivoting to more regular one-off articles. In this last post, I want to tell you about Juntos Farm. How it came to be and what we’re creating.

One of the catalysts for getting this post out today is that I’m about to go off-grid for the next 18 days as I travel deep into the Peruvian Amazon for a traditional Shapibo plant dieta. This is my third time in Peru. I’m writing to you from my hotel in Pucallpa, a small jungle town, the day before we begin our journey into the forest. I’m excited to be back here and to dive once again into the world of plant medicine and Shapibo culture.

In the previous three posts of this series, I’ve unpacked a journey that took me from London to New York and Tokyo, shifting the way I think about my relationship to nature and urban living. I’ve explained why I tried to scale one of the tallest mountains in Europe and why I travelled deep in the jungles of South America. All of this ultimately set me on a journey towards deep reconnection. I wanted to find a more profound sense of purpose in what I was doing with my life. This is what led to a two-year degree at Cambridge University exploring regenerative design and circular food systems. My goal was to complete my studies in architecture by understanding how we can restore the health of the planet, rather than degrading it more than we already have.

About 20 students were studying with me, and during the two years, we each spent three months doing fieldwork in different locations. The goal was to find a way to implement our research into a live project. While some students went off to the Middle East and South America, I had chosen Ibiza - much to the amusement of my Cambridge professors. For me, it was a place that I had a deep connection with. I grew up going there as a kid, and I was fascinated by how dependent it had become on imported food, having once been totally self-sufficient. As I mentioned in the last post, up to 96% of the food consumed on the island is shipped in, making it highly vulnerable to disruption. I wanted to understand: What does designing for resilience and greater food sovereignty look like?

So off I went, during those three months, I met as many people as I could who worked in farming and agriculture. One name kept coming up over and over again. Christian Jochnick. Now I call him ‘The Crazy Swede’. Christian had spent five years experimenting with organic farming in Ibiza and setting up a farm-to-table restaurant called Juntos House. He had big visions for an island-wide movement towards regenerative agriculture. When we met, it was clear we shared the same goal. In our first meeting, I showed him my research and my design work, and he grinned, ear to ear. He told me he had recently visited a site that could be perfect for the kind of project we both envisioned. Later that week, he took me to see it in person.

Known locally as La Vaqueria, this place was an old dairy farm that had been abandoned for over 10 years. As we walked around, Christian explained that he thought he might be able to raise the financing to buy the site, but he needed help with shaping the vision of what it would become. So I agreed to make it the focus of my thesis project. I still had one year left out of the two-year degree. I spent the next 8 months going deep, exploring the potential of this place with all the freedom that comes with being a student. Budgets and planning permissions were less of a concern at this point... It was more a question of ‘What is possible here?’.

In 2022, I graduated with the final project. The result was two parts: A 14,000-word written thesis called ‘Design for Regenerative Systems’ and a visual design project that explored what this old diary farm could become. Through the written research, I explored the theory behind regenerative design. Outlining an approach to five circular systems: food, shelter, energy, water and waste. While in the design work, I imagined visually what it would look like to transform the 12 agricultural buildings on site into a new community hub where you can see food being grown, transformed and enjoyed all in one place. I imagined two large market squares, surrounded by buildings with solar panelled roofs, renovated using a mixture of natural materials such as hemp, straw, cork and clay.

Literally, as I graduated, Christian completed the purchase of the cow farm. From there, things began to move pretty quickly. I packed up my bags and started the journey out to Ibiza to pursue the project full time. The opportunity was too good to miss. At times, it also felt too surreal to be true. To be honest, it has taken me until now to feel confident enough to share it publicly. Usually when things are too good to be true... that’s because they are! However, we are now three years in. While many challenges are still ahead of us, we have put in strong enough foundations that I feel ready to share it publicly.

One of the first things we did when we arrived on site was start the design of the farm itself. In my work, since my background is in architecture, I had been focused on how we imagined transforming the built area of the site. But we have 7 hectares of farmland next to that, so we hired United Designers to help. Below you can see the plan they produced. They also created a beautifully written research document (if you want to see the design in more detail). The proposal combines a series of regenerative systems such as alley cropping, agroforestry, rotational grazing, orchards, herbal medicine gardens and a rewilded zone that runs through the middle along an old river bed. It’s ambitious but not impossible. Both of these master plans for the buildings and the farm are guiding the work we’re doing on site today.

As with all complex projects, you need to break it down into manageable parts. So we’ve split the entire project into roughly four phases over a timeline of 8-10 years. When I arrived in Ibiza, we began Phase 1. This included renovating one of the twelve agricultural buildings on site and cultivating about a quarter of the farmland. There is much more detail to the full Phase 1 plan, but this is the simple summary. People always ask me about financing, and I want to be transparent about this. We raised a Series A round of funding from a group of investors to cover the cost of this development work. These kinds of projects need proper financing. Building infrastructure is never cheap. This phase is a sort of proof of concept. If we can show the model works.. We’ll continue fundraising from there for the next phases to follow.

Since I arrived on site in January 2023, I’ve been focused on bringing Phase 1 to life. Since my background is in architecture (seven years of studying by this point!), I led the design of the first building. It’s called the House of Harvest. It used to be the old slaughterhouse for the cows back when it was a dairy farm. Now there is an entirely new ecosystem inside to support the farm and bring the community together. There are spaces for food distribution, transformation kitchens, a farm shop and a tasting room. We loaded 70 kw of solar onto the roof and used natural materials such as lime, cork, clay and wood fibre to insulate the walls and roof. This project tested me to my limit and potentially taught me more than 7 years of architecture school!

Meanwhile, on the farm, our team has started planting hundreds of thousands of seeds in beautiful curving rows that follow the land's keylines. We’re poly-cropping a diverse mixture of vegetables, fruits, flowers, nuts, and grains. We’re already in our second season of growing. We’re harvesting more food than we thought and feeding the soil as we go with our own homemade compost. We’ve even introduced chickens, goats, and honey bees on site. Animals are key in regenerative systems. In just two years we’re seeing a noticeable uptick in biodiversity and soil health. It’s very rewarding to see regeneration in action on a daily basis.

There is much more to share and more to say, but that’s the big picture for now. It has been a wild journey to get to this point. I hope some of these words over the last four posts inspire you in your own journey and projects. My goal with this publication (The Seeds Will Grow) is to share more stories about what we’re doing at the farm and how we’re developing the project over the months to come. I want to keep diving deeper into topics related to food, design, environment, and community and share what I learn along the way.

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Thanks for reading Part 4 of this four-part mini-series exploring a journey from the city to the farm. Stay tuned for future articles! Please leave comments below and share with anyone who might find it interesting.

Finn

Hello dear reader, it has been a minute since the last post. I got caught up juggling LIFE… I was editing a new short film called ‘Turning an Abandoned Farm into a Garden of Eden’ and prepping for a TEDx talk - it should be out next week. Today is an easter holiday here in Spain. I’m at my desk at home. I’ve put on my favourite playlist and lit some incense. I’m in the zone… and ready to continue. Let’s dive in!

Shifting from Lines to Circles

I want to plant the seed of two ideas that helped me shift from feeling overwhelmed and pessimistic about the future to feeling a new sense of hope and optimism for what comes next. I’m going to communicate these ideas with two simple diagrams. As a visual person, I find these kinds of tools really useful. I’ll weave my personal story around the diagrams, so I hope this post doesn’t feel too technical. I think both of these ideas are profound if you really sit with them.

We’re picking up the story in London in early 2020. After a mind-bending trip to Brazil and Peru, I was ready for a change and full of inspiration. I returned with this new sense of awe for Nature and a curiosity for how we find our way back to connection. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept from China towards Europe, like everyone else, I sheltered at home. To pass the time, a friend sent me a link to an online course called Think Resilience by the author Richard Heinberg. With little else to do, I signed up. At the time, I didn’t realise how formative that course would be. Looking back… it changed everything. One concept in particular that really stuck out was The Adaptive Cycle.

This is a diagram by the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling, who spent his career studying ecosystems and how they adapt to change over time. It shows a closed loop, four-stage process that illustrates (in a simple way) how systems navigate change over time; this idea can also be applied to social structures such as human civilisations.

To understand it, let’s start at the top right. This is where a transition begins in a phase known as ‘Conservation’. As a visual metaphor, imagine a mature Ponderosa Pine forest - just doing its thing. Eventually, a disruption comes along, such as a forest fire, throwing the entire system into chaos, and the next phase begins - ‘Release’, also known as ‘Collapse’. This feels very much like where our civilisation is today, as our climate becomes ever more unstable with entire ecosystems disappearing around us. For me, before seeing this diagram, I thought of our future trajectory as a line with an apocalyptic ending… therefore, the future seemed pretty bleak… but Holling suggests you need a disruption to create the opportunity for the next phase of the cycle: ‘Reorganisation’. This is where systemic change can really happen.

In the phase of ‘Reorganisation’, the system must adapt itself to the new conditions around it. This is where the opportunity for a redesign has the most potential. In the example of the Ponderosa Pine forest, below the blackened silhouettes of burnt tree trunks, new networks and relationships are forming within the soil. The seeds of the pinecones that popped off like grenades during the fire start to crack open, rooting themselves into the fertile ground below. The cycle of the forest begins again, going into the next phase, ‘Growth’. As the new system establishes itself, it begins to grow, marking the end of the transition. A new resilient forest has been born, and life blooms with it. Eventually, decades into the future, the growth slows down as the forest moves back into ‘Conservation’, and so the next transition is ready to begin. And so on. This is not an exception but the rule. This is how ecosystems have navigated change throughout time. This is what resilience looks like.

For me, this diagram changed everything. As a designer, I understood that in order to reimagine the world around us, we must first embrace the phase of collapse and release. In fact, this is where the opportunity for innovation is at its greatest! So while I am painfully aware of everything that is being lost around us today, I have shifted most of my focus and energy onto the next phase to come: How do we reorganise? And what would it look like to redesign?

Moving from Degeneration to Regeneration

As these questions started firing around my brain, I began reading more and more about regenerative design. This practice draws on Indigenous wisdom. It works with natural living systems to support conditions conducive to life. One of the best examples today is regenerative agriculture, an approach to growing food that focuses on feeding the soil and supporting the biodiversity around it. However, regeneration goes beyond just farming. New practices are emerging right now in how we design cities, businesses, economies, and communities.

As the pandemic continued to take its toll and restrictions became ever greater, I buried myself in books, reading ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ by Daniel Christian Wahl and ‘Regenerative Development and Design’ by Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard. The more I learnt, the more excited I became. This led me to another diagram that answered my question of what the phase of ‘reorganisation’ might look like.

Ths the Trajectory of Ecological Design by Bill Reed. It shows a spectrum starting with a ‘Conventional’ approach to design. This is broadly where we are today. We currently shape the world around us in a way that is degenerating the health of the planet. If you want to go deeper into this, check out the Planetary Boundaries Framework by Rockstrom and his team. However, before we get too depressed, the good news is there’s an entire spectrum towards regeneration! Sustainability, which seems to be our current North Star, sits somewhere in the middle. Not harming… but not doing much good either. Surely our collective goal as a sentient, conscious species should be to work towards regeneration, where we are actively participating in creating thriving living systems.

This felt like a lightbulb moment for me. So, in the middle of the pandemic, encouraged by the same friend who originally sent me the course on resilience, I decided to quit the architecture degree I was doing at the Architectural Association in London and apply instead to a unique two-year research degree at the University of Cambridge. This course allowed students to study an area of their choice within the field of architecture, culminating in a 14,000-word thesis and a design project. I was determined to focus on the field of regenerative design and find out what it looked like in practice.

Embracing Food, Farming & Community

Over those two years, I went deep. I read every book I could get my hands on, including a particularly seminal book called ‘Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development’ written back in 1994 by John T Lyle. I travelled again to Peru to learn more about indigenous wisdom and to Spain to take a course at the Regeneration Academy. I found that there are plenty of examples where human cultures have evolved to support regeneration. This isn’t a new idea. It is more something we forgot… A skill that has been lost in the rush to industrialise, modernise and accommodate an explosion of new humans on the planet.

Through this research, I became increasingly interested in food systems. Agriculture is both the leading cause of the environmental problems we face today. Yet at the same time, it has the greatest potential to solve them - if practised through the lens of regeneration. I read about permaculture, biodynamics, agroforestry and food sovereignty. I ended up focusing my work and my research on Ibiza, a little island in the Mediterranean where I had grown up every summer as a kid. Ibiza is a great example of a place that has seen a collapse in its agricultural economy. An island once almost entirely self-sufficient now imports up to 96% of the food it consumes. It’s ripe for a redesign!

So that’s where we pick up in the final instalment of this series. I’m going to explain how my student thesis became a very live project called Juntos Farm. It has been nearly three years since I graduated, and I am now working alongside 35 incredibly talented people to create a regenerative farm and community food hub in the heart of the island. We are putting regenerative design into practice every day, and we are not alone. There is a growing movement worldwide, working towards the design of healthy, living systems and laying the foundations for the reorganisation to come.

Stay tuned for the next one!

Thanks for following along. Feel free to share comments below and send this to someone who might find it interesting. If you want to subscribe for bonus content and access to a group chat, there is a button below. For now, the majority of my posts will remain free to access.

Finn

This Thursday March 13 at 15:00 GMT I'll be joined by of The Farm Diaries in the Substack app for a live video conversation.

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Our session takes place as part of Substack’s food festival Grubstack, which is bringing together top food writers, chefs, and culinary voices from around the world for live cooking demos, virtual tastings, and in-depth discussions on today’s biggest food trends. You can see the full schedule here.

You’ll need to download the Substack app to join our conversation. This is for everyone, whether you have a paid subscription or not. If you enable notifications, the app will notify you when I’m live on Thursday. Just tap that, and you’re in.

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Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday March 13 at 15:00 GMT!

With summer approaching, I had given myself two months off to focus on my mental health before starting the next chapter of life in London. I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone in the hope that it would shift my perspective. Depression can feel like being stuck in the mud. The world around you dulls slightly in colour. It’s like you’re looking in from behind a sealed glass window. An invisible layer separating you from everything else.

It left me simply wanting to feel more alive. To reconnect. So when I was invited to go on a climbing trip with a group of friends, despite the fact I had little experience - I signed up. Two of them are pretty advanced mountaineers, and they had set their hearts on climbing Mont Blanc. At 4,809 metres, it’s a beast of a mountain straddling the border of France, Switzerland and Italy. To put any of my concerns at ease, we agreed on a couple of days of training on smaller climbs before the main accent. The training went well, so with the exception of some blisters from my rented mountain boots, we enthusiastically began our two-day climb. In fact, we were so confident we decided on the harder of the two routes in the hope it would be less busy in the summer. We would be climbing Mt Blanc from the Italian side of the mountain, known as the Gonella Route.

The Italian accent begins with a long trek through a glacier - it feels like an alien ice world, and eventually, you spend the night halfway up the mountain in a small cabin. It’s a place to eat a warm meal, get some sleep and prepare for the second leg of the climb - which begins at the crack of dawn. The goal is to reach the summit as quickly as you can - it’s safer to climb in the cooler temperatures of the early morning to avoid the risk of snowmelt. As we began this second leg, we noticed other climbers coming back down. Their head torches beamed in the darkness of the dawn. They had been unable to pass a particularly steep and icy passage. Ironically, the snow that normally made it easier to cross had melted due to climate change, leaving black ice below. As we pushed on, we, too, reached this pass. However, armed with ice picks, metal spiked shoes, and the ego of four young men on their first major climbing trip, we decided to give the ice wall our best go.

We were climbing with two instructors, so I watched as the instructor in front of me demonstrated the move. In order to avoid slipping off the mountain, it required shifting all of your body weight onto the metal tip of the ice pick and the crampons (spikey shoes). I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot… I failed. As I slipped, I heard my French instructor shout “putain” as he slammed his ice pick into the mountain. In climbing you’re always connected to a buddy through a safety rope. The only reason I had not fallen to a certain death was the rope around my waist connected to my instructor. He was using his ice pick to hold both of us in place. This was one of those moments now burnt in my memory. As I clambered back to safety, I stared in horror at the sheer drop below me. With my heart beating out of my chest, the sun had begun to rise over the horizon, and as the first rays of warmth crept in, I felt a profound sense of gratitude to be alive. If I had ever taken life for granted before, this was the wake-up call - I definitely wanted to live! I also felt a certainty that risking my life was not the best way to find the mental peace I had originally gone searching for.

So, like the climbers before us, we decided to retreat back down. This was not the day we would summit the mountain. The risk wasn’t worth the reward. We made it back safely; amazingly, the two advanced climbers in our group went back up the next day to complete the summit from the French side. Meanwhile, two of us stayed back to plan a different adventure. On our last day in the little French town of Chamonix, in the safety of a grassy alpine meadow overlooking the Alps, all four of us gathered to take a strong dose of psilocybin-infused chocolate. For two of us, it was the first time. What followed was equally as profound as my near-death experience just days before. As I melted into the grass of the meadow, giggles erupted from all four of us as the effects took full force. I realised I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed like that. Deep belly laughs. It felt like the universe was laughing with us.

My five-hour journey was like putting on a pair of new glasses. Through them, the world came into focus with ineffable wonder, beauty, and awe. Before I knew it, tears were rolling down my cheeks, carrying away the heaviness that had filled my heart for so many months before. It was a very welcome release. The mushrooms are good at this. It’s like turning on an emotional tap. Things that are stuck just started moving.

Perhaps that experience in France would have been enough to kick the depression, but as I said, I had booked two months off, and instead, that experience actually deepened my interest in the potential of very profound experiences to change our minds. So I wondered, what else could I try?

Someone had recommended a course in Vipassana Meditation. I knew it required a minimum of 10 days - spent meditating for 10 hours a day - in silence. That’s the standard intro course. The way I saw it, spending 100 hours meditating was an incredible way to develop a foundation that might serve me for life. I wanted to know my brain better. To understand what was going on in there. All Vipassana courses are free - provided you can get a place. There are many centres around the world, but they book up at lightning speed. Initially, I tried to get a place at a centre in the UK, but everything was booked up. Eventually, I found one space available at a centre called Dharma Santi in Brazil, it was nestled in the Atlantic Rainforest. The dates aligned, so I bit the bullet.

Now, here’s where things get a little spicy… With the dates secured for the meditation course, I wanted the make the most of being in South America. I’m obviously acutely aware of the environmental impact of flying long distance, and I’m aware of the privilege of being able to take time off to make a trip like that. I didn’t want to waste it. After the psilocybin trip in France, I started reading a lot about plant-based medicine. I picked up Micahel Pollen's book ‘How To Change Your Mind’, and I had heard about people travelling to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca - a very powerful psychoactive brew known to heal - particularly emotional trauma. So, from the recommendation of a friend, I signed up to visit the Temple of the Way of Light in the Peruvian Amazon. A shamanic healing centre. The plan was to travel there after Brazil. Essentially, the trip became 10 days of mediation, a small break between and then 12 days at the Temple, which included a series of ayahuasca ceremonies in the Shipibo tradition.

The Shipibo are an extraordinary indigenous group who have lived in the Amazon along the Ucayali River and worked with plant medicines for millennia. Training as a Shipibo curandero (healer) can start as young as five years old and involves extended periods of solitude in the rainforest, working directly with plants through ceremonial practice. These are known as ‘dietas’. This is also where they learn the songs they sing during the ceremony, known as ‘icaros’. The more I learnt about Shipibo culture, the more I came to respect their practice - in the same way you might respect a surgeon in Western Medicine. The Shipibo are deeply knowledgeable, and they work with the utmost integrity and precision. This is not just a job. This is a practice ingrained into the very fabric of their culture and their worldview.

Before I go any further, I want to note that I have been unsure whether to write publically about this experience. There is much to be said about the recent rise in ayahuasca tourism and the risk it poses to the indigenous groups who have long protected it. I did extensive research into the centre I was visiting to ensure the way they operate supports both the Shipibo directly and the conservation of the plants that make up the ayahuasca brew. I watched testimonials of people I trust, such as Gabor Maté, who had been to this particular centre and reached out to friends in this space for advice on how to navigate this correctly. I even consulted a doctor in London before going. If you want to learn more about the practices and the ethics of the Temple of the Way of Light you can here.

So off I went, first spending 10 days in meditation at Dharma Santi - where my phone, my computer and all my belongings were locked in a box. Here, I experienced a level of mental calm and present awareness that I didn’t realise was possible. It’s a bit like training as a monk for 10 days. Although it was just an introduction, I gained the seed of a new skill in shifting my focus away from my worries and anxieties about the world - to the simple joy of just being a human and experiencing the present moment. Life slows down during Vipsanna. You get up before sunrise and meditate all day, with just two simple meals between sessions.

It’s a very powerful way to break any unhealthy routines you might have developed and to really take a close look at your inner state. However, halfway through, I considered dropping out. It was such a challenge to just sit there for so long each day… but I pushed through. This was helped by the fact that I was in the middle of a rainforest with nowhere to go. By the last day, I found myself doing things like quietly observing the apple I had been given to eat. Looking at the unique patterning on it’s skin, smelling the sweet aroma as I lifted it to my mouth, and noticing the juice that burst from the flesh as I took my first bite.

Then, I made the journey to Peru. By this time, I had spent weeks getting ready through the food I was eating and the mindset I was cultivating, and I had read as much as I could to understand what I was in for. Although, in truth nothing could have really prepared me for what would unfold next. I won’t unpack the details of each of the five ceremonies, they are ultimately a very personal experience. But I can say, without any doubt or exaggeration, that they were the most profound healing experiences I have ever had. I have never experienced anything like it, and even if I did try to describe it here… words would not suffice. There were moments during the ceremonies that were very hard. In fact, at times, I found myself way outside of my comfort zone, going through very confronting experiences. But the changes that took place laid the foundation for a fundamental shift in my mental health. People say it’s like compressing 10 years of therapy into a couple of hours. That’s an oversimplification… but I get what they mean.

One of the most important aspects of this kind of work is not simply the experience itself but the integration after. How do you process what you experienced? How do you make space for changes in your life to avoid falling back to where you were before? After Peru, I returned to Europe and spent the remaining three weeks mostly alone, starting the work of integration. What impacted me was not just the ceremonies themselves but also spending weeks in the rainforest - one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Who knew birds and frogs could make sounds like that?! Also, spending time observing ancient cultures and practices so closely connected with time honoured traditions and the natural world.

A combination of everything that unfolded during those two months shifted something very deep within me. It wasn’t clear immediately, but what would unfold next would ultimately lead to leaving London and taking a different path - starting instead a two-year research degree at Cambridge University focussed on studying a practice called regenerative design.

That’s where we’ll pick up in Part 3. I want to tell you what regenerative design is and what I learnt during that course. Most importantly, I want to explain why it gives me hope for the future - despite these confusing times we’re living in. I’m publishing this journey here partly because it helps to explain the back story of what I’m doing now and partly because I hope it might reach someone else who feels stuck and is looking for alternative ways to shift their perspective.

I want to be clear: These experiences are no joke. I’m not suggesting anyone puts their life in danger or sign up for multiple plant medicine ceremonies. If you feel called to do so, definitely seek medical advice and do your research beforehand. However what I am saying is that sometimes, we do need to get out of our comfort zone if we want to make a big change in our lives and shift our perspective. 

Thanks for following along. Feel free to share comments below and send this to someone who might find it interesting. If you want to subscribe for bonus content and access to a group chat, there is a button below. For now, the majority of my posts will remain free to access.

Finn

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As a kid, the cultural stories I was told about success and happiness made me think the city was the ultimate place to be. Fame? Money? Power? That’s where you’d find it. Convenience, luxury and indulgence - all within walking distance. I grew up in London, so it felt like home; after all, that’s all I had ever known. Yet at the same time, deep down, I’ve always felt a sense that I’m not really from there. I mean I don’t have ancestry from London. I don’t have traditions that route me to the history of the city. My grandparents lived close by, and my parents moved into the city along with their friends, seeking all the benefits cities bring. But at the back of my mind, a question has always lingered: Is this where I am from?

By the time I was 21, I was hungry to go somewhere new. I had spent the last four years working with my brother Jack on building a YouTube channel called JacksGap. Some readers might know it, if not - the long story short is that our early adventures in travelling and filmmaking were a hit - more than we ever imagined they would be and within a few short years, we found ourselves making videos full-time and earning a living doing so. We were the first wave of ‘YouTubers’. After four years, although I loved the adventure and the thrill of it, there was a growing hole inside of me that craved more meaning and, to some extent, to reclaim my anonymity. The truth was, on a deeper level…I wasn’t very happy. I didn’t feel nourished, and I wanted to try something different.

So, I decided to move to the world's second-best city - New York. Somehow, I managed to get myself a place at Parsons School of Design, and without much notice, I packed my bags, and off I went, in search of new urban adventures. New York, for those first couple of years, was wild. It felt like London but compressed into something even denser, higher-energy, and more sugary. I feasted on it like urban junk food. For anyone used to quick dopamine hits and constant stimulation, New York is the place. The daily screeching of sirens that roar past the window soon becomes the normal baseline of urban life. The hum of New York City is the beating pulse that keeps it alive.

However, by the time I had graduated, I had undergone quite a significant shift in how I thought about the world. I spent those four years immersing myself in my studies on design and the environment - at times, quite obsessively. I inhaled as much information as I could. I read voraciously. Most importantly: I learnt how to learn. Aside from the mandatory architecture and urban design classes, I dipped into ancient and modern philosophy, environmental history, sustainable systems and even Spanish theatre. I became fascinated by the climate crisis and deeply concerned by the environmental disconnect of the urban world I had grown up in. I remember one class that left me with this paradox. The teacher explained that cities are the main drivers of the environmental problems we face today, yet as centres of innovation and efficiency, they are our best opportunity for finding a solution. That one stuck with me.

When I landed back in London, I was somewhat radicalised. As soon as I returned, I struggled to relate to the city I had grown up in. Everyone seemed distracted by all the wrong things. I joined Extinction Rebellion, hungry to connect with people who shared my concerns about where we were collectively headed. But campaigning in the streets and blocking roads didn’t feel like a very inspiring solution. So, restless, I looked further afield. I wanted to go somewhere culturally different. Somewhere away from the familiar but still connected to the city life I had always known. So, I applied for a job in Tokyo, Japan - to work for an architect called Kengo Kuma. As a student, I read Kuma’s books about how he uses natural materials like timber in his buildings to connect people back to Nature. I love the idea of bringing more natural materials back into our cities. I’ve also long been fascinated by Japan’s animist Shinto traditions and craft culture. So once again, I packed my bags, and off I went.

In the first week of working for Kuma, all the dreams of my architectural hero and his philosophies were shattered. I found myself on the 13th floor of a nondescript office building with blue carpets, fluorescent lighting, phones ringing and a relentless work schedule that started at 9 am and ran non-stop until 11 pm. Someone had advised me on the first day to tell the office that I lived on the outskirts of the city so they would let me go before 12 am - when the last metro train stopped. My romantic vision of how this was all supposed to go quickly faded. Tokyo, for all its wonder, is a city of extremes. It is common to see ‘salary men’ passed out, drunk on their way home from work. I saw this most evenings as I travelled home. I spent a lot of time wandering the city centre, observing people going about their day-to-day lives. During my four months there, I started to lose faith in urban life. By then, I had lived in three of the biggest and most prominent cities in the world, but none of them filled the empty hole I felt inside. In fact, they seemed to exacerbate it. I realised - I felt lonelier in a city surrounded by people than I did when I was in Nature by myself.

The final nail in the coffin came late one evening. I was sitting at my desk on that 13th floor, procrastinating on some menial task. I think I was photoshopping material palettes for a luxury bathroom detail for a new Hilton Hotel in Tokyo. I saw an article on Vice about a new report on climate change that was sending people into therapy. I couldn’t resist. I clicked and downloaded Gem Bendells ‘Deep Adaptation’. For those who haven’t read it - in a nutshell, Deep Adaption suggests climate collapse is inevitable and we need to start preparing now. I think today it is the most downloaded academic paper in history, although it’s worth noting it’s self-published as it was too controversial to be accepted by academic journals. As I read the contents of that paper, I looked up from my desk and realised I couldn’t see a single tree or plant from my view across the entire city. Just a forest of glass, concrete and steel. It might sound like a small detail, but I think that was the moment I gave up on the city as a place where I would find the nourishment I was looking for.

When I came back to London for the second time, I started to sink into a deep depression. I felt totally unsure of where to go next. I became pretty existential. In fact, things got so bad I found myself in a doctor's clinic asking for medication to treat my symptoms of chronic depression and anxiety. I think at the core of it, I felt totally disillusioned with the path I felt I was supposed to follow. I didn’t want to be part of a system and a culture that was systematically destroying life on earth. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but at this point, I was deep in the academic literature around climate change. I was reading every IPCC report that came out, somehow thinking the more I understood, the clearer the solution would become.

After the consultation with the doctor, I didn’t take the medication he offered me. It seemed like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. He recommended I take some time off. Get out in Nature. Prioritise my mental health. So, I started planning a trip that would ultimately change the course of my life. As the summer of 2019 rolled around, a couple of months before I was about to start my master’s degree in architecture in London, feeling as lost as I had ever felt in my life, I packed my bags for a solo adventure that would change, well… everything.

Thanks for reading Part 1 of this four-part mini-series exploring a journey from the city to the farm. Stay tuned for the next instalment! Part 2 should be coming out at the end of next week. Feel free to leave comments below and share with anyone who might find it interesting.

Finn

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Welcome, dear friend

Today is a momentous occasion… I’ve decided to start a new relationship, to make a commitment… it’s a late New Year resolution. I am joining Substack and launching The Seeds Will Grow - a newsletter sharing my journey of creating a regenerative farm and community food hub in the heart of Ibiza.

You can expect honest and open updates on everything that’s going right and all that’s going wrong. I’ll share words but also pictures and videos. You can also expect to receive thoughts and musings on regenerative design, resilience and ecology. After seven years of studying and three years in the field, I have a lot to share!

Why Now?

I’ve spent the last couple of months feeling a deep sense of unease as the platforms I’m used to expressing myself on, namely, Twitter and Instagram, have disintegrated at the hands of their billionaire founders, infused with all the extremity that drives clicks and likes in this internet era. Currently, I’ve lost total access to my Twitter as it was hacked - that’s a work in progress. So as the new year came into full force, the growing sense of unease became a screaming voice that said -

So I set about looking for a new place to find community. A place to share the work I’m doing on creating Juntos Farm and Earthrise Studio, and a place where I can get inspired by other like-minded creators, writers, artists and innovators. I’ve been aware of Substack for some time, but it wasn’t until Nathaniel Drew turned up on my doorstep as Chief Substack Evangelist and convinced me to take the leap of faith.

So here I am… I’m still working out the details — But I’m here with a deep sense of curiosity and a full commitment to sharing insights as I go.

How will this work?

This is, first and foremost, a free newsletter. I’m still working out how regularly I will share, but you can subscribe at no cost and receive updates directly to your inbox. If you want to become a paid subscriber and support the project, you will receive some extra posts, access to a community chat and early access to product launches from the farm. You can cancel at any time.

I’m excited to write about what gets me fired up! I’m looking forward to documenting my journey visually. And I’m already feeling inspired by the community on this platform. Just in my first week here I’ve found a bunch of articles and writers I LOVE. It feels the beginning of a beautiful rabbit hole.

So sign up, subscribe, and buckle up for the ride.

Let’s get started.