Meet Your Host!
The short version…
Jason is a guy who spent 6 years, in his twenties, hitchhiking around north and central America, as a vagabond gypsy balloon artist, volunteering at dozens of homesteads, permaculture farms, and intentional communities along the way. He knew that life had more to offer than what he saw in conventional society, and he’s been finding that to be true ever since!
During his vagabond years, he saw land management and community living done a whole lot of different ways. In 2008 he left MN in a veggie oil school bus, heading south looking for a new place to live. Six months later he landed at what became his home and farm in Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica.Â
After a dozen years, dedicating himself to that land project, he’s transitioned his focus to regional resiliance and nation-wide networking. The Sharing Insights Podcast was his first step along that path. After a year of podcasting and understanding better the needs of that audience Regeneration Nation Costa Rica was born.Â
Early Life
I grew up in Detroit, MI, and loved the city. It was rich with stimulation and kept me on my toes. It was what I grew up in and what I knew. It worked, for the most part, until I found myself sick with chronic indigestion and heartburn at age 17. Within a few years, I was living most days in discomfort. Doctors prescribed more drugs that didn’t work, and no one around me had much of anything else to offer.
I moved out to Arizona and spent the first few years of my 20’s getting into yoga & meditation, experimented with fasting, cleansing, and different plant-based diets, and growing a general disinterest for modern-day society. At 23, I loaded my backpack and walked out into the desert “renouncing the world”. I spent the next 6 years hitchhiking the continent in a unique and mind-enriching manner.
Career
Most of those years, on the road, I tied balloon animals for tips at farmers’ markets, tourist strips, and fairs. I had nothing to return to and learned the value of choosing a direction, keeping a steady pace, and realizing that no place is ever the final destination. We’re all really just moving on and on and on.
Navigating the Mystery became my relationship with life.
Eventually, I decided to settle down in Minneapolis for a few years. I’d grown a desire to make “big art” with people and found a tribe of co-creative festival producers that were doing just that. Eventually, though, restlessness and the desire to be warm took hold, and I found myself driving south, looking for a new place to live.
The next 7 years that followed were a dream come true and a restless series of dark nights all wrapped up into one. We bought land in Costa Rica, founded a permaculture education center, raised a family, hosted volunteers, built infrastructure, and got to experience those sides of the cycle where it all feels like it’s falling apart. Just to see a new day rise in its stead…
In 2016, the needs of the children took the family to the states for a few years, which brought on its own set of challenges. I used that time to study business and marketing and apply what I was learning to grow my balloon art & entertainment business. The business’s revenue grew each year, and I was hiring out a number of other artists to cover gigs, eventually evolving the business into a booking agency.
The business was working well, but I wasn’t following my passion. And therein lay my limits.
Finca Fruition
After my third year back in the states, my desire to live tropically was nagging at me. I was slaving away on the hamster wheel of city life, while our farm was being looked after by a crew of young fun-lovers who weren’t communicating with us and left the farm in a stunning state of atrophy and disorder. I determined to return and start sorting things out, both with the farm and within myself.
Over many months during the pandemic, with the help of many hands, the farm’s physical infrastructure had been regenerated, but the future vision remained uncertain.
From this place, the Sharing Insights Podcast was born.
I began the podcast to learn more about what other landowners were doing well to inspire guidance for my own project. The experience was enlightening, but it also coincided with my last year at the farm. My land partners weren’t available to discuss or agree on the changes that I wanted to make, and I was ready to be in a more co-creative environment. I left the farm at the end of 2022 and began yet another stage of metamorphosis.
Giving Back
I know that there are a lot of people out there who have land or intend to get some and want to do something impactful with it. Regardless of the experience I had as a contributor to places like this, the reality of owning and operating it had been a whole other set of learning curves. In today’s climate, people are looking to ecologically and socially beneficial projects for guidance and inspiration. Sharing Insights Podcast seemed to be the perfect vehicle to get these stories and advice out there so that more places can have a better chance to thrive.
After a year of developing the show and learning better who my audience was, I decided to broaden the focus of my interviews to include other industry leaders beyond back-to-the-landers.Â
As a result, I’ve rebranded the show as Regeneration Nation Costa Rica, celebrating the part we all must play for Costa Rica (and other nations) to become truly regenerative.
We all have so much to learn from each other. It’s my hope that these efforts will help us each in our efforts to create a more regenerative future.Â
Thanks for joining us on the adventure!
Be sure to Subscribe to the podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can have easy access to the lineup of insights that we have waiting. While you’re there, remember, it’s those ratings and reviews that help more people find us!
