Beginning the journey 🌿

Hello friends, family and curious souls. Welcome to the very first edition of Mana Growers Field Notes!

Over the coming months, these field notes will become a space to share pieces of our journey: what has been alive in us, what we are learning on farms and hikes, the people we meet, the books and recipes we love, the practices we discover, and the many reflections emerging.

More than travel updates, we hope these field notes become small windows into a bigger exploration. This first short edition shares why this journey exists and what is Mana Growers.

Why we are doing this trip?

For the past seven years and a half, Australia has been home. It is where we became adults, built rewarding careers as engineers (at least initially), created lifelong friendships, volunteered for causes that mattered and also where we became French-Australian.

Our lives in Sydney have been deeply unexpected, meaningful, joyful and privileged in many ways. But getting close to crossing into our thirties last year, we began to feel time differently.

With most likely one third of our lives already passed, we realised that the years ahead are precious, and that we no longer wanted to postpone certain questions indefinitely.

At the same time, our understanding of the environmental and social crises unfolding around us kept deepening. It became harder to ignore how fragile many of the systems we depend upon truly are, and how disconnected we often feel from the essentials of life: access to nourishing food, thriving nature, and close community relationships. Quietly, our inner voices started calling for something else: more time to be outdoors, learn new skills, and question what we want to do with the next phases of our lives.

So this journey was born.

Not as an escape from life, but as a way to move closer to it.

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anaïs Nin

Over the next months, we will travel through Western Australia, France, French Polynesia and New Zealand. Aside from seeing lifelong friends and family, we will spend time on small organic market gardens, food forests and homesteads learning about regenerative agriculture, natural building, seed saving, local food systems and ways of living with greater resilience and reciprocity.

Beyond the practical skills, this is also a pilgrimage. A time to slow down.
To grieve certain versions of ourselves. To reconnect with our bodies, our relationships and the living world. To spend meaningful time with people we love. To rediscover curiosity, wonder and attention.

We want to learn how to grow food, but also how to grow a life.

We know this journey will not magically provide answers to all our questions. But we hope it will help us ask better ones. And along the way, we hope to share these learnings with humility and love.

What is Mana Growers?

Guillaume discovered the word mana while preparing our first journey to French Polynesia in 2023. Its meaning stayed with us long after that trip. Across many Pacific cultures, mana is understood as a sacred life force — an energy that flows through people, places, oceans, mountains, plants, stories and relationships. A force that connects all living things, past and present. It is shaped by the way we live, act, care and relate to the world around us.

Mana Growers is our way to create an intentional space in our own lives to better listen to this sacred life force and explore many questions such as:

• What makes a place feel alive?
• How do we regenerate land while also regenerating ourselves?
• What does “enough” mean to us?
• How and where do we grow our lives rooted in reciprocity, beauty and care?
• What is our mana?

Mylene also recently discovered via her friend S, that mána also means “mother” in Greek. A coincidence with deep meaning because this project is also about taking real time to grieve the loss of her own Mána, whilst returning to something maternal: the nourishment, the slowness, and the belonging to Mother Earth.

And then there is “Growers“. It’s for the growers of all kinds we hope to meet along the way. But also ourselves, growing slowly through this journey to find the kind of future we want to cultivate.

Mana Growers is our humble attempt to follow what feels deeply alive. 💫🌞🌱

Thank you for being here at the beginning of this adventure. You can subscribe to receive the next field notes in your mailbox and follow Mana Growers on Instagram 🌞