On Our Community | Moa Raud

Meet Moa Raud, a creative mama living in a tiny house by the sea. Alongside partner Dave, she owns a recycled jewellery business Halio Creations, infusing love and sustainability into each piece. Moa embodies the essence of an earth goddess, seamlessly blending motherhood, creativity, and living well. Moa shares how she lives in harmony with the earth ☽

Share a pivotal moment or experience in your life that deepened your connection with nature and inspired you to live in harmony with the earth?

I feel Iike there are so many influential aspects to why I live this way, from the way I grew up to the way I got lost in the system to the ways I found, and am finding my way back home to living in connection.

Like everything in life I feel like it's a constant spiral, deepening with each layer. One recent pivotal moment for a deepening connection on my path to deeper connection was reading the beautiful book Braiding Sweetgrass while learning and establishing our gardens here on the land. There's a certain part of the book where she talks about our love for Mother Earth and how that love changes us, and then she explains in the most beautiful way how Earth loves us back, and reading that changed something within me.

To love and to be loved by Mother Earth, to truly see all the gifts I am given each day, gives me the deep desire to give back, to tend to the land, to sow the seeds, to put in the effort. To me, that was a big shift and I made a little love note to look at every day saying "what would you do if you knew Mother Earth loved you back?" that lived in my fridge for some time.

What are your daily practices or rituals that help you stay grounded and connected to the earth?

To be honest, daily practices and rituals in the season of mothering a toddler are definitely not what they used to be. Since becoming a mother there is no such thing as a daily meditation or yoga practice at the same time every day, it's all a lot more fluent and real, finding the sacred in the mundane. While I love having a bath and listening to an inner child meditation when I do get a moment to myself, my new ways of connecting and grounding happen in the everyday moments of looking closely at the bees in our garden, tending to and talking to the plants, taking a big breath of joy while pushing a laughing Maya in the hammock, putting my head under in the salty water while Maya is splashing close by and other moments of presence in nature and everyday life.

We know you have a vege garden you've been nourishing – another way you are connected to the earth though growing your own food! What are your favourite nourishing foods/dishes during the summer season?

I have a newly found favourite dish that is now a weekly staple in our home. We recently discovered that the estuary down the road is full of pippies and a day not too long ago we went down on a low tide to collect some, rinsed them and made a delicious white wine sauce to boil them in. I walked out in the garden and harvested some cucumber apples, purple beans and zucchini and made a cucumber feta salad, boiled up the beans, fried the zucchini and roasted some of our last batch of potatoes. Sitting at the table and looking at the food sources almost completely out of the garden and locally sourced seafood made me feel so happy and deeply nourished.

What book/s are you currently reading, and what music and/or podcast are you listening to?

I go through stages of reading, listening to audiobooks and listening to podcasts. I am currently in a podcast phase and am loving The Emerald, it's like a somatic journey and a piece of art in the form of a podcast and every time I listen to an episode I feel like it shifts something deeply within me. I've also just picked up the book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle from my bookshelf and am enjoying reading it again. For music, I mostly listen with my little one when we're in the mood for a dance and we're currently loving Sam Garrets latest album.

Looking ahead, what is your hope for us, our communities and the earth?

Hmmm, that is a very big question. I'm not sure if I have the answers, or if I'm the person to ask. I'm on a journey of learning more about the indigenous ways of doing things and feel like they have a lot more answers than I do, so rather than speaking I'm doing a lot of listening at the moment, and I think that could serve us all.

Thank you Moa for your inspiring answers! To follow along her journey, you can find her on Instagram @moaraud