The Goat Walk

Tina Trout Bio
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Returning to New Mexico after 25 years away, Tina sold her home and cooperative artist residency to embrace life on the move, living in a converted bus and trailer with her herd of goats. Trained in permaculture, natural farming, alchemy, and guided by a lifelong spiritual path, she discovered that grand ideas mean little without soil under your nails. Tina lives her insights in real time, from chili seeds to crafting wild medicines.

Her early explorations in Web3, launching Microbe Heroes NFTs and designing decentralized, shared-economy frameworks, revealed a profound truth: communities need more than visionary ideas; they need hands-on engagement. This led to her signature Goat Walk gatherings, where pattern literacy and regenerative practice become living community workshops.

Out of these experiments, she wove the Natural Being Framework, a dynamic map built on the pillars of Being → Having → Doing → Interacting. It’s designed to satisfy all our fundamental needs, in any place or condition, by honoring nature’s redundancies and emergent synergies. Tina’s purpose is to guide people back into direct engagement with land and each other, showing that the truest path to love, power, and wisdom is lived in the earth beneath our feet.

Her writings appear on Substack, blending practical reflections with a sci-fi time-travel saga, layering ideas through nuanced journeys across time, place, and shifting “skins” of identity and memory.

The Goat Walk

Field Notes on Failure, Feedback, and Emergent Pattern Literacy

By Tina Trout

Every morning, I walk goats with sunflower seeds in my pocket. Seems simple, romantic even but really, it’s a live exercise in pattern recognition, relational feedback, and what physics calls emergence from the edge of chaos. I call it The Goat Walk, and over time it’s become practice, template, meme.

Introducing Natural Being through The Goat Walk

Natural Being is a living framework, a cyclical map for co-learning with dynamic systems, soil, herds, or communities. Two core insights drive it:

Pattern Literacy

I attune deeply before acting, using a Three-Step Method, an informed Try-Fail-Try again loop, to turn “failure” into feedback as a teacher, revealing emergent intelligence over imposed control.

Stacked Functions

Every practice is designed to meet multiple needs at once (health, ecology, creativity,
community). The more needs a single action meets, the more regenerative the system
becomes.

This unfolds through four interwoven phases:

🜃 Being (Listening Before Acting): Cultivate presence and observation as your first move.

🜄 Having (Recognizing What Emerges): Take stock of resources, feedback, and stacked functions.

🜂 Doing (Iterative Experimentation): Engage in three-cycle, edge-of-chaos experiments to co-discover new rhythms.

🜁 Interacting (Co-Creating Emergence): Step into right relationship, letting listening and participation shape the evolving field.

Underpinning it all is the Triune of Love, Power, Wisdom, from microbial magnetism to self-knowledge as data to applied insight, and a commitment to right relationship drawn from Indigenous pattern-literacy, complexity science, and embodied practice. Natural Being turns every step into a canvas for regenerative learning.

Now, back to The Goat Walk

Each Goat Walk surfaces something new:

A shift in herd dynamics.
A reward that no longer works.
The call for fresh negotiation, fresh trust, fresh rhythm.
So I begin with being…

🜃 BEING, Listening Before Acting

I walk at goat pace, negotiating each step based on terrain, weather, and herd mood. They may remember the favored apple tree or alfalfa they discovered yesterday, requiring urgency to move them towards wilder pasture, away from crops or property lines. Every walk is different.

Every walk is discovery.

David, the orphaned kid with digestion woes, spent grazing time cradled in my lap, nosing my chin for comfort. I’d lost two siblings to rumen issues. Without this daily observation, sensitive biomes can quickly fail.

The Goat Walk is my observation time with him and all of my small herd, whom I call by name, like counting.

🜄 HAVING — Recognizing What Emerges

Take inventory of your stacked functions.

On each Goat Walk we’re: exercising me, the goats, and my shepherd dog Sahaj; monitoring goat health; regenerating pasture; strengthening neighbor relationships; scanning soil and plants; even writing and contemplating, feet to soil.

The Goat Walk teaches me negotiation with life. I map what I have: pasture capacity, grazing patterns, fence effects, remembered trails, and the quiet currency of intuition gleaned by walking the land every day. What emerges isn’t just goats and function, but relationship in motion. I begin to access a map of response and negotiation.

🜂 DOING — Iterative Experimentation

The pattern emerges.

I adapt route, timing, and call-and-response through at least three Try–Fail cycles until new rhythms reveal themselves, and then I integrate what I learn.

We always finish with sunflower-seed currency and a dash home. Topaz, my oldest wether, demands kisses. I have a special whistle when they wander. At the edge of chaos, complexity science’s sweet spot, we evolve. The babies test boundaries, running into the orchard. I learn to negotiate and compromise as they grow, changing the system.

Now the daily Goat Walk becomes practice in Guidance, Trust-Building, Gentle Boundary Work, and Energy Listening, a choreography of Reciprocal Design.

🜁 INTERACTING — Mapping What Has No Precedent

Stepping into right relationship.

This pattern isn’t in any manual. it doesn’t mirror modern goat-care myths, most of which are fabricated lies based on rumor. I’m learning to read my own map. Indigenous wisdom reminds us: pattern literacy emerges from watching, listening, and walking the land daily.

“True knowledge comes from the pattern, not the part,” as Tyson Yunkaporta says (founder, podcast host, and executive editor of Emergence Magazine).

In physics, toroidal fields, from hearts to galaxies, merge only when phase, resonance, and proximity align. So it is with goats, people, place. Emergence isn’t linear, it’s relational, vortex-shaped. Spirals.

The Goat Walk as Template, is…

A metaphor for participatory systems learning

A case study in adaptive rhythm-making

A feedback engine for growth

A relational intelligence practice training presence, flexibility, and co-creation

Finally, I don’t control the goats. I cohere with them, We enter right relationship together. And perhaps most beautifully, we stay long enough to see the pattern emerge.