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Month: June 2021

Prepping to pilgrimage – our next year-long bicycle adventure

Jun 30, 2021 | bike touring, home | 49 comments

Life is good at home. We have a thriving productive garden, beautiful friends and neighbours, a magical nearby forest, daily ritual, goodly water, air, food and special country and community in our lives. But it’s time for a shake up, another really big shake up. There is so much fear encircling the world, crippling motivation and stifling spirit. We want to ride straight into that storm from this place of gentle settled sanity.

Seven years ago we rode our first big cycling adventure, and crawled up the east coast of Australia at a speed suitable and desirable for five mammals on two bicycles. Now we again have itchy pedals and a thirst for permaculture pilgrimage – to take neopeasantry to the road for a second time, to further test our resilience and embrace uncertainty, to travel in right story relationship, write a bunch of new songs, seek ways to be in service, and expand once again our foraging, fishing and hunting knowledges. This is us back then after we returned home and wrote a book about our journey:

Woody was 14 months old when we set off last time. He was 28 months old when we returned. Half his life on the back of a bike! That trip imprinted significantly on him in innumerable ways. Now he is eight. He is knowledgeable and adaptive, creative and up for anything. We adults have had timely and important bouts of pre- take off fear and anxiety, and have been busy preparing ourselves since we made the decision to journey a few months back, packing up all our various libraries at The School of Applied Neopeasantry.

So where are we going? We have no definitive plans. We are thinking we will decide on the morning we leave what direction we will travel, which will be some time in the next week. We’re going to leave on the warmest day. Yes, it is kinda crazy to be heading out in mid-winter just after solstice, which will certainly throw more than just cold water over us. We are once again ready to be slapped and trammelled, whacked and winded to feel the full force of freedom. At least we think we are…

On this trip we are taking with us many new skills and processes. Tummo or fire pranayama breathing technique for one (via Wim Hof), to help with exposure to the cold and for general disease prevention. We will also trial other breathing practices that we read about in James Nestor’s Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art, such as taping our mouths shut while riding, a hack we already use during sleep to promote nasal breathing. Hauling heavy bikes with our mouths taped is no easy thing, but we’ll give it a crack anyway.

We have had a remarkable seven years, which also brought a fair dose of familial grief. We’ve survived this time by going deep into it, by keeping our hearts open, by holding monthly fire circles in the nearby forest commons, and discovering that grief is given its full form in the company of community.

Tyson Yunkaporta recently referred to Artist as Family processes as ‘creoling’. We like this. It speaks to emergence and never arriving. Being in an ever-rearranging flow state is why we are seeking life on the road again – to intensify the processes.

At the outset of this trip we will take away with us a deeper sense of the spirit of Djaara Mother Country, and a deeper practice of being in country. Acknowledging the mothering of the worlds-of-the-world we travel in, and taking with us daily rituals to honour the land as we seek food, camping ground, water, good company and days of easy transit. A big fear is having to face the industrial food system again, so we’ve been dehydrating goat, rabbit, various vegetables, fungi and fruits to take.

All of this food from summer and autumn’s harvest has been carefully dehydrated, bottled, stored and will be packed into reclaimed ziplock bags to fill one of our ten panniers.

This really feels to us like a pilgrimage of errantry. As Jim Corbett writes, “The first decisive step into errantry is to become untamed”. We are open to the uncomfortable encounters that we will ride into, as we are open to the freedom, uncertainty and grace of the road. We will be four mammals on two bicycles this time, and each of us will have our own story to carry, along with our collective song kit.

While the last big journey focussed on extending our knowledges of food outside the locks and keys of capitalism, this one will be more about songlines, and Woody and his fiddle teacher, the talented Adam Menegazzo, worked hard to prepare a bunch of Artist as Family songs to take with us.

There has been a mountain of preparations for this journey so far, such as emptying the house of no longer required things at a garage (garden, really) sale,

taking surplus things back to the local opshops and to the tip from where many of them came,

finding, with Goathand Brad, a year-long home for our herd,

retrofitting the old tandem (Merlin) for Patrick and Woody to ride, with the expert help and generous enthusiasm of local bikesmith Eric the Red,

selling Meg’s trusty old longtail bike (farewell intrepid ten-year old friend),

to help buy herself and Zero a new freedom machine (Cosmo), which we promptly de-branded with retroreflective tape,

receiving help from legendary bicycle tourer, Mick ‘Permaculture Pedals’,

repairing old touring equipment – thanks local zip fixer, Matt,

and giving out some home-stitched, wild-shot flavour – thanks for your sewing skills Blue Wren,

lighting a fire with scratched-for dry bark tinder, wet wood and a flint and steel on a practice ride,

preparing Tree Elbow University’s house and garden for our dear friends Ruth, Tyson, Apollo and Solaris to move into, and for a French film crew to shoot an interview with us and David Holmgren at the School of Applied Neopeasantry.

So many things to put in place, handover, store, accept, cross off, reconcile, process, pull out and celebrate before we ride off in the direction of the pointy end of a feather – a feather we will fling up into the air, watch spin around and land, and then steer our rigs accordingly. Letting go like this at the very start of our journey – not being in control of the direction we will first head – will join our extensive medicine kit. This kit includes the obligatory bandages and home-made herbal salves along with singing, dancing, breathing, bicycling, cold-water plunging, rapturous-eye hunting, being together, foraging (eating origin-known food), sharing story with people we meet, and fungal medicines such as these dried-ground Turkey Tails (Trametes versicolor), which were growing on cankerous wild apple wood that we pruned in the nearby common a few years back.

We recently had a hearty chat with Morag Gamble on her podcast Sense-Making in a Changing World, where we spoke about our forthcoming travels, decolonising time and re-culturing earth-positive lifeways.

We have no idea what we’re doing, where we’re going and what will happen to life in the next year. Charles Eisenstein recently spoke about the necessary naïveté required to walk the new story. Yes naïveté, and a kind of foolish trust – to throw caution at a head wind, to deliciously flow with a tail wind, and to belong in the dovetail join of grief and praise. We hope you’ll join us in this wild ride.

Much love,

Artist as Family

Forest & free – an out-of-school experience and the power of risk

Jun 28, 2021 | Djaara mother country, foraging, Free to learn, lived ecology, social warming, Unschool | 0 comments

There are few places left where kids can use knives, climb trees, navigate forests, tend fires, sit in circle, speak their story, and generally get scratched up and stung by being participants of life. This is why we re-established a children’s forest group this year and why we volunteer our time to run it.

Forest & Free not about setting challenges that are too great for children, and we don’t encourage an overtly competitive or risk-taking culture, rather we encourage children to meet their own challenges and learn from others around them, and of course from the forest. We are observing, however, that the broader cultural narrative of ‘safety at all costs’ is harming children, making them less resilient, less mobile and suffering more health problems at an increasingly early age.

Forest & Free is about embodying resilience, meeting difficult (at times) challenges, and allowing uncomfortable things to occur – cutting oneself, standing on a Jumping Jack ant nest, putting all your weight on a rotten tree branch while climbing, taking off from the group and getting lost, and generally playing around with life.

Our culture, up until recently, used to see breaking a bone, receiving stitches, getting lost and a myriad of other uncomfortable things as ordinary rites of passage for 7-12 year olds – the pre-initiation age – necessary for the development of children. In the past few decades the possibility of embracing and learning through discomfort has been almost completely eliminated. This doesn’t serve children.

While we don’t wish on anyone any great pain – and we explain each skill, challenge, game or wild food in terms of the risks involved – adversity is the underlying, ever present flip side of enabling such learning and growth. That’s why we ask parents, carers and children to share the risk with us. This is the community model of organisation, which is a powerful antidote to the culture of fear and risk aversion that so greatly limits and incarcerates our children, and therefore inevitably our society.

As adults we come to understand that our greatest learnings come through some sort of discomfort, pain or suffering. And it’s how we respond to these things that really matters in building resilience, wisdom, freedom and bouncebackability. Overcoming fear is liberation!

In allowing a child to attend Forest & Free we ask parents to accept that some learning occurs through risk taking, that sometimes adversity will present itself as part of this risk, and in turn this presents itself as a gift of learning for everyone. When we go through adversity we gather in circle and share our story.

Children choose a forest name when they participate in Forest & Free. That is, when their forest names avail themselves. Sometimes this is a rapid process, sometimes a slow one. We have in our mob Echidna, Plantain, Blackberry, Deer, Silva, Blackwood, Jumping Jack, Thistle, Silent Night, Raven, Black Thorn, Fox, Black Cockatoo, Gum Tree, Huntsman, Brown Snake, Brush-tailed Phascogale, Pine Cone, Kangaroo and Kookaburra, amongst the dwellers who gather on a Wednesday afternoon.

Brown Snake’s mother: “I have watched such growth and confidence blossoming in Brown Snake recently, in huge part because of what you are offering – this space of adventure, risk, freedom, resilience, learning and cooperation. He holds himself slightly taller, prouder because he inhabits this space and can carry it with him. Without risk in the equation, as cliched as it is, there wld be no such reward.”

Huntsman’s mother: “There’s nowhere where the skills you share are offered in this manner & we are extremely grateful to be a part of it. Each week Huntsman is ecstatic when we meet up and can’t wait to tell his family and friends about the adventures you’ve been on.”

Pine Cone’s mother: “Thank you for all you do, for encouraging, empowering and enabling our children to rewild and connect with nature. We all try to avoid our children’s suffering at times, even when it’s beneficial for them to go through the process. It’s good to reflect upon this.”

Kangaroo’s mum: I love how much extra perception Kangaroo has of what’s going on in nature. That a tree has fallen on its own, or has been cut down, which [plants] to use for ailments etc. Probably most importantly, he has developed a better sense of his limits. So when he is climbing a tree, or a cliff, I feel more comfortable knowing he can make decisions for himself about how to stay safe and still take risks.

Black Cockatoo’s mother: “Forest & Free has given our child a sense of belonging and place at a time where he has been challenged to find that. It has reinforced and amplified his joy of being a part of a group and the relevance of safe behaviours in risky settings. Our child has been put down by educators for his engagement in “risky behaviours” such as jumping from things or climbing things that are “too high”, for questioning and pushing boundaries with a desire to understand. He has been made to feel like he is bad and naughty for wanting to explore and push the edges of his curiosity which has led to his exit from the education “system”. Through beautifully held mentoring where he feels respected and therefore chooses to be respectful… What is more, he is learning [to be in] a space where his intelligence, silence, ideas AND his wildness are ALL embraced. At F&F the world makes sense and therefore the boundaries are respected and embraced (because they make sense). Best of all, he feels like he is a part of something, something special, it is a place for belonging, a place to be his wild, loving, risk taking self and it grounds him, fills him up. Every week upon returning from forest and free he returns in the dark, dirty, beaming and bright eyed. He gets in the car and shows me his wet feet, scratches and cuts with joy from a good time well had. When asked how it was he always says it was awesome, or the best, something he never said about school.”

Many thanks to all who have contributed to the fun, adversity and adventure of Forest & Free this year. A big thank you to Blue Tongue and Thornbill who have both assisted us with the children. It doesn’t take much to organise a bush group, and the forest has so much to teach us, it’s just about getting children into forests, deserts, grasslands and any other non-mediated environments, and not placing too many restrictions on how they engage in these places so they can keep connecting to the living of the world’s worlds. Here is a short video made by Thornbill Fizzy Mitchell that gives a little more insight into how children connect if they have the opportunity.

Sending much love out to you, Dear Reader,

Magpie and Blue Wren

 

A new home – our step by step transition from social media and Big Tech

Jun 18, 2021 | Big Tech, home making, social media | 7 comments

Hello Dear Reader,

What do you think of our new website? We hope you like it as much as we do. We’re really thrilled you won’t be spied on here, or have your data mined and sold onto third parties, and there will be no manipulating of your algorithm while you’re visiting us here. These are just some of the reasons why we collaborated with the wonderful meta4 team, Lorne and Juanita, to begin our steady transition away from Big Tech platforms. We’d love to hear of your plans and actions if you are considering doing the same. Equally as important, this new Artist as Family website houses all of our thoughts, blog posts, projects, videos and much more in the one independent place.

We feel quite grown up to have our own site, but to be completely transparent we also fear it not being as easily and seductively as interactive as the other media sites so please do comment, ask questions, share posts and bring others into this non-commercial autonomous zone. Yes, we agree, how can a website that relies on a coal-powered internet be anything but a contradictory thing? Our response to this may not satisfy some but if we don’t collectively share our narratives using this technology of trying to walk in right-relationship with the flowering, fruiting, sacred earth, then we can’t really begin or maintain our transitions and start the work that our future communities will need to build upon.

To have a little grace, thank you Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram for the numerous years of free story-sharing. It’s not entirely your fault you’re following an aggressive capitalist power agenda. It’s the dominant culture you grew up within, which if you don’t challenge you just end up going along with. Our elders have failed us. They have used fallen patriarchy – the forms of competitiveness and dominance – and put them before the mothering of the world. We all suffer for it, even the power seekers who will be the last to see it. Maybe one day they will. That will be a wonderful time for all. This is the world we seek. Between all three Big Tech platforms we use (well two really as Instagram is Facebook) we have around 25,000 followers. No small feat for unusual storytellers and unconventional culture makers. But before they ‘misinformation’ us, shadow ban or cancel us out entirely we’ve begun to make the leap.

Here, with the help of local love-futurists Lorne and Juanita, we have produced a CommonsTube to host our videos and this general website where we will share our writings, events, featured podcasts, public talks and photographs. We will continue to use the Big Tech platforms until they either completely disappear us from view or enough of you come across and subscribe here. We wish to get to 5000 dedicated subscribers before we decouple altogether from these powerful manipulators. So please sign up, and share with friends.

Previous blog posts were created over at Blogger between 2009 – 2020 and transported here.

Thanks so much for joining us on this new journey.