How do we transition from neoliberalism to something more beautiful, even as the Empire falls apart and takes so much life with it? Here we share an excerpt from Ryan Dickinson’s interview with Patrick on Ryan’s podcast, Sacred Lab.
You can listen to the audio excerpt here:
In the podcast, Patrick referred to the film The Babushkas of Chernobyl and the book The Wisdom of Insecurity.
Below is our accompanying drawing to this audio. The dotted line (in this series of drawings) represents transition, movement, or connection to both stories, the old one in the future other, or the integration of both to create a third reality in the very present. The dotted line plays with the oppositional, it acts as a permeable membrane between the so-called “real world” (of university medalists designing nuclear warheads, engineering viruses, sterilising food seeds, or calling heterodox thinkers conspiracy theorists while protecting state-corporate interests from scrutiny), and the imagined – the world we’re longing for, seeding into, and knowing the generational succession and resistance required to rebuild the village, while committing fully to the present moment to make that future possible, even in glorious futility and foolishness.
All power to the ones already moving to a more beautiful world our hearts, guts and minds know is possible. Much compassion to those wanting to move but are stuck or caught or entrapped by neoliberalism or something else. Keep wriggling your cuffs!
As always your comments are welcome, they give added spice to this place of story.
Thank you for this. Very helpful! Currently stuck in suburbia but trying to find a way out! Your posts give me hope!
Regards,
Senaj
Thanks Senaj, all solidarity to you. Keep leaning into that “way out”, or way in if you’re going to stay put. You’re probably across this, but in case you’re not, the book RetroSuburbia is gold for transitioning in situ in the suburbs. You’re local library should have this book by David Holmgren, there is also a RetroSuburbia YouTube channel. There is also an online, pay-what-you-feel copy of RetroSuburbia – a textbook for a step-by-step transition to a better more resilient life: online.retrosuburbia.com
I loved this podcast. I was really captured by the idea of following a goat herd through the landscape. I have had this image in my mind for a while of a group of families moving around with a herd of goats like the Romany people. Maybe I will do that one day.
Thanks Kathryn,
Milking, tending, loving and eating goats is a rich present and inevitable future.