We’re home. Well, nearly all of us are home. Woody and Patrick knitted their way back to Djaara Mother Country on a 12 hour train journey,

and were collected by dear friends who also helped us with the expenses of getting back from Kashmir, fast. Meg has stayed in NSW to assist Jan and Robert, Patrick’s mother and father, in their home. It was Patrick’s mum, Nana Jones, who became seriously ill after a medical procedure was botched. The doctors and nurses were incredibly caring, for the most part, and miraculously, despite the anti-sleep, anti-fresh air and anti-food the hospital mandates,

Nana has recovered and is back at home after a month escaping death.

There is nothing like a crisis in a family to bring everyone more closely together.

Patrick and Woody have celebrated the return of Zero, who has come home from staying with friends. His dementia and deafness have accelerated. Unsurprising for a 14 year old dog who has lived a kick-arse life. He spent the first day home searching high and low for his beloved Meg.

There is a special joy in the spring air here that only a close encounter with the death of a parent and the ageing of a dear dog can muster. Our presence to life is magnified at the moment, and it is the trace of our travels that is feeding into this. Adding to this joy, our chooks are back home, after also staying with friends, and we received our first egg on the afternoon of their return. Precious gold.

Before we left we told the bees we’d be gone for the winter, and on our return we announced to them our arrival home. Telling the bees about big events in a household is an ancestral tradition, especially for animist romantics like ourselves.

One of the many joys of being home has been to enter the cellar of our summer and autumn labours (mammals, plants, insects, microbes) and bring out a bottle of garden honey, which has creamed up over the winter. This is our bullion.

Woody and Patrick came home a little earlier to get more food in the ground. They first weeded row number one and planted it out with seed potatoes.

Then top-dressed the bed with the humanure compost from our household’s autumn ablutions, which has been quietly transforming itself into life-giving humus while we were travelling.

See our humanure compost workshop for more on producing this earth-giving force. The next row along in the annual garden area, row number two, has about 20 roundhead cabbages, hidden amongst the weeds, ready to kraut when Meg returns.

Sauerkraut is just one of our food-medicines that keeps us far away from the industrial medical system. Blood oranges in the garden, is another.

While on the subject of health, we travelled across ten countries, eating street food, interacting with other animals, soils and innumerable biomes and waters that our bodies had never encountered before, and yet we took no industrial medicines beforehand, no prior travel jabs, and took out no travel insurance. We got sick from pollution, and rested when we were run down. We steered clear of processed and acidic foods, and ate a tonne of chillies, well at least we adults did. Blackwood has never had a vaccine. Irresponsible or intelligent? You be the judge. From this vantage point, especially after being in the bizarrely self-congratulatory industrial medical system with Nana,

and beholding how that system is a mix of constructive and ruinous processes that often cancel each other out, our pro-active, non-participation in it is good for everyone. We don’t drain precious resources from those who have no other choice but to risk their health in an Australian hospital today. Good food, sleep, air, love, ecology, water, community and meaning are our pillars of health, as we unpack in greater detail in our Life beyond the Industrial Medical Complex video. Broad beans, planted just before we left, are just one more aspect that helps grow these pillars.

As are alliums. Meg’s leek kraut is about the best thing you’ll taste.

As is our roast goat that has been fed on a cornucopia of medicinal herbs, weeds and leaves from the forest we tend, love and learn from. Rubbing garlic kraut into the flesh before roasting is yet more gold from the gift of the sun. Mmmm, garlic kraut.

While we were away, some of you might recall, we had to give away our flerd. Our sheep and goats kept getting out, causing neighbours and friends a fair deal of hassle. After travelling through southeast Asia, China, Nepal and India, we have done some further thinking about farming on commons, and how to improve our herbivory processes. We have learned a lot from subsistence lifeways in many of these countries.

One of our biggest takeaways is the simplest thing: to spend the spring and summer harvesting and drying grass, and storing it for the winter. 10 minutes a day on a morning walk, can cut a wheelbarrow of fodder. Buying bales of feed in the winter is expensive, may hold residual pesticides and doesn’t help with managing local grass and mitigating bushfires in our neighbourhood. So cutting, drying and storing grass, as we saw in Nepal, Himachal Predesh, Ladakh and Kashmir, is for us subsistence-resilience, a term we coined while we were away. Here is the new herd we have just brought in.

There is so much spring growth here at the moment and few animals to convert this life-force into health-giving protein. A dear friend has loaned us money to buy this starter herd so we can continue to manage the local forest, (as Happen Films documented us doing a few years back), and supply our home and local gift economy with meat with no industrial inputs, while offering a bushfire mitigation and dominant weed reduction service to the neighbourhood. We are so grateful for the meat, organs and fat, which are transformed gifts from the leaves, fruits and sunlight (and much more) in the forest.

In Patrick and Woody’s first week home, hitchhiking to Castlemaine to get to a rites of passage event was a joyous father and son moment.

After hitchhiking from our home in southern Australia to Darwin at the beginning of our journey, thumbing our way to Castlemaine was a breeze. Patrick is about to volunteer again with 10 other uncle figures to guide a teen boy and their dads rites of passage. Our whole family is involved in this precious village rebuilding movement, which brings great joy into peoples’ lives, including our own.

Well, that’s about it for an update. We so look forward to all being home together and to start back up the many processes that make possible our living with little reliance on the machine of the Capitalocene.