In this unscripted, barefoot generation of thought through Mother Country, Patrick returns to the Pandora myth, which is necessarily entangled with the twinning myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and he connects these major western origin stories to the present culturing, making and remaking possibilities of Mother Country.
Patrick offers an embodiment experiment into what he’s calling the reclamation movement, or the returning movement. This spirit of consciousness willing to draw on origins and ancestors is in direct contrast to the groundless, innovation-anxious, becoming-thrust of hypertechnocivility, which Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, and Paul Kingsnorth are all critically and eloquently examining right now, among others such as Artist as Family.
Krishnamurti speaks to the “utterly religious” experience being characterised by a lack of fear in his 1972 work, The Impossible Question. This wisdom is unspoken in this reperforming of the feminine sacred by Patrick, but it underpins this experiment.
We hope you enjoy, Arriving at the Church of Mother Country.
Here is the audio-only version:
And here it is with vision (and cameos by Patch, Poppy, Drizzle and Eric – our goodly sheep):
In our latest video we give an insight into the philosophy and structure of our bush school, Forest & Free, which we established several years ago. This is a ‘school’ built upon gifts, with few organisational costs, little administration, and a whole bunch of community trust where the principal teacher is Mother Country.
For those turning away from the polarity trap of AI schooling and the neoliberal-transhuman programmes attached to it, or you’d like to start your own community-based learning group, you may find some useful things here.
Here’s the audio-only version,
and here’s the version with added visuals.
As always, your comments are not just welcome but appreciated. We’d love to hear your thinkings and doings as you push further away from the global culture of hypertechnocivility and lean deeper into your local culture of magic making.
This week Patrick is guest on Tyson Yunkaporta’s podcast The Other Others, which went live yesterday.
In Tyson’s words this is an “[i]ntimate yarn between two friends from two different families, cultures and online communities who ended up in… let’s say incompatible algorithms, during Covid lockdowns, resulting in horrendously oppositional worldviews. Nothing we can’t sort out with a good yarn. Because a yarn is almost like a ‘conversation’ but without the bullshit. Nobody is ‘just asking questions’ in a yarn, because you talk from your relation, not your position. The end result is not a resolution, compromise or any of that crap. It’s… nah I’ll let you listen through and find out for yourself.”
In Patrick’s words: “Our yarn was a frustrating misfiring of truths and beliefs with love, brotherhood and cheekiness all wrapped up into one long moment of trust rekindling.”
We’re grateful for Tyson reaching out with curiosity. It was great to reconnect our families. There’s so much more Patrick would liked to have raised, such as, how we can speak about Russian disinfo without speaking American disinfo and bringing into the mix the Industrial Censorship Complex that’s sprung from various US colonialisms – media, military, medicine, etc. We are relieved, however, that Tyson sees the overprescription of pharmaceutical products as a real thing and that medical fascism is on the rise, although that topic was cut off with the practicalities of him having to leave for school pickup.
So here’s the yarn, unedited and as raw as it was co-created.
In audio:
And from YouTube (we’re working on fixing CommonsTube):
Your comments and curiosities are always welcome, Dear Reader. Thanks for taking the time to engage with this post.
In this video we take you on a tour of the top 10 medicines that keep us outside the industrial medical complex. If you’ve never considered the following as medicines, we invite you open to this next half hour as we reveal our story of health and well-being, and why our family hasn’t required a medical centre or a doctor for many years.
Here’s the audio only,
and here’s the video version:
The key medicines we cover in this video are:
1. Ritual, ceremony & love
2. Barefeet, earthing & sunlight
3. Cold water immersion
4. Walked-for wild foods
5. Sleeping, nose-breathing & circadian rhythm
6. Fasting & listening to country
7. Home-grown food & kinship with soil
8. Fermented foods & honouring death & decay
9. Sauna to cook out winter toxins
10. Meaning making as creatures of place
As always your comments and additions are heartily welcomed.
Sending love, connection and good health to all who come here with an open heart,
In this latest video, Patrick examines the role of heterodox thinking both broadly and within more marginal cultural milieus. He is curious whether the potent religious myth of the turned over money tables has currency in this moment and whether permaculture in Australia is falling into wrong story by adopting neoliberal guerrilla tactics of censorship and divisive behavioural strategies that include the creation of contagion/scapegoat classes in order to stifle dissent or debate. What society only recently called a difference of opinion is now being labelled as misinformation. Does this matter? Who is watching? Does anyone care if the heterodoxy is erased?
Here’s the low-fi audio for those with low bandwidth to listen:
And here’s the YouTube video:
As Patrick mentioned your heartfelt feedback – critical, camaraderie or otherwise – is most welcome.
Patrick headed into the forest this week to record some thoughts about what is happening to the intention and meaning of the diversity and inclusivity movement.
Here’s the (12 minute) audio,
and here’s the (12 minute) video.
As always your comments are appreciated and most welcome.
We had the pleasure of hosting Uncle Charles Davison, Jen Ridley and their youngest children, Minya and Yindi at the School of Applied Neopeasantry last week. Patrick, Jen and Charles made some room for a kitchen table chat for our podcast.
Jen and Charles’ inner strength and wisdom to respond to ongoing colonialisms within the sovereignty of family and community bonds while keeping a close eye on the continual threats and incarcerating mechanisms of white institutions and other colonial spaces that continue to contrive to enclose, limit and construct minds of scarcity and fear – is empowering to behold.
We hope you enjoy this conversation and you appreciate that Jen and Charles’ voices are not widely heard Indigenous perspectives within the highly conformed publishing environment of neoliberal media. We elevate them here in a spirit of a truer diversity and call for your deep listening.
In this podcast, recorded a month ago on her birthday, Meg reflects on the intimate, the big picture, and everything that stitches them together. We hope you enjoy this hour with Meg Ulman, chief executive witch at the School of Applied Neopeasantry.
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.
Forest & Free is a place of fun, adventure, challenge, and a place of risk for 8-12 year olds in Djaara Mother Country. The kind of activities the kids will experience are fire making and cooking, bush walking and foraging, fishing and wild swimming, safe knife use and simple tool making, regenerative farming and animal husbandry, deep listening and storytelling, tree climbing and shelter building, embodying ancestral lifeways and learning ecological knowledges and awareness, listening to one another and listening to Country.
There are few places left where kids can use knives, climb trees, navigate forests full of old mine shafts, light fires and generally get scratched up and stung by being participants of life. It is in this spirit that we invite children to attend Forest & Free and for them to experience a healthy interrelationship between safety and risk.
In allowing children to attend Forest & Free, parents agree to sharing the risk with us and with their children. The risk is therefore spread three-ways – we as the facilitators, the parents, and the children – and is distributed this way to build personal responsibility and to avoid blaming, shaming and the possibility of closing down this community resource.
Life happens, and we don’t believe this is a good enough reason to submit to the cult of safetyism, which is a mental virus that has bloomed from institutions of the most industrialised countries.
We are not about setting challenges that are too great for the children, and we don’t encourage an overtly competitive or risk-taking culture, rather we encourage children to meet new challenges and learn from others around them, and the forest.
Forest & Free is deep listening, embodying resilience, meeting challenges, learning skills and having fun. The broader culture, up until recently, used to see breaking a bone, receiving stitches, getting lost, being burnt by fire, etc as a rite of passage for young people – necessary for the development of children at this age.
While we don’t wish any of these things on any child, and we explain each skill, challenge, game or wild food in terms of the risks and benefits involved, adversity is the underlying, ever present flip side of enabling such learning and therefore such growth.
As adults we understand that some of our greatest learnings come through discomfort, and it’s how we respond to these situations that really matters in building resilience and bouncebackability.
In 2023 we are running 8 full-day paid events ($20 per child for the day, 10am – 4pm). These dates are either in school holidays or land on public holidays and will be open to not-schooled and schooled kids.
We also run a weekly full-day program for not-schooled kids every Monday from 10am – 4pm. These sessions are based on a gift exchange. If you have surplus homegrown or home-made food, hand-me-down clothes etc, they are gifts we value. When there is abundance let it flow. When there’s not we understand.
Children are required to come with water bottle, healthy lunch and snacks, a sun hat, clothing appropriate to the weather, a pocket knife, and a sense of adventure.
We are looking forward to an exciting year of forest play, learning, exploration and celebration of life. We begin each event with a listening circle so as we can all hear where each of us is at. This helps build compassion and bonds the group, while practicing deep listening.
If you are interested to learn more about Forest & Free, or are thinking of starting up a forest group in your own neck of the woods, please get in touch. Similarly if you know of other bush schools in your area or have experience as a participant in another community bush school, please let us know in the comments. We value your stories and your thoughts.
Signing off for now with blackberry scratches on our shins, and bidgee widgee burrs in our feathers,
