We hosted our third July online session last Thursday night, Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. Over a hundred people signed up and many asked goodly questions that expanded the consciousness of the subject. We hope you enjoy this next offering.
Here is the audio-only version,
or you can watch it.
We hope you are enjoying these sessions, and that they are adding to your deliberations, plannings and responding to the predicaments of our times.
Our next session is Joyful resistance, an online tour of Tree Elbow, our 18 year old permaculture home. We look forward to explaining all the main hubs, hacks and behaviour changes that have enabled our transition to living well with little money.
Hello Dear Readers, we are excited to offer our first online course and to share with you an invitation we’ve received to travel to the UK in August.
The University of Edinburgh has invited Patrick to examine a doctoral thesis and for Artist as Family to present The New Peasants and host a Q&A for students. While we ordinarily do such gigs via the internet, an opportunity to return to our ancestral places of origin to meet audiences and share story and food will be a joy we haven’t in the past permitted ourselves, due to the environmental and monetary costs. However, we are hearing the call and responding with intention.
Some of our ancestors come from the Luddite Triangle in the mid-north of England as well as from Scotland and Ireland, and Meg was conceived in a caravan in Wales.
While travelling we would like to screen and Q&A The New Peasants at community gatherings in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, and in order to fund such a story-sharing adventure we are offering the following online mini course.
Here are the four sessions on offer, which you can either join without paying or by donation. To register, please click on the links below. You are most welcome to book all four sessions or just the ones that speak to you.
Session 1. A ceremonial approach – guiding men’s, women’s and grief circles, vigils and other community ceremonies. July 2 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they offer their experiences and processes for hosting community gatherings centred on deep listening, soul communing and connecting with the sacred.
Session 2. Ecological participation – guiding community forest education and wild play groups for children. July 9 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick, Meg and Woody as they offer their experiences and processes for stewarding a bush school.
Session 3. Community sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. July 16 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they share all the ways they have unchained themselves from monetary incarceration and co-crafted local gift economies, starting with a few households and growing it to over 80 households over two decades.
Session 4. Joyful resistance – online house and garden tour (the nuts and bolts of our systems). July 23 (3pm – 5pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they walk you through their home and garden, explaining all the main hubs that have enabled their transition.
If you can’t make any of these sessions, not to worry, as they will all be recorded and made available online. And if you can’t make the sessions but you’d like to donate to our August travels, or to our work more generally, you can do so here.
If you are in the UK or Ireland and would like to host a screening/Q&A or another type of speaking event with us in August, please feel free to get in touch.
Over the years people have enjoyed our travel writings, so yes we will be blogging our adventure again this time.
Whether you are fast approaching winter or summer solstice, we wish you warmth, the possibility of connection and we trust you are filing you baskets.
An elder friend of ours commissioned Patrick to build her a new compost toilet. Before it was delivered, Meg records Patrick showing it off. Designed for either sitting or squatting, with a toilet like this you too can close the poop loop.
The humanure workshop Patrick mentions can be found here, which explains what happens after the bucket is full:
We started as fecaphobes and transitioned to fecaphiles. Where are you in your transition?
In this offering, permaculture elder David Holmgren is our guest in discussion with Patrick speaking about this next phase of global energy transition, and thus societal transformation in the local context.
Here’s the audio version (1hr 52mins).
David and Patrick’s hour-long conversation is followed by a compost of goodly questions from community participants who gathered and shared food together for this event. We hope that this long-form drop will aid in your preparations for the coming months.
This event recently took place at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University in Djaara Mother Country.
Huge, hug-filled thanks to Jordan Osmond from Folklore Pictures (formally Happen Films) for both the sound and vision.
We’d love to hear from you about your preparations, priorities and musings at this time.
As many of you already know about us, it’s the everyday local labours of living an earth-honouring economy alongside a wide-ranging understanding of geopolitics that informs our makings, our permapoesis, and our wellbeing.
To acknowledge this next phase of rupture in the unfolding collapse of the global village, we present two offerings for the week. First, by Meg, on some of the food medicine that fuels our poesis, and the second a prose piece by Patrick offering a powerful response to the immorality of western hegemony, ruled by the Epstein class.
In this piece, Meg invites you into our kitchen to share a typical seasonal lunch.
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And, in the following piece, Patrick calls on the possibilities of active peace-making and resistance. (Audio 2:40mins)
A message of Peace and Resistance (from a family in transition)
As moral peoples of the world, let us all stand against the genocidal psychopathy of western leaders. Let us not be divided and distracted by the corporate-billionaire class establishment media and the empire’s state broadcaster puppets. Let’s stand against evil men who start wars and escalate mass suffering with bullshit justifications. This is an opportunity for the west to reconnect with Homer – compassion for ‘the other’ – that built western culture 2700 years ago. Let’s reconnect with an earth-honouring cosmology – the sacred feminine, which human cultures of place have lived within for most of human life. Let’s stand together to rid the world of war mongers, their lobbyists and businesses across the industrial, collapsing global village, not with violence, but by recreating local economies which take back sovereignty of our basic needs, serve our local biomes, and give the Financial Industrial Complex, who profits from mass suffering, nothing. Take away their destructive dollars by boycotting industrial food, medicine and energy productions, earn only a little so as not to be taxed and have your tax dollars support the war machine, and reap the rewards of relocalisation by becoming more connected to our home places, more healthy and more aligned in our souls. The future is radical localism. Defund the bankers that fund the missiles. Let’s work and be together. Create community sufficiency, and start breaking the machines that incarcerate us. We may not be able to bring justice to the aggressors of war and the perpetrators (or bystanders) of rape, but we can choose to give them nothing. We are the majority. Let’s only give our money and time to small local cottage industries, get out of debt, downscale to do it, find others to establish non-monetary exchanges with, relearn the skills our ancestors knew, and live again without conveniences the machine has hooked us up to. Conveniences keep us enslaved to the bankers realm, and therefore enslaved to the war machine. Liberate our hearts and our lives! Let’s no longer be complicit subjects of empire.
As always, we welcome your responses, feedback and shares.
Oh, and we still have some places on our April 4 tour. Come join us!
