Blog

A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.

Subscribe

Category: ceremonial species approach

School of Applied Neopeasantry online course & a story-sharing adventure to the UK & Ireland

Jun 10, 2026 | adventure, Artist as Family course, Artist as Family online event, Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, ceremonial species approach, children's learning, community sufficiency, ecological economy making, energy descent, food sovereignty, gift economy, home economies, home educating, lifemaking, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, relocalisation, revillaging, rites of passage, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, subsistence economy, walked-for food | 12 comments

 

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.

Artist as Family

Men’s business – rites of passage and the maturation of men (with Yin Paradies and Patrick Jones)

Apr 28, 2026 | ceremonial species approach, ceremony & ritual, colonialism, ecological economy making, eldership, family, fatherhood, First People, gender-lopsidedness, Indigenous knowledges, kinship, men's business, men's health, modernity, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, relationships, revillaging, rites of passage, transitional communities, wounding | 6 comments

 

We hosted our friend Yin Paradies at Tree Elbow over the weekend and before Yin left he and Patrick recorded a conversation focussed on their encounters within the ecology of men’s business.

Whether experienced in this subject or entirely new to it, we hope you enjoy their yarn on rites of passage, sacred economics, personal accountability, ‘fallen patriarchy,’ and reclaiming indigenous and peasant masculinities.

Listen (1hr, 6mins)

 

In their conversation Yin and Patrick refer to a previous dialogue Patrick had with Yin and his partner Victoria: Bridging, on the way back to indigeneity, and Patrick mentions drafting an annual ceremonial calendar as the next stage of our community’s revillaging.

Thanks for reading and listening! As always Dear Subscriber, we enjoy your feedback, comments and questions.

Subsistence food, people care and reclaiming mother goddess culture making (Patrick on 3CR)

Dec 9, 2025 | agriculture, appropriate technology, belonging economies, ceremonial species approach, colonialism, commons, community, community sufficiency, earth stewardship, food culture, gender-lopsidedness, mother goddess, neopeasant culture making, Pandora, permaculture, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, revillaging, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture | 6 comments

 

Last week Patrick spoke with Ann Stanley from Food Connect on 3CR radio on a range of topics, from big picture to small. We hope you enjoy their conversation. (25 mins)

How does mother goddess cosmology live through your household? How are you restoring the abundance of Pandora?

Q&A (on collapse, gifts, gender, ritual, neoliberalism, fire, revillaging, death and more)

Aug 11, 2025 | Artist as Family online event, belonging economies, bush school, capitalism, ceremonial species approach, children, Collective preparedness, colonisation, community sufficiency, conflict, corporatism, degrowth, Djaara mother country, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological economy making, edible weeds, eldership, energy descent, family, farming, fatherhood, fear, fermenting, film, fire, flow of gifts, food, food culture, food sovereignty, foraging, fossil fuels, gift economy, Grief, Happen Films, health, herbs, home economies, human rights, Hypertechnocivility, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, love, media, medicinal plants, mushrooms, neoliberalism, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, reculturing, relationships, relocalisation, revillaging, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, transitional communities, walked-for food, wisdom, wood energy | 12 comments

 

On the weekend we held two online Q&A sessions, each for an hour and a half. Here we share an edited version of that three hours.

We hope you enjoy this offering as much as we did co-creating it. A big hearty thank you to all who participated, and especially to those who asked such timely, goodly questions.

Listen to the audio version (1:19mins),

 

or watch the video.

A reminder we will be travelling with The New Peasants to Stanley, Merimbula, Canberra and Sydney in Gadigal Country, where Gadigal born elder and dear friend, Uncle Charles Davison, will be welcoming us all at the Dendy Cinema in Newtown.

Come ask us anything!

Jul 11, 2025 | animals in subsistence permaculture, Artist as Family online event, belonging economies, ceremonial species approach, children's learning, Collective preparedness, colonisation, commons, community, creative commons, culture, earth stewardship, energy descent, farming, Fire circle, First People, food medicine, food sovereignty, health, home economies, home educating, interspecies relating, lifemaking, neopeasant education, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, rites of passage, sacred country, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, transitional communities, village rebuilding, walked-for food | 12 comments

 
 
MAKE YOURSELF A CUPPA and come and have a chat with us. Over the years we have received messages from people in many countries asking us about various parts of our life and practice, and we have not always had the time to reply to everyone. So, we thought we’d offer a chance for people to come meet us virtually, ask us questions and participate in a generative discussion centred upon what we do and why.

We are making available two specific event times to try to suit as many timezones as possible; to come say g’day, ask questions, listen to other people‘s goodly questions, listen to our responses and clarifications, and feel the magic of connection that can often unfold by such a gathering of common interest.

Two online events in early August:
AEST: Saturday 9 August 7pm – 8.30pm and Sunday 10 August 9am – 10.30am

Topics we are often asked about involve home-education, subsistence economies, roles in the household, how did we begin, making decisions, ceremony and ritual, feeling demoralised, health fundamentals outside the industrial medical complex, involving children in labour, meaning and learning, dispute resolution, creativity in the home, and a plethora of other topics. We are very happy to answer your questions from very small details to the bigger picture stuff. We are also happy for you to come along and listen, and not necessarily feel the need to ask anything.

Please send us an email to register and receive the link to be part of the live Q&A sessions. Please put in the subject line which date you’d like to attend. Alternatively, feel free to write your question as a comment on this post, and we’ll take it to the live sessions. These sessions will be recorded and we will make an edited version available online.

We are looking forward to meeting you.

Warmly,
Magpie and Blue Wren