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.
We kicked off the ceremonial year with 60 odd (by every metric) kinfolk for our annual ceremony to honour the divine dark of the sacred feminine, for winter solstice.
To celebrate this moment, and our community’s deepening of ceremonial approaches, we publish for the first time, The sun wise ceremony calendar, specific to our mob.
We gathered with candles, seed breads, pickles, chestnut and kidney bean stew, rabbit cassoulet, quince tart, medlar pie, feijoa cheese cake, elders and kids.
We paused and listened at this time of the deep dark.
We paused and listened to Mother Country and Father Fire.
Paused and listened to old sonnets,
and newly hatched raps.
Paused and listened to soulful old songs,
and vitalising ones, sung for such a hearth.
Paused and listened to stories meticulously crafted or spoken off the cuff,
and the FireChoir brothers sang Mother of Mountain. We offer it here as a little insight into the ceremonial feast that was this year’s winter solstice gathering.
Slowly one after another we departed from the fire-lit clearing, and walked back through the dark forest to begin our patient sun wise journey towards the summer solstice.
Thank you Brett Ellenport and Leonie Van Eyk for such wonderful images.
Wherever you are we wish you a merry solstice, and a goodly pause.
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NB. If you are still wanting to attend all or any of the four online sessions we’re hosting in July, there are still some spaces available but you may want to book now.
Patrick was in his twenties when he first saw the original works of William Blake in London. He spent a day in the Tate back then in a magical trance, admiring the hugeness of Blake in his small, modest works, mostly book-sized. Blake’s cosmology is infused in Artist as Family‘s, which is in turn infused in Dante’s. Radiance matters. Facing our fears is the path of radiance.
We are energised to be heading to the UK and Ireland in August to connect not just with blood and earth ancestors (especially in Yorkshire, Scotland and County Clare) but cultural ancestors like William and Mary Blake. We are currently organising screenings of The New Peasants with lovely folk throughout Albion and Bridget’s Isles, and mapping out, not so much the route in which we’ll hitchhike, but the main stops without any idea of how we will get there. This is the chance aspect we trust when we travel; stepping into the unknown, stepping up to challenges, facing our fears and being present to what unfolds.
Cricket in the Himalayas. Cricket in Campbells Creek. Hallway cricket. Cricket in London.
Woody is excited to be in London when Middlesex and Yorkshire play at Lords. A pilgrimage of his own, he is looking forward to meeting the gods of his beloved sport, and connect with his sporting ancestors. Cricket is a divine spark that motivates him.
That Meg was conceived in a caravan in Wales, her path was set early as a wayfarer. Travelling is as natural a state for her as radical homemaking. Wayfarer in a neopeasant sense means forager, and when we travel all three of us practice permaculture on the road.
So, our tickets are booked, thanks to the generosity of a dear friend who has loaned us the cash. We are busily saving our coins, making feral jerky, and working out how much dried fruit, nuts and other preserved foods we will be able to fit in our packs. We are delighted our online course sessions are filling up, and the topics resonate. A huge Thank You to all those who have booked, and to those who were able to make a monetary contribution. There are still places available on each session.
A ceremonial approach – guiding men’s, women’s and grief circles, vigils and other community ceremonies (July 2)
Ecological participation – guiding community forest education and wild play groups for children (July 9)
Community sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies (July 16)
Joyful resistance – online house and garden tour (the nuts and bolts of our systems) (July 23)
We are getting ready for our annual winter solstice celebration, where we will gather with community around a fire, share story and food, pause, and behold the significance of the dark. Wherever you are in the world, may your solstice be grand.
A little news from the hearth of Tree Elbow where this morning we ate the last apple from the garden and cooked up the last of our tomatoes.
This week Meg recorded Patrick in the produce garden speaking about the valuable materials we gather at this time of year to tend the wintering soils.
Woody has started his own YouTube channel where he shows, teaches and inspires. He is currently editing a how-to video on converting medlars into fruit leather. This one on restoring an axe he found at the tip is one of our favourites so far:
Recently, we hosted a visit from Faith Mutheu who lives and works at the base of Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Faith is director of the Upendo Children’s Home, has recently studied permaculture and is looking to establish food gardens and humanure compost systems at the orphanage. Over tea we talked about humanure, grey-water systems, rocket stoves, chickens, bees and rites of passage.
We have been teaching on a number of online and in-person courses, and this weekend we are hosting our final house and garden tour until the springtime. What a beautiful and bountiful season! Prepping winter beds, saving seeds, filling our wood stores and the cellar so we can move a little slower over the colder months when the garden goes quiet, taking a break, like the cormorants on our local lake.
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.
