It took some bright labours to bump out of Tree Elbow, pack down the house, step away from our community responsibilities, and organise for the care of our animals with fine friends and neighbours. Some labour was the preserving of nourishing food for when we return home, knowing that we won’t always eat as we do at home over the duration of our pilgrimage to old Albion, Alba and Ériu.
Before dawn we checked off the last on our lists and walked with our packs to the town’s only bus stop, a fresh kilometre away. It was minus two degrees celsius.
We went into a weird and fatiguing twenty four hours of high energy industrial travel before we were sung into London town by our Devon friend, Steve. The Irish blessing he voice recorded went like this:
May the sun warm gently on your face, the wind blow from behind. The ground is soft in her embrace, and all you meet be kind.
We were welcomed in by a friend‘s mother, Carole and her husband Ted,
who live not far from Primrose Hill. And when we’d rested, been fed and joyfully connected, Carole spoke ‘go climb it’, so we did and encountered Blake‘s ‘spiritual sun’.
We brought an offering to Albion,
and spread some salt from our Mother Country here. We let the ancestors know why we’ve come,
each of us oaken under our skin.
We wandered summer streets and found little gardens of intrigue,
where voices sing and bodies dance,
as it’s meant to be.
Next day we went back to Primrose Hill, a site of Druid procession, walked by ancestral Tilia entwined with Ulmus in the street,
to the home of Woody’s beloved cricket.
Here a love of a game – ancestral Yorkshire v Middlesex – commingled with unhappy accoutrements of Empire, including Father Time.
Woody gave a match report, which doubled as his encounter with this sacred site.
Still lagged by jet and tired and dreamy, we spent the third day in Brixton town, and gathered at The Remakery. Alice there timely asks, ‘what if we just make everything?’
At The Remakery Joel and Alice and family hosted an intimate screening of The New Peasants, where we met this wild and threading lot.
And we met Alan there, from The Nettle Dress, who spun more nettle as we yarned,
and left that happy place late, and crossed ancestral fox.
On the way to Blake at the Tate, we stopped by a garden of love, and chanced across a fellow admirer of the bard, Fergy, and we yarned and spoke and laughed.
Fergy accompanied us to Tate Britain, though Blake was scarcely there,
So we parted and journeyed to Bunhill Fields, where the old sage is buried,
We sang and sat and spoke to William, praised and offered him salt,
may our brines together mix, and may our songs be always bright.
Hello! For the past several weeks we have been corresponding with kindly folk across the UK and Ireland, organising a route and itinerary for our August month of screenings and visitations in some of our ancestral places.
While in the south of England we’ll be visiting friends in Dorset and Devon, both of whom are part of the Mythopoetics Men’s Lodge that Patrick is also part of.
Some of Patrick and Woody’s ancestry in the UK is in the Midlands and Yorkshire, and we’ll be staying in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, where Sylvia Plath’s gravestone is. We are co-creating a gathering and screening there too – more on that to follow.
While in London, we will get to see Yorkshire v Middlesex at Lords. Woody is super excited for that one-day match. On his Dad’s side of the family, Yorkshire homes many of his old people, and is where the yorker originates, a full pitched ball that aims to get under the batsman’s feet that Woody is getting pretty good at turning on in a game. But more than cricket, Woody will also learn where some of the revolutionary genes comes from. Here is Patrick’s midlands and Yorkshire DNA overlayed by the Luddite Triangle.
Meg’s ancestry hails from Siberia and Poland, and one day we may go on that ancestral pilgrimage too, although that might take a miracle (or a sailing boat) as the most significant oil war in history escalates just as we’re about to depart for this one.
Having spent 15 of the 20 years Artist as Family have been together refusing air travel it feels good to be travelling with intention, just before cheap oil permanently disappears.
A number of years ago Patrick’s father Robert traced (via the records) the family back to around the 12th century, that is to the earliest recorded common folk surnames (that came about for taxation purposes). And then a few years ago Patrick was gifted a DNA kit for his birthday and from this his ancestry was mapped as such:
What follows is a rough map of our August pilgrimage, including both ancestral places and screenings. We are being hosted by goodly folk along the trail and look forward to meeting up with some of our subscribers along the way. Please get in touch if you’d like more details for the various screenings and meetups.
Well, this is certainly a mappy and information dense post! Hopefully it will be useful for you as you either follow our journey or connect with us along the way. We arrive in London on August 1 and leave from Dublin on August 31.
We’d love it if you could let your friends and kin know of our screenings/Q&As in London and Cambridgeshire (more events to be posted soon). Screenings in Hebden Bridge, Findhorn Bay, Boat of Garten, Penicuik, Edinburgh, and hopefully in Ireland in the later part of the month.
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.
Hello dear Readers. A heartfelt Happy New Year to each of you!
This end of year/new year season is often marked with big events. Bushfires, higher road fatalities, work stresses, greater financial pressures, family arguments, and major global events. Over this holiday period, the horror of the Bondi massacre and a brazen US kidnapping – presumably part of a plan to steal Venezuela’s oil and gold, needed to help lubricate the US war machine.
For summer solstice we gathered, celebrated and feasted at Melliodora with friends and kindred spirits, and the FireChoir men performed two of their original songs.
On Christmas day Artist as Family gathered for a simple BBQ and later in the afternoon Woody, Zeph and Patrick went fishing at nearby Cairn Curran,
each catching a large carp,
which Meg transformed into her famous carp mousse (click for recipe).
Patrick and Meg met on New Years Eve in Daylesford twenty years ago, and since then we have been regulars in the town’s NYE parade. Here’s a pic from around 2016. Yep, that’s Woody on the right in the purple dress and green shoes blowing his whistle.
This year none of us really felt the spark of creativity to organise a float, until late in the day an idea crackled in Patrick. He got tinkering in the workshop, and an hour later popped out all zombie-like with heavy sign in hands.
We sent the above image to some friends inviting them to join PJ in his pjs and sleepwalk down the main drag with him. Meg documented the stellar performance that Su Dennett and Dave Holmgren joined.
We are paying close attention to the growing tech feudalism unfolding, which western governments are helping to usher in under the guise of safety. A few weeks back we were locked out of Substack for refusing to comply to demands for facial recognition data on that site, due to the Australian Government’s new and overreaching digital ID laws, supposedly aimed at protecting children. Know any kids on Substack? We don’t either.
We’ve been listening to a brilliant Sydney criminal lawyer raising awareness concerning an Israeli phone hacking company called Cellebrite, whose products are currently being used by numerous Australian institutions. We’ve tuned into a British journo-comedian uncovering the surveillance enhancing deeds of tech company, Oracle, and how that company is significantly infiltrating the UK government. And we’ve been learning about the long-standing collusion of The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State.
But what does the western corporate media really want us to pay attention to? Chinese and Russian infiltration and hacking tech, right? All three links above have helped us understand further what is being prepared for western populations by western corporatism, and we highly recommend them.
On NYE Patrick, Su and Dave were spontaneously joined by Jean-Marc and a blow-in called Rachel. Both have been active in highlighting the genocide of Palestinians over the past two years. An article appeared in the Green Left telling how Rachel was stopped by police on the night she joined our float, and asked to put away her Palestinian flag.
As far as we’re aware, not since c1975 – when cartoonist and national treasure Michael Leunig (with friends) entered ‘Fun in the Forest‘ in the Daylesford NYE parade, where their float featured “real trees on the back of [a] truck and Mr Curly chased [a naked] female around the trees… greeted with hoots of laughter…” – have the police intervened in the free self-expression at this grass roots community event in our town. Many people cheered and clapped our Sleepwalker foot float. Apparently one person complained about the Palestinian flag. That’s democracy for you.
However, not all is solidarity. In our backwards and forwards with Rachel assisting her with her Green Left (GL) article, Patrick also expressed to her the loss of trust many of us felt in the GL’s capitulation to Big Pharma and Big Health during the great pandemic exaggeration years. Most of the GL mob back then refused to see the captured narrative and revolving door health officials, such as the head regulator of the TGA during Covid. Here’s Professor Skerritt revolving his door just 8 months after retirement from the TGA to become an ‘independent director’ of the largest pharmaceuticals lobby group in Australia. Go John!
‘Medicines Australia’… sounds so helpful and righteous, doesn’t it?
Patrick was also wishing to let Rachel know of the loss of human rights that resulted in the Green Left’s naivety. If anyone needs a recap of that pitiful time you can revisit Patrick’s long-form piece, The Left got Covid almost entirely Wrong, and why it matters.
Unity among diverse groups is what’s required now. To form a unifying stance of mistrust against any form of the state-corporate nexus. To trust any large industry that has enthusiastic state backing is a straightforward recipe for serving up more divide and rule colonialism. Globally, large industries and governments pay billions to nudge units (behavioural science companies) to sucker people into believing ‘we are doing this for your safety’. Our prediction for this year is Israel and the US will create a false flag operation to justify a major war with Iran. This will elicit a world war and thus greater crackdowns on free speech will ensue and bring in a general state of info-confusion and possibly even civil war in some western countries. Ever more sophisticated fake news delivered by AI tech will intensify greater justification for governments to erode our rights and mandate digital IDs for everyone. We will see political gulags emerge, further political assassinations, more journalists sacked and muzzled, and a further shadowing of independent websites like our own.
In the face of all this, one lecture series that has been important to us in expanding our understanding of the historical contexts for what is occurring today geopolitically, is the 28 part Secret History series, delivered by Professor Jiang, beginning here.
Professor Jiang’s work is wonderfully informative and provocative, though at times a tad shorthand. Gratefully, however, he says to his students, ‘don’t take my word as truth’, and states he’s ‘presenting theories, which are there to be challenged’ – the mark of a proper teacher. Western universities used to have such engaged teaching, and in part of this lecture series Prof Jiang speaks of his time at Yale University and gives a good summary as to why the western neoliberal academies are in decline in step with the broader empire. We’ve witnessed this too and spoke about it often over the past several years. Funding and research is often dependent on one’s compliance with neoliberal agendas. True scholarship, therefore, is sidelined to the margins. Our response has been to leave the neoliberal academies as potential places of knowledge and wisdom, and to immerse ourselves in more expansive intelligences.
Honey is filling the hives in the garden as we write this post, goats are converting gorse and blackberries into divine subsistence protein, Meg and other women are fasting in the forest and listening in Mother Country, sunflowers are on point of flowering, strawberries are setting a new flush of fruit, and each morning before dawn a young fox returns to our chicken forest to figure out a way in.
Life is rich and beautiful. It offers us an invitation to participate, an invitation to connect with what Professor Jiang calls the ‘divine spark’, and be part of it. There is much suffering around us, and in us. Much evil and hatred and censorship and authoritarianism on the horizon. Our political leaders will once again sell our human rights for bullshit wars and for ‘our safety’ and billionaire greed mongers will continue to enslave the material world to fill the great void in their beings where their souls once resided. The potential for such darkness is in all of us, and can usefully serve as a feedback for when we are not connected to the divine.
In 2026, western hegemony will edge closer to a great unravelling, so we will continue to be in service to the divine spark, access it in both ceremony and in subsistence, while we drink a toast to this precious life and all who are part of its eternal flourishing.
Here’s a recipe for a simple cider we might well toast such life with: Catch nine precious litres of water from the heavens and place in a ten litre brewer, add two cups of honey from the labour of garden bees, and ten sprigs of elderflower growing in the common. Let it brew for a week. Strain the flowers from the brew and let it brew another week. Enjoy this wild fermented, low alcoholic drink while listening to the cricket on the ABC – about the only thing we can trust on the ABC these days is sport. You can also make a non-alcoholic version by using whey as a starter.
So cheers and solidarity, dear friends! Let’s stay connected as hypertechnocivility descends deeper into collapse, and let’s dream together and renew the light out of the lessons from the dark.
We seem to be in a pattern of weekly blog missives. We’re going along with it as there is energy for that. Here, on the southern ridge bone of the Great Connecting Range in Djaara Mother Country, winter has momentarily returned with overnight temperatures plummeting to 1 degree celsius. This chilly weather system has coincided with our water heater springing a leak, the tank of which we drained and which, in turn, has meant we can’t light our wood stove so as not to damage its water jacket chamber. So we have been rugging up and sitting with the gratitude of what this hearth means in our life, when all is well with it.
In other news, Zephyr has stepped back into a creators role for Artist as Family. Zephyr experienced the full horror of modern drone warfare in Ukraine earlier this year, and escaped with his life, while he lost a number of comrades who had also joined the Ukrainian army. First Person View (FPV) attack drones have become an ugly part of modern warfare, meaning that soldiers – people – can be tracked and attacked with flying ordnance by a remote controller. Another cowardly gift from late industrial capitalism. As part of his recovery from the trauma, Zephyr has taken up using a FPV drone for peaceful operations, and gifted us this footage he took of Tree Elbow’s spring garden this week, to help promote our forthcoming house and garden tours. Thanks Zeph!
Zephyr is setting up a small business with his drone, so please get in touch if you’d like to employ his services in central Victoria. And, please get in touch if you’d like to attend one of our full-day house and garden tours (January 18 & April 4), which also includes time in the nearby commons that we co-steward with our neighbours and our goats. Meet Pav, the newest member of the blackberry munching herd.
This week we’ve been listening to Tommy Castles’ music. Tommy composed the exquisite soundtrack for The New Peasants. One of our favourite compositions from the soundtrack is called Bike Scavenger (ft. Carl Dickens). This music enters the film as Patrick fixes the wheel of his bike trailer to ride up to the local tip – our hardware store – to collect materials. The New Peasants will shortly be available to view online, and for peeps in this neck of the woods, Radius Gallery is holding a screening and Q&A on November 23, MC’d by David Holmgren.
In other news, The Pretty Good Cricket Podcast has just dropped Episode three. This week Blue Wren and Black Cockatoo dive into a sodden pitch and welcome in their first guest.
Well, that’s our neopeasant round up for the week. For those of you who have requested a video from us about hosting men’s and women’s circles, stay tuned. We are on to it. We love hearing from you in this quiet cul-de-sac of the web, so let flow in the comments section for a little more connection.
