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.
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.
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.
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.
