Today we are sharing both audio-only and video versions of our recent online session, Ecological participation (guiding child-led learning in a forest). Once again the format is a one hour presentation by Magpie and Blue Wren (with cameos by Woody and Lilly Pilly), followed by 30 minutes of goodly question time.
Some readers may be offended by the graphic nature this post. Discretion is required.
This week the ‘home theatre’ took on new meaning in the School of Applied Neopeasantry’s outdoor kitchen.
It became a site of needlework poetics and self-doctoring after Patrick took a blow from a cricket ball, bowled by Woody.
What a grand opportunity for this grubby neopeasant to practice the craft of self-suturing, and for us to share the story.
Earlier, at the ground where the sport took place, Woody and friend Fab scattered to find plantain (rib wort) as blood spewed forth onto the pitch. This useful, sometimes scruffy common medicine is found in almost all places where wounds commonly take place.
Years before, playing soccer, Zephyr had run to find his old man the same herb after Patrick sustained a head injury that required a number of stitches. Both times, then and now, Patrick masticated the coagulating, antimicrobial leaves in his mouth,
and quelled the blood of the head wound by placing the green mush onto the cut. A medical doctor friend, whom he played soccer with 12 years ago, stitched Patrick on the side of the field, and remarked how well the plantain had stopped the flow of blood. This time, after dabbling with self-suturing a little since the soccer head collision, Patrick felt ready for the next stage of creating the home emergency ward.
Sooted stretched sheep skins gave wall to the surgery, and blood-stained hands and dirt under the fingernails spoke of no violence of purity, often claimed by those who say they want to keep us safe. A sewing needle was fetched and so too the workshop’s old diamond stone to sharpen it by.
Then some modicum of cleanliness followed with the sharpened patchwork needle being dropped in a small dish of Brother Eucalyptus oil.
And the thread on hand, a piece of dental floss, was threaded through the needle and lowered into the oil as well.
So far we had all that we needed for the surgery. A kettle of boiling mountain rain water was poured into a bowl, then some previously boiled, now cooled water added, and then a splash of the cleaning oil.
This made a wash solution for inside the wound and around it.
Courage was mustered by this doctor of poetics, though the natural shock at the cut after the ball struck, was anaesthetic enough not to warrant worry for the procedure. Breath was breathed. Trust was trusted. A stable hand placed the needle. Some more youthful eyes would have been good, but not on offer, so in it went.
Relief! The first stitch holes punctured as though a through line in the series, Collapse of the cult of safetyism.
After puncturing the skin in two places in the middle of the wound, and pulling the threaded needle through, Patrick tied a double knot.
He cut off the remains of the dental floss thread and did the same for another two stitches. “This is fun!” He exclaimed to Meg. “The home theatre of deep adaptation.”
Patrick laboured gently just as he had done countless times sewing up our torn or worn clothes over the years. He was mightily chuffed with himself by the end of the third stitch. Self doctoring (and dentistry) in a time of collapse is more exhilarating than you would think. It’s empowering.
After the stitching was complete, he smeared our garden bee’s honey across the wound, as an external antiseptic and wound healing salve.
The whole procedure took around twenty minutes, and a few hours later (after a deep sleep) the bruising appeared.
48 hours later, after two days of deep rest and goodly sleep – the best medicine life has on offer (which hospitals disallow) – including nine hours of listening to the mass catalogue of woundings and killings in a telling of The Iliad, Patrick’s wound looked like this.
A cricket ball weighs 156 grams and Woody bowls at around 100 km/hr. So effectively this cricket ball is a punch in the face at high velocity. It is the order of things when a son, fairly, beats his dad. Another 48 hours on, the wound looked like this.
The following day was Saturday, and Patrick captained the senior cricket team, scored 60 runs alongside Zeph’s 57 and Woody took a wicket to each contribute to a mighty win. Initially Patrick batted in a helmet (a first for him), but took it off because he couldn’t quite see the ball. On Sunday, day six, he took the stitches out,
which was actually the most difficult bit, and where much of the learning took place.
The dental floss had began to fall apart, and we didn’t want any of it to be left inside in case it caused an infection. Dosing up on zinc, vitamin C, sugar-free food, plantain salve, mineral water pumped from down in the forest, and significant rest assisted Patrick’s immune system, so he could more quickly recover, fight off infection, and get back to the cricket. However, on day six, he was concerned that the poor integrity of the thread could send all the good doctoring backwards.
After the removal was complete and the wound site cleaned, it looked like this.
Then, on day seven of Patrick’s healing, Zeph called us from work. A large pane of glass had fallen and shattered across his arm, cutting it in several places. The nearby Maldon clinic doctor refused to even look under the bandage and told him to go to Bendigo Hospital emergency ward.
Patrick collected him in our friend Bei’s car, spoke with Zeph about potentially home suturing, attempted to get hold of a suture kit from some medical friends, talked about the possibility of laceration to a tendon or a nerve, and then decided it best to head to Bendigo. They arrived at 4pm, got triaged (that ugly word), had the cuts looked at, and then took a seat in that hot, stuffy place.
While waiting Patrick was thinking about our friend who lost a finger in this same emergency ward, due to having to wait seven hours to be looked at. When he was finally seen, the doctor said, oops, we needed to have seen you hours ago to have saved your finger. At the three and a half hour mark Patrick asked Administration Clerk 1 politely whether he could take home a suture kit and do the job himself.
The nurse looked confused and said, “No… I don’t think so, I’d have to ask.”
Patrick responded with a smile, in his wife-beater singlet: “I am a doctor you know.”
“Are you?” she said unsurely.
“Yes, a doctor of literature,” he replied smiling. “I stitched up my own face last Monday.”
She glanced at the wound above his eye.
“Let me look in the system… Oh, your son is next in line, shouldn’t be long now.”
“Thanks nurse, appreciate it.”
They were having fun. Or, at least Patrick was. Then, miraculously, Zeph’s name was called and we were ushered into a fairly dirty little clinic by a lovely Sri Lankan doctor. Patrick asked if he could watch the procedure because, as he said, he loves to learn. The doctor was obliging. Zeph was mightily relieved that at 8pm (the incident having taken place around 1pm) someone was finally going to take a look at his arm and assess whether there was tendon or nerve damage.
By comparison, in the home emergency ward last week Patrick stitched himself up within an hour of his accident. Because of his old man’s keen student-like attention and questioning, the doctor was very accommodating and taught as though giving a workshop. Patrick repaid the favour by schooling her on toxic adjuvants in vaccines and the over-prescribing of them, after she offered Zeph a tetanus shot. Naturally, due to her education in western medicine, adjuvants (the largely untold shadow side of vaccinology) were things she had never heard of. She was refreshingly open to learning. Her first job was to ascertain whether there was glass in the wound and whether a tendon or nerve had been damaged. She washed the wound under a bright light.
She used a syringe of salty water to irrigate out any broken pieces, and then showed her impromptu student how to open the wound and look down into it after flushing away the blood, to search for any white regions. White, Patrick discovered, means nerve or tendon. After the clean out, the lacerations looked quite trivial. It pays to thoroughly investigate the situation first, thought Patrick. “Observe first. That’s what I should have done when I first picked up Zeph,” he later reflected to Meg.
Patrick noted the way the doctor cut away the dead skin, and how she applied the nylon thread and the fishhook needle to suture Zeph’s wounds. As a fellow sewer, Patrick was impressed.
While a makeshift emergency ward suited Patrick’s purposes to self-suture last week, it’s a little different doctoring someone else without the right gear or missing knowledge. However, after last night’s free tutorial, it’s actually all pretty straight forward. Suturing skin is really low-skilled labour, and we have no idea why nurses are not trained to do this work, especially when small regional hospitals and clinics are now refusing to do it. This morning we heard from our medical friends saying they have saved for us some unused suture kits whose expiry date has passed, and instead of burning them as medical waste, and contributing to the great waste pollution stream of the industrial medical complex, they’re going to give them to us.
“I could have done this myself,” said Patrick to Zeph on the late, long drive home last night, “but I’m glad for the extra schooling.” It certainly has been a week of gold in terms of learning for a future with an ever greater reduction of services in regional Australia.
What are your self-doctoring lessons and stories? We’d love to hear how you are responding to the decline of affluence and the real, everyday need to skill up at home to take the pressure off a broken health system, made even more bankrupt by the ridiculous and excessive Covid response.
Onwards and upwards! Thanks for reading all the way and stomaching some of the more gory images.
Meg speaks with artist and friend Ruth O’Leary about her journey of mothering three boys, home educating them with her partner Tyson, and homesteading together as a family. Ruth weaves a rich story of courage-finding, as she flings aside career-centric industrial liberalism and reclaims something older, more primal and connected.
Listen to the audio here (55 mins),
or watch here.
You can head here to find out more about Ruth’s art, and for more on women’s business, you may like Patrick’s conversation with permaculturist-midwife, Eleanor Young, Recovering birth from the industrial biomedical complex. Eleanor recently published this paper on women’s experiences of free-birthing.
Unexpectedly, Patrick’s mum became critically ill while we were India. We have been bedside with her for a week since our return, gathering with family. Her recovery is slow but progressing.
There has been so much love expressed within the family, with cousins, aunties, uncles, grandchildren, parents all reconnecting, and as the hospital is full of Nepali and Indian nurses so we haven’t experienced reverse culture shock. The Manali wool in ICU has also been our long thread back to India.
In brighter news – news about a world that we know is possible – our friends at Happen Films published this short portrait of Woody yesterday.
Our favourite line in the film is, “I don’t decide what to learn, I just discover things.” Good onya, Woody!
In further helping create a world that we know is possible, where beautiful things are discovered, we’re teaching on two upcoming permaculture courses. This in-person course, and this online one. Come join us!
Do you stand against safetyism, paternalism and nanny statism, which render people immobile and dependent on institutions and industries that are manipulative and controlling?
Do you stand against the NATO/Azov nazi/US invoked genocide of Ukrainian youth by a reactive and bullish Russia?
Do you stand against cultural or political groups who silence and smear others based on their beliefs and values?
Do you stand against large-scale industries including factory farms, agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals and sweat shops that mistreat humans, animals and complex biota?
Do you stand against a King (and others like him dripping in privilege) arrogantly calling for an end to ‘convenience’?
Do you stand with the people of villages, towns, cities and suburbs who in their own power and capacity claim for themselves an end to industrial-scale convenience and consumption?
Do you stand with the flowering, fruiting and singing of Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia and everything else that is sacred and not industrially conformed?
Do you stand with life that enables more delicious life to cross over into necessary death and decay, and back into more abundance?
Do you stand for a future society that doesn’t help raise sociopaths or psychopaths into positions of power and influence?
Do you stand with eldership, mentorship and rites of passage, which mark the accruing of wisdoms, and the witnessing of all in the village, regardless of their stage in life?
Do you stand for the flow of gifts across all species and within all species?
Do you stand for distributed wealth, access to land for all, and subsistence economies that are earth-honouring?
Do you stand with the rivers and creeks – the veins of the world that take life force to the largest biomes – the oceans?
Do you stand with mountains, caves, hills and rocks, and any undulation within the terrain of any Mother Country that enables the magic of surprise, and the shadow world from where wisdom springs?
Do you stand with the seeds that are our heritages, which have made our cultures of belonging, and will do so again?
Do you stand with the smallest biomes, bodily biomes and microbial communities, as extensions of Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia?
Do you stand with Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia, honour them in the way in which you live, and defend them from machine mind in whatever capacity you have to do so?
Do you stand with both individual freedoms and communitarian care, without one eroding the other?
Do you recognise that true consent is not possible when metered out by top-down authority?
Do you stand with pollinators, in all forms, recognising the monumental gifts they bring to lifemaking?
Do you stand with the fungal webs that rule the worlds of the world, including the unreal worlds of hubristic human Empires that will always collapse and turn back into the mycelial realm?
Do you stand with humus and humility, and recognise they have derived from the same root word?
Do you stand with your herbal and medicinal plant commons, the remnant traces of your indigenous liberty and soul, which continue to bring gifts to your health and to your meaning making?
Do you stand with ecological killing in order to take life that makes more life possible, outside of a ‘man-made mass death’ cosmology, where at arm’s length civilisational violence occurs on your behalf as an industrial-food-dependent vegan, vegetarian or omnivore?
Do you stand with empowering young people to obtain skills for the future, both pragmatic and sacred (such as deep listening and beholding, foraging, gardening, forestry and hunting)?
Do you stand with village rebuilding and grass roots, cultural, ecological and microbial diversity?
Here are the Forest & Free children after harvesting 1.5kg of narrow leaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata) seed heads for psyllium. This plantain is a common, ancestral (Eurasia) and abundant plant that brings healing food-medicine to our lives. The kids collected this amount in just twenty minutes. Each week they learn about a new food or medicine that is not under lock and key, so they can build the skills, knowledges and daily rituals to augment their own pathways to freedom, responsibility and wisdom. We run Forest & Free within a gift economy.
So, does binary thinking have a place? In the absence of binaries how do we form our values? Is it possible to live without binaries?
We’d love to hear from you. When is binary thinking problematic? When is it useful? Would you answer yes to any the above questions? All? We hope this post generates some goodly discussion, and serves the contemporary dialectic for what mythos, what world story, we want to serve.
Forest & Free is a place of fun, adventure, challenge, and a place of risk for 8-12 year olds in Djaara Mother Country. The kind of activities the kids will experience are fire making and cooking, bush walking and foraging, fishing and wild swimming, safe knife use and simple tool making, regenerative farming and animal husbandry, deep listening and storytelling, tree climbing and shelter building, embodying ancestral lifeways and learning ecological knowledges and awareness, listening to one another and listening to Country.
There are few places left where kids can use knives, climb trees, navigate forests full of old mine shafts, light fires and generally get scratched up and stung by being participants of life. It is in this spirit that we invite children to attend Forest & Free and for them to experience a healthy interrelationship between safety and risk.
In allowing children to attend Forest & Free, parents agree to sharing the risk with us and with their children. The risk is therefore spread three-ways – we as the facilitators, the parents, and the children – and is distributed this way to build personal responsibility and to avoid blaming, shaming and the possibility of closing down this community resource.
Life happens, and we don’t believe this is a good enough reason to submit to the cult of safetyism, which is a mental virus that has bloomed from institutions of the most industrialised countries.
We are not about setting challenges that are too great for the children, and we don’t encourage an overtly competitive or risk-taking culture, rather we encourage children to meet new challenges and learn from others around them, and the forest.
Forest & Free is deep listening, embodying resilience, meeting challenges, learning skills and having fun. The broader culture, up until recently, used to see breaking a bone, receiving stitches, getting lost, being burnt by fire, etc as a rite of passage for young people – necessary for the development of children at this age.
While we don’t wish any of these things on any child, and we explain each skill, challenge, game or wild food in terms of the risks and benefits involved, adversity is the underlying, ever present flip side of enabling such learning and therefore such growth.
As adults we understand that some of our greatest learnings come through discomfort, and it’s how we respond to these situations that really matters in building resilience and bouncebackability.
In 2023 we are running 8 full-day paid events ($20 per child for the day, 10am – 4pm). These dates are either in school holidays or land on public holidays and will be open to not-schooled and schooled kids.
We also run a weekly full-day program for not-schooled kids every Monday from 10am – 4pm. These sessions are based on a gift exchange. If you have surplus homegrown or home-made food, hand-me-down clothes etc, they are gifts we value. When there is abundance let it flow. When there’s not we understand.
Children are required to come with water bottle, healthy lunch and snacks, a sun hat, clothing appropriate to the weather, a pocket knife, and a sense of adventure.
We are looking forward to an exciting year of forest play, learning, exploration and celebration of life. We begin each event with a listening circle so as we can all hear where each of us is at. This helps build compassion and bonds the group, while practicing deep listening.
If you are interested to learn more about Forest & Free, or are thinking of starting up a forest group in your own neck of the woods, please get in touch. Similarly if you know of other bush schools in your area or have experience as a participant in another community bush school, please let us know in the comments. We value your stories and your thoughts.
Signing off for now with blackberry scratches on our shins, and bidgee widgee burrs in our feathers,
