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.
If we wind back 150 years or so, pop-up tent settlements were rapidly sprouting around the country. Mining licenses were granted, pick axes took to rock, hopes for a better future flared along quartz seams, land was savaged, duckboards tracked through drenched camp lanes.
Today another sort of rush is taking place, only this time things have flipped. Miners are no longer the poor and land dispossessed of Europe wanting to establish a better life, rather they are already affluent wanting to take more resources than they need in a way that could poison the land, water and air and inhibit life for future generations. Creating jobs is no justification for causing damage. The pop-up tent settlement at Bentley in northern NSW does not house miners, but rather protectors, demonstrating how to mass organise against such ecological intransigence.
Metgasco, the mining company wishing to exploit subterranean gas reserves by a method called tight sands fracking, may have a miner’s license acquired through an arcane legal system that favours damage, but they certainly don’t have a social license granted by the people. For this stance, this ‘outbreak of democracy’ (for the people, by the people) we’ve been told we may incur the full wrath of the state’s riot police. But we will not be bullied by state-sanctioned violence, and despite our tiredness and occasional flare-ups with one another, we are united in our commitment to protect the land from narrow self-interest and greed.
Artist as Family have never sat up so many nights on vigil defending country, never observed so many shooting stars, never witnessed so many magical dawns.
We have never seen so many cultures comes together for a common cause,
never witnessed such making that attempts to remodel and re-sense the ancient and sustainable practices of Indigenous Australians.
We have never shared so many stories and personal frailties,
and rarely have we felt the power of community to work towards significant change; to enact outbreaks of vital democracy.
We are so privileged to be at the Bentley Blockade,
to learn important skills to take back to our own community. To witness, contribute and be part of the love.
