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.
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.
We hosted the first of our four weekly online sessions, on Thursday. Thank you to all those who joined the call, asked goodly questions and brought along your warming presence.
Please find a clearing and enjoy our latest offering, A ceremonial approach.
Here is the audio only version (1hr presentation + 30mins question time),
and here is the video.
We have three more sessions in July, so if you haven’t yet booked a spot here are the links.
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.
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.
