Below is our accompanying drawing to this audio. The dotted line (in this series of drawings) represents transition, movement, or connection to both stories, the old one in the future other, or the integration of both to create a third reality in the very present. The dotted line plays with the oppositional, it acts as a permeable membrane between the so-called “real world” (of university medalists designing nuclear warheads, engineering viruses, sterilising food seeds, or calling heterodox thinkers conspiracy theorists while protecting state-corporate interests from scrutiny), and the imagined – the world we’re longing for, seeding into, and knowing the generational succession and resistance required to rebuild the village, while committing fully to the present moment to make that future possible, even in glorious futility and foolishness.
All power to the ones already moving to a more beautiful world our hearts, guts and minds know is possible. Much compassion to those wanting to move but are stuck or caught or entrapped by neoliberalism or something else. Keep wriggling your cuffs!
As always your comments are welcome, they give added spice to this place of story.
Join Patrick as he asks timely questions of Bei Yin and Jashan Singh, two recent guests at our School of Applied Neopeasantry. Bei and Jashan’s stories offer clarity, warmth, honesty and generative responses to the discussion of how we might reclaim the local village.
You can listen to the audio-only version here.
And here is the audio with an image version:
Since our time together, we have begun discussions with Bei and Jashan and local farmers, land holders and community actors to see what can be achieved to enable young farmers from diverse backgrounds to grow food and sell it to local markets. We have been active in this space for a number of years matchmaking landless wanna-be neopeasants with people willing to share their land, and sharing our own story of farmless farming based not on private property ownership but rather on social relations. Our local food co-op feeds about 300 households and we could do with some more local growers who are willing to raise crops to directly supply them or to sell at the local Sunday market.
The majority of the world’s food is grown on small farms ranging between 2 and 70 acres. It is a blatant lie we need to use pesticides. It is a myth farmers need to get big. That’s merely the ideology of bankers, chemical companies, and the coalition of the willing found in the agribusiness and government sectors.
Neopeasants arise, take back control of how you grow and who you grow for!
Please feel free to comment or get in touch if Bei and Jashan’s story has inspired you and you would like to be kept in the loop about future farming possibilities. Additionally, if you have land to share and would like to offer younger farmers opportunities to start farming without going into debt please head to Land Share Central Victoria, contact us here, leave a comment, or start your own Land Share page in your region. The future of farming is debt and chemical free. We just need to link people up to begin discussions and collaborations.
What a time of the year to think big, farm small and cut out the banks and the middle men.
In June 2021, a small French film crew came to Australia to interview several people who are, in very diverse ways, responding to the predicaments of our age. Alongside permaculture elders and friends Su Dennett and David Holmgren, we have been featured in what is now published as a French TV series directed by Thierry Robert, starring Cyril Dion as the narrator. The series is in three parts and this short clip is an excerpt from ‘Regeneration | A New World (Part 3)‘ in which David, Su and Artist as Family speak of the cultural and economic shifts we have implemented in our lives.
A little while ago we asked our friend, the talented Catie Payne, to illustrate a simple graphic to demonstrate our household’s transition from money to subsistence neopeasantry through applying permacultural community sufficiency principles. We gave Catie a crude sketch representing our 15-year transition of decoupling from a destructive, incarcerating and extractive economy to how we are living now, and she came up with several evocative drawings for us to use as teaching aids.
A transition from money, for us, has been a transition from debt to indebtedness, from gratuitousness to gratitude, from mistrust to ever deepening relationships with the living of the world. Yes, money has played a role in our transition, but step by little step it no longer masters over us and crushes our souls.
Barter is a crude and clumsy form of economy, not one we wish to dwell in for very long. However, it is essential for building trust on the way from money to what we call a flow of gifts economy. Trust is always conditional in order for us to arrive at unconditional love, which is the place our economy now mostly resides within – a deepening love for the living of the world.
This transition from scarcity (indulgence mind, unproductive waste, greed, hoarding and miserliness) to abundance (the continual flow of gifts and the reverence for life as sacred, suffering, dying and renewing) is what we have found after 15 years of setting out into the unknown. Knowing what we were moving away from and what we were longing for was all we needed to begin this journey towards a more beautiful world of connection, relationships and self respect.
Thank you Catie, for the gifts of these drawings, thank you David and Su for your wisdom and continuous collaboration, and thank you Thierry and Cyril and crew for the gift of sharing heterodox stories.
Where are you in your transition, Dear Reader? Are you finding it difficult to begin? Are you unable to begin because you lack support and resources? Are you already a certain way along but feel stuck or limited because you are waiting for your community or family members or neighbourhood to step onboard? Or, are you radically flying with abundance because you come from a cultural or family setting where self-respect, generosity and the flow of gifts have always been your main lifeways?
