Blog

A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.

Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies

 
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.

Three drawings for the end of history (before returning to place-based, oral-wisdom cultures)

 

Wheel of social-ecological succession (or, the life stages of wisdom peoples of place)

An eschatology of industrial progress (before returning to oral, place-based, mother-country cultures)

The arrival of the last (and short-lived) monotheistic empire (before returning to animist expressions of life making)

Feel free to share our current graphic sense-making, and as always your comments are dear to us.

Artist as Family bowl, and a prayer for peace and resistance

 

As many of you already know about us, it’s the everyday local labours of living an earth-honouring economy alongside a wide-ranging understanding of geopolitics that informs our makings, our permapoesis, and our wellbeing.

To acknowledge this next phase of rupture in the unfolding collapse of the global village, we present two offerings for the week. First, by Meg, on some of the food medicine that fuels our poesis, and the second a prose piece by Patrick offering a powerful response to the immorality of western hegemony, ruled by the Epstein class.

In this piece, Meg invites you into our kitchen to share a typical seasonal lunch.

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And, in the following piece, Patrick calls on the possibilities of active peace-making and resistance. (Audio 2:40mins)

A message of Peace and Resistance (from a family in transition)

As moral peoples of the world, let us all stand against the genocidal psychopathy of western leaders. Let us not be divided and distracted by the corporate-billionaire class establishment media and the empire’s state broadcaster puppets. Let’s stand against evil men who start wars and escalate mass suffering with bullshit justifications. This is an opportunity for the west to reconnect with Homer – compassion for ‘the other’ – that built western culture 2700 years ago. Let’s reconnect with an earth-honouring cosmology – the sacred feminine, which human cultures of place have lived within for most of human life. Let’s stand together to rid the world of war mongers, their lobbyists and businesses across the industrial, collapsing global village, not with violence, but by recreating local economies which take back sovereignty of our basic needs, serve our local biomes, and give the Financial Industrial Complex, who profits from mass suffering, nothing. Take away their destructive dollars by boycotting industrial food, medicine and energy productions, earn only a little so as not to be taxed and have your tax dollars support the war machine, and reap the rewards of relocalisation by becoming more connected to our home places, more healthy and more aligned in our souls. The future is radical localism. Defund the bankers that fund the missiles. Let’s work and be together. Create community sufficiency, and start breaking the machines that incarcerate us. We may not be able to bring justice to the aggressors of war and the perpetrators (or bystanders) of rape, but we can choose to give them nothing. We are the majority. Let’s only give our money and time to small local cottage industries, get out of debt, downscale to do it, find others to establish non-monetary exchanges with, relearn the skills our ancestors knew, and live again without conveniences the machine has hooked us up to. Conveniences keep us enslaved to the bankers realm, and therefore enslaved to the war machine. Liberate our hearts and our lives! Let’s no longer be complicit subjects of empire.

As always, we welcome your responses, feedback and shares.

Oh, and we still have some places on our April 4 tour. Come join us!