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Category: rites of passage

Ecological participation (guiding child-led learning in a forest)

Jul 11, 2026 | alternative education, Artist as Family course, bush school, children's learning, community education, ecological knowledges, forest wisdom, Free to learn, home educating, homeschool, Industrial culture, interspecies relating, medicinal plants, Mother Country, play, post-industrial thought, praise, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, revillaging, rites of passage, unschooling & not at school, wounding, youngtimers | 4 comments

 

Greetings from wet wintry Tree Elbow.

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.

Here is the audio-only version,

 

and here is the video.

And speaking of ecological participation, we also share here two recent videos from Woody’s channel, Making venison jerky and Chopping wood with a Viking-made splitter.

As always your comments and responses are most welcome, and if you’d like to book in for either of the next two online sessions, you can do so here: Community sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies and Joyful resistance – online house and garden tour (the nuts and bolts of our systems).

Sending you rainy, wintery love from our hearth,
Artist as Family

School of Applied Neopeasantry online course & a story-sharing adventure to the UK & Ireland

Jun 10, 2026 | adventure, Artist as Family course, Artist as Family online event, Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, ceremonial species approach, children's learning, community sufficiency, ecological economy making, energy descent, food sovereignty, gift economy, home economies, home educating, lifemaking, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, relocalisation, revillaging, rites of passage, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, subsistence economy, walked-for food | 12 comments

 

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.

Artist as Family

Men’s business – rites of passage and the maturation of men (with Yin Paradies and Patrick Jones)

Apr 28, 2026 | ceremonial species approach, ceremony & ritual, colonialism, ecological economy making, eldership, family, fatherhood, First People, gender-lopsidedness, Indigenous knowledges, kinship, men's business, men's health, modernity, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, relationships, revillaging, rites of passage, transitional communities, wounding | 6 comments

 

We hosted our friend Yin Paradies at Tree Elbow over the weekend and before Yin left he and Patrick recorded a conversation focussed on their encounters within the ecology of men’s business.

Whether experienced in this subject or entirely new to it, we hope you enjoy their yarn on rites of passage, sacred economics, personal accountability, ‘fallen patriarchy,’ and reclaiming indigenous and peasant masculinities.

Listen (1hr, 6mins)

 

In their conversation Yin and Patrick refer to a previous dialogue Patrick had with Yin and his partner Victoria: Bridging, on the way back to indigeneity, and Patrick mentions drafting an annual ceremonial calendar as the next stage of our community’s revillaging.

Thanks for reading and listening! As always Dear Subscriber, we enjoy your feedback, comments and questions.

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

Mar 17, 2026 | art, collapse, drawing, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological economy making, eldership, energy descent, farming and colonisation, industrial progress, life cycles, lifemaking, lifetaking, love, militarism, Mother Country, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, reculturing, relocalisation, resistance, revillaging, rites of passage, transitional communities, village rebuilding, war | 2 comments

 

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.

Bridging, on the way back to indigeneity (kinship, initiation, druidry, homesteading, wisdom and eldership) with Yin Paradies and Victoria McKay

Jul 23, 2025 | capitalism, ceremony & ritual, colonisation, commons, community, culture, eldership, enclosures, Grief, Hypertechnocivility, Indigenous Australians, interspecies relating, kinship, love, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, rites of passage, sacred country, village rebuilding, wisdom, wounding | 10 comments

 

Make yourself a cuppa and settle in for our next long-form yarn with Yin Paradies and Victoria McKay from Anam Cara Homestead.

Both Yin and Victoria invite us to be on the bridge that spans between modernity and what they call our ‘primal’ selves, and to find and nurture fellow travellers in that place of reclaiming.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we have.

Listener’s note: At one point the audio goes a tad crackly in the conversation but it doesn’t last long.

(Audio duration 1:11mins)

 

And, here is the video.