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.
Forest & Free is a place of fun, adventure, challenge, and a place of risk for 8-12 year olds in Djaara Mother Country. The kind of activities the kids will experience are fire making and cooking, bush walking and foraging, fishing and wild swimming, safe knife use and simple tool making, regenerative farming and animal husbandry, deep listening and storytelling, tree climbing and shelter building, embodying ancestral lifeways and learning ecological knowledges and awareness, listening to one another and listening to Country.
There are few places left where kids can use knives, climb trees, navigate forests full of old mine shafts, light fires and generally get scratched up and stung by being participants of life. It is in this spirit that we invite children to attend Forest & Free and for them to experience a healthy interrelationship between safety and risk.
In allowing children to attend Forest & Free, parents agree to sharing the risk with us and with their children. The risk is therefore spread three-ways – we as the facilitators, the parents, and the children – and is distributed this way to build personal responsibility and to avoid blaming, shaming and the possibility of closing down this community resource.
Life happens, and we don’t believe this is a good enough reason to submit to the cult of safetyism, which is a mental virus that has bloomed from institutions of the most industrialised countries.
We are not about setting challenges that are too great for the children, and we don’t encourage an overtly competitive or risk-taking culture, rather we encourage children to meet new challenges and learn from others around them, and the forest.
Forest & Free is deep listening, embodying resilience, meeting challenges, learning skills and having fun. The broader culture, up until recently, used to see breaking a bone, receiving stitches, getting lost, being burnt by fire, etc as a rite of passage for young people – necessary for the development of children at this age.
While we don’t wish any of these things on any child, and we explain each skill, challenge, game or wild food in terms of the risks and benefits involved, adversity is the underlying, ever present flip side of enabling such learning and therefore such growth.
As adults we understand that some of our greatest learnings come through discomfort, and it’s how we respond to these situations that really matters in building resilience and bouncebackability.
In 2023 we are running 8 full-day paid events ($20 per child for the day, 10am – 4pm). These dates are either in school holidays or land on public holidays and will be open to not-schooled and schooled kids.
We also run a weekly full-day program for not-schooled kids every Monday from 10am – 4pm. These sessions are based on a gift exchange. If you have surplus homegrown or home-made food, hand-me-down clothes etc, they are gifts we value. When there is abundance let it flow. When there’s not we understand.
Children are required to come with water bottle, healthy lunch and snacks, a sun hat, clothing appropriate to the weather, a pocket knife, and a sense of adventure.
We are looking forward to an exciting year of forest play, learning, exploration and celebration of life. We begin each event with a listening circle so as we can all hear where each of us is at. This helps build compassion and bonds the group, while practicing deep listening.
If you are interested to learn more about Forest & Free, or are thinking of starting up a forest group in your own neck of the woods, please get in touch. Similarly if you know of other bush schools in your area or have experience as a participant in another community bush school, please let us know in the comments. We value your stories and your thoughts.
Signing off for now with blackberry scratches on our shins, and bidgee widgee burrs in our feathers,
Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity… – Charles Eisenstein, The Coronation, 2022
Australia’s most vulnerable young people have no meaningful support. Those who find themselves in prison experience a nightmarish reality, especially since Covid. If they want to see family they have to keep lining up for jabs, which as we now know are dangerous to young people, and therefore illogical and unethical to mandate. If prisoners want to eat fresh vegetables, breathe clean air, or feel natural sunlight on their skin mediated through the shade of a tree they have Buckley’s chance and none. Anything that can help them to heal or grow is road blocked.
While we can have compassion for all young people in whatever complexes they’re moving through, we can also remain critical of the adult world hubris, double standards and doubling down that continues to harm youngtimers. Can we imagine a world where young offenders are treated with as much media compassion and attention as furries? In many other countries programmes are run to help prisoners process their grief – the grief that lead them to drugs and/or crime, the grief they hold for what they did to others, the grief of living in sterile cells exiled from community and ecology.
Our social ills often have similar root causes, it’s just the expression of them that differ, based on our personalities and life contexts.
What leads one teen to bulimia, one to furrydom and one to meth and burgs? The answer, in our view, can be found in the disconnected values and projects of neoliberalism. Drugs and crime, body image anxiety, and other kinds of dysphoria all find lucrative legal markets – private prisons, social medias and hyper medicalisation products ranging from ritalin to puberty blockers. Neoliberalism knows that unhappiness and sickness pays handsomely, it trades on it and factors it into GDP. Neoliberal institutions – universities, governments, medias, etc. – that use the forms of neoliberal economics and psychopolitics, are unwilling to self examine how they support and fuel such alienation, disconnection and social destruction.
Neoliberal medias hold the power for neoliberalism to flourish, for propaganda to be normalised, for dissenters and heterodox thinkers to be continually hounded, censored or labelled as misinformation spreaders. The response to any diseased and dying monoculture is for a resurgence of weed species to repopulate and prepare the trammelled ground for the regrowing of forests. The war against weeds is unwinnable, so too the war against diverse approaches to science, politics, health, young offenders and governance. The time to regrow diverse cultures of place is now, and leave behind the medias that grow alienation, fear and control.
This year we’ve made a further commitment to advancing independent voices and platforms. What reporters, social and ecological commentators, podcasters or writers are floating your boat at the moment? Who are the weeds that are nourishing you? What is the ground they are rehabilitating? As always, your comments are welcome. All power to the those who smell rats and who are acting on all their senses of knowing.
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.
The community garden beside the library in our home town has been a site of commons reclamation since a small bunch of us occupied this so-called ‘crown’ land, twelve or so years ago. This little patch of non-monetised, unenclosed, available-to-all organic food commons sits as the only ecologically complex environment in the central business district of Daylesford; a town that sells mostly unnecessary things to tourists in service to the dominant economic orthodoxy – hypertechnocivility.
Last night we gathered to celebrate the solstice, re-commoning and Djaara Mother Country at this bright moment – the longest day.
Artist as Family has been playing music with our friend Maya Green for a while now, and we put together a small set of songs to share with our fellow community gardeners at this gathering. At our first gig as Dirty Trees, we featured poems by an anonymous ancestor, William Blake and Martha Postlethwaite that we’ve set to music, sharing some of the wisdom and lyricism we’ve been holding dear this year.
In this video we play an instrumental version of Mairi’s Wedding (also known as Marie’s Wedding, the Lewis Bridal Song, or Scottish Gaelic: Màiri Bhàn AKA ‘Blond Mary’). It is a Scottish folk song originally written in Gaelic by John Roderick Bannerman (1865–1938).
We hope you enjoy this little garden-brewed moment as you slide into the summer’s downtime or into winter’s hibernation, wherever you are.
Thank you to Blackwood Ulman Jones and Anthony Petrucci for your filming craft, and thanks to you, Dear Subscriber, for staying with us in our various forms this year.
A few days earlier we celebrated solstice at David Holmgren and Su Dennett’s permaculture home, Melliodora. The mens’ Firechoir sang at this event six months after they formed, at the winter solstice. Patrick has so enjoyed facilitating this group with Anthony Petrucci as choirmaster and the men look forward to sitting in circle and singing with the women’s group, facilitated by Meg, in 2023.
Much neopeasant love for a festive and heartfelt season of joy,
