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Quit Your Job & Work in Reciprocity with Linda Cockburn
250 Plays3 hours ago
I tell a story about making bugger all money but feeling filthy rich, before being joined by the incredible Linda Cockburn (pronounced “Co’burn” cos it’s Scottish) who explains why Capitalism is a death cult, and ways to crowd it out with reciprocity. Ample brain fodder and fiery inspiration here, folks!
We cover:
🪶 Being unmade by successive tragedies.
🪶 Quitting employment to work in the home economy.
🪶 Going six months without spending a dollar.
🪶 How to grow your own toilet paper!
🪶 Will politicians ever “solve” climate change?
🪶 Why you can’t question capitalism
🪶 How the growth imperative works
🪶 Changing the narrative through language
🪶 The debt treadmill for “developing” nations
🪶 The closest thing we’ve had to utopia in human history!
🪶 Old and new indigeneity through storytelling
🪶 Hitting bodily limits
🪶 How to get owwwfff the hamster wheel
🪶 Riches without an income
🪶 The Eudaimonia Index & Reciprocity
🪶 Black Soldier Fly Revolution!
🪶 How to share even when you’re a scoundrel only child like me
🪶 Why it feels great to give your best stuff away
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS
Linda’s books
The Quiet Revolution (basically why & how to decouple from the death cult of capitalism & start giving back to all life)
Eat My Shadow (hopeful and instructive collapse fiction!)
Linda’s articles in Organic Gardener magazine
A kickass essay by Linda ~ My Planet Saving Superpowers
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann
Seed Freaks ~ open pollinated seeds Tasmania
David Holmgren’s RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future
Sound credit: Bruny Island Ambience by guyburns License: Attribution 4.0
🧡🧡🧡 support Reskillience on Patreon (plz don’t use the app it takes a fee, go desktop) 🧡🧡🧡
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskillians
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Riskillians, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm gratefully recording in Jyra country, central Victoria, where it's still and clear and cold enough to send the first wisps of smoke up and out the chimney.
00:00:31
Speaker
This week I went harvesting hawthorn berries. There's a park near where we live that's always deserted except for gatherings of hawthorn trees and wild plums and feral roses and old, old oaks.
00:00:45
Speaker
I like to harvest hawthorn berries after they've been softened by the first frost and when their blood-red skin is at its brightest against the autumn sky. So I walked down to the hawthorns with an empty basket and a few dried plums.
00:01:00
Speaker
The plums were for leaving at the base of each tree to please the fairies.
Resourcefulness and Community Connection
00:01:03
Speaker
And on my way home, I noticed that the big old oak trees had been pruned, probably by the council, they'd lopped off their lower branches and left them in piles around the place.
00:01:13
Speaker
And my eyes lit up because to me, these weren't just stacks of woody waste, but mountains of shimmering gold goat fodder. So I bolted back home to grab the ute, then drove down with a pair of loppers, a pruning saw, and a mouthful of apologies to the elderly oak trees who, I've heard, use their senescing limbs like walking sticks to lean on.
00:01:38
Speaker
But we humans see them as unsafe and unsightly and promptly chainsaw them off, which is quite rude. Regardless, it took me about 15 minutes to pack the ute so full of oak branches i couldn't see out the rearview mirror, and while I was at it, I also sawed off a few smaller sections of green wood for spoon carving, which I've been on the lookout for.
Living Wealthy in Non-Monetary Ways
00:01:59
Speaker
And before I left, I flicked a message to our community group chat, alerting other local goat keepers to the bounty. Then I drove to my friend's place with a big resourceful grin and I flung the oak branches over the fence and watched her goats go apeshit.
00:02:17
Speaker
I milk these goats once a week, so it gave me immense joy to give back to the creatures who give me milky teas and cheese and ice cream. It was such an awesome morning.
00:02:28
Speaker
I felt rich, sickeningly rich, dripping with foraged gems up to my eyeballs in connection and reciprocity. I'd harvested wild medicine five minutes from my home, gleaned fresh wood for spoon carving and delivered armloads of edible gratitude to my goatee pals.
00:02:48
Speaker
In the conversation you're about to hear, i shared that I make about a third of the average Australian weekly income. It really surprised me when I did the math because, wow, that's not a lot of dough, but you know, I feel like the richest bitch.
00:03:02
Speaker
Rich in firewood, friendship, homegrown food, bubbling ferments, birdsong, compost, creativity, freedom, time, and connection. We drink milk money can't even buy raw oak-fed goat's milk with bonus cuddles and animal husbandry skills.
00:03:21
Speaker
I've never seen that for sale before. I reckon there's a psychological trick here, a way of taming the inner consumer who wants you to make more money to buy more stuff to fill the bottomless skip bin of disconnection.
00:03:33
Speaker
When you start seeing riches everywhere... When you behold the golden web of true wealth that is Earth's living systems, that supports you, that supports us every single day, you fill up, content, satiated, grateful and generous.
00:03:51
Speaker
And then buying that fancy handbag kind of loses its appeal. Unless it features specialized pockets for harvesting berries or holding bottles of raw milk, in which case maybe it's worth it.
00:04:03
Speaker
You know what I mean though? Crowding out the consumer demons with everything money can't buy. That's what I'm getting at. And if you'd like another hour or so of fiercely anti-capitalist sentiment with stories of love, loss, and reciprocity thrown in for free...
Guest Introduction: Linda Coburn
00:04:18
Speaker
Buckle up, because today we're hanging out with Linda Coburn. Linda's a Tasmanian lass, well, originally a Kiwi and somewhat Scottish, who's been in my peripheral vision for years.
00:04:29
Speaker
And when she sent me her book, The Quiet Revolution, which basically backs up everything I care about with intellectual rigour and is like, here's how to get off the hamster wheel and into the web of life.
00:04:40
Speaker
Well, a reskillience conversation ensued. Linda's lit a fire under my butt to be even more radical, and I hope she does the same for you. Huge thanks to the patrons of this podcast who support the show, no matter what unpalatable but undeniable stuff it brings up.
00:04:56
Speaker
I'm so grateful to you for contributing to my livelihood. It's so darn special to be directly connected and accountable to you not a third party. So thank you, thank you so much to the Riskiliants Patreon community.
00:05:10
Speaker
We're at patreon.com forward slash riskiliants. And if you want to support the show in a non-monetary way, some priceless actions are sharing it with a friend or online.
00:05:21
Speaker
or leaving it a review on Apple, which is what people look at when deciding whether or not to give these crazy conversations a chance. Here's the wonderful Linda Coburn. Enjoy. I
00:05:34
Speaker
i really love how you do your intros. They are just beautiful. They are a meditation. They are just so gorgeous. And the sound effects in the background, it just sets a beautiful scene and it has such a wonderful, welcoming experience.
00:05:49
Speaker
feel that reflects what you do. It's wonderful. Oh, that means so much to me, Linda. Yeah, I have a lot of, um I have a love-hate relationship with writing those intros because as you know, you're a writer, I'm not sure if you've written to speak before, but writing to read and writing to speak is so very different and you can be florid and and quite foolish with words on a page and it's very forgiving in a way that spoken word isn't.
00:06:14
Speaker
Agreed. agree So they say you pre-write them. They don't feel like that. They feel very natural. You you are very good at this. you know And I'm not somebody who compliments for any other the reason than I actually think it.
00:06:28
Speaker
Oh, I'm just picking it up. Thank you so much. If only I could sound that brilliant and as a first draft. But no.
Linda's Life in Tasmania and Personal Reflections
00:06:34
Speaker
I do you love to start with who you are and where you are and what you're doing just because it does feel like a bit of a fundamental foundation for a deeper conversation because you have so much amazing deep shit to share and i can't wait to get stuck into the guts of that but I'm also really curious about your life yeah what is your life like down there in the Huon and also I'm very jealous because that is such a beautiful part of Tasmania it is we live in paradise and
00:07:01
Speaker
I'm really grateful that we just haven't stopped being grateful, ah because because which is an interesting way of saying it. But, um yeah, look, we if we go anywhere or i just look out the window, Trevor and I are forever saying, can you believe we live here? This is the most stunningly gorgeous place in the world. I can just walk out my front gate and and go for a bushwalk.
00:07:24
Speaker
You know, I am 10 minutes away from the most spectacular beach full of hardly any people and rock pools and sand and caves and I can spend a day there.
00:07:38
Speaker
It's just, yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, and have you always lived in Tassie? No, I'm actually from New Zealand. I'm actually from a small town in the South Island of New Zealand and It was a very conservative, patriarchal little town that i really did not fit in at all.
00:07:59
Speaker
And I was born into a you know like a conservative household. I was just thinking about this recently that because my father is in the unfortunately in the process of dying at the moment and We've had a very long, very fractured relationship.
00:08:13
Speaker
And, yeah, my my parents thought that the best way to bring up children was to humiliate them to the point that they had no self-esteem and they did a pretty good job of that. I was really lucky to have, don't I'm say word, escaped that.
00:08:28
Speaker
and I met Andrew when I was 18, 19, 19, 19. ah nineteen nineteen and fell in love with both. did I just look back at that time and it was the most fantastic time of my life. I finally felt like I was loved by somebody who actually saw me for the first time my life and it was wonderful. But then I started to say to people that, look, I think he's going to die. I can feel he's going to die. And ah people go, it's only just because that's everybody thinks that. go, no, it's going to happen. and And one day I went for a a bike ride, 40 to beach.
00:09:06
Speaker
and my favourite rocky, stony beach that you didn't swim in otherwise you'd die. Still loved it. I picked up a stone and and I was just thinking about the fact that I really felt it was imminent that he was going to die and I didn't know what it was or when it was going to happen but it was going to be soon. And I looked and here's the stone, it was the perfect shape of a heart.
00:09:25
Speaker
And i put in my pocket and biked out to his place, gave it to him and a fortnight later he died. It was a microlight accident and we were there. I was lucky enough to have other people there because the only other time he actually had a flight when other people were there.
00:09:42
Speaker
And um there was a little damage to the strut and it collapsed and he hit the ground and I wasn't able to do anything for him. You know, I was just able to hold him until he died. He was never conscious of again.
00:09:57
Speaker
And that was that was huge. That was, you know, you you you get unmade in your life. You get unmade multiple times. And making yourself back, you have options perhaps that you didn't have before about who you are going to be again.
00:10:12
Speaker
And it took me... five years to to to get to that point. And meanwhile, I had met Carl. He was um living in Australia at the time and he earned a lot more money than I did. So we eventually decided that I would move there. Actually, the first week I met him, he said, you really need to know before you're in a relationship with me that i i think about killing myself all the time. this is something that's, you know, me.
00:10:39
Speaker
And it really set up all the alarm bells. But I figured that you can love people enough that they don't feel like that. Well, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't. In fact, in the end, I think loving him made it worse because he couldn't return it because he was in such a bad one.
00:10:55
Speaker
And um yeah, all of a sudden I was on my own again and he he died five years later and I was back in that same place In a strange place in Sydney, which I absolutely abhorred, going through all those lessons that I thought I had already learned and having to sew myself back together again.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so, yes, I think that's been a very formative thing about my past is those two deaths are with me still and they are with me still and I feel they're very present in my life and I'm really lucky that they've been.
00:11:28
Speaker
um But they made... It a place where I was free in a way I'd never been before because i was now on my own in a strange country, knew very few people.
00:11:40
Speaker
So I decided to take ah a risk, an adventure, and I spent a year in Outback Queensland as a governess. I was 25 or 26 or something, and that was amazing.
Community Work and Personal Growth
00:11:53
Speaker
It was just amazing. I actually saw the real Australian. It was so damn wild. It was amazing.
00:11:59
Speaker
Driving home from the pub was a 90km drive and, you know, there would be groups of wild horses on the road in the moonlight, you know, there would just be emus panicking everywhere and there would snakes. It was just fantastic and the sky was bigger than I'd had ever seen the sky and I loved it.
00:12:20
Speaker
But then I moved to Gympie and I decided to have, I was still very broken and I decided I would have a year of love. And the year of love was not me getting it back. I didn't see that that was actually on the cards.
00:12:35
Speaker
My year of love was about how much I could put into the world. And putting all that love into the world, I became a, I was a youth worker in a time when you didn't have to have a degree in youth work.
00:12:48
Speaker
And I had the most fantastic. year I actually wrote about that and I think in the Quiet Revolution and made a lot of difference to people people's lives I still hear from some of them every now and then find out where I am and go just did you realize how much that meant to me and how much that means to me too and I think that's that whole connectivity that we're into um so had a year of love and I found accidentally managed to attract Trevor who had Also, I lost a partner exactly the same way as Carl. A lot circumstances were very much the same. He was having a very hard time from her family as I was from his.
00:13:25
Speaker
But yeah, it was um a moment to be able to say, well, thank you, Carl. You know, Carl and Andrew, you've given me the ability to help this person. I had no intentions of a romantic relationship. We had a three-month phone conversation.
00:13:39
Speaker
And yeah, I remember putting the phone down one day and going, That's amazing. that was Thank you very much for giving me those experiences, sorry, that allowed me to be able to say the right things for somebody else.
00:13:58
Speaker
So, yeah, life is never what you expect it to be and it's the stuff that comes at you sideways that matters the most. That's the long story. ah Well, I did not expect that.
00:14:12
Speaker
Such you know, confronting and beautiful story right at the top of our conversation. But thank you so much for prefacing our conversation with that and sharing that part of yourself. And golly gosh.
00:14:25
Speaker
And then, okay, falling falling in love with Trevor, how did you come to be realising this vision that you're living within now? Well, it was really interesting to reflect on that one.
00:14:40
Speaker
I read The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. It was a Tom Hartman book from 1998, and that was about peak oil. and We weren't really talking about climate change at that stage.
00:14:53
Speaker
And I read it while I had my, like, two-month-old son in my arms, and at the end of it I was looking at him going, I should never have had to, you know.
00:15:04
Speaker
that that that moment that I think a lot of people come to about whether to procreate or not, and and I must admit to being very glad I read that book in 1998 and not 1997.
00:15:15
Speaker
It really shook me away. that That was it, you know, and I had a job where I was not long after that, about a year later, I had a job where I was driving everywhere and using so much fuel that I ah you remember running thinking, well, how much carbon does this create?
00:15:36
Speaker
What does burning fuel create? You know, didn't even know. Nobody really even was talking about it. And so I looked it up and I thought, how much carbon is that creating when I drive and how much of air is that polluting?
00:15:50
Speaker
And the figure that, you know, at that stage it was about one kilo of CO2 for ah every litre of petrol you used and that was a capable of polluting and over 10,000 litres of air, around about anyway. it's it's It's actually more than that now because it's more energy to extract than it used to be.
00:16:11
Speaker
So the question was, well, how do I get away from this? How do I do something different? You know, we can't afford not to both be working unless maybe I could work at home. um I could grow the food and do all the things and displace the things that we're outsourcing and do them from home. And and I remember her driving to my next job and by the time I got there I was on this euphoric high of oh my god I am going to just change our worlds and I did dragging all my family with me and so yeah that was that was sort of the start.
00:16:45
Speaker
What work were you doing at the time and also Trev? Trev was um working for Queensland Forestry Research um and doing really important stuff so that was great i was It was the beginning of the internet world and I was being employed i wasemp employyed for about three and a half years to travel around South East Queensland and teaching people how to use the internet.
00:17:09
Speaker
It was damn boring, but it was well paid. Have you done formal training or tertiary education? I have two partial degrees.
00:17:21
Speaker
There's partial degree club, I'm in that club. Well, that's one of my things is my my parents, we I had four brothers and they were given the opportunity to have go to uni, but I was a girl and I was only ever going to get married. So there was no point wasting it, even though I was clearly the most academic of them all.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I actually found out years later that people came and tried to do an intervention on my behalf on that level, which was really beautiful. But yes, my mother said, there's no point you only get pregnant. And then when my job ended as as a youth worker, I thought, right, well, this is it. I'm going to get that degree in philosophy and psychology I've always wanted.
00:18:02
Speaker
and it was through Deakin Uni. And three days after I was accepted to Deakin Uni, I found out I was pregnant. And that was sort of like such an irony. Mother, you were right.
00:18:15
Speaker
But um so yes, that and I came back to it and tried to do it again 10 years later but working a full time with the family and trying to do the kind of things i was doing it just didn't happen.
00:18:26
Speaker
And have you always been a writer? Absolutely. Words have always been my religion really. I remember after Caleb was born saying to myself, well, that's it. You're just going have to face it.
00:18:38
Speaker
You are not a writer. And I... I had this existential angst of going, well, who the hell am I then? I don't know. I wrote five books straight afterwards.
00:18:49
Speaker
I love being able to say that I'm a writer because writer encompasses everything in life. It's just a matter of talking about the things that are attracting your interest and kind of sharing that, beaming that out into the world. Like it's the best umbrella for a fickle person like me. Oh, yes, me too.
00:19:04
Speaker
And, you know, I think that's the thing I realised recently is that when people are given the space to be able to do anything they like, that we are actually all innately creative, even though the people who were told in school they weren't, we are all innately creative.
00:19:20
Speaker
I love watching people unveil that part of themselves and let their freakish creative flag fly in whatever direction it wants to. Exactly. we need more of that.
00:19:31
Speaker
Indeed. So you started making these changes in your life based on the aha moment of how our actions impacted the very air that we breathe.
Sustainability and Self-Sufficiency Experiments
00:19:42
Speaker
So what then did that look like? You were transitioning to what it sounds like a more home-based lifestyle. Then what happened? Well, you know, immediately i decide that we have to go six months without spending a dollar and see if we can actually do that and pull it off. And this was sort of before the days of reality TV. So I was kind of a little bit of intriguingly different.
00:20:04
Speaker
And I really wanted to know, you know, is it possible to live off a suburban block? Because, you know, peak oil is the way it's going. We're not going to... have the ability to just say, yeah, no worries, I'm going to go to the supermarket and buy whatever.
00:20:17
Speaker
So yeah, it was a ah wonderful experiment. Okay. So you started doing crazy experiments with your family and sharing about them. Did you feel like you were successful at those experiments or were they just generating more and more questions and more and more self-reflection?
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, it took about three years and I mean, I wasn't a particularly practical person, so I had to learn how to be practical and I hadn't really grown food before. So I had to learn how to to grow food on on a really steep, rocky block, how to save seeds, how to, you know, everything had to be questioned about, well, know, if you're going to go six months without spending a dollar, and I mean, this is the question your everybody asks, so I might well answer it straight up.
00:20:59
Speaker
What are you going to wipe your bum with? We grew lupus. And so this is, you know, south-east Queensland, so it was nice and warm, and I had this steep slope that I couldn't grow anything else on so I just planted loofahs there and we had hundreds and hundreds of loofahs all the kids in the neighborhood would come around and help me peel them because I loved peeling them and we hang them wash them and hang them on the line and during our six months we just had a basket of them chopped up into segments and a bowl of water with a couple of drops of essential oil and we used them once we had a compost loo so you used it once and you dropped it down the loo and it
00:21:37
Speaker
so much better than that toilet paper. Oh, I'm imagining there's a nice sense of exfoliation that happens there as well. Chintel exfoliation. Yeah, just to get a little bit of that crust off. We don't want to take it all off because it's a protective that's update.
00:21:53
Speaker
But yes, I'm actually growing them now in Tasmania and breeding them to be more cold tolerant. So this year we've got heaps and heaps and heaps but not enough for toilet paper but certainly enough to to wash the dishes with.
00:22:06
Speaker
ah Super amazing. All right. So at this stage of your adventurous existence, you're making the connection between not spending any money. So economics and the good life, a better life, a more sustainable way of living.
00:22:21
Speaker
Yeah, just getting off the treadmill. And by saying no money, that meant you had to supply everything yourself and do without anything that you didn't actually need. So it got rid of a lot of the dross that we think is essential but it really isn't.
00:22:37
Speaker
And it also gave us parameters where when you say, i'm not going to spend money for six months and you say it publicly, you're it It makes it really much harder to spend money, much harder.
Critique of Capitalism and Systemic Change
00:22:51
Speaker
it was a lot of sort of reasons why doing it, but definitely capitalism has been in my sights for a long time.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yes, yeah. You say that capitalism guarantees extinction. It's a debt cult. It's a debt cult. I've written the Quiet Revolution, debt-free and working-less, how our species survives, and, you know, I really came to some big realisations when I was, I've spent 25 years reading about this area and and asking myself a lot of questions and I realised that politicians are never going to be able to actually resolve carbon, the the climate crisis as we like to define it when really its that's just a symptom of capitalism, of a rogue system. It's not ah actually the problem and that we needed to to go deeper to the actual problem and and how it was that capitalism works.
00:23:45
Speaker
One of the things that you cannot do with capitalism is you cannot question it because if you question capitalism, that's almost enough to start it to buckle. So what we have is people arguing about all sorts of different things but actually what not what we need to, which is that we need system change.
00:24:02
Speaker
So that's one of the things that came of became obvious and that the way politicians are, they can only keep they've got to keep growth going. So after three months without any growth,
00:24:14
Speaker
you're starting to look, go and you're in recession. If you go into recession, A, you're not going to be voted back in again, but also um you're going to be worse off, the people are going to be worse off. So you have to keep pushing this this barrow all the time. And they are not going to be able to do anything within that paradigm to resolve anything. all they can do is reinforce it. So when we look at politicians and and the decisions they make, we'll go,
00:24:43
Speaker
Why would you do this? Why would you open up a new coal mine? Why would you support this? Why would you keep the damn Tasmanian salmon industry on its feet when it should be pushed out the door? And it's because they can't do anything else.
00:24:57
Speaker
So they're as stuck as we are. And, yes, they are definitely part of the cult, so they may not actually even see that there's an issue. But if you've got a system that every 25 years doubles in size and in 300 years it's going to be over 4 000 times bigger than it is now well that's just not possible and the impossibility of it and that we are still persevering despite the obvious impossibility of it it's quite miraculous really but it's it's come to its limitations it's come to the end of its ability to adapt and that's becoming more and more apparent to everyone which is
00:25:34
Speaker
terrifying, but also the most wonderful opportunity to actually be there to not say, hey, capitalism's bad, capitalism's bad, but to talk about alternatives that are different.
00:25:47
Speaker
Because if we want to be effective, we can't just fight against something, we actually have to fight for something. So that's why I wrote The Quiet Revolution, is it's fighting for something, something that actually isn't just good for the environment or that we should do,
00:26:01
Speaker
but is something much closer to who we actually are as a species. So what do you say to people who really insist that we need to methodically kind of rehab the system that we have, work from the inside, put some poultices on it, clean it up a bit? Well, I think this is really interesting because i spent a lot of time reading about how change occurs throughout history and also about the use of language.
00:26:31
Speaker
And so so before when I said, you know, capitalism is a death cult, well, I always slip something like that in simply because you know to change the paradigm, and this is we don't need to be inside politics to do it. We we we just have to be the aboriginal person who needs to use our language to change the narrative.
00:26:50
Speaker
One of the things that really gets me is that we're putting what we call developing nations onto the debt treadmill and we're doing it deliberately because expansionism is part of capitalism and we need to keep expanding and we want to make sure that those supposedly poor nations become much more developed because if they've developed then they are, apart from anything else, on the capitalist treadmill, they are on the debt treadmill. So we lend them money But we what we're doing is we're actually saying we're doing good things, but we're going to particularly the global South and Africa and America, South America and Asia, and say we're going to help them become like us and create that system where we think that that's ah and an ideal. But what we're doing is we're lending them money at a higher
00:27:39
Speaker
interest rate than we actually lend to ourselves because they're supposedly more of a risk. And when the money that comes in for development, they don't actually get that money. What we do is we come in and actually build it on their behalf. So really it's somebody else, contractors who are making the money in a different country and all these people are left with is a debt.
00:27:58
Speaker
And that's a system that we've been really good at using to our advantage. So what we need is words that will help address that. so Now when I say, we we normally we would say in a developed country or an undeveloped country, well, I say in a less developed country, that would be something somewhere like Africa.
00:28:19
Speaker
Oh, well, Africa's not a country, so we'll say Nigeria. And that overdeveloped countries like America and Australia, so the language says now that we've got less developed people, that's okay, and we've got overdeveloped. Now the negative thing here is the overdeveloped countries. So we're changing the paradigm with words and phrases that change the order of things because at the moment our language floods the whole arena and it's all very pro-capitalist.
00:28:50
Speaker
So that's one way everybody can actually help dig us out of that hole. Yeah, death cult certainly has a catchiness to it. It's got a great thing. It's such a tricky arena and topic because, of course, the argument is, oh, do you want people living in poverty? Don't you want to emancipate them with the power of money?
00:29:07
Speaker
Don't people deserve their Nike airs? Well, I think there's something else in the and the book too, which is John Bodley. He was an anthropologist and his study is about cultures where development has taken place and how every single time it has been to the detriment of the population, not the increase of it. And and we tell ourselves this. This is one of another thing I do in the book is talk about assumptions, things that we believe to be true, which when you actually nail down to them, aren't, but they're part of the cult.
00:29:40
Speaker
I guess that's one of the things that the main things i want to do with the book is explore ways of thinking that are outside of capitalism looking back in so suddenly we can see it better because it's really hard when you're on the inside to see what you're living as is as abnormal and we live.
00:29:57
Speaker
I call us homo-ridiculous. so ah Our lives are just ridiculous but they're normal to us now. So how do you change that? You use your language and you say homo-ridiculous.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm reminded of um Helena Norberg-Hodger's work and in the local, I think it was in the Local Futures film where she actually takes the people, she's working in Ladakh, a really remote part of, i think, northern India and taking folks into Western settings and actually just showing them the the disconnection and emptiness and and and cult that we're caught up in because, too, she sees that fetishisation of Western life happening there in more traditional cultures and that's really troubling.
00:30:39
Speaker
As you were answering the previous provocation, Linda, I was also just thinking of your your work around helping us understand utopia and dystopia in these words and where they might be found in history, maybe little examples of them, because utopia is is a word that I think a lot of people would see as idealistic and unachievable.
00:31:03
Speaker
And I really loved in your book, how you've actually went into different, well, there was one specific period of time where you could say. This might have been a little glimpse of utopia before it was it was crushed by the fist of a bigger
Utopian Histories and Indigenous Mindsets
00:31:15
Speaker
system. But yeah, I'd love if you could talk to us a little bit about utopia and dystopia. And I mean, i just want to share this quote of yours too. is it weird being quoted at? I mean, i'm I'm really into quoting you at the moment because you're just such a great such a great writer. But I just love when you said, we've rolled out dystopia to the majority of the planet with disastrous results.
00:31:34
Speaker
while congratulating ourselves for doing so. Like, that is such a tragic summary of what we've done. But yeah, I wonder if you could give us that little glimpse of where utopia might be located in history.
00:31:47
Speaker
This, to me, is probably one of the most important things in the Quiet Revolution, is that I attempt to give people back to themselves. um I, you know, my history is French, English, Scottish, Irish, I'm a bit of a mongrel,
00:32:03
Speaker
and I'm a coloniser. I come from, I'm a coloniser. That's where my heritage is. And it was reading back into that time and into that period when we had this this brief 150 years of what we was called the golden age of the proletariat after the very horrible bubonic plague which wiped out a third of Europe.
00:32:28
Speaker
Because there was such a drop in numbers in the population, it meant that there was ah a gap in the labor market and we were able to negotiate, and I'm going to say we, okay, yeah the we.
00:32:41
Speaker
This is the we that people who are still connected to their people use and I am really loving using this we. These are my people I'm talking about here. um They had 150 years where they took back control of the commons and looked after it because they knew they had to, because they had people coming after them, their own children. Their traditional thinking was to think ah thousands of years into time and and forward to think, okay, what am I leaving for my descendants?
00:33:13
Speaker
So they did this this thing, and i as I was reading about it, I realised that these people were Indigenous to that land. They weren't colonisers then.
00:33:24
Speaker
It was only once we were pulled, dragged, kicking and screaming and funnelled into factories and mines that we our mines were colonised. we We were pulled away from our people, our traditions, our land.
00:33:38
Speaker
We had nothing. it was There was a horrible little phrase that was that, the The surf owned nothing but his belly. And so for the first time in our lives, we primarily earned a living through the sale of the only thing we had left, which was our time and our labor.
00:33:58
Speaker
And we were ground into the most awful freaking paste. And Once we were divorced from who we were and where we'd been and we our cultural roots were broken and we were on our own, and this is when Thomas Hobbes used the phrase, our lives were solitary, brutish, nasty and short.
00:34:20
Speaker
He wasn't talking about medieval times. It turns out we were actually pretty progressive. We had microcredit, microfinance. we Women, the the whole gender gap, it wasn't there.
00:34:35
Speaker
You know, we get this, tell the story that it was just awful and I'm sure there were aspects of it that was and that was outside of our control because we didn't have sort of ability to to keep children alive basically when they were young.
00:34:47
Speaker
So anyhow, we came through this process and I see it as being that our minds were colonised and once our minds were colonised, it was only then that we were able to go out and be forced to colonise the rest of the world and inflicted on them.
00:35:04
Speaker
And that was to me that realising that that isn't all of my history, that a lot of my history is of being in the right place and doing the right thing. And yeah, look, humans have never been perfect. I'm sorry. You've got to be careful when you talk about utopia, that you're not setting up yourself to to say that things were perfection. They certainly weren't.
00:35:25
Speaker
But compared to where they are now, if we had not had capitalism, there would be a a lot less of us, obviously. I wouldn't be living here, nor would you. And the world would be a lot more intact than it is now. It wouldn't be facing down the barrel of extinction.
00:35:42
Speaker
So I think that was really wonderful. I want to give people back, and I don't want to detract from any other indigeneity, but I want people to to get back the fact that once upon a time we were Indigenous too, and while we can't be those same people anymore, we can recreate a new form of indigeneity.
00:36:02
Speaker
The way we do that is through storytelling, and which is the oldest, oldest thing of all, and which I'm really glad that I am a storyteller. And that my my fiction books, Eat My Shadow, and more lately the one I've just finished, Butten Up Buttercup, it took me so long to realise that the thing that's different about them is that they are indigify.
00:36:24
Speaker
They're about a return to inter indigeneity and how we do that. And it's very hopeful. i say I think that's the thing. we we There's a lot yet to be proud of and to look forward to. And, yes, the world is just the most horrendous place at the moment.
00:36:43
Speaker
And there's so much grief and it's not just for climate, it's for people, it's for the whole thing. And that's another thing I think that Palestine has given me back is that i had lost faith in humanity. I really had.
00:36:59
Speaker
and had, I just saw us as, you know, doing my best against the fact that I just saw us an inexorable tide to extinction and that I really didn't like people anymore.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then Palestine came along and they are, you know, of course, like everybody is crappy people and there's good people, but they're good people. And I'm happy to fight for them, more than happy. It's not just an obligation that I love to have.
00:37:28
Speaker
to do anything I can to help. And that made me realise that we are not just all Indigenous people, but we are all the same and watching their lives and their stories are no different from watching our own, you know?
00:37:45
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for bringing that in. So, no, it's don't apologise. I'm thinking about this... this passion that moves you and that's moving you in this conversation that has moved you for decades to experiment and share and put yourself through the ringer and in many ways in pursuit of of answers and and role modelling. So I'm thinking about challenges you might have experienced along that journey, whether that's questioning yourself, self-doubt, um health-wise, what have been some stumbling blocks that you might have experienced?
00:38:27
Speaker
I've been a Taipei person. When I work, I work solidly I never stop. and But I did have to stop because I ended up breaking myself.
00:38:38
Speaker
And I think this is, again, another thing that's happening with capitalism is that we are breaking ourselves, physically trying to push ourselves on the eternal wheel, which is only going to keep turning faster. but It needs to. That whole 4,000 times bigger in 300 years.
00:38:53
Speaker
three hundred d We will have to work faster, to be in more debt, et cetera. But as it is, I couldn't cope, you know. I i ended up working 16-hour days, seven days a week, and I had Christmas Day off each year.
00:39:07
Speaker
And, you know, I was a complete powerhouse at it, but i was so damn exhausted. and and i'm Sorry, just to, like, give a bit of detail. What work were you doing at this time? I started Seed Priest's.
00:39:20
Speaker
which was um my attempt to think, well, what what are people going to need in the future? They're going to need well-adapted, climate-adapted seeds suitable to the area, lots of diversity, keeping all those things that are actually dying out in circulation.
00:39:38
Speaker
And rather than just growing food for people, enabling them to grow their own food and get passionate about it, you know. And I certainly made people passionate about tomatoes. I think I had ended up with over 200 different varieties of them. but um So I was doing that and it it well and truly outgrew us really quickly.
Living Richly Without Conventional Income
00:39:58
Speaker
I think actually when COVID came along, we had to keep shutting the store because it was blown away. I think we had $30,000 worth of seed sold in one week and trying to keep up with that was just massive.
00:40:13
Speaker
But that, you know, people were really into it. That was wonderful. that they they They wanted to grow their own food, but that all sort of just petered away. And now actually our stats show that less people are growing food than they were before, which is a pity.
00:40:27
Speaker
The big stumbling block I found is that not only do I work too hard, that I always end up trying to do everything on my own. i don't ask for help.
00:40:39
Speaker
I think that's my biggest stumbling block is I don't ask for help. and But that we're all doing this thing, you know, and and I break myself on the level of I have heart failure now and i have limited my heart my lifespan considerably by working too hard. But that's so many of us and are on that treadmill that I eat well and I exercise, but not sleeping and eternal stress and working too hard is breaking people. all over the world. with ah The stats in the white revolution were that there were people in their 20s who were just working double, double, double, double double shifts until they died.
00:41:16
Speaker
And, you know, I think that's my biggest limitation and I think it's a limitation that a lot of us are coming up against. Mm-hmm. I did laugh out loud when I read you said bitching about capitalism only entrenches it. And I do feel like there's a certain degree of bitching that feels cathartic and rallying, but we've done that now. So let's talk about some of the... We can do instead, yeah.
00:41:41
Speaker
Exactly. Some of these amazing pathways that you've been laying out for us in your books and online. and now on the podcast, which I'm just so thrilled to be sitting with you here today, Linda. I can't tell you how wonderful it is to speak with you.
00:41:55
Speaker
Anyway, gush, gush, gush. yeah, let us let us in on how you see some of these pathways opening up. You know, if someone's there on the hamster wheel, stressed out of their mind, can't keep up with bills, cost of living, blah-de-blah, status anxiety, how do they either launch themselves headlong off of that thing or start tiptoeing away?
00:42:18
Speaker
Well, it's actually something, thing that I get. um I get people contacting me fairly frequently who read the books and who, I actually had a woman that gave me such goosebumps who, um,
00:42:31
Speaker
sent me a message to say that she was ah an ethical investment consultant. She had read The Quiet Revolution over the weekend and everything just suddenly made sense to her and she was going into work on Monday to resign.
00:42:45
Speaker
Yeah, she wanted to live a life that was congruent with with her beliefs and she no longer felt that. working a nine-to-five job was that, no matter what that job was really.
00:42:56
Speaker
So that that was pretty amazing and and there's been quite a few of them like that. But it is actually really hard and and I feel very much for particularly young people for whom this is not necessarily a a possibility. This is a debt trap we're in and and for most of us it is going to be successful in trapping us and we can't necessarily move away from it. A few of us can and we can leverage up those who are still in the system but not all of us can. We have to change the whole system. But I do think and do see a lot of people doing that whole
00:43:30
Speaker
as the the Chinese, what they call it, lying flat or tanking, who were just saying, no, I don't want to be part of this system anymore. This is not something that has anything for me. And young people are ah ah jumping off.
00:43:43
Speaker
But at the same time, i mean, why wouldn't they? They don't have the opportunity of potentially purchasing their own home. That seems to be permanently out of the most people's reach. But removing themselves when you've got a family, et cetera, and Look, another thing that happens too is that if you're in a relationship with somebody who doesn't have those same ideals, and this happened a lot after we wrote The Living The Good Life, we got lots of messages, mostly from women, saying I would do this in a shot except my my husband or my partner is not interested or my kids are not interested.
00:44:20
Speaker
So it it really is a social issue as well as a financial one. And I do feel for people who can't, don't have that opportunity to to walk away. It's impossible to walk away from the civilization. you As soon as you pick up a a hammer, you are part of civilization.
00:44:38
Speaker
But there's so many things that we can actually do that aren't stopping doing things, that are starting things and doing things that are positive. So instead of going, it's going to be, it's all about not doing this, not doing this, not having this, doing without, looking at all the things that are, I can have this, I can be part of this, I can build this.
00:45:01
Speaker
And there's this energy in there that's wonderful, even if it does mean you are still having to work a job. Yeah. think it was Frances Weller who spoke about how we've got this society geared around pursuing secondary secondary needs of the human person, whereas the primary needs, belonging, connection, real useful work, like all of these things that aren't for sale, they're languishing and leaving this kind of gaping hole in our hearts and souls. And this is the the hole we try and fill with more stuff.
00:45:36
Speaker
So there's definitely um what you're saying around orienting ourselves towards that sense of abundance and and joy and pleasure and taking delight in all the things we can do and have and be and engage with.
00:45:50
Speaker
and feeling like I've just been feeling so fucking rich lately. Like I make like half of what the Australian average, wait, less than a third maybe of what the Australian average wage is. I'm sure it's below the poverty line. i haven't done the maths for a while, but we've got like all of this firewood.
00:46:07
Speaker
have the most amazing partner and the love is just monumental. Like get to milk my friend's goats and have fresh raw goat's milk and make halloumi and swapping food and there's flour. It's like,
00:46:20
Speaker
I feel like the wealthiest, most like grotesquely rich person, but that's just my perception. And that perception, it gears me towards doing more of those things. And of course there's logistics around setting myself up so that I can live on such a frugal low income and a lot of privilege that comes with that as well. But it's definitely for me and a lot of other people, I don't respond well to restriction and denial and,
00:46:47
Speaker
and shoulds and shame like that shit will make me go in the opposite direction so yeah I'm like I wonder how you've kind of played with your psychology in that way and what you're speaking to here as well how other people can maybe change their lens on things I probably do without a lot of things that people would consider essential but I don't even recognize what they would be because I don't see them as ah ah as a loss or a... I was trying to think of something and and the only thing I could think of is that we haven't bought a packet of crackers in I don't know how many years.
00:47:22
Speaker
um Because, you know, it was one of those plastic-free Julys we started making our own crackers and we never went back to them. And it's not as convenient or anything, but I don't even notice, you know, because it's just become a different way of doing things, a different habit. And...
00:47:38
Speaker
And I haven't had an income for three and a half years. And I feel incredibly rich. So that means that, you know, I can't, I don't go out and I go into the city and I don't know what the hell to do there because I have no interest in in going shopping. There's just nothing new that I would actually want to buy. But i don't I don't feel any sense of deprivation. I feel quite the opposite. Just as you said, I actually feel like I've got so much already.
00:48:05
Speaker
And a particularly the time, the time is enormous, isn't it? it It's now i I think when I get up, it it's like, I have three hours of the day where I will spend gardening or doing something that's about generally food or you know repairing something or keeping something going longer.
00:48:27
Speaker
And the rest the day is mine and I feel like that's the biggest, richest thing in my life is that I can spend eight hours a day if I want to, learning new skills, teaching myself stuff. I go next door and get apple prunings and make baskets know it's trevor does most of the kitchen stuff because i'm really just not into it anymore i'd rather get clay out of the ground and turn it wild clay and pet fire it make i'm making a cool curtain which is a terracotta curtain that
00:49:00
Speaker
makes the house cool, you know, the air wicks the breeze as it comes through the back door and cools the house. I have an earth fridge that I'm working on. I grow oats and flake our own oats and that's just a whole learning new learning process, you know, perennial wheats. I'm growing perennial cotton.
00:49:20
Speaker
it's so exciting and I can share those things with other people and I have seeds and I can give them away and it becomes part of something bigger again and and you were right I don't have a lot of money but I am so damn privileged well I want to get on to reciprocity and eudaimonia and you've touched on those things in your response there but just quickly maybe if there's anything helpful as a summary that you could offer around how you've positioned yourself to be able to not have an income like what are some of those key considerations or choices you've made in your life to get you to that point because I'm sure people might be asking how the hell do you do that?
00:49:57
Speaker
but We were very lucky so in Queensland straight after we finished the six months basically that's when the the um property boom happened So we were very lucky to be able to sell the house at, know, I think we bought it for 88 grand and we sold it for 210 or something.
00:50:15
Speaker
And that was like eight years later. and i mean, that was insane. So we were able to buy, to come down to Tasmania, sight unseen, find a block of land and Trev,
00:50:25
Speaker
And I will say, Jeff, because I designed the house. He always says it's harder to design the house than he tends to build it, but that's rubbish. So I designed the house and I did anything that didn't require a right-hand corner ah angle and um mud. I did all the mudding.
00:50:41
Speaker
But he built our house from local materials that we found and we yeah we had them the motto, if there's a hard way, we'll find it. Mostly was about the locality, of being able to build something that was beautiful.
00:50:56
Speaker
but that actually represented our values, which was that it was either recycled or, I mean, all the timber in our house is celery-top pine ah that was designated for firewood and we saved it from firewood and now we have this most incredible house from timber that is a by-product from forestry that they didn't value and and it's the most insanely beautiful stuff.
00:51:18
Speaker
So we were able to to use that gain through the sale of that house to I was working full-time and Trevor was ah building the house so we built a house that's probably worth I don't know I'm never going to sell it so I don't really care but probably 800 grand in a rural area on two and a half acres so now we have this amazing asset where we can live for free know oh you can't no we can live for free but close and it's enough to be able to to grow our own majority of our own food from and to spend our time on and love being here so I think
00:51:55
Speaker
that's been a very fortuitous luck being and making use of it. And that's not going to be something that's open to everybody anymore because the world is changing very quickly and that debt trap must get tighter otherwise capitalism will fail.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Sorry, it's a bit negative business. Well, no, that's okay because we also, I'm starting to learn that naivety and idealism aren't necessarily things to be ashamed of and we can dream big when it comes to alternatives.
Eudaimonia and Reciprocity Concepts
00:52:27
Speaker
Let's talk about um solutions that don't necessarily get stuck on people's current situation and all of the traps that have been set for us.
00:52:35
Speaker
And i love um I love your work on reciprocity and then this idea of eudaimonia and an index for that and then putting it into practice via reciprocity, ah radical kind of giving back. If you can paint a bit of a picture for us, that would be swell. ah Okay, so so what i I tried to think of was if capitalism doesn't work, what does?
00:52:57
Speaker
And again, it came back to Indigenous thinking and Indigenous people think with with reciprocity and and reciprocity is a concept that people understand. So interestingly, I started filming people recently saying the word, showing them word and saying, how do you say that? And they didn't, actually couldn't say it most people.
00:53:18
Speaker
But so reciprocity with not just each other, that's a concept most people get, reciprocity, I give you something, you give me something back, which is not an Indigenous way of thinking. Indigenous way of thinking doesn't have any idea that of return. It is simply the process of giving, and that is that you make yourself and your community and your society safe ah by a process of giving back without thought of return,
00:53:48
Speaker
because if if everybody's doing that, then it can't help but happen anyway. And there's no time on it. You you know, we have a sort of a tip-for-tap tally board of I give you this and then only like like three years later and you've never actually returned favour.
00:54:02
Speaker
It doesn't work like that Indigenous thinking either. But the big thing that people really had an issue with was, and I'm going to ask, going to put you on the spot, Katie, They could not think of any form of reciprocity they have with the planet.
00:54:17
Speaker
thank It was just here. How do you do that? I can't even imagine it, they say. what's What's a form of reciprocity you have? Weeing on trees and composting my poo and putting some mulch on a scarred bit of bare dry earth.
00:54:34
Speaker
That sounds pretty good. I especially like the shit. I'm right into shit. I always say if you have an existential crisis about your career or your life or your purpose, just start composting your shit because honestly when I look at the creaturely world, no one's worried about their higher purpose. They're just eating and shitting and it's it's so it's cycling nutrients in the system. It's like just get that right and then start thinking about, you know, the books and the the whatever overlay you want to put on it. but Yeah. Compost your shit.
00:55:05
Speaker
Slight tangent. I'll get back to to mind in your a second. um But yes, one of the reciprocity things I'm doing now at the moment with shit is um I'm looking at black soldier fly larvae. I wrote about this in TQR, but now I want to do it, um which is that, you know, if if civilis civilization peters out, which, you know, let's face it, it's going to, what are we going feed our chickens with?
00:55:28
Speaker
You know, we have bred them to eat a lot more grain than they would have normally have done anyway, so we we do need to breed them back to to much more of an insectivore. and which they we can find their own seeds as well, but we don't need that concentrate all the time.
00:55:43
Speaker
i I found black soldier flies. So I'm setting up in our glass house um a the composting bay where we actually have five like tubs that get exchanged about every six weeks.
00:55:58
Speaker
And they sit there and they compost down. And then after they've been there for five times six weeks, whatever that is, 30 weeks, they go out underneath the tree and they get covered in mulch and they feed the tree. And that's always been fine.
00:56:10
Speaker
But now I actually want to find a way to feed them to black soldier fly larvae, the poo, and little insectary farms. Those black soldier flies do not come into the kitchen. They're not a vector for disease.
00:56:24
Speaker
but they're really great protein, they're full of calcium and actually feeding them to the chickens. So that's and a way I want to use poo. That's another reciprocity thing. And once you start thinking reciprocally about everything, you find all sorts of creative ways of being human again, because we are incredibly creative, but creative in the wrong direction. So reciprocity is a great way to get back on track.
00:56:51
Speaker
But eudaimonia is a fantastic word which I had never heard of and and then once I had read it, it does seem to, I heard it on linda Linda Woodrose mentioning it as well. I'm going, oh, my God, there's my word.
00:57:04
Speaker
um And eudaimonia just, it means flourishing. And so eudaimonia is the goal to make the the people and planet flourish and reciprocity is the practice that enables that to happen.
00:57:19
Speaker
And so that's the core of the quiet revolution, how that would look. Because a lot of times ideas are just really abstract. You know, I can talk about that abstractly and you're never going to have any idea how that can be achieved.
00:57:32
Speaker
I really want to look at how that can be achieved and I've created like that, an invented suburb that lives that way, et cetera. And people can start. Well, people do. They say to me, I read your book.
00:57:43
Speaker
And I decided that if that was my world, this is who I would be in it. And they'd get really excited and they'd go, this is what we need to be excited about what comes next. Yeah. I was just looking at that section before we jumped on this call and I don't know, i'm I'm extremely watery today and susceptible to flooding, but I was just, I just lost it because it was so beautiful and so rare that we that something like this vision is illustrated in in a rich and colourful and enjoyable way, it's just the abstractions, as you say. So I wonder if you could speak a little more to some of those reciprocities, those ways that people could be living and working in the community just to whet our appetite.
00:58:29
Speaker
o Because I guess it's going back to a form a new form of it in indigeneity, I mean, which is oxymoronic. But because suburbs are not fit for purpose, which is really wonderful, we've got books like Retro Suburbia, et cetera, to help and guide us on that way.
00:58:47
Speaker
So we need to reclaim suburbs and cities and rural areas with reciprocity and people and planet in mind. Reciprocity is reclaiming like a suburb.
00:58:59
Speaker
and it might be that we've got elderly people living there, well they can live in their homes for as long as they possibly can and we would actually help them do that. We would take over their gardens and use them to grow food for the community at the same time.
00:59:13
Speaker
We could have flocks of ducks that go through backyards, all the fences, let's take all the fences down. and Once we do that we've actually got a heap of land Let's create little pockets and places in there that you can hide away and read a book and have your privacy as well.
00:59:29
Speaker
But also that means that those ducks that go through and eat all those slugs in your backyard can do that and come at the other end. People are getting eggs at the same time too.
00:59:40
Speaker
All those add-ons of how many things can you add on top of this that cycle those nutrients that cycle food, cycle community through the same area, but also realising too that we have we're 500 years down the track and we've become individualists and we need our individuality as well.
01:00:01
Speaker
So I you just think it's... um The future is yet to be completely imagined and and I can't do it all i'm on my own and nobody can do it all on their own and what a wonderful thing to put together. it' And to that end, um I've actually made friends through the White Revolution with an Australian economist, Dr Alexis Wadsley, who I gave the book not realising that he had a and doctorate in economics and if he had, I would have been terrified too too terrified to give it to him.
01:00:33
Speaker
And he loved it. And he's championing it and saying, yes, this is actually possible. This is not actually a complete idealistic dream. um And so so Alexis is working with another fellow on a reciprocity board game, another way to help people to learn how to rethink reciprocity.
01:00:52
Speaker
so So the whole goal of the game is that you never accrue too much because if you accrue too much, you can't carry it all. you're better off giving it to somebody who actually needs it. And when they have something in surplus that you need, they do the same for you And the the only way you can win is if everybody gets to the end. And if some everybody's not getting to the end, you can actually trade off your goals, your go to somebody else so that you eventually you get there.
01:01:19
Speaker
And that is Indigenous thinking. There's a wonderful book with a great name that I can't say, unfortunately. But he talks about growing up in a South American village where missionaries tried to get them to give them prizes and ah be winners by having running races because they realised they really loved running.
01:01:40
Speaker
And they couldn't work out why all these kids would run to the finish line and then just stop and and wait for everybody to catch up and go over together, refuse to be winners. And they these missionaries were so frustrated because they were trying to teach them the value of competition.
01:01:53
Speaker
And the kids didn't realise it, but they were teaching their value of collaborative caring, you know, and and just how far we've come. Sorry, I get so excited about reciprocity.
01:02:05
Speaker
It is beautiful, yeah. And I'm just thinking, okay, automatically I go to how do I do this and what do i what are my challenges and blocks? I'm an only child. Well, my dad respawned, but um an only child for a long enough to influence me in that way.
01:02:20
Speaker
And, for example, I just made like a huge batch of halloumi, which is the stockpile of gold basically that's sitting in my fridge and from a bunch of milk that my friend gave me. And when I think about giving the halloumi it's like, no, it's my halloumi. Like I'll give them something that I don't really want, like a bunch of greens from the garden or some lemons or whatever. Like, don't know, I just realize and recognize as part of myself that isn't very good at sharing.
01:02:44
Speaker
Like I want... the security of of my cheese asset. And I wonder what you have to say about like sharing psychology or how we can get past the clutching.
01:02:56
Speaker
Well, it is. It's capitalism that actually encourages the clutching, isn't it? So I guess one of the things I've been thinking about late recently is that we are not going to be able to have systemic change, system change without cultural change.
Cultural Shift to Abundance and Episode Closing
01:03:11
Speaker
And you you you hit the words um that is – Capitalism is about scarcity. Reciprocity is about abundance. So, again, getting past that is getting past all those years of being inside a capitalist system. It is really damn hard to change those voices in your head. My mother keeps saying to me all the time, just worry about yourself. Stop worrying about everybody else.
01:03:36
Speaker
And I'm going, no, Mum, i you don't understand. This is the only way we're going to make it as a species. Trev makes halloumi. He makes brilliant halloumi. Goat's milk from our goats. And he gets such a big kick out of giving it away. And sometimes that means we don't have that halloumi until the next round comes. But the pleasure of giving it away makes up for that.
01:03:57
Speaker
And the fact that people appreciate it so much because it tastes so damn good. He loves that. So we actually, you know, it's taken us a long time. I probably was exactly where you were too.
01:04:07
Speaker
But now after all these years of growing our own thing and stuff and it's not, doesn't have a monetary, doesn't need a price tag. So that helps because it's none of that sort of tallying going on that level as well.
01:04:20
Speaker
And we just love taking people out into the garden and helping them help themselves. And it seems really weird because I think sometimes, gosh, you know, i would never think to help myself to be a pay packet.
01:04:32
Speaker
And this is our pay packet, but how wonderful it is to be in a space where I don't see it that way, but this is my largesse that I love to share. I think it's a cultural change that will happen as a result of cultural change.
01:04:46
Speaker
Well, so much lucidity that you brought to the airwaves today. I'm really grateful for your time and your stories and your offerings. Thanks so much, Linda. Thank you, Katie. It's been a real pleasure and a real privilege.
01:05:01
Speaker
That was Linda Coburn, whose books and writings you'll find linked in the show notes for you to roll around in like a puppy in the autumn leaves. I actually live in fear of scooping up a big armful of autumn leaves to dance in and inadvertently showering myself in dog shit.
01:05:17
Speaker
Anyway, thanks for listening to today's episode, friends. I feel like I have announcements and fun rescalience things to share, but they're not quite ripe yet. So maybe next episode.
01:05:28
Speaker
Hope you're loving up autumn wherever you are, or maybe spring if you're way up high above our heads. So much love to you all. Catch you next time.