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The Church of Mother Country with Patrick Jones
1k Plays7 months ago
Leaves and loam, feather and bone, it’s Patrick Jones from Artist as Family!
Patrick is Meg Magpie Ulman’s partner in permaculture neopeasantry, father of Blackwood and Zephyr, creature of Tree Elbow, songsmith, wordsmith, goatherd, grower, speaker, radical homemaker and reverential rubbish collector, most often seen on two wheels towing a load of scrap wood as one might bear a royal being, carried in a scared procession.
In this conversation Patrick shares a really special story about how he came to be Blue Wren as well as tales of anger, renewal, goddesses and content creation. It’s a gentle and beautiful thing which I’m really excited to share with you.
Artist as Family’s home on the web
Artist as Family’s blog (READ IT)
Artist as Family on YouTube (YOUTUBE SUX)
Happen Films ~ Creatures of Place
Martín Prechtel ~ Long life, honey in the heart
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Viscilliance
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Viscilliance, a podcast about skills, the resilience they bring and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us.
Lifestyle Adjustments Without Heat
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm recording this on unceded Jaira country, looking out through the window at a bright half moon tracking slowly to the west.
00:00:30
Speaker
The highlight of my day has been turning on the hot tap. We've had a late flush of warmth here in central Victoria, and in order to keep my house cool, I've avoided lighting my little fire, which is also my oven, my cooktop, and my source of heat in winter.
00:00:48
Speaker
It also produces hot water. So no fire, no hot water, no hot showers, no hot tub for dirty plates and cutlery. But far from being a nuisance, I love this system and its limits. I love being connected to reality. And the reality is that hot water requires energy. And that energy involves me collecting kindling, chopping wood and faffing about with matches.
00:01:15
Speaker
After seizing the opportunity to light my fire on this cooler than usual day, I now have a small and precious provision of hot water stored in the tank. I can get a few loads of dishes and a shower or two out of it before it turns cold and I'm back to whim-hopping it.
00:01:32
Speaker
I'm always really careful to eke out my wood-fired water, motivated to make it go as far as possible because I've been there in the forest, sweating and dusty, harvesting and hauling and splitting and stacking and seasoning timber to sustain my little hearth. And this is what I mean by living closer to the ground.
Guest Introduction: Patrick Jones
00:01:53
Speaker
It's about bringing your needs and their fulfillment as close together as possible.
00:02:00
Speaker
It's about being able to touch your life support systems, tend them, interact with them, without unwieldy chains of production and distribution, without the middleman. It feels solid and resilient, complete with frugality incentives, because you're the one doing the work.
00:02:20
Speaker
And even though wood stoves aren't amenable nor accessible to everyone, we can all bring something we've outsourced back home, whether that's salad or rainwater or education or entertainment. And this has me thinking of today's guest, who I encountered for the first time many years ago now on YouTube, singing a song about not showering and instead washing by swimming in the lake.
00:02:45
Speaker
Do you know who I mean? It's Patrick Jones of Artist as Family. Meg Magpie-Olman's partner in permaculture neopessentry, father of Blackwood and Zephyr, creature of tree elbow, songsmith, wordsmith, goat herd, grower, speaker, radical homemaker, and reverential rubbish collector. Most often seen on two wheels towing a load of scrap wood as one might bear a royal being carried in a sacred procession.
00:03:15
Speaker
In this conversation Patrick shares a really special story about how he came to be Blue Wren, as well as tales of anger, renewal, goddesses and content creation. It's a gentle and beautiful thing which I'm really excited to share with you.
00:03:32
Speaker
Before we get into it, I want to give a shout out to Susie Muir, who you can hear in Episode 3, and Andy Wildman, who sent me such high-quality, thoughtful responses to last week's release via email. Thank you both for picking up the podcast themes and prompts and running with them.
00:03:49
Speaker
Also to Madeline, who left an extremely sweet iTunes review, to those who send me supportive messages on Instagram, and all of you anonymous legends who tap 5 stars on Spotify for big dopamine and search engine optimization energy.
Interview Approach and Spontaneity
00:04:05
Speaker
Okay, here's Patrick Jones, and be sure to find your way to Artist's Family's website via the show notes and sign up for their glorious missives. Enjoy! Yeah, being...
00:04:19
Speaker
Being a man of my generation and being someone who is asked for their opinion, I'm wanting to be cautious not to fall into the whole expert BS. Yeah, I'm much more interested in connection. And I do fall into the expert BS quite often. And Meg and I are trying to do that without teaching too.
00:04:49
Speaker
And we always start our teaching on PDCs with like a circle. So even if it's on the zoom that everyone just checks in. So we could do that before beforehand or as part of it, but yeah, just even to drop in.
00:05:05
Speaker
Like, what have we arrived with today? I've told you that I've had a whole lot of liquid. But maybe a little bit more. Like, what have we arrived with in this conversation? And maybe then that can be deleted out and then we can just start. Or maybe not.
00:05:23
Speaker
I love the safety net of the editing suite, but I also love the playfulness and the trust that is required to have an unfiltered, unfettered, unscripted conversation. And I think you've felt the
00:05:40
Speaker
brunt for want of a better word of me, of my discomfort with, I've done a lot of free form conversational style interviews and then second guessing myself and wondering if I have to be a lot more prepared, show a lot more rigor and diligence. And that's why I sent you those questions and feeling something kindling in me of this podcast is designed to serve.
00:06:07
Speaker
the listener and I suppose I'm moving from creating a lot of things and potentially everything we create is an act of personal expression and self-satisfaction but there's something inside me and then living in this podcasting space now that really wants to be useful and really wants to land and delight the listener which is why I thought
00:06:30
Speaker
God damn it, I really need to sort this out and have a structure, but that's a tension that I'm toying with, I guess, and wanting to see which way is best to go.
Origin of Blue Wren
00:06:44
Speaker
I think starting with a structure is excellent because it's a set and setting. You're creating a container for this conversation to be held in.
00:06:55
Speaker
And then I guess there's the letting go. One set's container is like both. Yeah, both parties or all parties are in the container. Then there's this, I mean, that's what I like about a good compost. What is this? A good compost station. A podcast, a simple thing. Welcome to compost. A word, compost.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, it often starts formally and then just loosens up and that'll happen.
00:07:28
Speaker
The alchemy is so exciting to me. There's the fear and trepidation and the multiple bushways that happen before an interview starts. And then we bring all those ingredients and those structures and those expectations and something alchemises over the course of the conversation, which that feels a little magic. And it's quite, it's quite addictive. I don't know if you felt like that. Definitely. Yeah, particularly on your side of the microphone.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah. Well, maybe what I'll offer as a starting point is this morning I walked out onto my balcony at dawn and heard the tutoring of wrens and saw a beautiful pair of superb fairy wrens pecking at the ground, flitting around, he with his splendid
00:08:23
Speaker
iridescent crown, and she looking so svelte in her grey, and their tails, everything so clean out of these wild beings stay so immaculate. And I also pulled some cards yesterday, some tarot cards, and I pulled the wren card.
00:08:46
Speaker
And Patrick, it struck me that I've been marinating on this conversation and feeling a lot of excitement for welcoming you here. And I understand that your forest name is Blue Wren. Yes. I would love to hear you speak to the Wren and bring the Wren however you feel, too.
Daily Routine and Life Making
00:09:10
Speaker
Thanks, Katie. I also had an encounter with a Jenny Wren and a Blue Wren.
00:09:18
Speaker
pair this morning on my way to feed the goats. Ren is what I regard as my country name, given to me after three days, gently listening quietly
00:09:44
Speaker
fasting by a creek not far from here and I went on a big journey in that four days but on the third afternoon of the third day
00:09:58
Speaker
I went into a big hole and witnessed my death and the whole forest became this kind of thick, purpley, evil. I don't like using that word too much because it comes with so much loading but that's probably the best way I can describe it. And yeah, I just saw
00:10:28
Speaker
the forest just dying everywhere around me and I yelled for help and a wave of blue wrens came eventually a wave of blue wrens came and pricked
00:10:50
Speaker
with their beaks, everywhere they went they pricked the purpley light away and returned the forest to this just the most subtle and illuminating and giving and yeah beautiful light.
00:11:11
Speaker
So, every time I see particularly a blue wren, I just stop and pause and remember that moment I had in the forest fasting. And yeah, that's how I feel. So yeah, blue wrens claimed me and I claimed them in that moment.
00:11:39
Speaker
Beautiful. I hadn't heard that story before. I don't tell it very often.
00:11:43
Speaker
Wow, thank you. I also found myself using the Blue Wren imagery when I was emailing you about the things that I'd discovered, the gems that I'd come across on your website, having not looked at it for a little while, in preparation for talking with you today. And a word that shone, and I believe I said like a Blue Wren, was the word life making. And you'd referenced modes of life making.
00:12:12
Speaker
on your home page and I suddenly had a lot of questions about what is it to make a life as opposed to existing or living and I'd love if you can share how you go about life making.
Transition to Sustainable Living
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's fairly practical and also creative. So the day weaves between
00:12:41
Speaker
composting, composting human urine, walking branches of broad beans that have been stripped of their pods to the goats and checking on fences, bringing back a bundle of kindling for the
00:13:02
Speaker
for the brick rocket stove in the outdoor kitchen taking in buckets into the house that have been rinsed of urine that are soaking some sort of carbonous material or soaking into the roots of the citrus or other fruit trees lots of going in and out of doors bringing food in
00:13:33
Speaker
taking materials out, taking tools out. This morning I stretched a pelt of a rabbit that I shot last night out at a neighbor's farm. That rabbit is dinner tonight and that rabbit also is the
00:13:56
Speaker
the teaching of my eleven-year-old boy how to procure food in a way that is not farming. We hunt together. Plunging cold water. I'm just running through the things that have happened this morning already.
00:14:25
Speaker
sharing some intimacy with my partner Meg. Or rather, intimacy is probably too polite a word. Inhabiting the creaturely. Preparing a blog post from an, which is another excerpt from our forthcoming book on neopessentry.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think just the gentle weavings between conversing with neighbors and community friends, sharing resources and skills with them, making art, making poetry, writing songs as a family and singing them, and yeah, practicing
00:15:24
Speaker
what we call subsistence neopessentry or kind of belonging economies. Yeah, lots of walking for food and walking for medicine and walking for fuel. Subsistence, neopessentry, belonging economies. I'm sitting here feeling
00:15:48
Speaker
a little bit surreal because I've watched Creatures of Place countless times and that's the Happen Films documentary that showed the day in the life of or a slice of life of you and Meg and Woody and Zero at Tree Elbow.
00:16:07
Speaker
And as I watched that film in lockdown in Melbourne, I could feel that glowing ember inside yearning for the kind of life way that you were, you were tending and had cultivated over time. And now I'm sitting directly opposite you, hearing these words and feeling the imagery of your daily existence and
00:16:35
Speaker
that surreal sense of how did I get here? And how did that ember really ignite and lead to this amazing red hot permaculture existence that I'm lucky enough to be living right now? And I wonder how that ember, how long you nursed an ember inside for the type of ways and creaturely modes that you now
00:17:05
Speaker
inhabit. Where did all of this begin? Were you in a state of longing for a long time or has it been quite natural to you to end up where you are? Yeah, it was more anger that I started from a place of anger. Yeah, just angry that I was subject to the culture I was born into.
00:17:30
Speaker
And I'm happy to go back to that, but I something else also Rose there when you were speaking because I'm just thinking about the
00:17:41
Speaker
the plantain tea that I had this morning and how your teachings came back to our house, teachings on the weekend came back to our house about mellow tea and its interaction in the gut lining and just how it works as a binder.
00:18:04
Speaker
And, and Plantain is a real friend in our house and, but this was just new, beautiful new knowledge and just how that has, yeah, that just, I think the, I guess what I'm going at here is that the ember is never nurtured in one person. It's always across and that what,
00:18:35
Speaker
I've discovered is the more generosity and the more sharing in my discoveries, the more generosity and sharing in the discoveries of others come back. And that's where subsistence really comes alive because
00:18:55
Speaker
so much economic activity can take place in that flow of gifts. And in fact, much of our economy is now in that flow of gifts. There's a little bit of barter for building trust and there's still about 20% reliance on
00:19:14
Speaker
the monetary economy. But yeah, the beginning places have been many.
The Role of Anger in Activism
00:19:24
Speaker
I think of myself as a kid, barefoot along the Midagong Creek in New South Wales, yabying and picking the
00:19:35
Speaker
the flowers of honeysuckle and sucking out the nectar. I don't know where that knowledge came from. My parents were generous and beautiful enough to just let us kids be free and wild down by the creek. That's the first great gift I received, I think.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, so, and I think that gift of looseness and child wonderment and learning how to yabby and forage for blackberries and honeysuckles, that ember just stayed alive in me somehow, despite formal education and
00:20:27
Speaker
you know being very politically caught up and philosophically caught up for many years in the academy and in the city space and then a returning home not to that same creek biome but to a similar high country cold climate wet country with big old eucalypts and
00:20:56
Speaker
And yeah, so the belonging story of Mayan has been around 30 years in this environment, in this area, and just slowly listening, processing settler guilt.
00:21:14
Speaker
And then realizing when settler guilt no longer was in service to the world, it was a part of a journey into what is it that I am and who am I and what do I serve. And recognizing that
00:21:44
Speaker
holding shame and guilt if it's productive is important, but when it's not productive it's really ends up being Political and political ideological violence I think so recognizing the ideological violence in me and I guess belonging is
00:22:15
Speaker
yeah is is a lot of inner work and communitarian work yeah and it's it's that the work that we do by ourselves and um and the work we do with one another yeah and so recognizing that um rather than prepping for a dystopian future that where um
00:22:43
Speaker
Yeah, engaging in community sufficiency for a dystopian future Thank you for bringing that into the conversation I haven't quite
00:22:57
Speaker
landed on how I want to insert those notions of preparedness and collapse and awareness of the meta-crisis into this podcast yet, but I would love to have that as something we can thread to pull on a little bit further and down the line in this conversation. But first of all, I had a bit of a war of my left and right hemispheres going on as you were speaking, because in regards to the gift economy,
00:23:24
Speaker
So artists' family live predominantly in the gift economy. Is it 80% or something? Did you say at the moment? Yeah, like arbitrary percentage, but yeah, a lot. Okay. Yeah. So the left hemisphere was like, how did you do that? What are the strategies? How did you set yourself up in X, Y and Z ways to be able to make that happen? Because I don't know, it feels like it takes a kind of
00:23:49
Speaker
a radical intelligence to orient yourself and organize your life in a way that you can drop into a gift economy style of living. So that was my left hemisphere, quantification monster. And then the right hemisphere heard you saying beautiful things about listening and generosity of spirit and giving
00:24:12
Speaker
giving when you perhaps feel like you want to receive and soulful engagement in internal and external processes without a weddedness to an outcome. So I want to put that to you as something for discussion. How did you arrive in the gift economy in the way that you are, whether that's speaking to the strategy or the soul? Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, love the question. Yeah, so as I said,
00:24:49
Speaker
I think it's fair to say we, but probably me more so in the coupledom space with Meg and I. But yeah, my journey started with anger and repulsion for the dominant economy and its influence on dominant culture making. And recognizing
00:25:15
Speaker
that the economy we make is the culture we make. That became really clear for me in my 30s. And then I was a builder to pay the bills, to get back into my studio.
00:25:34
Speaker
um write poetry and make art yeah so a number of things happened then um for years i'd been wanting to go car free and recognizing that a huge amount of my money that i had to earn was going in
00:25:53
Speaker
Maintaining, servicing, and I had a balmy old ute, but still a lot of my income was going each year to that petrol. Maintenance, licenses, fines. I didn't start to drive sensibly until I met Meg.
00:26:16
Speaker
In a previous relationship I really tried to convince my then partner that we could scale down to one car and I would walk to work and bike ride and just deal with one car.
00:26:35
Speaker
that wasn't going to happen in the context of that relationship. And so when that relationship ended, I'm not saying that that was a catalyst for the ending, but it was certainly up there. I was growing in a particular way. I had recognized certain structural problems in my own life and how I was
00:26:58
Speaker
so welded to the dominant culture in that way, the dominant culture that I was very critical of in my art and my writing, more critical writing. So I, yeah, eventually that relationship dissolved and in meeting Meg we came together with all our different environmentalisms and she influenced me and I influenced her and
00:27:27
Speaker
But more than that, we just developed a collaboration of seeing how far we could take things. And that was really exciting. And it has continued to be exciting over 18 years really.
00:27:44
Speaker
Yeah, just without recognizing when we become, well, we are trying to take on too much and we become demoralized and recognizing in those early days, particularly when we consciously started to transition away from money dependency and big carbon or industrial dependency.
00:28:08
Speaker
that if we were going too slow it was also demoralizing. So getting this sort of just right speed of transition was important and so we would accept the feedback in that process and have lots of conversations around that.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yes, but I go back to the anger because it's often, particularly in men, it's an emotion that is almost problematic in men. Those of us being industrialized and
00:28:54
Speaker
hold a lot of frustration and have very little agency for facing our fears or speaking our frustration or going into
00:29:10
Speaker
our demons and so that's another conversation but I've become very passionate with men's work and hold a men's circle here in Dellsford just for deep listening really for men to get together and listen deeply to one another and not fix and not
00:29:31
Speaker
not do anything, not judge, just accept and open to another man's story and yeah, that's really powerful, powerful stuff. So I didn't have anything like that when I started out, but I kind of had an idea of when I was in
00:29:52
Speaker
wrong story and when I was in right story intuitively and I love that except the feedback principle in permaculture because it just gave me permission to do that on a personal front and I still use that every day of my life when I'm overstepping and overreaching and
00:30:21
Speaker
But yeah, masculine anger is almost oppressed or repressed in the culture, and particularly with sensitive, educated, inadvertently, men. And so that reveals itself in other ways. And depression is one of them.
00:30:46
Speaker
and yeah so I've had this relationship with my anger that I've matured with it and it's matured me because I recognize that
00:31:04
Speaker
When my anger is put into something or someone else, then that is toxic. And when it is allowed to reveal itself and I can be with it, it's not. It's actually really useful. So in a way, the transition away from the dominant culture, which is so aggressive and so masculine in a lopsided and toxic way,
00:31:29
Speaker
But male anger itself isn't a problem. It's actually how it's, whether it's, it comes with responsiveness or whether it's reactive. And I think that, that dance between reactivity and responsiveness is like a, has been a big learning for me and indigenous
00:31:55
Speaker
friend and teacher of mine, Jen Ridley, who's a Wiradjuri woman, is really strong in that space, like she's the one that brought to me that awareness around reactivity and responsiveness. And what I've understood is that
00:32:16
Speaker
responding to something requires a pause whereas reactivity is like this immediate sort of flare-up or attack or putting a wound into someone else or something else.
00:32:33
Speaker
And yeah, our culture is just full of reactivity and full of wounding, receiving wounds, putting wounds into others, then the wounds received, then go out as other wounds. And I still see this in myself like every day, like, you know, like it's still, it's just,
00:32:50
Speaker
getting greater awareness and being able to incorporate the pause and then the response. That's the kind of dance really that I feel really alive to. I'm not sure if that answered your question but it was.
00:33:03
Speaker
I feel like it really did in the most unexpected of ways because what I what I heard was you found an egg or honor in Meg and you were able to together push push your edges and see how far you could go and for want of a less hideously mechanistic word like gamify the transition and make it make a game in a joint and a delight of these changes which can be
00:33:29
Speaker
can be rough going switching from one thing to another. You mentioned
00:33:36
Speaker
being able to healthily express your own anger or find an outlet for that. And I'm wondering if you can, and then the responsiveness and the reactivity and just connecting that really strongly to what you see unfolding in our culture and what is almost certainly a collapse that we have on our hands. I'd really love you to
00:34:01
Speaker
kind of bring that home, that point of the wounds that you're speaking about in yourself and in many, many other people, how they are manifesting in the kinds of behaviours and fucked up shit that goes on that is kind of perpetuating this crisis that we're in.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, just on your first point, yeah, Game of Fire, I like that. I feel like, you know, in a way, Meg and I have created a practice of a new form of economy, which is then a practice of a new form of culture making or life making. So, and I feel like the only way that we've been able to go in so deeply is that
00:34:46
Speaker
it's a kind of holistic life practice that's not like kind of we do something over here and then we try to transition away from whatever to whatever. And that makes it really exciting without creating a kind of
00:35:12
Speaker
purification society that's been really important to meet people where they're at to honor that to look for the beauty in them that's why we love living in an unintentional neighborhood because the other is so pronounced and there's such learning and teaching in that
00:35:41
Speaker
Yeah, so our neighbours sphere is probably more important than our family sphere, our outer family sphere, who we love of course, but our neighbours are like day to day
00:35:57
Speaker
investments and care and generosity and looking out for one another. So what we have particularly since Covid and as the culture or the society goes deeper into collapse,
00:36:16
Speaker
What we recognize is that neighborhood sphere is probably, apart from the household itself, is probably the next tier out of significance and that can be developed with most neighbors if there is generosity. There are some neighbors that obviously we just, we can't establish or maintain relationships with and that's fine too, but the great majority of neighbors respond to generosity and
00:36:46
Speaker
non-manipulative gift giving. I feel like that's really important because there's a lot of weariness around gift giving, which is part of the culture we've come from.
00:37:02
Speaker
This might be a good time to pick up on the community sufficiency point and the preparedness for a dystopian future with a wry kind of smile on
Community Sufficiency in Societal Collapse
00:37:12
Speaker
your face. But I'm wondering what do you see as our future, as this dystopian future? What are you preparing for in essence? And how does community sufficiency meet that? I think it's a big fear for a lot of us and meet your vision for that future.
00:37:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think that community sufficiency has changed for me. Like it was, you know, I was before COVID, I was gallantly like this is, I was more of an activist.
00:37:50
Speaker
Now it's just like pragmatic, it's just nuts and bolts and finding the community, those in the community that are understanding the collapse, not to be exclusive to others, but understanding that we are heading into collapse and therefore investing more time into those who are working to prepare for that as well.
00:38:20
Speaker
and at the same time you know being open to to others who are approaching this time in a completely different way because there's always learning there as well and feedback that's useful yeah so
00:38:48
Speaker
But I guess community sufficiency is now for us, it's more serious since COVID. So how many relationships can we maintain? Rather than this sort of broad broadcasting of join the community garden,
00:39:12
Speaker
bring the whole town in and we can grow food together and learn how to transition to local food systems in very modest, unfunded ways, which is where Megan and I started.
00:39:29
Speaker
many years ago to now, well, who is actually taking food growing seriously and what are the interrelations we can have with them? What's the flow of gifts between our households, of which there's probably about 80 households in our town, of which there's an unregistered flow of gifts. And why I think that is really important for community sufficiency is that
00:39:55
Speaker
While formal bartering may be good for establishing trust between households or individuals, it's a really clunky system and you may as well just have money. So bartering is for us on the way from the formal economy, from money scarcity to flow of gifts, abundance. And when things are abundant,
00:40:24
Speaker
It's a relationship between not giving yourself away and not giving away your stalls, but when there is legitimately a flow to let it flow. Because when others have flows,
00:40:40
Speaker
It's infectious, that attitude isn't infectious, so all the different things that we do in the community are not to be do-gooder volunteers, are actually wanting to develop the gifts of the gift.
00:41:00
Speaker
There's about 21 different questions all coalescing into what may be vomit if I let them go unchecked. So what I want to ask very simply is, how have you changed as an activist? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, the last several years I've been really seeing how
00:41:30
Speaker
It's a little like what I was saying about volunteers. There's this sort of purification thing that happens within the activist class and I've just, as I've aged, I've become really
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, repelled by that. And I recognize it in my younger self, too. Just grandstanding, virtue signaling, and seeing that in my own activist class in COVID, really,
00:42:05
Speaker
Yeah, there was almost like a mirroring and I didn't like it. I knew it was in me. The biggest things we don't like are always in us, I've found. So yeah, I'm really investing more and more in
00:42:26
Speaker
people who are not in that class who certainly are thinking and acting and preparing in all sorts of ways from really small steps to really significant but just I think yeah four or five years ago it was like just
00:42:48
Speaker
most of the relationships I had were with people in an activist class, and now it's almost none.
Counteracting Dominant Narratives
00:42:56
Speaker
Or if it's not none, then there are people like ourselves who are certainly sharing what we're doing as a potential place of inspiration.
00:43:11
Speaker
but with lots of question marks and red flags going up around. Just seeing, for example, 20 or 18 years ago, we were like, yeah, solar panels and wind farms are going to
00:43:31
Speaker
be part of our methadone program for coming off oil. And we have a one kilowatt solar system that we bought in a community buy-in shipping container from China. And that's been driving our two kilowatt a day house. And then lots of walking for firewood, wheelbarrowing wood.
00:43:56
Speaker
and I'll half driving several appliances usually at the same time or at least one or two or three appliances. So walked for energy and a little bit of solar has enabled us to live a very productive household on just two kilowatt hours a day and the average Australian is 18 and the average American is 28. So just for perspective.
00:44:26
Speaker
But what I see of the solar and wind and the renewable sector is just, you know, the marching in of the Rockefellers and the marching in of the mining industry. And I just see it as the next mining boom. And it's not a methadone program anymore. It's actually trying to keep a pace with fossil fuels. And that is disastrous. Yeah, looking at
00:44:54
Speaker
how the activist class get caught or captured by industry.
00:45:00
Speaker
I mean, Meg and I, a year ago, had behavioral scientists, psychologists, who were particularly looking at culture changes. And they boasted in their introductory letter that they work for Nike and IKEA, and it's like, thinking that would be somehow impressing us, and they wanted to know everything about neopasantry. And so, and offered us $500 for an hour zoom.
00:45:27
Speaker
And we politely said, go fuck yourself. I would love to ring that response.
00:45:38
Speaker
And because that, yeah, that's just an example of our little niche, of how it gets consumed, how capitalism owns, and it walks its way into everything that's beautiful and shits on it and destroys it eventually.
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah so the activist class in the last several years just seeing the capture. I'm seeing these incredible books by Naomi Klein on your bookshelf and I just was such a big fan of hers before COVID. Yeah there's just and I think this
00:46:23
Speaker
path that first people talk about this constant relationship between right story and wrong story and just how quickly you can flip and I think that's what happens with activists and I've seen it in myself
00:46:41
Speaker
And I don't think, unless I had been doing that deep listening work in the forest and going and fasting for four days at a time and emptying out all the hubris and connecting with humility and the humus, which I have the same root word. I love that.
00:47:03
Speaker
I don't think that I would have really understood how I was getting suckered into certain political ideologies. Climate capitalism now dominates the climate response. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about, just seeing this every day.
00:47:28
Speaker
and even you know why are we talking about climate exclusively like why aren't we talking about the way in which we treat mother country like that which is obviously an issue with consumption so why aren't we talking about a consumption crisis which puts the onus back onto people why are we talking about climate which is something that's
00:47:53
Speaker
Of course, anthropogenic climate is being referred to, but it still takes the onus away from individuals. And it puts it in the hands of the big experts and the big institutions to make things right. And of course, they're in wrong story permanently, public institutions and corporations now. And so
00:48:21
Speaker
So anything that governments and corporate power take hold of is immediately
00:48:34
Speaker
the complete flip to what we should be doing. That's what I found. And so rather than waste time with that world, that dying world, that world that is bringing collapse and injustice and suffering,
00:48:54
Speaker
Why not bring it back down to the scale in which humans are best in? And that is the village. So rebuilding the village is everything. And yes, of course it's not like saying what is happening in the Middle East is not happening. Apply card and marching
00:49:17
Speaker
is still important, but unless that is backed with day-to-day movement away from being powered over
00:49:27
Speaker
by corporatism, then it's a complete waste of time. Like the placards come second. The way in which I live comes first. And so therefore it's not this yad rhetoric that just creates more ideological violence.
00:49:49
Speaker
I'm not saying that I don't create ideological violence because I probably do.
Gender Dynamics and Community
00:49:54
Speaker
It's hard not to. We're ideological creatures. But if it is grounded, if what we say is grounded in our actions, in our day-to-day, and those things are
00:50:12
Speaker
have humility in them, such as composting, and making humours and making more life possible, or being participants in making more life possible, then all we're doing is just, I feel, contributing to the noise and contributing to the suffering. Yeah, big resonance.
00:50:40
Speaker
I'm feeling like reclaiming, as you said, the humus and the humility and the human creature of ourselves and acting from a place of kind of willful feralness in some senses, like undomestication, seeking pleasure. Is that something
00:50:59
Speaker
that can be trusted if we if we undo all of the um if we come away from that religious overlay the purification station and allow ourselves to really drop into place and connect and be part of these living systems again and and re-creature ourselves can we be trusted to still act in a way that is good for the planet is good for each other that's where i
00:51:23
Speaker
I wonder, because I think that people get stuck on this idea of, well, if I'm not trying to be good, if I'm not forcing myself to be an activist or do the right thing or recycle my soft plastics, then I'm just going to be this rampant hedonist who's sitting on the couch, like, scarfing something unholy and ungodly and doing absolutely nothing. I think we tend to go down into that extreme, like,
00:51:45
Speaker
If I come away from all that known way of being, that domestic civilized self, what am I then? Am I wrecking? Am I just like a bull in a China shop kind of thing? Yeah.
00:51:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's just about integrating everything, like the frailty integrated with domesticity and the masculine into the feminine. And I feel like Puritanism is come by gender-lopsided masculine sky religions and
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I feel like the bigger mythological and cultural picture is in our deeper prehistory making past where all of the goddesses were feminine and that didn't mean that masculine power wasn't important or valued.
00:52:50
Speaker
I think the gender lopsidedness of our culture is highly contentious. I feel part of me not even wanting to go there really.
00:53:08
Speaker
I also have arrived at what I call the Church of Mother Country, which is listening, which is a kind of feral, under-worlding reconnection.
00:53:29
Speaker
Of course not to my ancestral lands, but to lands where I'm becoming an ancestor. And so I think structurally the big global culture has a problem with not patriarchy per se,
00:53:55
Speaker
I'll use the term even though I think it's slightly problematic but toxic patriarchy.
00:54:02
Speaker
and that patriarchy is often referred to in the pejorative, whereas when there is healthy matriarchy and healthy patriarchy and also healthy spaces for shapeshifters and those who define themselves in other ways, that's when you have healthy culture. And traditionally, for most of human history,
00:54:31
Speaker
we've lived in the feminine realm where religion is, sorry, we've lived in the realm where religion is or the spirit world is feminine and governance world is masculine and so sort of trade and you know all those things that I guess bridge building and standing at the edge of the village and holding back
00:54:57
Speaker
violent intruders and again I'm not wanting to be like really gendered, divisive here because of course there's lots of cultural, I mean shield maidens in my Norse ancestry also stood on
00:55:16
Speaker
the edge of the village and protected villages. So yeah, regardless of our gender, there are feminine and masculine traits that are really important to create the whole village.
00:55:33
Speaker
the witch hunts in the middle ages smashing feminine knowledge and grandmother knowledge wisdoms and herbalism and midwifery and dispute resolvers and
00:55:48
Speaker
all of that, all of that important holding the village, we're still recovering from that, and both men and women, and we still hold the violence and the trauma of that, as we are still holding the violence and trauma of industrialisation and
00:56:09
Speaker
the men of the villages being sent down mines and into factories and exiled from the home and household economy first up. Yeah, so I know there's a lot in there and there's a lot of generalizations and no time to really deep dive into a lot of that. But these are the subjects I'm really passionate about in a research way.
00:56:37
Speaker
And yeah, particularly myths like Pandora and Epimetheus and Prometheus as a creation myth for the West. I feel like that is so...
00:56:49
Speaker
I mean, yeah, the Garden of Eden is pretty incredible as a myth. But I feel like the triangle between Epimetheus, Prometheus, and Pandora is like really rich. And if we can understand how that triangle is still informing culture, I feel like that is a pathway to understanding
00:57:19
Speaker
how we move or where we might move to. And like any good myth, it's not prescriptive, it's interpretive.
00:57:29
Speaker
Hmm, great. Yeah, so evening up the gender lopsidedness I'm wondering too about the role of elders and law and The the wills of our hearts and souls as well as playing into this re-culturing that you're talking about Yeah Yeah, and I feel like one of the
00:57:55
Speaker
The most important things Meg and I have done in the last 10 years is to elevate certain people in our community in giving certain people in our community elder status and begging them to step into that. And as kind of, I guess, mentor, age people, really wanting
00:58:21
Speaker
some of our elders to step into eldership and also seeing those ones that are already performing that but not having the platform or the confidence to step more fully into it because the culture or the community isn't asking for that. So I feel like asking for that eldership has
00:58:46
Speaker
being, yeah, I'm getting tingly sensations through my body.
00:58:53
Speaker
Yeah, I just feel there's five particular elders that Meg and I have called. And yeah, they're just very beautiful people. They're what Martin Prechtel calls echo people. And I feel like some of that wisdom is, I'm starting to understand that not having to have an opinion on everything, being able to listen deeply, being able to reflect back.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yes, taking strong positions on things that need some strength but also allowing things just to also become watery and letting a lot go. Thanks for that suggestion that we can actually
00:59:43
Speaker
call up our elders because I'm feeling that we have an expectation, maybe a latent ancestral expectation that our elders are there, that we are held and we're tucked under some wiser
00:59:58
Speaker
force in our community and then at the same time we have a culture that puts older people in chairs and locks the door you know sits them in front of a television and so there's this strange expectation and then complete disregard of elders in our communities. I mean the other the other
01:00:18
Speaker
end of eldership is initiation and rites of passage and so both of us have got involved with the Castlemaine rites of passage as first as we went through that process as initiates and then now that we're part of the organizing group for bringing not just
01:00:44
Speaker
teenagers and their parents but also older folk as well who haven't been through initiation and I didn't go through until I think I was in my 40s and
01:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, just I wanted to go back a little bit because you mentioned eldership in a kind of, what does eldership look like in a gender distributed rather than lopsided culture? And Martin Prechtel's books are like so good in this space.
Australia's Cultural Renewal
01:01:22
Speaker
He's an indigenous American writer who became an initiating chief in
01:01:30
Speaker
Guatemala and in the 60s and his books write about that time and what the gender-distributed eldership looked like was was just big messy roundness not neat little logs around a fire like we we meet in the forest with our men's and women's and and our bushgoat kids but um yeah we're one
01:02:01
Speaker
I mean, I feel like people are really interested in that. I'm not going to go right into that space, but it was the first time I could see what that looked like in his description throughout the book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart. So Matin is
01:02:22
Speaker
yeah from a distance a indigenous thinker and actor who's really stepped the two worlds of modernity and indigeneity and yeah his work has been really important in this in kind of like how do we rebuild the village and his village was
01:02:46
Speaker
ultimately destroyed by Marxism, Catholicism and capitalism or fascism in the late 1960s. So after many years of service, he and his family had to flee and had been living in the States ever since. But that village is in renewal.
01:03:11
Speaker
And his work has been really important and his service has been to tell the possibilities of such a village that is only a few decades ago in existence. And that's the same thing about living in Australia. We've only had colonisation here for 200 years. It's like a blip of time. And even though we are part of that story,
01:03:40
Speaker
We're so close to living culture and renewing culture here in Jara country to non-imperialist ways of living. And that's exciting. That's what Australia as a nation... God, I hate that. Those words together. That's what this continent offers.
01:04:05
Speaker
not WHO treaties and complicitness in global corporatism, but actually how close we are to non-imperialism here. Yeah, that's a great reminder. Yeah, I'm thinking of sitting
01:04:30
Speaker
at Tree Elbow a couple of weeks ago, sharing a meal with you all and your swaps, the younger people who had been helping in your patch the last week or so. And we had a conversation over a very, very delicious congee that Tao had made with about 75 different condiments that Meg had fermented and brought to the table. But our conversation was around art and content creation and
01:04:59
Speaker
Possibly it was one of those, it's one of those streams of thought that I've been chewing like cud because it partially undermines a lot of the things that I do and that I'm drawn to do, which is whack stuff up on Instagram or create a podcast to share these stories, loudly, widely and far afield.
01:05:18
Speaker
But I also know that we share that suspicion of scale and a devotion to a networked kind of sharing, person to person and that spreading really beautifully as far as it needs to. So I'd love to hear a little bit of a rehash of that conversation from your perspective around what it really means to be living in this time of
01:05:47
Speaker
still this obsession with wanting to get messages out there, to change people's minds, to have as many different listens and likes as possible, and then bravely kind of losing a bunch of followers and saying, well, I'm just going to speak to the people in my zone zero or my immediate neighbour sphere. What does that look like for you and how
01:06:13
Speaker
How can I find peace with still wanting to make stuff and share stuff, but also feeling deeply skeptical of my desire to broadcast? You know, where does that come from? And what is the sweet spot? Yeah.
01:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's in the full recording, but earlier, maybe before we started, you press play, you talked about that this podcast is in a kind of service to the listener. And I
01:06:48
Speaker
way to see what you're doing as creating something. And I feel that too when I press publish with Meg on a new post and we do that about once a week.
01:07:04
Speaker
But I feel like we're in much better relationship with that thing, even though I still feel shame and guilt about looking at clicks and things like that. I look forward to not being so interested in that, although moving away from social media into just an independent website, it's not that big a thing. It's not much of a preoccupation.
01:07:32
Speaker
It's certainly really loving. We love to engage with their comments. That's part of the excitement. I feel like more than clicks, it's more like, oh, another comment, what's being spoken. But yeah, moving away from Instagram and Facebook and Twitter or X, it's just really good for my nervous system.
01:08:00
Speaker
And also I felt, yeah, the way that I, I think I spoke to you on that night talking about scale, is that when I went to art school, an artist in the early 90s, a young artist would be so wrapped to have like 20 or 30 followers.
01:08:27
Speaker
you know like someone who's following your work that would be incredible and now we're talking about thousands of people and not it's never enough and so yeah I feel like
01:08:43
Speaker
that whole global scale is Incredibly anxious producing and also not helpful. It's just I get I guess more of that noise and Yeah, that's not to say that certain podcasters or writers or poets or
01:09:06
Speaker
content producers and podcasters that we listen to do have a lot of other people and rightly so. I think it I've always
01:09:18
Speaker
I've always loved being niche. In that, I've always had suspicions once I start to become too successful and I've clipped various different art practices or stopped them from developing and I wondered whether that was this kind of self-loathing thing and maybe when I was younger that might be part of it but it was also more
01:09:46
Speaker
recognizing what commercial interests do to the poet. Well, not to the poet. There's no commercial interest with poetry, but certainly in the visual arts, I was invited to have my first solo show in Sydney when I was about 22, and I said no, and I felt like I wasn't ready.
01:10:10
Speaker
And this particular gallery had shown some of my work in a group show before a couple of times and then said, you're ready now. And I said, actually, I don't think I am. And I'm a slow maturer in many ways, but I feel like in terms of my soul, I was a fast maturer and have really
01:10:34
Speaker
I made lots of mistakes, said lots of stupid things, hurt people, but ultimately I feel like I've had a good relationship with myself. I know what feels wrong, and so I went away and two and a half years later I got in touch with the gallery owner and said,
01:10:59
Speaker
I'm ready. I have this show. I've been working away and I have this show of drawings and paintings that I'm really excited about and I never heard back from them. And I was like, oh, okay, that's good. It was hard at first, but it's good. Yeah. Wow. So that relationship was not based on
01:11:28
Speaker
slow burn, longevity, listening to a young artist, when they say they're not being ready, it was based on extraction. We're ready to extract from you. And I feel as I grew, I became more and more aware that that's how industrial capital art works. And so
01:11:53
Speaker
more and more of my practice became about disrupting industrial art practice and I've done a whole lot of things and then got quite popular and then composted that practice because it
01:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, but then with Artists as Family, I've found this sort of, because it's collaborative, it's not the solo artist, particularly the solo male artist, hubris, it's
01:12:24
Speaker
It's collaborative, it's animals and children, which is the arts, they never work with animals and children. Well, Artisa's family, we go right there. And it's, yeah, it's kind of un-museum-mobile. So, which is, you know, like a real intention of ours.
01:12:49
Speaker
And of course the internet made that possible, made our practice of songwriting and block making and more critical posts, more sort of critical analysis of the culture, a whole range of things really.
01:13:08
Speaker
and then just like hacks, permacultural, neopresentary hacks. Yeah, like if you don't just come to us to get a human or compost workshop, you also get the problems of germ theory in that presentation and yeah.
Storytelling in Societal Transition
01:13:31
Speaker
So do you still believe in the power of sharing those stories? Yeah.
01:13:37
Speaker
Absolutely. Okay, people are in the mood to integrate those learnings. Yeah, and I feel like they're not there for the longevity. We're in transition and maybe human society is always in transition of some form, but these seem like big ones. This is a big time for transition and so it's
01:14:05
Speaker
When do destructive technologies such as the internet, how can
01:14:19
Speaker
these technologies enable us to be rid of these technologies. I feel like every time I borrow a van, a friend's van, I am doing it for purposes that can
01:14:38
Speaker
grow more things, create more opportunities to be more and more embedded in a biological reality rather than industrial reality. So salvaging stuff from the tip. And mostly I
01:14:57
Speaker
pick things up with my bike and my bike trailer and haul it up the hill and down but sometimes using a bigger industrial tool or in this case a digital tool to enable us to have the conversations and again not be purists it's more like I'm leaning into that world
01:15:20
Speaker
every year a little more while at the same time and using the technologies of the dying old world and to help it
01:15:36
Speaker
I'd love to hear about your book, the book that you and Meg are writing, especially on this theme of creation and sharing. I'd be really interested to know what's driving the creation of your new book and also what your book is going to be about.
01:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's called Artister's Family's Book of Neo-Peasantry, and we hope to have your illustration on the front. I'm putting that down as a kind of...
01:16:07
Speaker
I don't know, cementing. Hopefully you're okay with that. I'm giving the sparkle fingers. Yeah, we love your drawings. Yeah, so the book is really written by both of us again, like our last book, and it is the day-to-day
01:16:28
Speaker
processes and activities and wranglings and failures and successes and harvests and processes and skills and relationships that course through an entire year and we're doing an experimental edit of it where each day for a year we
01:16:56
Speaker
each journaled a post and now on that same day a year later. So we're still in the seasonal thrum but a whole year later of that same day and it's very beautiful because the patterns and I mean obviously the changes but the it's really a lovely process to be editing in that way
01:17:23
Speaker
And also it's a slow edit. We don't have a publisher as yet. We haven't sought one. We're wanting to be in the process of it. And we're also releasing little excerpts as we go which like about one a week or one a fortnight. And that's lovely too because that's
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, just giving the kind of form some airing. But it's lovely because sometimes it's the two of us talking about a day that we shared quite closely together in very different ways with different details.
01:18:01
Speaker
Other times it's like we're completely doing very different things, but there is this sort of resonance between what is being had and then Blackwood is going in and out of those different days. Yeah, lots of relationships coming in and out of the book, neighbors and community friends.
01:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, and again, we wanted to initially write like a manifesto on neopessentry, but then we decided that that was way too hubristic and we just needed to speak about the day-to-day.
01:18:53
Speaker
And so there is like some hacks in there and there is some, it's not a how to book though. It's really, some days it's a how not to. Yeah. That reminds me of my friend always says this to me when I ask her how to do anything. She says, yes. Yes. That's her answer.
01:19:15
Speaker
And I feel that that's a similar response to telling a story if someone asks you how to do something. It's meeting it in an unexpected way that's far more potent. And I can't wait for your book to find its place on this shelf. Yeah, I'm looking at your books.
01:19:32
Speaker
I've got book envy, library envy. It's a bit of an amalgamation of all the tea house inhabitants but yeah they're good old friends those books. Patrick finally I would love to ask
01:19:47
Speaker
for your recommendations. If you have three or however many you feel to offer, permaculture, neopresent, recommendations that I think I mentioned to you could be anything from a phrase or a rhyme or a book to a course or a workshop. I'd love to hear them.
01:20:05
Speaker
Yeah, on a workshop front, I don't really do them, I'm a bit of a make it up as you go, but I did do a workshop.
01:20:21
Speaker
in Castlemaine a year or so ago on natural beekeeping Through the permaculture, Castlemaine permaculture hub there and that was so wonderful and His name, Adrian Yodas, everyone raves about his workshops. They sound pretty sweet. So good. So good.
01:20:44
Speaker
So Adrian, I highly recommend him. Vandana Shiva, a massive hero. I just love her.
01:21:00
Speaker
I love how she speaks about Bill Gates. It's just so funny. But also just how she just brings that feminine warrior into the consciousness in such a big way. I feel like that's her...
01:21:21
Speaker
her work on so many fronts and again that holistic, you know, doing the saying, doing the saying, which is awesome.
Book Project on Neopessentry
01:21:30
Speaker
And then people like Wendell Berry keep going back to Wendell.
01:21:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's a couple of sub-stackers. I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce his name right, but Paul Kudens and W.D. James. They're working in this really interesting space of
01:22:00
Speaker
post-industrial thinkings and you know doing a lot of the scholarly stuff and addressing a lot of the typical problems that come up in people like us who want to leave modernity behind incrementally and rebuild the village and that's
01:22:29
Speaker
uh... slugged by marxists and socialists on the one hand and capitalists on the other but these thinkers are really floating my boat at the moment because they're talking about a very different form of communitarianism that doesn't lead to oppression that is based on a kind of meritocracy and access to land for everybody
01:22:57
Speaker
but not hoarding of land, hoarding of resources. So it's not capitalism and certainly not socialism. And they're looking at people historically like C.K. Chesterton, who I think in 1926 wrote a kind of third way manifesto on what he calls distributism, something like that.
01:23:25
Speaker
Anyway, this is more of my nerdy structuralist self. How do we attend to the horrors of Marxist, socialist, and capitalist, and fascist?
01:23:40
Speaker
hubris of the anthropocentric hubris, hubris of the 20th century and that we're still living in that silliness and how do we rebuild the village where there isn't a powering over without feudal lords but we kind of reclaim a free
01:24:08
Speaker
humility, peasantry without like, rubbishing that word and without diminishing it and without understanding that many people have moved from oppressive and horrendous peasant conditions around the world where powering over has smashed the culture and all that is left is the poverty.
Episode Conclusion
01:24:34
Speaker
But how do we return to a glorious poverty?
01:24:39
Speaker
It's going to be a glorious list of resources that we link below this episode. Is there anything else that we haven't drawn out that you really wanted to speak to?
01:24:53
Speaker
I reckon that's pretty good. Yeah, thank you so much for creating this container. I feel like that was immediately, it's like a Pyrex. It's not just an old Tupperware container. It's really shatterproof. Goodness that we've got going on. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, Katie. I really enjoyed it.
01:25:16
Speaker
Thank you to Patrick Jones and thank you for listening to episode 12 of Rescilience. Please keep suggesting voices you'd love to hear from and places you'd like to take this conversation. I'm as intrigued as you are about where it's going to go. See you next Monday.