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Joy Over Meaning with Elisa Rathje
1.3k Plays7 months ago
Elisa Rathje lives on a small farm, on a small island, telling microscopic stories of resilience.
She's an artist, writer, filmmaker, podcaster, unschooler, grower, permaculturalist, goatherd and goose mistress whose work has fed me, and so many others, for years.
From Appleturnover Farm on Salt Spring Island (in the Strait of Georgia between mainland British Columbia, Vancouver Island and Canada), Elisa documents slow, simple approaches to skilling up and rooting down, normalising the pursuit of tiny joys.
This conversation roams between life as art, the illusion of security, community sufficiency, how to call on your inner grandma, decolonising the mind and becoming a propagator of small, ancient patterns of regeneration.
I hope you find much to savour in this sweet, soulful audio morsel. Check out + support Elisa's work!
Elisa Rathje/Appleturnover on Instagram
Elisa on The Accidental Gods podcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Resilience' Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned in to Rescilience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that will help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. I'm gratefully recording on Jara Country, Central Victoria, which is flush with autumn fruits and nuts and fungi, a season of feasting and fattening before the frosts.
00:00:30
Speaker
I've got chestnuts on the fire and dried figs on the benchtops for joakate crumbs on the floor and a perpetual pot of poached pears to keep my ice cream company.
The Power of Small Stories
00:00:42
Speaker
But what's really filling me up are the tiny tasty stories from the land, narratives so small you might not think them stories at all. Like the way my axe, when swung at the right speed,
00:00:57
Speaker
at the right angle, can slice a piece of firewood like butter. Or the way our lonely old goose waddles up to the milking stall each morning, waiting to share a bucket of chaff with the goat. Or the other day in the community food co-op, as I watched a golden river of honey flow out of a vat and into my glass jar, flecks of propolis and wax catching the afternoon light,
00:01:25
Speaker
My whole attention ensnared in its sticky descent. A friend once told me a story whose main character was a droplet of water at the end of a gutter, growing fatter and fatter and refracting the light, hanging on for dear life. The image has stuck with me for years. And I've been asking myself, how can I tell smaller stories?
00:01:50
Speaker
A story is an account of events, true or fictional. What makes something a story, rather than just an example, is the addition of emotional and sensory elements, like sights, sounds, sense, colors, feelings, goosebumps, goats.
Finding Joy in Everyday Experiences
00:02:08
Speaker
It doesn't matter if there's no drama, no hero, and no resolution. A story can be a moment of eye contact with a blowfly.
00:02:19
Speaker
I suspect that telling smaller, gentler stories from the living world can soothe our nervous systems, solve the inflammation of social media. Small stories show us how to harvest entertainment from the everyday, reducing our desire for high-octane IMAX experiences and energy-hungry Hollywood epics.
00:02:41
Speaker
Small stories secretly lower our set point around what we need to achieve, acquire and aspire to in life. And when we share pint-sized fables around the table, around the fire, to our kids through vast online networks, what we're really doing is relocalising our attention, making a fuss over what's right in front of us,
00:03:06
Speaker
Storytelling is a key human skill, a teaching technology as old as the hills that is coming into season as we drop into the chill. So, what itty bitty nitty gritty here and now folk tales will find their way through you this winter?
Introducing Elisa Rathji
00:03:27
Speaker
My guest today is a big fan of the small work, who lives on a small farm on a small island telling small, small stories through words and films and art. It's Elisa Rathji of Apple Turnover, a kindred goat herd and goose mistress and green thumb documenting the slow, simple approaches to becoming resilient.
00:03:51
Speaker
Her home on Salt Spring Island, which is in the Strait of Georgia between mainland British Columbia, Vancouver Island and Canada, is a one and a half acre heritage orchard teeming with food, fibre, fodder, fluffy animals, medicinal herbs, hidden rainwater catchments, stocked ladders, tiny spaces and permaculture logic.
00:04:12
Speaker
I love Elisa for so many reasons, not least of which is her honey smooth voice that could say just about anything and I'd lap it up. I'm sure you'll agree.
Decolonizing Minds & Regenerative Patterns
00:04:24
Speaker
In this conversation we talk about life as art, joy over meaning, how to call on your inner grandma, decolonizing our minds and reclaiming tiny ancient
00:04:35
Speaker
patterns of regeneration. It is so beautiful and I'm so excited to share it with you. A huge thank you to Elisa for enriching the Resculience podcast and you can find all the links to her work in the show notes. I've got some good news and shout outs at the end of the episode so stick around till the 11th hour and for now here's the wonderful Elisa Rathji. Enjoy.
00:05:03
Speaker
It takes real guts to, you know, grab a gander. And I mean, they're actually easy to grab, but you do have to have the guts in advance. And not everyone's used to wrestling large birds.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's not a module that I ever took as part of my formal education. It reminds me of grabbing stinging nettle because you have to do that emphatically. Otherwise you're going to be stung and geese have a lot of bravado and bluff and they're so charming as well. But once you understand their ways, you can, you can get past them in the paddock, but I can see how that would be intimidating for an outsider.
00:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's not really the first thing you want to introduce people to. I welcome, and you're going to have to keep the gander from jumping into the feed bucket and biting your ankles on the way to send him home to bed. No, no. Doesn't appeal, so. Yeah.
Elisa's Farming Journey
00:06:01
Speaker
So have you come from a family, a heritage of land-based living, or you mentioned you'd been at Apple Turnover Farm for seven or eight years. What is the backstory? What have you brought to this place? Yeah, if I have
00:06:20
Speaker
relationship to land and farming, it skipped a generation and certainly was fizzling the one before it, mostly because of immigration. So both of my parents immigrated and left in difficult circumstances. And so the places that they came from did
00:06:50
Speaker
produce food, but that wasn't something that they pursued. Some folks in the family did, but most didn't, and so that's something I'm patching together.
00:07:05
Speaker
right, with grandmother internet and just learning from being in places. So we ended up in England where the father of my kids is from and we were in London and
00:07:25
Speaker
growing a lot of like growing as much food as we could in this tiny little area and just kept talking about growing more food and chickens and all that.
00:07:37
Speaker
So we kind of got pushed there by circumstances, we got pushed out to Sussex and so that was really, I'd already been writing about traditional skills and so I just dove really deep into it and with it all the food and all the taking care of other people's chickens
00:07:58
Speaker
I really got to do it pretty slowly so it was about 10 years ago we were back here on the bigger island and got our first chickens and then our cat and really I remember going from no child to one child and one child to two children I think that taking care of
00:08:24
Speaker
gardens and taking care of animals is that same kind of like, oh, I have to be present in this way, or you will die. And I have to have some rhythm to an order to how I do things. And actually, my tendency is not to have any order. I wake up every day and don't know what should be in it. Like I don't naturally have a rhythm I have to
00:08:49
Speaker
really work hard to have any, and the animals particularly keep me in order, the children have kept me in some kind of, and I don't mean order, I mean like a rhythm.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, I really resonate with that. Like the blessing of being beholden to something as someone who naturally maybe sidesteps a little bit of responsibility and is like yourself a documentarian and a scribe and an observer.
00:09:23
Speaker
more than a participant naturally, but being pulled into those systems by the animals, by the seasons is such a gift for me. So I really love what you're saying there. But I'm still so intrigued. There's so, so much I
Traditional Skills & Permaculture
00:09:38
Speaker
want to ask you because I actually don't know that much about your story. And so living in the UK,
00:09:47
Speaker
and starting to write about traditional skills. Did you come from a writing background then? I'm actually thrilled for you to say, oh, I'm patching this together as I go because I want to hear from people who are learning on the job, not from a long, long line of elite level gardeners. So this is wonderful news to me. Tell me more about that interest, like where that came from and that process of inquiry.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I studied art. I told people I was an artist from when I was three years old and like from what I can remember. And my mother is an artist and my grandfather a musician. And so there were doors open that were easily wide open already that no one, everyone just shrugged. And they were like, yeah, of course you are. And I didn't think of myself as a writer
00:10:43
Speaker
until very recently, even though I've written my weight in journals, because my older sister is a writer and my younger sister is a graphic designer. And so then, you know how you sort of offer up this role and as if you can't each occupy them in different ways.
00:11:02
Speaker
With the traditional skills, it just became more and more compelling living in a country with that kind of history. And I just kept getting deeper into these traditions. But my art practice already was, I guess, I can't even call it multi-disciplinary. I basically would start with
00:11:33
Speaker
an idea and let it tell me what material, what technique. And so I already just love to learn. So I just love to learn new things all the time. I love to find out how something is made and make it myself. And I think it took
00:11:58
Speaker
It took a while to understand that there was a resonance between what is traditional and what is sustainable.
00:12:06
Speaker
But I think that that started to become more and more critical to me. And my writing sort of flowed into that direction. And I think once we'd moved to the land, we couldn't live in a city anymore. It's just so compelling to... I heard you saying this yesterday. I was listening to you talk to Patrick Jones.
00:12:36
Speaker
that immediacy, that closing down that space between what you need and how it's produced, where it's produced. And I think for me that actually it's enormous joy and pleasure when you do that. And also the quality, the quality just skyrockets, your appreciation skyrockets
00:13:04
Speaker
I mean sometimes the exhaustion I'll stop because I will pile on too much. But yeah and I have practiced some skills that I haven't returned to or it takes me a long time to get back around to them and other things I've adopted and they're just firmly in my everyday and they never leave.
00:13:29
Speaker
Wow, there's so much coming up for me in your answer and especially that direct contact with your life support systems. And I love how Patrick articulates that as well. I want to make sure that for people who don't know you, don't follow you online, haven't had the glimpse that I've had into your beautiful, just sun drenched and goat filled existence, are you able to tell us, give us a summary of Apple turnover farm or the story of Apple turnover farm in a way that you
00:13:59
Speaker
We just fell in love instantly and this place is only an acre and a half and people don't believe me when I say that because it's so well designed in the very first place.
00:14:15
Speaker
I mean, okay, so this is Sinkoten and Hulkeminim speaking people's land, the island is, and often folks would come over from the mainland, pause here for celebration and food events, and then move onward, also lived here. But this area became an apple orchard 125 years ago,
00:14:42
Speaker
And I have in the back, there's a couple of queen apples that are that old. And then, and then it became a homestead just the acre and a half little snippet 60 years ago or so. And those folks really knew their stuff. I mean, I can only imagine that they
00:15:06
Speaker
they must have known what they're doing. So they put so much in place and then everyone who's lived here has put more in place. And so, you know, we showed up with a quince tree and planted it and then found three quinces in the thicket, giant ones.
00:15:22
Speaker
And we came with some apple trees and now there's 24, like there's so many and pears and cherries. And so it already had, it was like on the edge of permaculture. It was the homestead. It didn't need very much, like there's even rainwater.
00:15:41
Speaker
capture here and when we put in our gray water bed we were looking at the plumbing and and there was already it was already plumbed for some of it and we realized later I had the pure luck of the granddaughter of those homesteaders getting in touch and she tells us stories every now and then she sees a picture and tells us another story which is amazing there were rabbits in that spot
00:16:11
Speaker
And so in this case it was, it was piped out to a peach, just straight out the wall to a peach tree that you could pick from the kitchen window. So these are like, there were already geese around the lake, around the pond. So it's like it already, it has its own preferences about how it wants to be, I think. Yeah, tells me what it wants.
00:16:36
Speaker
I often feel like permaculture is the victim of its own elegant logic. Like sometimes I don't see permaculture because of the invisible ways that it's working or the obviousness of it. Have you skilled yourself up in the arts of permaculture formally, or has that been... I know it informs a lot of your design choices and your life ways, but like what's your relationship with permaculture?
Pursuing Joy Amidst Crises
00:17:01
Speaker
Oh, I'm a bit of a rebel, you know, like unschooling my kids really. I've been listening to my dad talk recently. I'm like, oh, that's where I get it. I do have a degree in art, but that's about as far as I ever went to get, you know, I tend to just self teach. That tends to be, that's my practice. And I was very ill.
00:17:29
Speaker
like I guess a decade ago and luckily the illness while it I had to stay in bed for a long time my mind was still very clear and I read a hundred books in that time and they were all non-fiction they were all permaculture books and I'd
00:17:52
Speaker
I just had heard the word. Someone had said it, and then another person said it, and I thought, well, I don't understand. What is this? And then when we moved to this little lake on the main island a dozen years ago, basically after we came back from England, someone said, oh, well, you have to go up and see Gordon Anne at EcoSense. They've got a permaculture nursery, and they built their Cobb House and the works.
00:18:22
Speaker
and they're dear dear friends but I had that it was such a great thing because my first encounter was not a book it wasn't a video was just walking in and seeing what they had done and how it was working and so yeah then I read everything I could get my hands on but I would say
00:18:46
Speaker
And I've heard this from other people, often Aussies, there seems to be this link, I would like to have a little bridge going over, that it's like there's this constellation of practices where art school and attachment parenting and
00:19:11
Speaker
herbalism, foraging, or natural healing kinds of modalities. It's almost like permaculture is just waiting for you to follow one of those little pathways and get there. And that for me as an artist designer, it really appeals because no one's telling you what to do.
00:19:34
Speaker
but they're offering you principles. And that to me is the most useful thing. Yeah, I love that image of all of the little pathways through the undergrowth, like that we're tracking.
00:19:50
Speaker
back to some essential, like we're seeking something. I wonder if every person has this kind of yearning, every modern person perhaps, or if it is something unique to these arty, farty, green-thumbed, permies. I don't know, like what is at the core of your search for meaning, I suppose? Hmm, wow.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I think there's a couple of answers to that. One is, I'm not exactly searching for meaning. I'm finding joy.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, and increasingly with grief and huge tumultuous change in my own life and then seeing it in the greater world and the climate and the everything, the everything. Right? Crises, all the crises, I think I've needed to go even closer to that, like,
00:21:03
Speaker
why am I here? And like, how can I just be open to the pure joy of whatever this is in this moment? And sometimes I'm doing that just to continue to exist, to continue to be okay and to, yeah, not get caught up in
00:21:30
Speaker
the, the future and imagining a future from that fearful spot. So coming back to joy is one thing. And but then I could answer it another way and say, you know, when you when you're looking at all of these,
00:21:57
Speaker
crises and just every problem that comes up all through your life and the lives of the people around you, I'm looking for patterns and I'm looking for what's working and what's not working. And so for me that's
00:22:16
Speaker
that's often what I'm writing about or thinking about is like, how do we make sense of what's happening and what has happened and what could happen? Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, the joy comes first, I feel, for me as well. But it does make me very curious about your theory of change, and I know you've been interviewed by Amanda Scott
00:22:42
Speaker
on the Accidental Gods podcast which is absolutely the podcast that I preferentially listen to when I'm rolling around on the floor stretching of an afternoon and I just need someone comforting in my ears and I was so thrilled when your voice started bouncing out of my device that day.
00:23:01
Speaker
And she asks that question of her guests, you know, what is your theory of change? What do you think makes a difference? What are those patterns that you have seen propagating something generative and healthy as opposed to extractive and destructive? Yeah, I love her work. I love her work so much. And that was a really good conversation. Yeah, theory of change. For me,
00:23:31
Speaker
I think that when I get too big, when I think too big about the world, I can just feel really powerless and hopeless and I'm no good to anybody at the end of one of those days that I'm no good to my family and I have enough responsibility that I really have to be.
00:24:01
Speaker
and increasingly so as as elders age and yeah I so I need to be sustained and that usually means to to bring it back to what I can reach with my own hands.
00:24:21
Speaker
And I have consistently been surprised at what I can reach with my own hands and in connection with community.
Life-Giving vs. Extractive Patterns
00:24:32
Speaker
And so I write about the small work and the small work for me is
00:24:41
Speaker
It still is something I continue to explore and I write essays frequently. As things come up in my life, I'll look at it through this lens of what is the pattern that's underlying
00:24:59
Speaker
dominant culture and what is the pattern that's underlying what is actually life-giving and for me I can see that life-giving parts and the parts that I've been participating in as a mother and unschooler and gardener and
00:25:26
Speaker
And all of these different roles, they're collaborative. They're going towards symbiosis. And so the solutions that I'm looking for have that quality. And I see that in, it's very clear in traditional cultures. It's very clear in attachment. It's very clear in
00:25:50
Speaker
as soon as you start growing your food and realize just how much you're not growing your food. And so I think that a lot of the work that needs to happen is actually laying down
00:26:11
Speaker
at the smallest level, new patterns. Or I hate to say new because they're ancient, but right now they are quite new. And to unpick when we are using the competitive, the dominating, the
00:26:33
Speaker
colonizing pattern and often that is just in my own mind that I can be using that very
00:26:49
Speaker
you know, it's a conquering, it's a conquering way of being and I can try to conquer myself and I can try to conquer my children or the garden or, you know, the animals and the goats aren't really amenable to being conquered, they're pretty good at not being conquered but there are characters that aren't as, you know, resistant and they have been and
00:27:15
Speaker
So to bring a different pattern to this, I think by nature, like David Holmgren talks about this, and of course the small slow solutions principle is the friend and relation of this.
00:27:34
Speaker
We can't change from that gigantic upper political socio-economic way up there out of our reach when they're doing crazy things and they, who's they? They go home.
00:27:51
Speaker
and they eat food and they get dressed and they move around somehow and they have heat and they have light. So what are they doing? What am I doing? And how can we do this in a different way? So I usually am looking directly at how I live because that's what's immediate to me. And even the pattern of your language inspires me and it
00:28:15
Speaker
harks, it harks to what you're saying, you know, you invite the ducks into the kitchen garden to do some weeding and to faucet and noodle around I think were your words and that idea is different too. We get the ducks to do this and even like even the way that you create your beautiful videos in
00:28:38
Speaker
From a perspective of humility, you know, you look at what the chickens are doing, sunning their feathers and take your cues from that time to hang the washing on the line to get that beautiful sterilizing sunlight. That in itself flips our colonizing approach and I just love that.
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because the sensitivity of the characters in my family is such that even if I were to try to go too far in one direction of seeing the chickens in any kind of instrumentalizing way, they would pull me back. And I understand that
00:29:21
Speaker
You know to farmers they I'm not a farmer, but I am a small holder and and the considerations when they are purely economic and that that particular economy that we are being run by That is that is inherently that conquering pattern That that that profiting pattern it it will run you wrong
00:29:51
Speaker
and it will run everybody in your way wrong. And as soon as you move it to that intimacy of collaboration, like your collaborator, when she's a chicken, she'll let you know what she wants. She's gonna show you what she needs. Yeah, and it is that first principle of observe and interact that starts opening you to that possibility. The goats in our old ancient
00:30:21
Speaker
bachelor goose cooperate in the mornings when I go to milk and I put the milking bucket down when one of them is finished and she can just finish off her meal while the other's on the stall and the old white goose is loitering in the wings because he's going to share that bucket of food with the goat and they kind of take turns to stick their head in and occasionally one will kind of butt
00:30:44
Speaker
or bleeped at the other, but it's just, it's such a, it disrupts my idea that everything's in compartments and animals don't communicate and they're just these inert things in our environment that are for our own gain. And I've also been watching like the kookaburras and the kurrawongs and the magpies interact in really extraordinary ways, you know, looking at different bits of real estate, you know, hollows in trees and it's actually,
00:31:11
Speaker
It has a sense of enchantment to me too and enchanting is one of the prevailing feelings I have when I look at your work. I'm enchanted again by the simplicity and beauty of the everyday relationships between things and in the natural world. It sounds like you've always had that eye for wonder and seeing the small stuff that maybe a lot of us filter out. I don't know, would you say that that's true?
00:31:42
Speaker
Oh, I think so. My mother used to say that she could just give me something tiny to play with and I'd be busy for hours.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. And I do love. It's amazing. I wonder why I spend any time inside the house at all. Because when you go out, I'm a different person. And so, so much falls away. And of course, this is a little
00:32:14
Speaker
Protected oasis and for so many reasons it is it is such a safe little spot Not to say that life doesn't happen and I know you've been there with or death, you know And it is real and then I go this is intense and it is immediate as well sickness and death and or just like
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, that is also as immediate, but yeah, the enchantment. I do feel like this place just has its own, that's probably the quality that we fell for in the first place. Yeah, you can feel it and
00:33:03
Speaker
And it really, I think it's smallness also, although I don't feel like it's small some days. Some days I'm like, this is way too much. What the? I can't keep up with all of this. There's no way. And I don't. But I do feel like the size of it allows for some real rooting down into
00:33:27
Speaker
tiny projects which is my favorite thing, my happy thing, so I just um you know like oh this fence is falling down it's totally rotted out the this is like disaster and then I panic and then I'm thinking wait a minute it's really close to the creek you shouldn't have built a fence here but
00:33:49
Speaker
A willow fence would love it here. And so if I can get myself in gear and actually get the willow for the fence, then that thing is just going to be content and there's no post. I don't have to do that anymore. I'm not worried about it falling down. In fact, I've already harvested the wood and just left a wire fence that was there and used the wood for other things because that's not going to work there. It's just going to rot. And so I love those
00:34:20
Speaker
I love, to me, I think that is art here. Making films now, it's very much more like, oh, you are an artist. That's kind of obvious from the form. But I would say the first few years that we're here, I wasn't doing that. And the form really was the living and those little projects where you go, oh, but what would really be great is ducks.
00:34:50
Speaker
And that old building that was just a shelter would be a great duck house if we could do this and this and this to it. How do we do that? Yeah, there's the listening and then there's the understanding of the interlocking relationships and the ways of things that is almost like a language in itself that you gradually understand because there is the ecological literacy
00:35:15
Speaker
you know, that allows you to understand that a willow wants to have wet feet and you can have a living fence growing near that waterway as opposed to a rotting bit of dead timber. So yeah, do you set aside time to study, you know, to like really get to grips with the different personalities of trees or plants and animals, or are you really naturally gleaning those insights along the way?
00:35:45
Speaker
Hmm. I think it's always both. It's always been back and forth.
00:35:54
Speaker
I mean, you know, this is a goat herd that you're just out there. And so there's, of course, you're going to observe. And just living in a place throughout the seasons, you know, you're getting a sense of what's needed somewhere or what's failing somewhere. Where you could put something, you get exciting ideas. I mean, I think the world, if anything, right now is just
00:36:23
Speaker
chockers with ideas like you. I have overwhelming lists of things I would like to do. And also, I've been lucky we have a great permaculture group on the island and we go to each other's gardens, which is a fantastic way to learn. So I am
00:36:48
Speaker
I am always studying and my kids send me stuff all the time. There's a constant, probably daily I get several things. Oh, you know, you can tie this fabric up and this knot and then you don't even have to have a cloth bag with you because you've already got, right?
Problem Solving & Community Dynamics
00:37:07
Speaker
And those sorts of solutions, that's actually my idea of fun. Like it really is.
00:37:14
Speaker
And I'm realizing as a late-stage ADHD kind of self-diagnosis that solutions are dopamine, and I am so after those kind of hits, they feel good. They feel good, and I actually think that's kind of the point is
00:37:39
Speaker
we can worry about a future where we're going into we don't know what and how are we going to manage it but we're not there yet and right now is an amazing moment with the internet the way it is and libraries and books and people sharing and videos like it's insane what you can learn and how easily
00:38:05
Speaker
It's a great time to be reskilling like it's nuts and it's fun. It is so fun. It's so satisfying and I think my whole day is pretty much oriented to like moving everything else aside as quickly as possible or ignoring it and neglecting it. That also happens so that I can spend more time on one of these projects.
00:38:34
Speaker
Oh yes, you brought the future into the conversation which I really do want to ask you about. But first of all, you express this gorgeous sentiment around living your life itself as the form and the practice. But what I am curious about is
00:38:56
Speaker
how you see the sharing of that. What effect do you think it has posting a reel, having an online presence? Is that really just an extension of your artwork and the nature of creativity in that it wants participation and a responder? Or do you feel like it still is a good idea to be propagating this stuff in a space like Instagram?
00:39:25
Speaker
Hmm. I know, I definitely have had my struggles with...
00:39:33
Speaker
With different forms of media, when I was graduating from art school, I had an exhibition in the city and also did street banners for the whole city. Well, not the whole city, but where they have their street banners, I did those. And it was like a moment of being an emerging artist
00:39:59
Speaker
after which I had a child very young and have been patching my art practice in around the edges. But at that moment, I really was reckoning with the gallery system.
00:40:16
Speaker
And that whole, Patrick touched on this too. This is like, that whole thing is based in an economy of extraction. So I had already kind of, yeah, been thinking about what happens with art in a rarefied space where you have to have an education in advance. And to me,
00:40:40
Speaker
missed the point. Like, why would I want this just to be for people who are in the know? I think that for me, Instagram, YouTube, all of these things are super compelling because they, okay, you are reckoning with the algorithm.
00:41:02
Speaker
But otherwise, there is no gatekeeper. You get up and you do your thing. You put it out there and people respond. Maybe you're having trouble reaching people. Maybe you're like, oh my god, I got to get up at 6am and post this. Okay, now I can schedule it. I can actually sleep. But if I don't post every week, I'm going to disappear. There's way too much pressure. Nevertheless, I had someone tell me the other day that
00:41:27
Speaker
my films weren't really film festival films. And I thought, well, I didn't actually ask you to, you know, like you invited me to send you one of my films. I didn't make it for a film festival. I made it to be used. And YouTube is where you go to learn stuff, to take action on. And to me, that is what my work is for, is to move you into action.
00:41:57
Speaker
And so I don't think this is any worse or any better than what we had when I graduated 30 years ago.
00:42:08
Speaker
uh no not quite that long but you know it it there there are still gatekeepers but they've got to step over you've just published your zine it's amazing it's gorgeous you directed it no one told you what to do and fantastic you didn't need them to why would you need them to yes we have tons of stuff on the internet but i welcome that like i i really think it's
00:42:36
Speaker
Joseph Boy is one of my favorite artists. Everyone is an artist. To bring in the activism, right? You want people to see your zines. It matters if they do. It matters that more people do. It doesn't have to be everybody, but more people, I would like more people to see your work. And that's something that I think
00:43:08
Speaker
Yeah, it is a challenge and I keep playing around with it. I work on Patreon and I just adopted the Instagram subscriptions and some people said that they wanted to
00:43:24
Speaker
subscribe to Apple Turnover there because there would be less noise, and they can just go and spend that time with it. And it's a way to connect, and there probably will be multiple other ones in the future. But for now, I'm willing to play with this one. I suppose I'm going to call it one of the taglines of Apple Turnover, but the small work on a small farm on a small island, I think that's really beautiful.
00:43:52
Speaker
I've spent a lot of time in Tasmania which is an island off an island and there is something to be said for being in a contained place and your mind kind of has as a geographic boundary and there's a safety in that and there's a nice limit around that. Being on an island in this time
00:44:21
Speaker
you know, how much is there for you around the seclusion and the what's happening out there versus what's happening in here and we have a big moat around us. Like, is that part of the reason you love Island Life? Hmm.
00:44:40
Speaker
Yeah, there is a certain moment when the tourists arrive and I live on actually a very busy road. There's like one main road and I live on that. And the noise when you're trying to make a film.
00:44:56
Speaker
is intense and I wish they were all on bicycles. And I keep, when I can, try to participate in the work of making that a possibility, like sharing vehicles and just staying home more, just stay home. But, you know, I, and so there is
00:45:20
Speaker
because it's such a gorgeous place. There is this influx of people and then they do kind of fall away in the winter.
00:45:33
Speaker
I think the limits are really vivid. I love what you said about having that image in your head of the edges. That's true and that you just have a sense. It scared me at first when I first moved to even the big island, like what you couldn't access and like, oh, this is suddenly not easy or this is twice the price or,
00:45:59
Speaker
you're going to have to travel for a few hours to get to whatever this is. And yeah, that also being a blessing and protected. So it's like vulnerable and protected. It's a really weird mix, especially thinking about these ferries or fossil fuels.
00:46:21
Speaker
what are we going to do? How are we going to do that? And yet at the same time, this land for a while there, sort of Victorian and for a few decades after, produced a lot of food that they were sending elsewhere.
00:46:39
Speaker
And so the capacities are there, but the economy at this point is not. Folks want to come to our farmers market, but that doesn't mean that the people locally are buying all their food there. They're not. Food being cheap,
00:46:56
Speaker
still seems to be like a massive pursuit. But there's tons of activism to become more food secure. Have I totally lost the thread? I think I have lost the thread.
00:47:14
Speaker
gingerly coming around to is at this point in time, what your perception of the future is and how you're thinking about it in terms of your own resilience, your household, your place. You mentioned that, yeah, maybe once upon a time it was a food bowl there on Salt Spring Island, but like what happens if the fairies can't run? What are you, are you prepping in any way or are you letting the unfolding unfold and surrendering to that? Hmm.
00:47:43
Speaker
Um, I do think so slowly and, um, so small and usually with my own hands and by bicycle and with hand tools. So I, I probably couldn't prep if I tried, like I, I'm, I'm not that organized and I haven't really thought it through, like I'm tend to be a little bit haphazard. Um, and, or, or I'm just going at it more like, uh,
00:48:12
Speaker
We can't eat wheat, but fresh ground grain is amazing. And like, you can hook up this grain mill to a bicycle. Do we have a bicycle? We've got a kid's bicycle. Well, what if I attach it to this? Hey, dad, how do you think I could brace this thing? And then, hey, Miles, how do you want to help me to like construct this thing? And then we've done it. And then we mill our grain.
00:48:38
Speaker
And so it's sort of prepping. It certainly mattered during the pandemic. And so that was a good test. But more than anything, it matters. Like, spelt bread is like $10 a loaf. It's insane. And doesn't taste anything like what we can make. Now, my life of late has been so intense. I haven't been baking spelt bread, but I can I can bake some crackers and
00:49:07
Speaker
whatever. So these are prepping to me. There's no point in me prepping. There's just no point. It has to be the whole community. It has to really be the whole island.
Collaboration for Future Challenges
00:49:21
Speaker
Like really, we all have to be in or someone's going to get mad and do something awful, right? Like that's where we are. I mean, that's true of the whole planet, but let's just say this island. And luckily, um,
00:49:37
Speaker
We have, uh, we're a transition town and we've got a lot of forward movement on like looking in terms of, um, the land in terms of like pods. So people were approaching it from like an emergency pod. If there was wildfire, making sure you can tell a certain number of neighbors around you, et cetera, like how are you helping each other? If everything, um,
00:50:03
Speaker
go sideways, but then starting to use that same kind of geographical area, very small, as where you're making sure those farms
00:50:15
Speaker
and pooling more resources to make sure you actually are growing what you could eat here. And people on the South End have been testing this. It's so inspiring. And so that's the future I want to move towards very, very quickly. I would love to see that happening. I think it really is because that's how you make sure everyone's taken care of. I really don't think there's any point otherwise.
00:50:43
Speaker
it doesn't, they'll all be at my house eating the apples, like, it won't be happy. So we've got to do it together. Having said that, any skills I can bring, maybe that's my preparation is like sharing, sharing skills or just soothing people into action, because we all get so wound up. And it feels like we can't do anything. And to just like, at
00:51:12
Speaker
on the one hand, calm down, and then think about what we can actually do. And not everyone wants to grow stuff, but some people like to fix stuff, and some people like to plan stuff. Yeah. Great point. And I feel that grief come over me when I realize that if we cooperated,
00:51:38
Speaker
a lot of our problems would just go away. And it is the invisibility of our emotions and our fear response that would fuel the fucked up shit, basically, rather than some kind of practical reality. I don't know, that's something that I can't do the maths on whether we have the skills and capabilities regionally to
00:52:03
Speaker
get together and feed ourselves when the chips are down. But I suspect that the co-operative, the cooperation in community would render a lot of those worries irrelevant. Tell us more about what that looks like on the ground there being part of a transition town. What does that entail? How often do you get together with people and what do you talk about?
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah, I was really involved a few years ago and we wrote the Climate Action Plan and then this group has really just redoubled its energy and taken
00:52:43
Speaker
responsibility for all that. And so there's so many different directions happening here with activism around cycling, as I mentioned earlier, cycling infrastructure.
00:52:58
Speaker
and then like I think today they just had a clothing swap and mending day at the high school so fantastic yesterday and today and they've had repair cafes and there's like there's so much happening there's a plastic free group that I was participating in we've now got a refillery
00:53:27
Speaker
so many good things that are are very small and accessible and I think that's the thing is like we actually know those things like you're probably your grandma would go to some kind of knitting circle and to just actually say well this is important
00:53:45
Speaker
All the traditional skills are already here that they never left. They might have softened a little bit, but they're really reviving. And so I think that that character of a rural setting is just
00:54:02
Speaker
It works really well. I mean, there's always pressure for and against, and there's directions that people go off in that I don't necessarily agree with, like the whole electric car thing. I'm like, well, if you want to electrify the bus, go for it. We've got an electric school bus. Excellent. To me, the shared is much more important than a bunch of people having their private vehicle.
00:54:31
Speaker
nevertheless like the whole is so positive and I think it keeps the energy going.
00:54:38
Speaker
I feel really chuffed because that kind of stuff is rife in our town, and we're not formally known as a transition town, but I often feel like, gosh, there's no niche untapped here. You know, like if you want to be a pioneer of green, good, growing things, like go somewhere else, because it's done. It's done in Dallas. We're like, we haven't covered, which feels amazing. It feels so good.
00:55:02
Speaker
You mentioned grandmother, and I love, I think it's in one of your videos or one of your posts about asking what would your inner grandmother do. Would you be able to share that with us? Yeah. So there's two resources for this idea of the inner mentor that I returned to again. And again, Tara Moore, she wrote, what does she write?
00:55:32
Speaker
playing big and then Ken Page was on Simplify podcast and he did his inner mentor thing and they're just, they're talking you through just imagery to get you to a place where you're really vividly imagining kind of a future self, the self that has already got through what's facing you, what's scaring you,
00:56:01
Speaker
They've done the thing that you really want to do and they're on the other side and like look at what they look like and how they stand, what they wear, you know, what's their voice like? Where are they? And really vividly imagining this future you and then inhabiting
00:56:23
Speaker
That's one of them. Or having a conversation with, that's another one. And so I needed more support recently and I went back to playing big and look through the book. And one of the exercises was to ask your inner mentor what
00:56:46
Speaker
I liked to do. And I really loved that. And for me, when I first did Tara's meditation, this future self was, you know, silver-haired and
00:57:01
Speaker
just clearly was the grandmother. I think she even asks you to ask her what her name is. And she was the grandmother. And I have often said that, you know, I'm always looking for the grandmother to teach me these skills that I didn't get to learn because of that disconnection that happened with corporate culture taking over all this production and all these solutions.
00:57:29
Speaker
So, for me, the inner grandmother is an orienting voice. It's that inner wisdom, not the critic that's always telling you, like, what the hell are you doing? Why would you do that? That's dangerous. You should stop. It's the wise inner voice. And I really like the idea that
00:57:49
Speaker
We have that to refer to and that we can encourage that voice and consult it.
00:58:02
Speaker
And some of it's really banal. The inner grandmother would not leave compost buckets from the loo. They've got a lid on, but she wouldn't leave them sitting in the hall. That's not how she does things. She gets that thing out of there. She does her dishes after dinner. She doesn't go to bed and watch a movie because she knows how good she feels the next morning when it's a clean kitchen and someone else is going to cook because it's already clean in there.
00:58:32
Speaker
So sometimes those things are so really, really simple. And sometimes I am consulting her to ask like something much, you know, something that my heart really needs help with and I'm really struggling with. Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:55
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. I have an externalized inner mentor in the form of Sue Dennett, and I can just ask, what would Sue Dennett do? It's the hardest thing. Oh, how beautiful as a practice. I constantly feel like it's our self-image and our
00:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, that idea we have of ourself that informs our behavior, informs our potential. It's like, who are we? Mm-hmm. Yeah, in essentials. And it's always ahead. It's always changing. So you know, she's always ahead of you. You don't arrive. You don't arrive there. Yeah. What other practices really keep you grounded
00:59:53
Speaker
Well, I journal a lot. I have a fountain pen. You see it in some of the films.
01:00:03
Speaker
it's a requirement for my day. I write every single day, sometimes for hours, although recently realized that sometimes I'm using it to try to generate enough dopamine to get started or enough organizing to deal with overwhelm. And I'm sure that if some poor person has to read them all, they'll be like, oh my God,
01:00:30
Speaker
Shut up about like you're about to go do this and now you've done it. But that's often what I'm, that's often the practice is I need to check in. And I do that in the morning after I get on the mat, which all will go sideways if I haven't slept and that's like the curse of the age I'm at is like,
01:00:51
Speaker
sometimes I don't get that time. But when I do, I feel like myself. And increasingly on the mat, I'm going at once closer to really super connecting to a sense of like the core of the earth and the sky and just like getting oriented to something much bigger than myself.
01:01:21
Speaker
And also like just getting my core in action and doing some exercises that turn on my back muscles and turn on my core muscles and get into all the corners because I'm closing in on 50 and if I want to do this stuff I have to be fit. Also I took up swing dancing with my kids a few years back.
01:01:45
Speaker
and I love it. It's a source of pure and utter joy, it can be. And again, because I was ill and I had surgeries, my core disappeared. And you can't move a ladder around an orchard without your core muscles. You're going to pull something. You can't trim goat hoofs without core muscles. You've got to have
01:02:12
Speaker
these things in place so that practice that is just basic and then I'll be active but I won't even think about exercise and so exercise is a word never crosses my mind I just get on the mat and my agreement with myself is that I'll just get on the mat for as long as it takes for the kettle to boil
01:02:38
Speaker
And that's, that is like, usually I can agree to that. I'd have to be pretty tired not to agree to that. Yeah, I think that's a really great way of getting ourselves over the line in so many situations. They're just, just until X. But I'm guessing your kettle is on the fire.
01:02:57
Speaker
It isn't anymore. April, we are no longer on the fire and I miss it. I miss it somewhat, although there is this pause, you know, this pause when you're not watering anything and you're not hauling wood and you kind of go,
01:03:15
Speaker
I mean, I'm a bit cold, I need my hot water bottle, but this is a nice pause. I like that pause. Being wood and carrying water does occupy quite a vast amount of mornings and evenings, especially we're coming into winter, so I'm amassing kindling and getting into that rhythm of, oh, things are going to be really damp, so do I have dry stuff to start the fire? Yeah. And factoring that in.
01:03:46
Speaker
I mean, I am going to be stacking wood. I need to stack it in the next couple of days. And it's a new film I'm working on about that. And so I really need to get stacking. But it's different from the bringing it in every day. Having that part of your routine fall away is like, oh, I have all this space.
01:04:08
Speaker
And speaking of woodstacks, I say them as the ultimate form of wealth. When my woodstack balance is bumping right up the top of my verandah, I feel like a big fat billionaire.
01:04:22
Speaker
But yeah, something I'm really curious about and I suppose is like a bit of an undecorous question to ask is like the economics piece. I'm so fascinated by how people swing this because I think in this time, the great turning as Joanna Macy calls it this time of transition.
01:04:41
Speaker
A lot of us are yearning and doing our very best to carve out time and space to live in the small work and live close to our life support systems and be hands-on. But of course, a lot of those labours and loves are not
01:05:00
Speaker
Lorded in a monetary sense and unless you come from that foundation of security having access to land having some inheritance it's really it's really tricky to get off the wheel to get off the hamster hill and find.
01:05:15
Speaker
that time and mental and physical energy to start skilling yourself up in whatever way calls to you. But like, what can you share with us about how you've done that? What you think enough is in that realm? How you can deepen into frugality so that some of those things don't matter as much? Yeah, what springs to mind when I ask about finances?
Financial Challenges & Community Solutions
01:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, these are very much on my mind, particularly right now, and I wish I could give you an easy answer. I really think it's
01:05:56
Speaker
It's one of the most awful parts of modern life right now because everything is just ballooned up because of investment, treating homes as investments and not as homes. And so the price of things around here
01:06:16
Speaker
we wouldn't be able to do it now. We just wouldn't. And that's only seven, eight years. And that is terrifically privileged. And Papa Bear and our family has prioritized this and worked really probably too hard for it, you know, at jobs that
01:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's not been easy and and at the same time I do think that Yeah, and I have to say I also look at the future and wonder like does it matter if if one day I can pay off this mortgage and
01:07:05
Speaker
will it all fall apart anyway? It doesn't really matter if I've paid for it. Like I might just get shoved off it. Who knows? Like this is, it does feel very tenuous and actually, um, I mean, renting is really tenuous here. Like let's face, it's really expensive around here too. So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. And, uh, so,
01:07:32
Speaker
Collaboration is one direction I would be going in and I will be going in, in terms of, you know, having land but needing more help on it and wanting more social time. I don't want to be lonely on the land and I don't like working by myself all the time. I do enjoy a certain amount, but like work many hands, right? Many hands make small. And so it really,
01:08:02
Speaker
I think all of that matters. I think security is just, I think what I'm trying to say is security is hilarious. That's really hilarious. Like it's just not there. It's gotta be community pulling together or it really doesn't matter if I paid my mortgage, doesn't matter. So there's that and I will say that
01:08:28
Speaker
I'm the last person you should ask for financial advice and I have always approached this maybe because I started as an artist and I had no expectation to make money from when I went to school. I found an old journal of mine where my grandmother is walking with me, my actual grandmother, and I had just graduated from art school and she was altering between saying
01:08:57
Speaker
Like, how are you going to survive? How are you going to support yourself? What are you going to do with this degree? And you know what? I really believe in you.
01:09:07
Speaker
And I know you're amazing at what you do. And you're so, oh, I can't remember the word, but like able to pull things together. And I think that word that's escaping me right now is what I'm able to do. And so many people, historically, we all did this, the frugality. So the solutions where you do save a lot of money, just having one parent at home,
01:09:37
Speaker
You can pay for yourself to do that, compared to what you would spend on a job, on a vehicle, on your clothing, on your food, on what is anybody doing at the end of the day? What is the emotional health of your kids at the end of the day? I mean, that depends a lot on who they are. And I know what my kids are like. They thrived on me being there and on having this exploratory way of
01:10:05
Speaker
learning where it supported them as very naturally being artists. And so those things, yeah, I think that sometimes it can come out in the wash if you've got somebody at home and somebody at work.
01:10:26
Speaker
in a family. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, we're up against so much with the investor real estate. It is an awful thing and it destroys communities. And my first community that I grew up in is mostly gone. There's nobody left. And the homeschooling community I had in Vancouver, a lot of it
01:10:52
Speaker
went off into the ether because people couldn't afford to live there anymore. Well that is a profound loss and it's happening now here on Salt Spring. People are struggling to find somewhere to live and sometimes have to leave the island. This is, it's a tragedy.
01:11:10
Speaker
I love that framing of what does it cost you to work? And these are really good questions to ask because yes, it is an expense in so many ways. And yeah, it's an illuminating exercise to really run the numbers on those things we think we have to do and those things we think are not even an option.
01:11:32
Speaker
and how they actually square up ultimately. So to round out the conversation on a positive note, because that is my disposition, I would rather ski towards the optimistic side of things, I'm wondering what is bringing you the most joy at the moment, whether that's a new skill, an old skill, a favorite goose, you know, what are the moments of joy in your life?
01:12:00
Speaker
Yeah for me right now it's definitely dancing and I've been learning to lead so I don't just do the follow but I do both lead and follow and I really love what's happening
01:12:20
Speaker
in swing dancing right now that's really aligned with the culture, I think, in that people ask lead, follow, or switch. And you can switch midway. And this is a language to learn that is like, who is initiating what's happening and who's responding. And then what happens if you are collaborating in this and how do you swap that so you both
01:12:48
Speaker
neither had stopped following or stopped leading and then and just what it does to my brain and in conversation with music that I have always loved and to really begin to
01:13:04
Speaker
deeply listen to another person with just this simple connection of holding hands and to me it's meeting so many needs and I am in pure joy in that moment and so I have to say I'm just like seeking that out and looking to make more community
01:13:26
Speaker
around that, especially because I can dance with my kids and see them dancing with community elders and meeting new people. I mean, it's restorative in a way that I feel like we just desperately need that real hands-on
01:13:47
Speaker
body on, ears on, everything on, kind of interrelationships. Yeah, I love it. Oh, glorious. Glorious, and I love the layers as well. And what you're playing with there are bigger themes and concepts about what it means to lead and follow and collaborate, so super wonderful. And where can people find you online? So Apple turnover,
01:14:17
Speaker
dot TV is my site. There's patreon.com slash Apple turnover and I always putting more things up there for patrons and followers and then Instagram at Apple turnover as well.
01:14:34
Speaker
Okay, great. I will link all of those things in the show notes, and it is just such a delight to be able to interact with you like this in having only sent you messages surreptitiously in the background and watched you from afar. So what a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you so much. It's been a huge pleasure. So nice to meet you properly.
01:15:00
Speaker
was Elisa Rathji who you'll find at Apple Turnover online, on Instagram, on Patreon and I suspect in your imagination after that conversation. I am absolutely frothing to tell you that my guest next week is Tristan Gooley, the natural navigator, lauded explorer and author of countless books on the art of nature's clues and signs.
01:15:24
Speaker
And I also discovered that he's one of the kindest celebrities in existence. I was super nervous, so come back next Monday to hear Tristan's brilliance and my sincere attempts to stay cool under intense or structuredness.
01:15:39
Speaker
I have some excellent news from the Resculience community too. A listener, Kat, hey Kat, who really resonated with Yin Paradis in episode 10, decided to pay him a visit at Anamkara and do a workshop and a working exchange there at the Homestead. And she told me that she had an absolutely life-changing time. So thank you so much for sharing that experience with me, Kat. I am totally floored and delighted by the interconnectedness.
01:16:08
Speaker
There are also more and more ears tuning into resculients around the world, which isn't easy to comprehend actually as I quietly record these words in a little tiny house without a sense of any kind of audience. So a big hello to our new listener in Romania. Greetings to those 29 resculiwags in Sweden.
01:16:30
Speaker
and the heartiest of thank yous to everyone who goes the extra mile to subscribe to Resculience and also to download these episodes. And actually, downloads are the only real metric that I can access in terms of listenership. I don't know how many people are streaming or how many plays it's had, but I can access the downloads. And they're actually showing that Resculience is up to 10,500 downloads, which again, feels mighty cool to say,
01:17:00
Speaker
is absolutely impossible to comprehend. If this podcast brings you joy, solace, or inspiration, please share it with friends, tell your jaded workmates, send it to your progressive nana, pop it on social media, leave Reskilient's review on iTunes or Spotify, or simply contemplate these conversations while sitting in a tree, consuming nothing but oxygen and Karawong song.
01:17:27
Speaker
Thank you so, so much for listening and I'll meet you back here next Monday.