Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones - Artist As Family

An episode from the 2021 archives featuring Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones of Artist As Family based in Daylesford. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:05

Hi, I'm Sophie. Welcome to Big Things Little Things, a podcast series where I sit down with inspiring change makers to discuss the big things they're doing, the little things that make them who they are, and together we vision pathways towards a better future. Hey guys, this is Sophie. Welcome back to week five of the podcast. It's crazy, it's five weeks already. Um, so I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land from where I'm speaking today, the Githabo people of the Bungelong Nation, and pay my respects to elders, past, present, and emerging. Well, welcome everyone. I'm so excited to be here today uh introducing the guests, Artist as Family. This family, some of you might be familiar with them already, but if you're not, I'll tell you, I guess, how I know of them. So I came across them when I was watching Gardening Australia and they were featured on their property called Tree Elbow in Dalesford, Victoria. So it's um an urban-sized block, a quarter-acre block that they run um, I guess, in line with the permaculture um principles. And it's just a beautiful house. They have a little um granny flat kind of house that they can have guest um farmer workers in to stay there. They have so much just um vegetables and fruit trees, and there's so much abundance on the property. And yeah, it's just they they live a really interesting way of life where they um they live outside of the monetary economy for the most part. So they've really tried to take themselves out of that consumer lifestyle that's really intertwined in the capitalist model because we don't really stop and think about it very often, but um we spend a lot of our lifetime at work and when we get home from work, we're often quite tired, and we might go to the gym or go home cook dinner, then you go to bed, and then you get up and then you go to work. Yeah, so we're we're just kind of running on this treadmill going a million miles an hour, and then we've got our two days off on the weekend when you know we we just need to wash our clothes so that we've got clothes for the next week and then meal prep for the next week. So most of your life is spent working in a job for somebody else, and so we don't spend as much time with our family, and we don't spend as much time in our home, and we don't have time to prepare our food, so we buy our pa our food packaged. And so Meghan Patrick live a lifestyle where they've really challenged that narrative and they have decided that they're going to um live in a way where they have a productive household unit instead of a consumptive household unit. So they produce more on their property than they consume. So um like they grow so much of their food. Um, what they can't grow, they barter in the community. So I know they have a f a network of about 80 families that they barter with, so that they um and I've seen through their YouTubes they make heaps of cool stuff. They um get goat's milk and make cheeses, they'll make fermented um foods with the garden produce and fresh foods, and they make all these really interesting medicines that they teach you how to make through their videos, which is so cool. One of the ones that I've done is fermented uh garlic in honey, and you ferment it for six months, and then when you get sick, you take some of the garlic um cloves and they just absorb the honey. So they that horrible raw garlic taste just goes away and it's much more palatable because they say that garlic is nature's antibiotic. So yeah, they just live this super cool lifestyle where they've they only work a minimal amount. I think Meg only works like two days a week and she is the bread maker, like sugar mama, and Patrick calls himself in this interview like the house proud man, because he like they both obviously do heaps in the home, but um he does a lot of things like the bread making and um he also ferments all this like super cool alcohol. Not that I've like tried any, but I want to try some if I can ever get to doubt it. Um but uh yeah, so I'm really excited to share this interview with you because it was so cool. Like when I listened back to it, I just thought, oh gosh, what do I cut out? Because there's just so much gold in here. So that's awesome. It was just such a good conversation. So I hope you enjoy it. It is a bit long, like it's uh not not long, long, but you know, for a sitting down in one place it it could feel long. It's an hour and a half, um, so or an hour and 15 minutes. So um maybe listen to it while you're doing like some weeding, or if you just have to drive somewhere, you know, use it as a excellent background to help get you through uh, you know, a good job. So yeah, anyway, I I hope you enjoy it. And um, if you do enjoy it, I'd love if you could share it, share your enjoyment of it um just with other people that you love. It could you can just tell them. You don't have to put it on social media. Social media is stupid. Write somebody a letter on paper with a pen and tell them how much you like this podcast. That's the best kind of review, a written one that nobody does anymore. Does anybody handwrite anymore? Let's bring that back. Okay, so um enjoy. I'm sorry, I've blabbed on for ages in this intro, but this is who I am, and sometimes it's nice to get a taste for who your host is. And if you didn't want it, well, too bad. Now you've heard me blab on. Okay, so enjoy. Bye guys. Oh, and one more thing. I forgot to mention that they're currently on a bicycle tour that they're doing. So they literally just packed up like a backpacking backpack for each of them with all the stuff they need, and they go on the road, so they're going to go for about a year, they've said. And they just I think it's just in Victoria. Um, and they're just like riding around on their bikes, just going, you know, where the wind blows them, and they don't really use muddy, they just try and um work their way around or like exchange. Um, you know, they're they'll help people do stuff for for food and or accommodation and um they'll do a lot of community work um as they progress around the country and um yeah, it's really just a cool way to travel. So um if you're interested in their travels, uh you can find them uh on their blog, Artisters Family. If you um look them up, yeah, you'll be able to check out their bike tour. So enjoy.

unknown 7:25

Bye.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

We're calling from Gundi Jamara, People's Country, um, in southwest uh coastal Victoria.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

So the property that you live on uh I've heard called Tree Elbow. And I was wondering where did that name come from?

SPEAKER_04 7:44

Well, it's a little bit daggy, the answer. Um so Patrick and I have been together nearly 16 years. And when we first got together, like most relationships in the beginning, just that intense love and intense passion. And we were saying, I love you to each other, but it just didn't feel like those words were enough, and they didn't describe just that oh, that just that squishy um romance that we were feeling towards each other. So uh one night we said to each other, okay, let's come up with a new term. We'll each just say the first word that comes to our mind. So one, two, three, and one of us said tree and one of us said elbow. So instead of saying I love you, we say tree elbow. So when we were deciding on a name for our property, it just made sense that it would be called tree elbow. And also where our property sits in relation to the town of Dalesford, we just sit on the very, very edge. So if you make your hand into uh an L, your left hand into an L, and you see that sort of like a tree elbow, and our um our property is on the uh the corner of town and the edge of the forest.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

And also in Jaja Rom people's country.

SPEAKER_04 9:10

And also um a tree elbow is also like a boomerang shape, and we really believe in the boomerang as a metaphor of what you put out into the world comes back to you. So we really like that as well, as part of the part of the reasoning for the name.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

But and also um I think there's there's some implied potential force um when you say I love you to someone else. There's a kind of loaded expectation and loaded emotions, whereas to say tree elbow, it takes the loading out of it and actually goes to the to the expression. And of course, it comes from wanting to explain, you know, to express a different way of saying I love you, but it's yeah, it's not loaded, it's not um putting something onto somebody. So I that's that's why I I like the process and of using it. And yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:08

I've heard you refer to yourselves as neo-peasants, and I was wondering if you could explain to the listeners a little bit about what you mean when you describe yourselves as neo-peasants.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yeah, so um we use the term neo-peasant both in um cheeky terms and also in more serious terms, and I guess the cheeky uh aspect is that we're electing to call ourselves peasants from a perspective uh position of privilege, of education, of um, you know, a couple of generations of being middle class. And you know, it's it's a tongue-in-cheek use of the word. But the more serious aspects are the ancestral connections that we're uh reaching back into. That is, with our ancestors who were land bonded, who had um close connections to small patches of loved land, who had rituals of return, who had a relationship with commons and community. Um, yeah, all the good stuff uh of the peasantry that is very is not often discussed. Um the word peasant itself has become a pejorative term. It was a term used politically to weaponize the peasantry. Yeah, that's probably it in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_03 11:26

Yeah, no, I I find it really uh an interesting way of living and something that intuitively really speaks to me about how you are making that connection with place, that I really do feel a lot of modern society has has begun to forget why it's important to have a connection to place. And I was hoping to to ask a little bit about your your story. So in terms of your awakening to to the problems in the world, I've heard you speak a little bit about how it was after you both got together when you watched a series of documentaries. I think one of them was about Monsanto. Yes, that's right. The world according to Monsanto. Yes, yeah. So this sort of process of of discovering that the world really didn't, or the the way that society is functioning is not really in a manner that's consistent with your with our best interests or the nature's best interests, and that this was uh an awakening process that you had after you had to you got together in Dalesford. And I was wondering, so once you've you'd watched those documentaries and you've said that you went into sort of a grieving process, which I can completely relate to because when I uh became aware of it sort of happened with me becoming aware of the climate crisis, I guess, through a similar process where I was listening to a it was uh an essay being read by Catherine Ingram called An Essay on Extinction, where she tied together the science and the human stories of possible future scenarios that we might encounter. So I listened to that uh essay one night when I was in bed, and it all kind of hit me at once, where I thought, oh my God, this huge awakening to how things were. And so when I heard your story about when you watched those documentaries and went into this grieving process, that really resonated with me.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

I'm really glad that you brought up the grieving the grief because it is so essential. And um, somebody asked us yesterday about what gives us hope. And I really want to touch on the um intermarriage of hope with grief, because I think people who are aware of what's happening in the world and who have had those moments whether you're listening to an essay or watching, you know, whatever it is that that is our um deeper understanding of what's happening in the world, that you know, part of that process is going into that grief and yeah, real really going into it. And as anybody who knows, who's had you know really full-on traumatic events happen in their past, or you know, big or small, whatever the those griefs are, it's really important that we give ourselves permission and allow ourselves to really go deep into the process of grieving for whatever has been lost, or whatever has not yet eventuated as we as we thought that it might, or as that is our birthright to expect that it might.

SPEAKER_03 14:58

That's right. And and what did the grieving process, how did that look for both of you? Because you you watched the documentaries together, right? So it was really a joint process. Yes, it was.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah, I mean this this links back to your first question about uh um where does neo-peasantry come from? Because I I think that when when we become aware of the world and what's going on and what's been taken and what we've lost at a big societal level or in a community sense, not just in our personal lives of of loss um and grief, but actually at the bigger societal level. What um when when we when we hear um about what happened to our grandmothers and sisters and mothers in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, um as as the first really big systemic um controlling top-down violence uh of them, it wasn't just an invader. This was actually um church and state um turning on its people and basically um mass killing, persecuting, um throwing out of build, you know, basically making many women homeless, um basically uh through fear campaigns and through propaganda, um sacrificing or making women, um, particularly death uh duelers, birth duelers, death duelers, uh herbalists, midwives, wise women of the town, all of those that were bundled up and labeled witch. Um so these are our ancestral um mothers and grandmothers and um daughters and sisters. And and so if we don't understand that narrative, um because we are all sitting with that trauma still in our culture, it's only a few hundred years back that it stopped, maybe 300 years back. I'm not saying that um peasant societies throughout Europe were um you know hugely egalitarian like we hope for today, but there was um much more gender-distributed culture, and that maternal wisdom and paternal wisdom had its place in the village, and both were honored. The peasantry up until the Middle Ages had still an animist um uh characteristic in their in their Christianity, and and it was it was accepted and allowed to have that animism, which and in that animism is an honoring of mother as earth, or the maternal um giving, the maternal um uh continuity that that basically life resides with the mother, and and that is central. And so the witch hunts were basically paved the way to the enlightenment, which is basically patriarchal colonialism, which we're still living under that that system. So I think when we when we deep dive into our ancestral past, even in more recent ancestral times, like the last 400-500 years, we see what um uh fallen patriarchy has done to our society and continues to do right right now in this moment. Those stories are if they're secreted, if they're not, they're they're in our body. We we walk with them with that trauma all the time. We we we we are we are born in, we are made into that trauma. And if we don't go into it, if we don't open to it, um then we don't actually know what's wrong with us. We don't actually know what we've come from, and therefore we can't actually grieve. If you don't know what you're grieving, then you can't actually do, you can't go you can't grieve properly.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

That's very true. I I love hearing you talk about that historical perspective and um the that sort of process of minimizing the feminine in society, especially beginning with those kind of witch hunts and things like that. I I think that that's a perspective that so many people would never really have been exposed to. You hear about the witch hunts and things like that, but not in that in that sort of perspective. And we don't often talk about how there is so much residual trauma from all of those historical events that remains to this day. And I am interested in how do you think that humans in this day and age should approach and process that that historical grief that we still hold?

SPEAKER_04 20:00

Yeah, I just wanted to just also just touch on the word witch because to call somebody a witch is still such a negative term, and I think the language needs to be uh reclaimed, as we are trying to do with the word peasant, which also, as Patrick said, is such a pejorative term. And you know, when you're um make growing food for your family, Sophie, and saving seeds, and when you're making food in your kitchen for your family, there's this alchemy, alchemical magic that happens when you're putting the intention of love into the food and the seeds and the soil. I mean, that is witchcraft. And I know when I'm fermenting or when I see Patrick kneading um our bread, our daily bread, or feeding our sourdough start-off, we're making milk cofir or sauerkraut or pickles or whatever that is, that is the embracing the unknown and the magic of microbes that these days, of course, science tells us what they are, but many many many centuries ago or many decades ago, we didn't know what it was. You know, people just thought that it was this magic that happened, and of course, it it is magic.

SPEAKER_03 21:18

That's right. We've just sort of lost the it's it's like something occurring in plain sight that we see so much that we've we just failed to even recognize, I guess, the forest for the trees. But it is so true that that intention that you infuse with with the things that you do. Like I notice any time that I last night I sent dinner up to my parents who live nearby. And every time I send food up there, you know, I I've often used things that I have from my garden to um to add flavour. I I'm in no means growing everything that we cook, but I try to to grow as much as I can. And I always have such you can just feel the response from people when they eat that food that they it's It's not just feeding them, it's it's nourishing some part of them that is almost intangible. And they're always so incredibly appreciative of me sharing food and and hearing the story of the food. So I definitely agree that there is this kind of everyday magic that if you look hard enough, you you do see it.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

And maybe we need to start calling ourselves witches again and or neo-witches.

SPEAKER_03 22:25

Well, I mean, it's it's really yeah. I I was going to ask you one of my questions, actually, Meg was what is your favorite witchy brew to make in in your kitchen? Because I know you have such an amazing um setup with your fermenting table. And yeah, I was I was interested to ask you what's your favourite thing to make at home?

SPEAKER_04 22:46

Well, we're on the road at the moment, so our witchy brews look pretty different. Um, but at the moment, uh three-cornered garlic is in season here and is abundant. And do you are you familiar with what that is?

SPEAKER_03 23:02

No, I've never heard of that.

SPEAKER_04 23:04

Um, it's also called onion weed. Um, they're uh the stem of them are a little bit succulent and they're triangular, hence the name three-cornered garlic, and they have a series of little white uh flowers at the top of them, and they like to grow in um at this time of year. So here we're approaching um springtime.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

In spring.

SPEAKER_04 23:29

You're in spring, it's still quite cold here. Um, and it likes to grow in very wet areas, so ditches along roadsides, um, yeah, sort of boggy kind of areas. So you do need to be careful where you're harvesting from because if it is by a roadside, then it's going to get the runoff from the road. Um but so we've been um picking that and making a kraut out of that. So just chopping it up really finely and just sprinkling it uh with salt and just putting in a jar with a um uh another jar on top of it. Um, yeah, just so it makes its own brine and it's ready pretty quickly, and it's an allium in the allium family, so it is um a prebiotic as well because it has uh it's very high fibre. Um, and so you can make a probiotic out of it as well when you ferment it. So that's my probably my favourite witchy brew at the moment. Awesome.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

That's so cool. I do love how you really embrace uh just the the food that is available to you as you progress through the countryside. I think that that's fantastic. And I I would love to ask if you could just explain to the listeners the journey that you're on at the moment and how it's going.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yeah, sure. So we left a home about three months ago now, in the middle of winter, our first two nights on the road with our bikes, with Woody, our then eight-year-old, now nine-year-old, and our Jack Russell, who's 11, called Zero. And so you had four mammals on two uh pushbikes um with all our gear, with the tents with harvesting, hunting, fishing um equipment, with three food panniers, some clothes, um, basically everything we need. So, yeah, a little caravan uh of gypsies um on uh on the road for the last three months. Um, and really uh like our big trip several years ago where we rode from Dalesford to Cape York, listing, uh doing many things, meeting people, um exchanging permaculture skills for um backyards to pitch our tent, or you know, exchanging food workshops, or um a whole range of different things really. Um, and we we gave uh weed uh foraging walks um to community groups connecting with community gardeners and permacultureists and and just about a whole range of different people, bikies and um cattle people and um yeah, these little trips have become, or not little, because that was a year or 14 months that last one, and this is going to be a year as well. They're they're every now and again just to sort of shake our comfort. Um, it's we call it a pilgrimage, so it's our bicycle pilgrimage. And um we're just learning, yeah, just being sort of back into that lovely, naive place that you are when you leave home, where you know you have at home this intimate connection, this knowing, this community, this support, this safety, there's all these beautiful, wonderful things that you build up over a life. Um, but to go on to the road um smashes all that apart. And that's really exciting because it it puts us in a vulnerable place in order to learn and to get uh or to to really um if we're in right relation um with country and with the communities that we come across, um we uh have we receive gifts of knowledges and understandings that we can then take home to our own community. And just just on that, um, you know, back back home, I wanted just to pick up something we were talking about before. Meg and I have been running um uh circles in the forest, um uh like grief circles with community members and several um yeah, they can be 12 people to 20 people um around a fire in the forest. And um basically that's a place for uh because I think there's many opportunities. People grieve in either family groups or individually, um whereas uh with the big societal stuff that we also need to share, it doing grieving publicly is something that we don't really do much in our culture. So um, and maybe that's the sort of that's where um more formal religion played a role um up until recently. But um in terms of just having um places to uh where where there is um just lightly facilitated um circles where there isn't anyone dominating the conversation, um people speak and no one interrupts. Um and it's an opportunity to to have there's a set of protocols which I won't go into here, but um yeah, there there are gifts that come into that circle. So when someone opens up and tells their story, it it it is a gift back into it uh into that circle, and that can have profound um uh consequences in the in the in the um in the community. And and I think it just enables us to uh be able to be deep listeners in the world. Um we we always start those circles by listening to the forest for 15-20 minutes and we go off in to individual sit spots and then we come back to the the forest and then we sh we share.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

I'm so I love these circles that you you run, and I love that idea of of just connecting with other human beings and processing those deeper emotions that we just silence these days to our detriment and the detriment of the world around us. And I just uh always, I always, when I hear you talk about the community work that you do in Dalesford, that I think, oh, I just wish that I lived closer. Because I would just love to be able to be part of something like that. And um, you know, I I think the next best thing is is for me to try to facilitate something like that in my own community because I I have started a group here where um I'm trying to establish a system for trading and bartering food like you do, because I know that you have a large network of families that you um exchange food and services with. And um that's a big part of you living outside of the monetary economy. So I'm in the very beginning phases of that. But just um yeah, sort of going back to the the question that we were at before about um the historical trauma that um we have experienced and uh how how do you think we we could deal with that kind of um trauma and grief in this modern day and age to process that and move through that so that we're not constantly repeating those vicious cycles and maybe moving into a new place where we can we can have free up that energy so that we can live in a new way.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah, there's so many um places we could begin. Um I guess I just Charles Eisenstein's work, I think, is really essential in this. Um, I mean there are many people's work. Um Tyson Younger Porter is another another one when he he talks about um tangible um philosophies, tangible uh processes, not um, and just being very mindful of just how abstract everything is um in our culture, or not everything is, but like um certainly um how abstract power is and control is in our lives. And so um, but Charles Eisenstein's um I think his book is A More Beautiful World, Our Hearts Know Is Possible is a is a really good place to start. But for us, it's it's basically um not uh you know opening to grief, being okay with being vulnerable, embracing uncertainty, um developing practices of um community kinship and care, understanding that generosity um breeds more generosity, that um that a healthy community is a healthy person rather than the flip side of that. It's all about the individual, um, that our individual needs are met collectively. Um uh yeah, reclaiming our I think that's reclaiming the village and um and you know people will say that's our indigenous soul or our ancestral soul. Um there's many ways to describe it. Certainly um for us listening to First People's Wisdom and First People's Um Cmologies and reconnecting with our own uh as far back as they are, and seemingly inaccessible as they are, um, they still exist. And we've got old all of us have old stories that we can connect to, and we can certainly listen to the stories of land bonded people, the people who hold the land sacred and hold community sacred.

SPEAKER_04 33:16

And I think to be an entire whole person, we need to acknowledge that there's some yuckiness in that, and there's a lot of emotions that um aren't um aren't nice and aren't um happy, smiley emotions, and we live in a culture that's not very good at that. So I think to, as we said before, to be to be good at grief, I think is really important and to talk about it, to really process it so it doesn't become this trauma, we're not stuck in that stuck place. And I also think to really be good at anger, and that's one of the things that I learned from my relationship with Patrick. Um, this is my longest relationship by a long shot. Before Patrick, my longest relationship was about six months or two a year, because every time I had an argument with a boyfriend, I was out of there. But I learned with Patrick how to fight in a really healthy way and how to argue and sort of to work through things. And I think there has to be room for rage in this culture and in this society. There's so much injustice and there's so much privileging of that unjustness over what our hearts know is right and true. And so we're not caught up in this the rage and the anger, and so it doesn't get out of balance. We need to also work out how to process that in a really profound ways. Um, so we're not, you know, Patrick and I have both been activists, we've been blockades, we've written letters, we've we've banged our heads against the gates of parliament, and that that work is really, really important. But for us, it also makes sense to work towards creating the world that we do want to see. And there's, you know, that whole be the change and working towards creating that change is definitely where permaculture comes in. And I really like one of the things that I've heard you say a few times, Patrick, is about permaculture being a way for second peoples to move back into more of a mindset and a way of being and belonging that traditionally first peoples have been brought up with.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:45

Yeah, I I I think I just wanted to make a little comment that that that's very uh insightful and a very simple thing that uh Patrick said before. That we need to sit with our discomfort and vulnerability, which I think in our modern day people spend a lot of time and energy trying to run away from those feelings and to distract themselves from those feelings. And I I definitely have been very guilty of that through many different mediums, I guess using TV, using music, using any means of distraction, alcohol, drugs. Um, you know, you try to suppress these feelings. But really to move past those feelings, you have to sit with them. So it's really just putting off that moment, like that discomfort. How long do you want to put it off for? And so I think it is so true that we do just need to sometimes feel really terrible and yucky and angry and sad. And I think a a really interesting part of my journey since I did listen to that essay with Catherine Ingram was that it's it, I've described it like it it flicked on the light switch to see things in a different way. And one of the things that it has done to me is it's made me very um sensitive to emotions and feelings. And yeah, I I think I'm much more sensitive to a lot of the injustices in the world these days. And I I don't know exactly how to explain it, but I just feel like I feel everything so deeply since I had that moment of awakening. And yeah, I think it's really important for humans these days to learn to just sit with that discomfort. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

And I think to add to that too, is that uh becoming um conscious is is about being aware of the the stories our minds are telling us and the the negativity that um that is so prevalent in our in our in our ego speaking to us. Like if we if we become aware of that voice talking to us, saying, no, I I'm not very good, or you know, that that person's not very good, or that person isn't the person I you know want to be with now. And just the the judgmental nature is the trauma, is is the deep-seated um generational trauma that's within us. When I said before, the trauma is held in the body, it's also the because the mind is a big part of the body, and and what we tell ourselves is um you know, keeps the grief in an unproductive, festering place. And I think this is the power of things like meditation and breath work, which we've been really turning to, um, and being aware of our thoughts, can't you know, just becoming aware of wow, I'm in a really negative place at the moment, or wow, I'm I'm actually um I I haven't been having my mind speaking negativity at me for several days now. How how how free is that? You know, whatever it wherever it is. But I think, yeah, that turning to drugs and alcohol, particularly as young people, is the stories we're telling ourselves. And we have a society that that basically amplifies that trauma, that's a long-term societal trauma, by things like Instagram and Snapchat and all the things that um uh constantly holding a mirror to us, um, as a kind of young Dorian Greys who are need to be seen in a particular way, need to be seen as attractive, as capable, as okay, as funny, uh entertaining, um, and certainly, yeah, the secretion of actually what's going on are much more holistic because all of those things may exist, but um, there's a whole lot of other things that are going down with all of us at the moment. And, you know, particularly in this time of COVID, um, and so much fear and so much worry, the antidote to that is to stare at a leaf, really, to go to go for a walk and to behold bird song and to to breathe into the world as lungs of the world to actually absorb, to take in the world, and to uh being oxygen and to give back to the world, world being carbon dioxide, and and and to just get back to sort of simple um rituals of um connectivity. We are a part of this world, we are not separate, we are not bodies of um bodies to be manipulated and controlled. We are we are free people of this world who have responsibilities uh to the well-being of our communities and and to to the world to the to to the earth.

SPEAKER_03 41:00

You mentioned Charles Eisenstein before, and I I did actually, before I spoke to you this morning, I I was listening to one of his podcasts with Orland Bishop, and it was very interesting. They were analyzing uh the state of of the world, and I guess Charles Eisenstein was trying to to pull out of Orland some practical things that humans, you know, can do in the moment, um, just in this face of all this uncertainty. And and Orland Bishop said that it basically the gist of what he was saying is that it's just so much bigger than we can ever imagine, and that humans, however, we're all so beautifully interconnected that part of what we need to do is is sit with ourselves and and contemplate just contemplate life and how things are, what if? Because we have so much power to envision these different futures, uh, and and we just need to reconnect with that. But there wasn't sort of like a one answer that he was giving, but it was just an interesting perspective on on the world at the moment, because I think so many people are are going out trying to find these, you know, what should we do? Which boxes should we tick in the face of climate change? And maybe there aren't any boxes that we can tick.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Well, I guess it's that's the thing, the reconnection with the leaf is the reconnection with our food, which is the reconnection with our soil, which is the reconnection with our the sunlight, which is universal, but it falls in in our little patch of the world wherever we are, or the rain that comes, or the winds that blow in. That these are the and and of course the our neighbors and community around us. So these are these are the tangible relational possibilities that we have. And the bigger um the bigger we're in this problematic dilemma of globalism and the corporatization of globalism. So this sort of utopian ideal of the of the global village has long gone, and we're left with um large corporate forces um wishing to you know grow our food in a particular way, give our medicine in a particular way, provide us with energy in a particular way, and basically data mine us for all the technology that we use and and manipulate us through algorithms and and you know, I mean, these are all um these are these are things that we can get very anxious written about. It's not to say we should also just turn back to the leaf and only be in company of the leaf. We need to, I think personally, and um rather than we need to, I need to be mostly in relation with the lived and loved land that I'm in and on, which is unceded land. But the uh the bigger political uh um geopolitical um concerns all we also need to stay present to them because our powers uh as small community groups are being usurped. Um things are being done on our behalf that we haven't given permission for. So it's it's basically a uh yeah the the I mean climate change is uh anthropogenic climate change is uh the way in which industry um has has well our economic system really um has uh operates it it basically incarcer our economic system incarcerates people and it um and it's slowly and or quickly depending on where we are degrading the land now we don't stop and say we need a new economic system why don't we do that? I mean of course there are many of us who do say that but why in mainstream media uh don't we hear this just repeated time and time again? It's so obvious what our economic system is doing to the planet and to communities and to the well being of people.

SPEAKER_03 45:25

That that podcast uh this morning was really delving into this issue of of this patterning that we're in and and that humans have a need to to stabilize their environment and to control things. And I think in a way the economic system is like a manifestation of that need of ours to control our environment. And why aren't we changing it? Well because is it because we're scared of change? You know we are scared of the unknown and what they were saying in that podcast was that um sometimes it takes a cataclysmic change to to force the system to break so that that energy can be released and then change in its form so that we're living a different life. So it's perhaps it it won't change the economic system until there is some kind of terrible event. I mean maybe the pandemic is part of that.

SPEAKER_04 46:20

Yep absolutely but did didn't we all think when COVID first started that things would be radically changed? And I don't mean in the way that they have changed but I just saw the you know the interest in artist's family's work and many other permaculture um practitioners just the interest in permaculture and the interest in self and community sufficiency was just skyrocketing because people were at home, people were scared people saw how vulnerable saw empty shelves in supermarkets. Yeah and people those supply chains were were broken and people were very still yeah and people were very fearful for good reason. But now I think people things have shifted maybe not for everybody but for a lot of people things have shifted and they just want things to go back to normal and how they were because as you say you know that's there's definitely safety in that and people are afraid of making big changes.

SPEAKER_00 47:21

And fed up with with it now too it's it's been such a long thing um with so much politicizing um so I think yeah there's I mean there's so much grief in just the pandemic let alone anything else.

SPEAKER_04 47:37

But I also think we need to keep in perspective that the pandemic is an obsession with ourselves because it is anthropogenic. It is all about the people I mean why why are world governments and policymakers making these great changes to save lives when whole ecosystems are collapsing. Yeah they're not about humans but this is about humans. So we also need to keep that into perspective.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

And all the way along the coast because of the lockdowns um we've heard local people talk because we've been on jetties fishing and talk about just how much how many more whales and seals and wildlife and just the abundance that have come in much closer in and around the towns than usual. So and and you know you hear hear these reports all around the world of just um more deers and wild animals you know inhabiting cities and villages goats coming down into Welsh villages um dolphins swimming into Italian towns birds of prey coming closer to towns and cities. Yeah so I I feel like there's this um such opportunity I I mean many people do like like we've been really given a lot of grief but also a lot of insight into what's possible and um but fear is it will always distable or or um dis enable um uh any kind of um productive movement or any kind of um renewal and yeah I think yeah it's whether it be collapse um which I think um you were intimating before whether the economic system can't be we can't think rationally um about we can't look at the economic system and what it's doing to people in place and country um I mean it it it began as a colonial project the um the the the the the the economic system we and it still is and you know unless we actually fess up to the fact that the um global pool of money and and the financial um sector is still a giant act of colonization um we are never going to fess up so yeah so it looks like it's most likely going to be a collapse scenario which is so disappointing because you know if if we staged it I mean this is why we're friends with degrowth activists and why degrowth is so important because we are degrowth activists exactly but um why why we've yeah we've made relationships with that movement is because it fits so beautifully into permaculture because it's staged it's rather than collapse just holding on to this dinosaur of a economic way of being it's a it's staged um decline so which is what we've been doing in in a household and community context for the last 15 years and and it's you know we've become freer less anxious more in life more in love with the world more generous having much more to share um because of that staging and so like okay we're only modeling at a household and community level but and as as as many many people around the world are at various different stages of it of a transition um whether it this is you know such a ground swell movement an under uh underground movement that will just just emerge as things fall down i I suspect that's what will happen and that's I guess the hope as the big system collapses and takes so much with it there'll be so much collateral damage in that collapsing um and and is you know which yeah this is what we're seeing right now um a big big systems big uh controlling systems um yeah yeah oh I I think it's it's it's very interesting yes what you were uh saying and I guess it it harks back to what we were talking about uh before when you were mentioned hope early in the conversation um and I I guess I I was intimating a little bit of the possibility of of collapse of of things as we know it.

SPEAKER_03 52:17

However I think part of my hope and that's really shown through this podcast is my faith is with the people and I think that it's true what you say that the groundswell movement is growing. And I I think people it's shown through all this interest in permaculture and these movements that people are turning their minds to a different way of being and I think that it's actually much more prevalent than than you know even we think I think so many people are it's almost an innate response to this situation that they're starting to realize the importance of community and connection and the mainstream media which represents fear like you said before it's really this this dichotomy of the mainstream media representing fear and the people representing love and what will win. Well I believe that love always wins in the end and that sounds really um just naff but I mean my that's my intuitive sense and I think that my active hope is is trying to spread these messages to to people through this this podcast and and telling the stories of people like yourself that there is a new way. And it may seem as though things are terrible and we're living in this fear-driven world and to some degree we are at the moment but we just need to to keep connecting in our communities to each other and and to rebuild that that village that we have lost because that's where our strength lies. And I said this to Hannah Maloney when I spoke to her a few days ago what we have above the mainstream media and the politicians is we have the numbers.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

So it's really just staying strong and spreading our message and and I think yes like there will at some point be some form of collapse but you know we can meet it things things will look different in the future but yeah if we're together we can meet it and if we all die together well at least we'll die in love you know yeah that's that's my yeah and and the collapses we're already adapting to the collapses I mean it and rather than one big collapse we're going to probably see you know many many many collapses some very big some small but but constantly we're on the we're on the other side of the bell curve and um so yeah I mean permaculture will really kick in if the if the descent is slow and steady um whereas a kind of um uh yeah if if it's really radical collapse then um things will yeah which I I don't think is going to happen. I think it's going to it depends on where you are in the world um at different times there'll be you know continuing to we're we are going to continue to see um uh extreme weather events um knocking communities around um we're very fire prone area so we're working with uh community um with fire mitigation um informal again because we can't work formally with the local council because it's um there are just there's just too much bureaucracy so I think that's the other thing that our institutions have become so um uh complex and befuddled in bureaucracy that um they've become dysfunctional and so that's uh a another big part of the problem so but there is always the way to work in community groups so the council basically leaves us alone with about 30 people working in our area of south southwest Dalesford working with goats um to do bushfire preparedness in order to um uh get the forest back into a place where first people's burning techniques can take place because at the moment for me to hire blackberries are going to just crown um create crown fires um so we need the blackberry and the broom and the gorse which are all sort of second people's weeds really we need second people's weed eaters which are goats in order to um create the kind of grassy woodlands that then uh jarrah people who are bringing um traditional fire back into country can come and we're already connecting with uncle Brian Nelson he's bringing his um uh uh initiation boys sorry Ricky Brian is his dad uncle Ricky Nelson um is bringing his uh men's business boys uh to that forest on an annual basis now uh to do working bees there and so to build those connections um to then bring traditional fire back and um in into to the land in order to then re-regenerate indigenous biota but also to be a part of that regeneration so that we as second pupil are are uh learning to learning or feeling our way into living in right relationship with the land and with and honouring the ancestors of that land.

SPEAKER_04 57:31

And because land is where we our land where we live is different to the land that you live on is different to the land that we're currently on and all the communities are different on those pieces of unceded sacred land it's there we're all expressing it's all about diversity and before you when you said Sophie that we have the numbers and we have we it we're as individuals and as individual communities we're going to respond differently to what is happening on our land and to what is happening in the world we're gonna respond in our own unique ways and I think that has been so lost those nuances of individual responses and individual um uh or small scale responses yeah exactly community neighborhood sense exactly but this whole economic system is put trying to push us into one way of living the experts' way yeah and there's there's one solution to one problem and we all know that that's not possible that there isn't just one way of being in this world and I feel like that's one of the most beautiful things of uh of traveling and you know these kinds of generative conversations like we're having with you is about sharing stories and listening to people because when you're sharing stories with people there are so many different responses that people are having.

SPEAKER_03 59:08

That's right. Yeah but I I did this is it's sort of related but it it is a change in gears slightly because it's about this one-waysm and um I did really want to ask Meg um in particular so the way that you live is is definitely outside of the mainstream um since you've been together and and base embraced this neo-peasant lifestyle. And I hope it's not too personal to ask but I was wondering how you approached um birthing as a mother uh from your neo peasant perspective. Well um great question thank you I know it's a very intimate question and I ask this because I I have um I guess I had a home birth for my second daughter and that experience was very transformative. So that's why I I'm just interested in your perspective as a woman and how how maybe birth how the experience was for you and whether that shaped the person that you are today.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:08

Well I feel like even before the birth um just in terms of pregnancy and even just before even before pregnancy so when Patrick and I um and I guess my hesitation is w which part do I go back to um so when Patrick and I got together uh Patrick had had a vasectomy um and the first night uh we were one of the first nights we were together Patrick said um I want to be with you and if you know if you want me to have it reversed then I will oh what too much too soon but of course great foresight so Patrick uh we decided after many years that um that we would like to have a baby together and Sir Patrick had his vasectomy reversed um so that was you know really wanting to um live um a very connected and natural life but also needing to have this intervention to undo a previous intervention um um so that was clearly a success because uh we had Woody um but before we had Woody I had three um miscarriages and they were really big um but I knew that it was kind of practice and I knew that my body was preparing for a full pregnancy so although I was devastated and there was much grief um and much singing uh about that grief um that you know um miscarriages occur in many mammals so I knew that I was in good company um and the pregnancy itself uh was just this very beautiful very magical time of feeling really part of the world and of course you don't have to go through pregnancy to to feel that but for me that was really essential or the feelings were essential just this being connected and looking at flowers and buds and fruit and just thinking well that's just me and really I'm just a pine cone you know having babies and leaving my having seeds um and yeah the the we had aimed to have really really wanted to have home birth we had the birth pool set up at home but after three days of labour um we tried to we were taken to hospital uh with our midwife and uh tried to labour there and a four and a half kilo baby yeah four and a wow he was giant and I'm quite small you yeah you do look tiny from what I've seen um so yeah so we had ended up having um a emergency season well it wasn't actually emergency but it was a Caesar um well I guess it was emergency it was unplanned and unwanted but um yeah very much glad that that's been part of our story and we tell it to Woody in that you know he was a big baby and then really tried to uh to push him out naturally and that didn't happen so the doctor came and he took his sword and he cut Woody out of my out of my womb um and this is where Western medicine is fantastic exactly in those in those moments it's so good. Yeah and I'm yeah incredibly grateful that we live in a country where we I didn't have to go in debt for the rest of my life to to pay for this birth.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

But then we also as soon as the birth happened and that wonderful moment of Western medicine just just beautiful people just smart intelligent doing this incredible work um and then um and then this sort of barrage of you need to be these antibiotics you need this you need that you need just the obsession and the fear mongering around all this stuff that is was completely not so we had to get out of there really quickly.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:10

And so um at that time Patrick was doing his doctorate and um was really wonderful because he had three months paid paternity leave and in the history of um the in the university University of Western Sydney what's it called now? Yeah that's what it is yep something like that. Patrick was only the second person ever second man ever to take paternity leave um usually it was the women who took maternity leave. So to have him at home to help it was just after we got home after being in hospital it was just this really beautiful time of being in our garden and um and also Patrick and Woody share a birthday so Woody was born on Patrick's birthday and which is at the end of August. So it's really the sort of end of winter the beginning beginnings of spring it was a very magical time and also and I say this to any of the parents out there or parents to be um to really look up um the Dunstan baby language which is uh a language that you can uh understand what your baby is saying so it's it's only um applicable from birth to three months um and I won't I won't go into it now but it's really incredible. So Dunstan baby language there's five I just wrote that down that's I've never heard of that and that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:29

I wish I had known about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

There's five sounds and they all um equate to a need.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:36

And they're based on different reflexes that the baby makes. So I'll just just tell you a couple of them quickly. So there's nyah, nya nya which is based on the sucking reflex so that means that your baby's hungry there's which is upper wind and which is lower wind. So if you can hear that the upper wind then you don't want it to get to the lower wind because that's much more difficult to settle your baby when they've got lower wind. But why aren't we told this? Why don't we know this? Even our independent midwife, that all the midwives in the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the obstetricians, nobody has this information. Is it because it was held with our great great grandmothers, you know, in the time of the witch hunts and this this is um that was killed off with them? But what else have we lost? And I think these sorts of bringing this knowledge back into the present tense is really vital.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:29

Oh, I think, yeah, it's so I I find the whole childbirth experience just very interesting. And it really ties back to our discussion of the the witch hunts and things in the beginning of the conversation. Yeah, because I don't think that there is one, you know, right way to birth for for everyone. And I'm also extremely grateful for for modern medicine, and there are definitely times when that's absolutely essential. But I definitely recognize that something that has been taken from women is is trust, you know. When we're not allowed to trust our bodies, we're the only animal that I know that we don't think that we can birth a baby. And sometimes we can't, but you know, we we can in a lot of instances. And I think that just a really important thing moving forward is is to start to to encourage women to to lean in and trust their body and trust their instincts with having babies and and raising babies because there's so much wisdom that that we're disconnected from.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:34

And I think that's for anybody alive at the moment. I mean, this is another thing with the one dominant story that our governments are shoving down our necks, is that we're not allowed to have that sovereignty over our own bodies. We're not allowed to make those decisions for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:49

And that one-wayism is inherently patriarchal, I would I would argue. That it's it doesn't allow for nuance and and um and yes, the trust thing, if trust was restored back to women in that case, in the case of birth, but trust generally, if people were um basically told stop being told that you know, stop listening to yourself trust an expert, the expert knows the science is correct. Well, that's just nonsense. I mean, most much of the time the science is a process, like anything, and most good scientists will recognize neck recognize that in their field it's a process of inquiry and understanding and knowledge accrument.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:34

And it and this is just those words that you said, Patrick, are exactly the reason why we've decided to uh not send Woody to school because it's the it's the trusting his own intuition, it's learning who he is, and it's not top-down. We we're part of what we call um partnership parenting with Woody, and it's not it's really trying to not be top-down and not tell him what he should be learning and what is important to him, it's really letting him unfold and because we it's we can't just say, Okay, women, you're on your own now. Now give birth, because it starts. Yeah, you know, it starts as children because they have to not be severed from those lines of intuition. And how do we help them trust themselves? We have to give them that trust, we have to show them what it looks like.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:26

Yes, I the homeschooling journey that you're on is is very interesting to me. I um my girls are one and two and a half, so they're not quite at that point yet. But we um we've been talking about it recently, and and I'm definitely feeling a real draw towards the the homeschooling and unschooling. And so I uh yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about that. And um, how is Woody finding that now? What does a day look like for him in terms of his learning? Not obviously it's different every day, probably, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

So he has areas of um where he's just really inclined, uh, and then others with that he's like music where he's chosen to play, say, the fiddle and chose and he loves music, um, but the uh the inclination to play um is you know comes and goes, whereas something like building or fishing or hunting is just his um that there he is where he wants to be. And so that you know, in many respects, this year away has been about just getting out on the road and developing particularly his hunting and fishing and foraging skills. Um so and you know, the other thing I guess about providing this as a basis for education, uh, of which history and mathematics and literature and story, yeah, story and everything feeds into. That's the thing that if a child is excited and and a passionate learner, they will absorb so much more, so much more quickly, and then they through that um that one interest or two interests or three interests, everything else can be fed in as a as a potential learner. So you in in many respects, unschooling is um setting up good frameworks for that sort of um self-directed learning, whereas but you the parent doesn't have to be the educator in in that sort of traditional sense. And I think a lot of people are put off by homeschooling because, oh, you know, I I've got to be a teacher. It's like that's not the point at all. The children teach themselves. If you have a look at um uh Professor Peter Gray's work, he um wrote a book called uh Free to Learn, and he's uh evolutionary biologist who's particularly looking at um how mammals learn. And how mammals play and learn through play, and yeah, and how modern schooling basically just takes more and more play out of the equation.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:05

And puts kids inside, usually on chairs, usually.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

In front of screens. And so this this is sort of like you know, it it has the obvious health effects of anxiety, of um sedentism, the you know, of not being fully in your body, um, being able in your body, which then limits your trust of yourself and your capabilities.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:30

There's just the on on effects of because at school, well, traditionally school, you know, the schools at the moment that we see, especially in this country, are again a product of that one-waysm, that there's one curricula, curriculum, there's you know, one one end goal, which is to get everything right on a test, which is really anti-life.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

And also very competitive and and I again I would argue patriarchal. It it's not gender distributed. It's the that while uh you know probably more women work in the education system than men, I I would say it is an inherently patriarchal system still.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:13

And that's right. Yeah, also I I 100% agree with you, but I think we need to make the distinction, and we've talked about this before, Patrick, uh, about toxic patriarchy and patriarchy. Because I think patriarchy is welcome and is important, but it's when it becomes gets out of balance and it becomes toxic, that's when I think the issues or or in the absence of um anything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:37

That's that's its problem. Patriarchy is uh absolutely toxic in the absence of distributed power.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:44

Yeah. I I think it's uh the whole um discussion surrounding um femininity and masculinity and well or whatever terms you'd like to use, um, I I find that very, very interesting. And and I do, this is I'm not, you know, super well versed in this area. This is just me speaking from like from the heart, but how I feel, I definitely agree that it seems to be an extremely um, there seems to be a dense masculinity in our culture at the moment. And just from my experience, you know, that that feminine energy that's the life bringer and the the current state of the world, it does really, we we are crushing, crushing the life out of things. So it is, I think part of the way forward is is trying to to re-embrace that femininity that has been so oppressed for so long. And it's it's how to do that. I'm I'm still kind of grappling with that, and I I don't know, but that's I think talking talking about these problems, and I don't know if you have any insight on how we might restore the balance with the that feminine masculine um in society, I'd I'd be interested to hear it.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:53

Yeah, well, when we have um house and garden tours at our house, Patrick usually does the outside, and then every people come inside for the and I give them the tour of the inside of the house. And I always start by saying a woman's place is in the home, and a man's place is in the home too. And Sophie, I know that you're reading Radical Homemakers at the moment.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:13

Yes, and I wanted to read it before our interview, but because we moved um we moved the interview up, I haven't finished it yet, but I'm loving it.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:20

And for me, that book holds a lot of the answers about our way back to gender distribute distribution, and because it talks about how, especially in the first half of the book, how it was the men's relationship to that sacred home place that was severed first when they were sent down the mines and sent into factories, and then the women were at home left to do all the work, which was then made very meaningless when they had machines which to do the work which separated them from doing these beautiful labours of love that were part of their you know, making the food and growing the food and their connection to place and their connection to family and community, which was was severed. So I think for us, a return, a big part of our return journey home of reclamation of these processes has been to go slowly and to give ourselves permission to go slowly in our journey of growing food and restoring community bonds.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:33

That's right. And and that that book is so I guess you know, the concepts that they're quite quite practical and quite simple, but just that returning to to the home as the base and and finding that connection in the home to the bigger picture is is actually so radical. Yeah, but so simple. It's uh it's like the such an obvious solution, but people so obvious that it's overlooked.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:57

And also to because there are two types of feminism that I see, that there's one is that a woman's place is in the home, and to give that status because there is great power and great responsibility in feeding yourself and nourishing your family and community. Whereas we're told as women throughout our industrial schooling that we need to put on power suits and you know be in government or be CEOs or work outside the home place, and that's where we're going to get power, and that's where we're gonna be seen in the world for who we truly are, and that's where we can express our gifts and anything else is just not important. I call that empire feminism. And I think when we think back to our great-grandmothers and how they lived, and how yeah, I think that that's where, for me, that's where I take um I take courage from. And I know when my uh grandmother was still alive, I looked down on her because she was a housewife and all she did was make food for her family and and community, and she cleaned the house, and but I didn't see what an empowering thing that that that is.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:13

That's right, yes. I I exactly the same. And now I just you look at things with a different lens as you learn. And unlearn, that's right. It it really is a process of unlearning everything that we have been taught.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:32

And and equally for me, um, who's the the the so-called um mould that I should have fitted into is the big earner and someone who has a job in the real world and not be a shepherd of our goats and not be um the you know the the razor and co-ed co- guide? Well, I was gonna say co-educ co-educator of Woody because he's really I guess we are in a way, we're co-educators in that sort of um partnership parenting and partnership educating, but we're sort of educating ourselves really in in that. So I don't really want to use grandiose terms like where Woody's educated, but but having we are his as he is ours, yeah. Having like hands-on um, yeah, yeah, as we'd like to say, Meg is is the breadwinner, she works two days a week, I'm the bread maker. Um there are many traditional gender roles, and there are many complete, you know, I'm the sewer, I'm the knitter, I'm I'm kind of the house proud person. Um in many ways.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:43

What are you saying? I'm proud of our house. You're slacking, Meg. You're slacking. I'm proud of the house that has created.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:53

Um so yeah, there's lots of there's lots of uh things that with I mean I I study feminist um theory at university and um I've always called myself a feminist. I've I've written a feminist text called Refermenting Culture. Um, but I'm also a masculinist. And I feel like in this world of um of toxic patriarchy, whether you're male or female or someone who identifies as other, if you have hate, hatred in yourself, ideological hatred, you are a product of patriarchal toxic toxic patriarchy, basically. It doesn't matter whether you're a feminist or a misogynist or a misandrist or a a green person or a a blue man or whatever you are. You know, that that hatred is the trauma within us all. And it's it's come through toxic patriarchy, it's come through oppression, it's come through control.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:49

Um that's right. And and it's it's like you said earlier, it's just returning to to that comment, just that hatred is is the trauma, and exactly it's recognizing that and sitting with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:02

So it's really fair enough to be angry, it's just how how do we develop uh how do we enable our anger as a legitimate uh uh emotion to what we've inherited, what we've been made into. Um how do we uh how do we I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:24

But I was gonna say, how do we process that so we don't then pass it on to the next generation?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:28

Yes, that's right. So that our anger isn't put as a wound as it so often is, a wound into somebody else, that our anger can be expressed without judging or wounding or harming other people. That's that's something that I I find like you know, that's a life's work that that I personally need to work on that. Um, and I think I think that's probably common for many people.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:56

I think I think that's a a really poignant uh probably place to to stop the discussion now. Um I think we have touched on so many big topics, but I've loved having this conversation with you and just hearing your your insights. And I I love the way that you live your life and and your constant, I think your commitment to to learning, constantly learning and educating yourselves is is so impressive. And I really um yeah admire and and strive to to embody some of the things that you you do because I think it's it's really it's awesome. Wow, once you say too.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:35

It's been great to yarn with you and yeah, we're we're pretty sluggish just to begin with, I think. So um it's it's nice to have actually um powered up from our sleepy Sunday.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:46

Oh gosh, no, don't worry. I think sometimes just just trying to have these conversations through a technical program is it's so hard. You know, it's it would be so lovely if we could just sit down um around the campfire. But I did actually one little comment I'll make before we do um end, is that um I think I think I heard you talking about the importance of the campfire, you know, and sitting around the campfire to discuss and process emotions. And I have actually heard somebody comment recently that that podcasting is the new campfire.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:14

Yeah, digital campfire. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:17

I I definitely think so because even though it is kind of using these systems and that, you know, kind of shit in a lot of ways, but but uh I the personal growth that I've experienced through listening to people just have these in-depth discussions through podcasting has been so pivotal in my life. So yeah, same that. So I yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:37

So I think these And it's imperfect and unscripted, and there's lots of ums and buts, and oh, I've lost my training thoughts. And you know that this is the campfire. Um, and yeah, I I really have been enjoying particularly those um uh podcasts that don't clean things up too much as well. Um even though I think earlier I asked you to clean something up.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:03

Don't worry. I have a piece, I have a post-it note in front of me that says, do not say like, so um or up because I recorded a podcast two days ago with with um a friend of mine and I said like about 50,000 times in it, and it just created about four hours of editing work for myself. Well, uh when I listen back to this one, hopefully I haven't done that so much. But um, well, I'll let you guys continue on your your wonderful journey, and I really hope that one day I can meet you in person, um, give you a hug and hang out because you guys just seem awesome. Thanks, Sophie. We look forward to So there you have it, guys. That was our discussion. I hope you enjoyed it. I had a really good time sitting down with them and and having this chat. I found it personally really beneficial for me just to be able to ask them some of these really in-you-face questions, especially around climate. They're just on the same page and they're very realistic about the future, and I find that really refreshing because so many people don't want to talk about it or they don't want to get into the nitty-gritty because it makes me feel bad, but I don't know. My thing is um I think we've got to talk about it so we can work out what we're gonna do to make it better, and like so it's kind of hopeful. Anyway, that's just my take on it. So yeah, it was it was great, and they were so nice. Oh, I just really want to meet them in person one day. I hope we can hang out and just you know, as aforementioned Patrick, drink some of your mead um in your stone cellar, which is another cool thing to check out in their YouTube videos. So, yeah, anyway, thanks guys for coming on. And um, I really look forward to next week I'm sitting down with Ella Noah Bancroft, who's just such a powerful uh woman who lives in the Byron Bay region, and she's just such a strong, passionate activist in so many really important areas at the moment, and she has such a beautiful radical mind. So I can't wait to sit down and ask her some questions just about how she lives her life, and um I'm excited to do that and share it with you. So tune in next week for Ella Noah Bancroft. Thanks, guys. Bye.