letters

to relocalise is to become present. to arrive. to put down the virtual world and enter the palpable, the sensible, the tactile, the physical. to abandon the hunt for a deal, always exploiting a cheaper option, and instead to invest in each other and in the place we are in, not for-profit but for all … Read More

getting out of our own way as we seek to transform the way we live, so that the way we live regenerates life, it requires so much re-patterning. if we are to cease repeating the same errors that got us into this mess, we must first observe our patterns. sometimes my well-intentioned creative solutions follow … Read More

the latest variation of a climate in flux clearly suited the grapevine, as the farmhouse disappears beneath its leaves as if to pull a blanket over and turn in for a nap. the intensity of our lives wants a buffer and a break like this. inside the shady house i practice a sequence of care … Read More

if we knew we were already living at the edge of the future we want to see, how would we live this moment? if every action matters, what shall this day look like? what would we cease? what would we do more of? what would we let go of? what could we alter, in the … Read More

as if compelled by a force to speak i posed a vision to my community and our leaders. a lot of us gathered at the edge of a bicycle park at a rally for safe cycling on this small island, to ask questions of our elected member of the legislative assembly, who cycled there, with … Read More

what’s needed now is to shift away from the pattern that seeks to heal the living world while still firmly parked within a domination model, which sees people as separate from ‘nature’, and therefore sees nature as thriving when left alone. to shift into the collaborative pattern that sees people as part of a greater … Read More

the quandary we face now is that the climate and ecological crisis wasn’t caused by one thing and cannot be mended by one thing. it was made by a billion small and repeated actions and will be repaired in the same way. yet perhaps what we can say about converging crises is that they all … Read More

living on a small island is its own metaphor of the limits to growth, of our dependence on imports, an exchange made vivid. we could stand at the harbours and note what is imported and exported. whatever needs are not met on island and whatever waste is not managed on island, it is clearly delineated … Read More

when we choose to live closely bonded with the land, to turn to it in reciprocity, tending to the soil and the water and the plants and the animals for our mutual thriving, we are reclaiming a pattern of collaboration with all that lives. when we take the responsibility for what we need back into … Read More

what happens when we pause to listen to that small voice that gives gentle suggestions throughout the everyday? to honour the ideas, to take the action requested as one might run along and meet the requests of a beloved grandmother, not later but right away, in this moment. this moment generally is when the voices … Read More

what if we regarded insecticide, herbicide, pesticide through the ethical lens we apply to homicide? everything we need to know is in the name. i won’t touch here but for a moment on the suggestion that we already tolerate a level of femicide that ought to be absolutely unacceptable, and that this alone illustrates the … Read More

at the receiving end of the firehose of overstimulation that is dominant culture, how do we find the space and stillness to muster a creative response? the imagination may love some noise and colour for a time, but to make our own, many people dearly need quiet. for us, living so intensely at home, homeschooling, … Read More

the critical work of our time is not in grand gestures. it is in what i like to call the small work. the tiny step that requires the most energy, because it is the first. all the energy bound up in avoidance, in meaning to, in wishing, fearing, procrastinating, it’s more than enough to do … Read More

when my first child was tiny, as i drove across the bridge i’d picture the semi colliding with the pickup ahead, steeled to danger, hyper-aware that another life was held in my hands. vigilant. i might’ve stayed paralysed like that, but in seeking health through nutrition and herbal support, a long line of healers, my … Read More

getting things done needn’t be the measure of us. any moment that we refuse to judge ourselves by the values of the profit-motive, totting up achievements versus our sins against productivity, is a moment that we step out of the extraction economy and begin to co-create something remarkably different. as fleeting as these moments may … Read More

the recipe that calls for whatever’s grown well in the garden or the local farms this year, foraged in the wild larder and preserved in our household and community kitchens, not just a recipe unconnected to the season and this place, this is the recipe for a resilient future. the cookbook that focuses on ingredients … Read More

the state of the world is unnerving, but it’s no accident that what actually nourishes and restores our nervous systems are the same practices that restore the state of the world. here in this northerly place, winter is deepening. we track our animal nature in longer sleep and quieter lives. the tracks run along the … Read More

the project of making a minimal, utilitarian wardrobe falls to long winter evenings. stormy weather gives us a little more time to practice our skills, working on an ambitious project of making, mending, reconstructing more and more of our clothes. i’m trying to make just the clothes i would use in my daily life, cosy … Read More

the future we want to live in may well be systematically — culturally, politically, economically – out of our reach. corporations and billionaires may well hold the power-to-change in ransom to a structure that goes on extracting compounding interest from a planet on the brink of collapse. and yet. it may also be true that … Read More

acting like the world revolves around us, as a guiding pattern in dominant culture, is imploding before our eyes. we can spend a great deal of energy trying to fix what’s broken, to patch up the parts with solar panels and electric cars, swapping out a bit here for a less destructive bit over there, … Read More

the suggestion that we just aren’t good enough is one of the stories woven tightly into the fabric of dominant culture. we tug on that thread and find it tied directly to our own sense of worthiness, knotted deep in our own psyche. but this narrative is not ours alone to unpick, in solitude, in … Read More

as we become fluent in the life we want to live, immersed in living systems, there are particular dialects we begin to pick up on. one of those is how community happens. the isolation of recent years is particularly painful because we’re social animals, we need our herd, our flock, we cannot do this alone … Read More

our kith and kin surround us, here, and though relating with people may dominate my mind, relationships to all living forms bring me firmly to my senses. then i recognise the soil under my feet, and relax into it, i often forget that the earth is supporting me, grounding, rooting. now i lay down as … Read More

next to an actual nap or meditation, collecting my thoughts is the most restorative act of the day. it isn’t the sitting, the stopping, so much as the focusing of jumbling thoughts to a single moving point along the page. ideas flow through ink, scattered thoughts concentrate, funnelled through handwriting, distilling the chaos of the … Read More

coming of age, coming to consciousness of a greater world and one’s place within it, it must always have been a rite of passage fraught with apprehension and possibility. but emerging into a world in civilisational collapse is quite another matter. for those of us who have tended to complacency, too overwhelmed in getting on … Read More

the generations returning to the land, called by a deep longing sowed by old stories that took root, they save the seeds of something that could sustain us all. our children still remember the city, and translate, like immigrant’s children, their fluency so agile that you might even mistake them for country people after just … Read More

having awoken to the collapsing ecological state of this moment, beginning to touch our grief, beginning, finally, to thaw out of paralysis as we recognise all the forces of denial that prevented action, we come to the edge of despair at the sheer enormity, the vast and multiple confluent crises. bleakness and doom. we see … Read More

perhaps you have reckoned with this old story before. i first recognised it, as the mother of a newborn, as i learned to read the cues of my tiny child. the midwife, an elder, expressed without wavering a deep trust in me, my body and my child to know just what to do. she placed … Read More

In the face of ecological crisis, it doesn’t matter about my front entrance, no. But all of us lucky enough to have a front door, we live each day in impactful ways. We can share knowledge to shift into attunement with a living, thriving earth. Our designs, habits, actions, our stories matter when we share and learn from each other.

Conceiving of ourselves as wasteful and exploitative, a pox on the planet, really, depends on daily systems that reinforce this story through linear waste-streams. Extract, manufacture, ship, sell, consume, throw away. Yet the compost toilet captures human ‘waste’ nutrients in the ‘waste’ product of sawdust and transforms it through nitrogen-powered heat and microbial alchemy into rich soil to nurture a thriving, water-holding garden. We are always making organic matter. Whatever else I did today, I made more life. So it is with biochar.

if half-sleep yielded writing, writing became a social post, a post became a radio recording, which in turn became a video-podcast, then perhaps the transcript that is printed as pages of a book that you’ll assemble with your own hands and read in your own way, is itself just about ready to dream again, as … Read More