Our latest musical missive...

This mid summer has seen the birth of a new song in the family. We sing and play it here, juxtaposed with 1950s super8 footage of family taken by Patrick's grandfather Fred Jones. It shows a post war time when life was less hectic and far less mediated.

Patrick and Woody were invited into a spontaneous dance party after playing cricket in Dal Lake with these joyous Punjabi men.

A rough translation from the Nepali:

"Hello to everyone

We came across this Chinese man playing a traditional Lusheng wind instrument in Laos. Traditionally the Dong people of southeastern China play this instrument.

Sunshine Yang is a current volunteer-student at the School of Applied Neopeasantry. In this podcast episode Sunshine shares with Patrick her experience of the back-to-the-land movement in China.

This week Patrick spoke with researcher, permaculturist and midwife Eleanor Young, and those of us at the School of Applied Neopeasantry are still brimming, enlivened by this sensitive, thinking and wise scholar-practitioner advocating for women-centric birthing.

Patrick shares a goodly yarn with English artist, Joel Gray. Together they traverse the sticky, dominating, Promethean-go-it-alone world of the machine, of the all-consuming Moloch, and yet arrive at a composting place, restoring Pandora's fermenting vessel, her Gaia, her Mother Country – the entanglements and gossipy liveliness of tending the village seeds beyond transhumanism.

Links to Joel's collaborative work are embedded in this video, plus other material from both his and our worlds.

We hope you enjoy this yarn as much as we did making it. Love and power to the brothers and sisters who are learning to dance with gut (Pandora), heart (Epimetheus) and mind (Prometheus) logic integration.

As always, your comments and pitchforkings are more than welcome.

Patrick from the School of Applied Neopeasantry takes us through the management of gorse by goats and the ecological significance of slow and small solutions for post-industrial, subsistence and land-less farming.

In this unscripted, barefoot generation of thought through Mother Country, Patrick returns to the Pandora myth, which is necessarily entangled with the twinning myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and he connects these major western origin stories to the present culturing, making and remaking possibilities of Mother Country.

Patrick here offers an embodiment experiment into what he's calling the reclamation movement, or the returning movement. This spirit of consciousness willing to draw on origins and ancestors is in direct contrast to the groundless, innovation-anxiety, becoming thrust of hypertechnocivility, which Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, and Paul Kingsnorth are all critically and eloquently examining right now, among others such as Artist as Family.

Krishnamurti speaks to the "utterly religious" experience being characterised by a lack of fear in his 1972 work, The Impossible Question. This wisdom is unspoken in this reperforming of the feminine sacred by Patrick, but it underpins this experiment.

Relevant references to this piece include:

Paul Kingsnorth's 'What is there left to conserve?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EObWLbJqGkI

As always your commentary is most welcome.