Radicalising the home economy for greater adaptation and well-being

Hello Dear Reader,

We've been incredibly busy with harvest season this year. It's the first time in 12 years without volunteers helping to prepare and store food, fuel and medicine for the winter, exchanging their labour for learning, and helping us process the various abundances of this giving season.

We're happily ensconced in the thrum of this seasonal moment with a quieter, more beautiful world, engaging with a plethora of wonderful neighbours, song birds, goats and other sentients while ramping up the next chapter of our radical homemaking.

We've also been making more neopeasant how-to videos and putting out other offerings on our Youtube page as our way of contributing to strengthening peoples' home economies, adaptation and general well-being.

Last week we participated in the first Happen Films podcast, which is a weekly, hour-long conversation with people navigating this new era, embracing the not-knowing of it while at the same time knowing pretty much what to get on with.

While we've spent the past 12 years slowly weaning ourselves off the monetary economy, and up until COVID-19 we had managed to achieve a 70% reduction of dependancy on the global monetary economy, like many people we have lost money income. We are now a 85% non-monetary household, and while we're pretty excited about this as we've been working towards such an achievement for a while, we weren't entirely prepared for it. The first 50% of reliance on money was fairly quick to achieve. Going car-free, giving up air travel and a few other expenditure-curbing things did this for us within the first twelve months of our transition all those years ago. However, the remaining 50% has been a slow step-by-step process, the last 30% being for our rates and some some utility bills, though mostly for our access to a modest parcel of land.

Let's talk about housing being recognised as a basic human need again in Australia, and let's all work together to phase out multiple property ownership. Let's sing up the seeds and the rain for universal access to land for everyone so we can grow the local-ecological economies we really need to invest in now.

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We have been overwhelmed by people's generosity in response to our return to social media, and specifically for our neopeasant how-to films. Your kind and encouraging words (both publicly and privately) are spurring us to share more about our life and daily processes. We have had many people ask us to put a Donate button on our blog. We have ummed and aahed about this but today have decided to. Many thanks for your support, everyone. We are feeling most humbled and most grateful.

In our recent fermenting garlic film we offered a free copy of Patrick's 2017 book re:)Fermenting culture. Here again is the link to the PDF of the book and the link to the audio version.

Thanks Dear Reader for joining us on this strange, unknowable, threatening and exciting journey.

May your homeplaces be strong, productive, restful, and places of deep belonging.

Meg, Patrick, Woody and Zero x