Downloaded from YTS.BZ
[metal rattling]
[squeak]
[soft music]
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ
[rustle]
[Patrick] What I guess we came to realize step by step was
being in relationship with our energy,
[rustle]
being in relationship with our food,
that we can grow ourselves or tend or husband
being in relationship with our medicine,
which is through a love
of communing with plants.
Then we can move from that aggression
and domination ideology
into something very beautiful
and very human and very ancient.
[soft music continues]
There are many examples in my ancestry
where my peasant folk lived time-rich,
culture-rich existences.
[liquid pouring]
[crackling]
My old people are Norse, they're Vikings and Celts and Gaelics.
The Druidic churches were oak forests
and so that gives me a clue
that I come from people
who worshiped the divine in the natural world.
[soft violin music]
[birds chirping]
[insect noises]
[loud buzzing]
Neo peasantry describes
how we live
and our connection to our peasant ancestors.
My great-grandparents I would describe as peasants.
[Patrick] Thank you for your summer productions.
I mean no harm by disturbing you
and I aim to take the top box
and leave you three to pack down for the winter.
[birds chirping]
[Meg] I think about peasants as living in harmony
with the seasons and with the the wildness
and the richness of the world.
Whoa. [laughs]
It has 15 kilos of honey in there.
Wow.
Neo peasantry just simply means new peasantry
and recognizing that word peasantry has
often a pejorative usage.
So reinstating that word gallantly
and the Neo is locating the privilege that we have to choose
to live like this.
Yeah, they'd normally put the honey at the top of the hive
at this time of year.
-When they're... -Was this at the top?
Getting ready? Yeah, this is the top box.
So that's what we're gonna see.
We can always put it back if it's just brewed.
Oh goodness.
[bees buzzing]
[Woody] Oh, lemme get you something.
Just hold it there.
I mean there's a fair bit of honey in there.
- [Woody] Some brewed? - [Patrick] Or it's quite...
[indistinct conversation]
We need to get the honey...
[Meg] Do you want me to open the door?
-Yep. There's a few bees here. -Okay.
So if we just open those doors, sweety?
No, no, we…
There we go. Out, both out. Yay.
[Woody] Perfect.
This is my favorite part.
-[calm music] -[Patrick groans]
[Patrick] Two decades ago when
Meg and I first got together and we started watching
a whole range of documentaries
and came across Vandana Shiva's work,
what I was reading or what I was being so repulsed by
in my own culture of birth,
I started to see people acting in different ways
and that was incredibly inspiring.
[soft music continues]
[Meg] I grew up in Melbourne, the closest big city to here.
I thought the aim of my life was to
have a really good job where I could earn lots of money.
One of my big motivations
that was propelling me away from the values of the culture
that I was born in
were the values.
Amazing! [chuckles]
[crunch]
They just didn't feel right
and I didn't really question them
during my first three decades of life.
They were just what I was told to do.
They were just what I was told was the right way to live.
There was lots of questioning that went on at that time.
We saw these great trifectas
of the super petrol station,
the supermarket and the super pharmacy
being this conglomerate.
[Meg] What is a way of living that
actually reflects my own personal values?
Not the values of my parents, of the culture at large,
of the billboards, of the government,
of the corporations,
of the education system, my grandparents nor any of that.
What actually is important to me?
[tapping]
[clinking]
Meg had some savings from previous years working in Melbourne
and we cobbled together enough for a deposit to buy
what was very cheap back then,
nearly 20 years ago, this quarter acre,
it was perceived as an ugly duckling.
People said, "Oh, that-you wouldn't want
to build on that swamp."
[buzzing]
[indistinct chatter]
[calm music]
Oh, good.
-[Meg] Hi PJ. -Hi guys.
[calm music continues]
[Meg] Zephy's room.
The list of things we had to buy from Ikea; Zephy's drawings.
[Patrick] The first two or three years were actually quite difficult,
like we're trying to do so much, so quickly.
It wasn't a part-time thing.
It soon became a…
Like obviously we were working
and we had a lot of things to do.
We were also dancing a lot, and we were having fun.
-We weren't this couple that came together -[calm music]
and were very serious.
[kissing sound]
[Meg] Did someone say party? Oh yeah.
[Patrick] The time Zeph came to us
for half the week, we were parents.
Zeph is my first son.
Named Zephyr
after the Greek god of the west wind, Zephyrus.
-Perfect. -You'll often hear farmers,
like old-school farmers say,
"Ah, there was a bit of a zephyr this morning."
I love that. I love hearing that.
A gentle warm breeze.
[birds chirping]
Pretty much from day one, I would take him down
into the forest and into that sedge swamplands
and introduce him to country.
[snap]
[indistinct chatter]
We would go on big bush walks together,
end up making things out of stone in the forest
and we were one week on, one week off with him
and sharing the parenting with his mom.
Hi Zephy, hope you're having a fantastic time.
We are missing you so much. All three of us.
[screams]
[sings and hums]
[music fades]
[birds chirping]
[distant voices]
[man] And finally putting some things together
and it's making more sense as we go.
So what you are about to come into is just one
response to the predicament of our age.
It's not the solution to the problem,
it is a response to the predicament.
Being able to build with very little money
has been a big part of our story
so that I retired from building
so I could be seven days in the household
and community economy.
Meg is five days in that economy.
Switching time wealth for cash poorness
has been wonderful and it's made a…
enabled a very rich life.
For good composting, you need a misting event to happen,
and the way you get a misting event to happen is to be able
to constantly mist as you're…
-[slow flowing] -as you're throwing material in.
It's getting wet, so each layer is getting wet.
One of the things that we like to do is to create potash.
We like to take our volunteers and also the bush school kids
to go through with a scoop and a dust mask
and just broadcast it through the forest
mimicking what an indigenous cool burn
would be like if it could take place there.
[soft murmuring]
A cultivated garden is like a relationship with the wild
and the domestic
and I think that's what permaculture is too.
I think what we're doing is like an emerging mythology.
An emerging story
just like many folk around the world.
A new old story,
and I like to say old too because there's always hubris around,
"Oh, what we're doing is new."
Whereas actually it's often a leaning back
as much as a leaning forward.
[distant murmuring]
[Meg] I had no skills, no practical skills.
I knew how to write emails and press releases
and fill out spreadsheets,
but I had no practical skills.
So these last 20 years has really been a process
of me unlearning a whole lot of stuff
and really deciding for myself how I wanna spend my time
and you know, I have one life.
Do I wanna be just chasing the dollar
and always feeling like I don't have enough time
or do I want to be present to every single apple that I pick
and every single cucumber that I slice.
Imagine a life like that where you can really be present
to every living thing and every relationship
[people chatting]
[click]
Instead of going to work to earn the money to buy the thing, we're just
doing the thing ourselves.
[rattling]
It's very important for our family to eat a diet
that is as local as possible
and with as few industrial inputs as possible,
there's no way that you can look at the industrial system
and think that that works at all because it doesn't work.
It is a broken system.
I feel like one of the great learnings that we all received from the pandemic
was the instability of our centralized systems.
Whether that was the medical system
or that was the our food systems.
Just the disruption of supply chains.
To rely solely on those, doesn't feel resilient to me.
So I am living my life
and helping prepare Woody to live in a way
that is much more independent of those centralized systems.
When we started living like this,
we didn't know where we were heading,
we just knew what we were turning away from,
[rustle]
but we didn't know that it would lead
to such richness.
[rattling]
[water pouring]
[snap]
See you in a couple of months when you're vinegar.
[rattling]
Having been a vegetarian for so long,
I totally understand why somebody would decide
to be a vegan or vegetarian.
It comes from a really important place.
If you live in a way where you can't access
food outside of the industrial system,
it makes sense to participate in the industrialism-ness
as little as possible.
[cackle]
When I was 10,
our primary school went on an excursion to an abattoir
[laughs]
and I was the only kid in my class who seemed affected or appalled at all.
And I came home from school that day and said,
"I am never eating meat again."
-[calm music] -[birds chirping]
When I was 30,
I decided that I wanted to start eating meat again.
So I did a short course,
it was called Kill and Dress Small Livestock,
and we learned how to lovingly take an animal's life
and all of us were crying at the end.
It was really emotional but incredibly empowering
and it taught me that you can eat an animal
and that you don't have to hate the animal.
That you don't have to hate an animal to take its life,
that you can do it in an honoring way.
I feel very embedded in the cycle of life when I am eating meat.
This feels like a really important process
that I want to do myself.
I want to live an accountable life
and for me that means taking personal responsibility
for all of the actions that I take.
[Indistinct words of prayer]
[Meg] We eat roadkill,
we take the lives of our own animals
and these are animals that we name and that we tend
and that we help birth and that we…
We love these animals.
They're a big part of our family dynamic and our family system.
I just feel like I'm channeling
my foremothers. Feel very connected.
Yeah, just to my peasant ancestors
[tender music]
[Patrick] We're saying this level of violence at this scale
is an ordinary part of ecological life
and we wanna say no to the systemic, manmade mass death
of the food system,
whether you be a vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore.
[rattling]
[crackling]
[rattle]
[crackling of fire]
[tender music continues]
[soft murmuring]
-[gunshot] -[rattle]
[gunshot]
[Patrick sighs]
Thank you little rabbit.
[sighs] Thank you for your life.
[birds chirping]
[thud]
[indistinct murmuring]
Acorn beer.
Remember the acorn and feijoa cake recipe?
-Yeah. -[Meg] I also got so many flowers
coming on a whole lot from…
I know the acorn… the feijoa flowers.
-[engine in the distance] -[birds chirping]
[Patrick] Both Meg and I, we're really just watching
and observing how kids, through play,
like human mammalian play, is just loaded with creativity
and that's, that's how we learn.
This is Zephyr's and my dad's drawing
and we're gonna rub this out
and then we're gonna do another drawing.
[squeaking]
[Zeph] Can we put some music to this?
[high-tempo music]
[Patrick] He was born with one ear that wasn't formed,
one ear that was closed over.
Often kids that have hearing deficits
mask that.
They don't want anyone to know
that they've got a hearing disability at all.
So they act in ways that make sure that people forget that.
[rattle]
Because of his physical prowess
and his incredible athleticism, he would be the kid
that was scaling the 40 foot tree
[upbeat music]
running across the roof of some three-storey building.
[upbeat music continues]
[screams]
[Meg] He was always hurting himself.
You know, if there's a dam there and it's a party,
he was always the kid to fall in the water.
So wherever we went, I had to take first aid kit
and change of clothes.
[loud steps]
[rustle]
[music fades]
[Patrick] So here's a lively active, a very physical kid.
Hi cousins, I love you very much.
I play... I play Auskick and soccer and I do rugby.
Thank you.
[Meg] Zephyr was three when I came along
and every step of the way of being a stepmom
I struggled with,
is this the right thing to do?
If Zephyr's mom was here, what would she say?
Am I being a wicked stepmother?
When I was telling him off, I really was so unsure of myself
the whole time.
And as soon as I became pregnant with Woody
and definitely when he was born,
-this knowing came into me. -[calm music]
-[soft tender music] -It's like I know exactly what to do here
and I have followed that strong thread.
When you grow up,
are you gonna kick a football with me?
Yes? Okay.
- [Patrick] I think that was a yes. - [Zeph] Deal. Deal.
[Meg] That strong knowing said,
"Don't send him to school.
What you are doing here is important."
[thud]
Yes, he can learn to read and write,
but ecological literacy needs to come first.
And because I was brought up in the suburbs
in a very loving home, but very nature disconnected,
-[splashing] -I knew that I didn't want that for him.
[calm music]
[Patrick] Woody learns through a path
of his own inquiry, his own curiosity.
[loud buzzing]
This is a big piece of spotted gum that I've got
that a friend gave to me
and I've already got one chopping board out of it,
but I should get another three.
So it's a really nice wood there.
[buzzing]
[Patrick] We've learned a lot through Zeph.
Admittedly Zeph was in a school environment
and peers
were, you know, replace parents
and peers are manipulated by big systems,
particularly industries.
Whereas with Woody being fully community schooled,
unschooled, home schooled,
combination of all those things,
it's this dance between not being too warrior-like
while also in context
allowing him to understand the dominant culture
that he's also born into.
Flood. Spade.
[Meg] If I saw kids,
high school kids for example, thriving and helping,
healthy and happy and like in their own sovereignty,
then I would say, "Wow, I want Woody to be part of that."
But that's not what I'm seeing.
I'm seeing a lot of kids looking like this a lot of the time and…
-A lot of anxiety. -…depressed, anxiety.
It's not an environment that promotes
thriving of our young people
[snap]
-See you, Woods. -Bye.
[rattling]
[calm music]
[Patrick] And that happened before.
My hopes for Woody when he's older are none of my business.
He is free to do what he wants and to be who he wants.
And that feels really important for me to know that.
And I believe it in my guts, like the whole of me believes that.
[rustling]
[rattling]
I would like him to have inner resources
where he can cope with whatever comes his way.
So I would like him to trust his own intuition,
to work out in his own way what his gifts are
that he can then give back to the world.
Forty. Exactly.
That was a good guess.
There's exactly 40.
Whatever future he's going to inherit,
I want him to be able to find
a good balance of being appalled
and being in love with what, with whatever comes.
Because we can focus on the brokenness of the world
and it can break us as well
or we can notice it and be appalled
and notice the beauty and have that in balance.
Have a look at that grain.
Such beautiful wood.
-[calm music fades] -[birds chirping]
So these are parasol mushrooms and they're really good eating.
They're often found in eucalyptus forest.
So that's the umbo there.
And then these little lines here
in the mushroom are the gills and the spores are in the gills
and then they fall down onto the forest floor
when you put them like that in your basket.
[rustling]
Now these are saffron milk caps.
Can do that,
and no other mushroom that look like this, do that.
See that orange on your finger?
That means it's a saffron milk cap.
[rustling]
I feel like in the future I'll be pretty set, my skills
and I can teach like a lot of my friends all that stuff too.
[rustling]
[birds chirping]
[quacks]
[clucking]
[motor humming]
Thank you, girls.
[birds chirping]
[Meg mumbling]
[Meg] So we have a volunteer program, it's called SWAPS
and that stands for Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists.
It's an immersive experience.
They really become part of our household
and get a taste of what our daily rhythms are like.
I really love to have the volunteers
it's a really special part of what has built this place.
And as we always say to the volunteers who come,
you know they're eating the preserves and the ferments
and they're warming themselves with the wood
that the previous volunteers helped to get.
So it's like a pay it forward to the next lot of volunteers.
-[snap] -[rattle]
[Woody speaking in the distance]
Yeah, really well.
Yep. [sighs]
[sighs]
Twenty minutes of sweating a day keeps the doctor away.
[thud]
My health ambition.
[Woody sighs]
I want to die chopping wood,
in my nineties, preferably. [laughs]
What about your hundreds?
Oh yeah, I'd take that.
As long as I'm chopping wood, I don't care.
[loud buzzing]
[buzzing stops]
[thud]
[Patrick] Layer by layer, season by season, year by year,
gleaning the necessary skills,
building the necessary relationships
[crack]
and also having a lot of fun.
So moving from anger and defiance and warriorness
to play and fun and a big fuck you to the system.
As we're starting to find our confidence.
When I'm going for a walk in the forest,
I'll bring back some kindling
and it makes sense that we get most of our wood from this forest
because it's so close to our home.
And we with many others that who live around here
are stewards of this forest.
We're in relationship with this forest
so we understand what's happening seasonally, ecologically.
And...
we love being in this forest.
We love this forest, we tend this forest
and we want this forest to flourish
as we flourish.
[rattling and rustling]
[bleat]
[Patrick] Hey Eric.
[Woody] Hi sheep.
[rattling]
[thud]
[crack]
[Patrick] That should keep us going for a while.
We basically don't have electricity bills.
The key to it is our firewood.
The heart of our home.
So this is our stove top, it is our oven.
It heats our house, it heats our hot water.
It is our dehydrator, toaster, kettle,
and our clothes dryer.
And we also like to say it's our TV,
so we just sit and watch the logs burn.
[calm music]
[Meg and Patrick chatting]
[slow violin music]
[indistinct chatter]
[chirping and creaking]
[music fades into the rain]
[calm music]
This little building is a building
Zeph and James, a volunteer here, built.
Made almost entirely from recycled materials.
At the time of building the kumquat,
there was a major exhibition of Banksy,
the graffiti artist, that came to Melbourne.
Zeph was sort of struggling between, like,
on the one hand this is illegal
and risky and he was excited by graffiti,
but on the other hand he, it's been culturally celebrated.
I said, "Well, why don't you do the history of graffiti
as a homeschool project?
Why don't you really go into that?"
And he did.
And that was quite a beautiful time.
He was doing that project as more a formal education
or a research-based project,
but more and more going out
and then practicing his own graffiti in the town.
So much so that one night
he completely bombed the town
with like 30 huge pieces.
[spray paint hissing]
He was caught
and ended up in the local police station.
-[police sirens] -[latch clicking]
I was trying to guide him on this careful,
nuanced path of contributing culturally
as a graffiti-ist or a stencil artist
and you know, the problems of offensive destruction
to other people's things.
So after six months of community schooling,
he started to talk about going back to school
and to go to the local high school.
Onto ah… to brighter things.
If your idea of a holiday is packing up the kids
and heading to the beach, then you need to meet this next family.
They have taken the idea of a road trip to a whole new level,
spending more than a year traveling
up and down Australia's east coast by bike.
But that's not all.
The family also ate for free along the way,
foraging for wild food and even cooking up road kill.
Some parents got to know that this kid Zephyr
with this unusual name.
Oh that sounds like that family from Daylesford.
So he became quickly known as that dirty hippie
that eats roadkill, from Daylesford.
He started his high school years with that story
and couldn't throw it off.
[birds chirping]
[loud crack]
-[both sigh] -[crack]
[Patrick grunts]
[buzzing]
-[birds chirping] -[squeaking]
[clatter]
[Meg] We are now mostly not living in the monetary economy,
but we still have rates to pay.
We still have some bills, we still buy in some food
and you know, secondhand clothes.
So we, we have very low overheads and low costs,
but we still do participate in the monetary economy.
So I work two days a week for David Holmgren and Su Dennett.
So David is the co-originator of Permaculture
and I work in David's office.
[calm violin music]
We live below the poverty line, very happily and very easily.
How we're able to live like this is because we rely
and live mostly in the gift economy,
not the monetary economy.
[girls speaking]
[Meg] Thanks, guys.
[girls chatting]
The flow of gifts is really about trust,
living with a knowing that
what we put out comes back.
It's being generous, knowing that generosity is contagious.
Things like our bush school, Forest and Free,
we operate in the gift economy.
So we take 20 kids out every Monday from 10 till 4.
In exchange, parents gift us produce from their garden,
hand-me-downs.
So we get meals made for us.
[indistinct chatter]
When I was working in an office, I had money so I could buy those things,
but it was, it's an economy of meaninglessness, of disconnection
and I choose hard work and connection any day.
[birds chirping]
Okay. Do you remember how to play neo peasant with villaging?
Yes.
What we do is work together to get all the money out of the bank.
So we bankrupt the bank so they no longer are a part of the game.
[rattle]
Three.
One, two, three. [sighs]
[Meg] Market Garden? Three dollars.
Look at this.
Small goods.
-See if I can… -Oh, yum.
That's really good. That one.
Anyone wanna lend me a dollar?
-Yeah. -Sure.
-I need some new beans. -Sure.
One, two, three, four.
Chance.
Fraudulent banking services.
Pay each player ten dollars each.
That's good. I did do that.
Ten dollars each?
No, that's actually not what it says.
Daddy, you can't just do that.
-Yes, you can. -That's not good.
- This is our reality. - You have to earn your money.
[rattle]
[crack]
[clatter]
[crackle]
[liquid pouring]
[burble]
Yeah, and around the back here, isn't it?
Yeah.
[Patrick] We rarely get sick
and we certainly only get a cold and sometimes a flu.
About a year ago I was knocked off my bike
and I still have residual shoulder pain.
So this is some stinging nettle,
which is like acupuncture.
Yeah. So yeah, it's really stinging. I want that.
It gets all the blood there and yeah, medicine.
[Patrick] You know, a lot of people at our age
are very unwell and have many different diseases
and it's not because we're somehow biologically superior.
It's because I think we trust, and our economy,
and way of relating is based on relationships
with things, we touch things, we absorb things.
We only ever seem to think of parasites as negative in our culture
because we're in this ideology of germ theory
that the world is dangerous and we should fear it.
It's full of viruses and bacteria and terrible things.
But of course we are walking forests of many different
more-than-human participants.
So if we think of ourselves as a relating body,
then it's possible to then trust all those relations.
[upbeat music]
[squeak]
[rattle]
[music continues]
[screech]
[clunk]
[screech]
Gives me great satisfaction straightening these,
which I get for about ten cents.
'Cause to buy a new one off the shelf is about ten dollars.
[music continues]
[clang]
[Patrick] Probably the first ten years we had come
to the neighborhood, we just were walking in the forest
and observing it and learning about the edible mushrooms
and falling in love with this area.
The CFA did a big burn all the way around
this edge of the forest
and it was a really destructive and fast and furious burn.
It wasn't nuanced, it wasn't like indigenous burning.
The forest didn't feel good for a while.
And I remember saying to myself then,
"I want to start working in this forest
and give them no reason to come back."
And so that was a nearly decade ago.
I talked to neighbors about introducing goats
and then sheep.
So farming it with no legal tenure to land.
The sheep and the goats are particularly interested in the newcomer species.
That's their main thing. With an elder or a hawthorn
or a blackberry or gorse.
They'll absolutely go it.
You've got this nuanced and relationship-based land management
versus pesticides and bulldozers.
We eat the surplus goats and sheep and that's our payment
for working in, in public land in Djarra people's land
in real terms.
And also doing that with relationship
with Uncle Rick, who's one of the Djarra elders
and an emerging elder called Beck Phillips, who's a friend.
There is this beautiful indigenous renewal in Djarra country
and alongside that
there's what I call permaculture subsistence,
which is we white fellas reclaiming our indigenous soul
in how we work with land.
Subsistence permaculture is a way back
in to how we as second people, our ancestors performed life
as land-bonded people.
[Woody] Look out. Look out.
Hang on.
This is Alice and she is about five years old.
They're really good fire mitigators
and they're also
putting all this lovely poo on the ground,
which is really good for the soil.
[birds chirping]
- [Patrick] Thanks, chookies. - Thanks, bunnies.
-Thanks, bunnies. -Thanks to the forest.
[clang]
Sunshine.
I'm gonna take her through bottling the cider.
- You are. - And we're gonna process the conk,
the tinder fungus,
for medicine to take with us.
I want to write an email to Zeph
and send some photos.
I'd like to send a photo of you hitting
your handmade cricket bat, practice bat.
-The one I made yesterday? -Yeah.
I'm making a project
on Australia's cricket captain Pat Cummins.
I'm really into cricket,
so it's a good homeschool project for me.
I'm sticking in photos of him winning us the Ashes.
[Meg speaking in the back]
[indistinct chatter]
[Meg] Do you know the fungus,
the tinder fungus that was over here? The big white one.
- [student] Oh yeah, yeah. - [Meg] Put some of that in there.
[student] Because this is cool.
[Meg] In June, we are going to hitchhike
to India
and we'll see how far we get.
We can be neo peasant permies in situ,
but to take that then onto the road, like how do we live a radically frugal way
without our wood stores,
without our seed bank and without our cellar bank?
What does it look like in a different context?
And I do love that.
I feel like in the past we've found great rhythms
and I look forward to seeing what that looks like this time.
-[calm music] -[Meg] Woody being crazy about cricket,
India is crazy about cricket.
[smack]
So I made this... [gasps]
supposed to be like a baseball bat sort of thing... yesterday
and I put one of my cricket bat grips on it,
and I've already got a few cherries,
as you can see,
and I'm pretty happy with it.
It's good for my defense to practice.
[smack]
-[Patrick] Shot. -[smack]
[Woody] Ups.
He will turn 12 on this trip and to introduce him to the cultural Other
through something that he loves, and through a shared passion.
[smack]
Just that invitation to... "I'm from somewhere else,
but I connect with you through a game of cricket."
-[smack] -[thud]
-[smack] -[Patrick grunts]
-[Woody] Sorry! -[Patrick laughing] Geez!
[both laugh]
- It got stuck with your phone. - That's funny.
[Patrick] That's a good one.
- [Woody] Is it good? - [Patrick] Yeah, it just shows the…
[Woody] Let's send that to Zeph.
[Patrick] Yeah, the craft of it.
[upbeat music]
[music fades]
[keystrokes]
[Patrick] "Dear Zeph",
"looking forward to our next visit."
He fell in with a bunch of very vulnerable boys
-and they all egged each other on to do -[Boys chatting]
more and more crazy things in the town.
-Petty theft -[glass crashing]
and then eventually moving into stealing cars
-[car brakes squeaking] -and running drugs for older boys.
- [people screaming in the distance] - And it just became a nightmare.
[police sirens]
And at one stage he was in a high-speed police chase
-[car brakes squeaking] -and he nearly killed a police officer.
-[door squeak and snaps] -[lock clicks]
[prison reception recording] "It is subject to monitoring and recording."
It is unlawful for this call to be redirected
or be part of a conference call.
If you do not wish to accept this call, hang up now.
"If you understand the conditions of this call, please continue."
-Hey, Zeph. How you going mate? -[Zeph] Hi.
Zeph went into...
[sighs] prison.
First, youth prison and then adults at 15
and pretty much has been in there since. He's now 22.
And there's the two brothers.
Yeah, Zeph had just got out of juvie
the first time, and things were going really well
and then lockdown happened and he couldn't see his mates
and he broke curfew
and he was back in.
[sad music]
And that's just before he was then went into weeks
of lockdown in juvie.
And that's when he tried to escape for the third time
and they took him to adults.
-[music continues] -[birds chirping]
[rustle]
For about a year, I slept in the forest.
[crying] That was a… [sobs]
That was a big, big time.
His story has been a great gift to my life, as painful
and unwanted
[sobs]
as it has been.
But I have so much joy and gratitude
for the work that I do because of his story.
Another gift is understanding how to better raise Woody.
How Zeph's story
and my failings as a father has informed me.
Doesn't make me [laughs]
a great father,
but a much more aware and conscious father.
The real gift of Zeph is
understanding how me as a father and other men
who love Zeph in the community didn't have the skills
or the craft of bringing him up.
Not raising him,
but like elevating him where he needed to be elevated.
And that is a nuanced thing
and it requires a village, not a nuclear family.
And I think that the village rebuilding
that Meg and I have been doing [sniffs]
over the past several years is because of that.
Because of his story.
[sad music continues]
Moving what needs to be moved, for the flow.
[indistinct speech]
[birds chirping in the back]
[chirrup]
[soft bird chirp]
[soft people murmur]
Okay, we're gonna do a thing we call "blackberry surfing."
[loud cheers]
[kid] Climbing to a tree!
[kids chattering]
-[indistinct chatter] -[snap]
Forest and Free is a weekly bush school.
We have a whole day with the kids.
[kids chatter]
It's an opportunity for kids to be outside in the forest
to reconnect to the forest.
There's loads of different cubbies that we're making,
different shelters
and some of the kids have been working on their shelters for a year or so.
[student] I decided that it needs some work so I added a lot
of insulation around it
and it could fit up to, I don't know, six people, I reckon.
[student] This is my cubby.
Here we have a rock bed.
Hopefully next time we come, I'll put some broom.
Here, we have, like, curtains.
[indistinct chatter]
[student] When you're in the forest, it just makes you feel more, like, relaxed.
It's really fun because when I'm at home,
it's kind of boring, but when I'm at Forest and Free,
I get to express my energy.
[Meg] When they're building cubbies, they're learning about
natural building and architecture and where to position it.
Where's the sun coming from?
And if we have an opening to the south,
which is usually where the rain comes from,
then maybe we need to weave a door and have that as our opening.
And they're learning what materials are around,
what flowers, what birds, what insects.
They're just, they're embedding. They're learning how to be in place.
[kids chatter in the distance]
[birds chirrup]
[soft calm music]
I facilitate a monthly women's circle,
it's called For Crying Out Loud.
And Patrick facilitates the men's circle, which is called Fire Choir.
We started these circles maybe five and a half years ago.
We gather here at the fire circle
and Patrick or Woody comes down earlier
and lights a really big fire for us.
We live in a culture that doesn't do grief very well.
The circle is a way to acknowledge our grief,
to share the grief.
And it's a witnessing circle.
It's a deep listening, a deep sharing.
And we speak from the heart and we listen with our hearts
and to really practice listening in a nonjudgmental way.
[music intensifies]
This circle is just medicine and it's something that I crave.
It was a deep remembering of something that
is ancient in our bones.
Sitting around a fire, sharing stories.
To sit in circle with women who I've known for many, many years,
but to witness them at their most vulnerable,
at their most honest
and open expressions of themselves or their pain
or their grief or whatever it is that they're most alive to,
to really witness women in that rawness
is just incredible.
I used to cry with shame
whenever I would cry.
You know, I was sort of embarrassed of my emotionality.
And now, I'm a proud crier.
I feel like that's what happens around this circle.
Our moments are witnessed so our lives don't just speed by
that we are in the grief.
We recognize and we air the grief.
So we have room in us for the beauty to come out, for the beauty to go in.
[music fades]
[soft cawing]
We planted this little kumquat
[clears throat] when Zeph
and James finished this building
and this is the first year it's fully fruited
and it has pretty much grown
over the period of time that Zeph has been inside
in the prison system.
And when we get back from India
in four months' time,
Zeph is coming out.
And these fruits,
which are in abundance, look like they'll be ready.
So that feels like a cycle.
[insects and birds chirping]
[clucking]
[Patrick] I've been noticing since moving towards
the departure, a real groundedness.
I'm so in love with the processes
of packing down the house
and filling the cellar and the wood store
and moving the goats and sheep to a friend's farm.
[bleat]
Thinking through what sort of meals we can have on the road
to keep out of the industrial food system
as much as possible.
[Meg] I have so much excitement about going,
but the excitement only really extends to closing the door
and walking out to the A300 with our sign.
- I can't really think beyond there, but... - Me too.
...even just to get to that stage, it's just like,
oh my God, it's just gonna be the most liberating feeling
and I'm looking forward to that.
-Two kilos. -Kilo and half.
-Yeah. -Yeah, yeah.
That's good because we have backpacking.
[indistinct chatting]
[crickets chirping]
[laughs]
[Meg] Officially welcome to Tree Elbow.
Really great to see everybody. We're very lucky.
Feeling very lucky to be part of this community
and very lucky to live where we do.
[Patrick] I had my first pangs
of unsettlement last night for this trip.
I felt anxiety for the first time, which is good.
Just helping my body to step into unknown things.
[people chatting]
[birds chirping]
[calm music]
[Meg speaking indistinctly]
[Woody sighs]
[Woody speaking indistinctly]
[laughs]
[music continues]
[Patrick murmuring]
[Meg and Woody speaking]
[Patrick and Meg exclaim]
- [music intensifies] - [birds loudly chirruping]
[music fades]
[music resumes pace]
[car engine buzzing]
[indistinct chatter]
[honk beeps]
[music intensifies]
[calm end music]
[flute music]
♪ Do not try to save the whole world Or do anything grandiose ♪
♪ Instead find a clearing In the dance forest of your life ♪
♪ And wait there patiently Until the song that is your life ♪
♪ Falls into your own cupped hands And you recognize and greet it ♪
♪ Falls into your own cupped hands ♪
♪ And you recognize and greet it ♪
♪ Only then will you know How to give yourself to this world ♪
♪ So worthy of rescue ♪
♪ Only then will you know How to give yourself to this world ♪
♪ So worthy of rescue ♪
♪ Only then will you know How to give yourself to this world
♪ So worthy of rescue ♪
[maraca rattles]