or, unpicking workshop design to create genuinely open exchange So I’ve been experimenting with various formats for a workshop here in Cloughjordan. I’ve been trying to find something that people were interested enough in doing, and that would get the work out there. But I realized, after somewhat lukewarm response, that I was thinking too [...]
Read more →Apocalypse I have reached for the sword. I can’t or won’t tell you how or when. Let me then make the argument. 1) We are at seven billion humans now, expected to rise to at least nine billion. 2) If everybody lived like an American, we would need about eight planets. For Europeans the number [...]
Read more →Soundtrack: It’s hard to know what started it. It was ongoing when I left London for Cloughjordan. It might have started when Bembo Davies showed me that what I was doing was terrible theater, just did not work. It might be an impending 40th birthday. More than anything, it might be my work starting to [...]
Read more →My Templars of Earth statement seems to have ruffled quite a lot of feathers. These feathers seem to be in three general categories. People who don’t like the militarism. People who think its a secret society People who don’t get the esotericism It’s Templar because it deals with life-and-death struggles, albeit not armed ones, and [...]
Read more →Say only I understand and accept fully that the human race is harming the natural world by driving species to extinction, releasing long-lived pollutants, changing the climate and poisoning nature. I understand and accept fully that the human race makes many suffer horribly and die in war, famine, injustice, poverty and oppression, and that we [...]
Read more →Right. Can’t sleep. Things needed done, and said. Let me frame this clearly: the dominant species is killing the planet. We are obsessed with political trivia and the defense of fantastic constructs like banks, while ignoring the biological and human holocaust we are unleashing on every side. Children starve, nuclear weapons slumber in their silos, [...]
Read more →For years, my primary spiritual practice was Achalanatha, who in Buddhism is rendered as a protector of the right of women to become enlightened, although I was trained in a Hindu lineage, where such a right is not even conceivably questionable, by an extraordinarily ferocious female teacher, a Grandmother from Hell if you will. Anyway, [...]
Read more →In “Living in a Changing World” I suggested a workshop where I’d spend a week basically trying to transfer everything I know about infrastructure-centric crisis response; an ultra-deep dive for people who had come through Permaculture or Transitions or other kinds of risk management education, and wanted something which took that kind of thinking and [...]
Read more →Seed of the idea came to me when I was teaching part of the Permaculture course at Cloughjordan yesterday. Made a couple of tweets. Right, who wants to help me figure out a Collapse Course where I take all this stuff and teach it? When? Where? Who? Need perspective. “Living in a changing world” type [...]
Read more →I had a hard Dark Mountain. Not an unenjoyable one, but for me it was more about failure than success, which may be an interesting precedent. I don’t fail easily, but there is a time and place for everything. I was doing The Sacred bit, at least part of it, in dialogue with Dougald. There [...]
Read more →