Community
Integrate rather than segregate - principal 8 of Permaculture.
Like so many of the principals of Permaculture I often find myself reflecting on how I can better achieve integration in my life whilst living in a society which largely values segregation - school, office, shops, nuclear families. It is a huge factor in choosing to home educate our kids, work from home, grow a large portion of our own food and to actively participate and belong to our local community.
When I think of the future and what I want it to look like, it is largely spent ruminating on how I can continue to merge these fundamentals that our culture prefers to define as seperate.
The cultural narrative says children should be in daycare, kinders and school not to benefit the individual children (as it packages it so conveniently) but to free up the labour of the parents to contribute to the endless growth paradigm that is our economic system and to train an obedient and dumbed down workforce to take up the mantle. Don't be fooled, it is for the benefit of a broken system, not a healthy populous.
The mainstream narrative says our elders should be in retirement villages, not to benefit our aged (as it heralds so convincingly) but to free up the time of their adult children to contribute to the economic juggernaut that must grow at all costs. Don't believe the sales pitch, healthy communities where longevity thrives are not made up of select age brackets.
We don't question the fact that our most vulnerable and those most in need of unconditional love and care, our young and our elderly, are separated and shut away from the real world. We have created artificial constructs, institutions, under the guise of 'what's best' to the detriment of our species. We no longer care for our children and grandchildren or our parents and grandparents, we pay other people (a pittance) to do the most important work of all. We tell ourselves we don't have the knowledge, time, money, patience, understanding, compassion, ability to care for those who needs us the most. We have gone so deeply down the wrong path that we have tricked ourselves this for the betterment of all, that the segregation is natural, healthy, for the best. But I look all around me at a planet burning itself to the ground, illness of all kinds rising astronomically, the natural world pillaged for profit or largely ignored, addictive devices we cannot extricate ourselves from and the barrage of information which spews forth from them confusing and distracting us all from the bleeding obvious - our society is sick beyond measure. We have splintered and fractured our world into so many moving parts it's a miracle any of us keep up. We are all struggling to keep our heads above rising inflation, rising debt, rising costs of living, rising tempretures and sea levels, rising isolation, rising mental health crises, rising disparity and intolerance. I look around me and I lament how we got here but I'll be damned if I hang onto this off-the-rails rollercoaster. I refuse to fuel this beast.
I don't partake in a lot of things that our society considers normal because I know there are infinitely better ways to contribute to a better world.
1. I don't want a career, I want a life full of meaningful work.
2. I don't want well-behaved, well-educated children. I want passionate, connected, curious individuals who deeply know themselves and how they can best serve the world they will inherit.
3. I don't want to pay other people to grow, distribute, package, cook, vend and dispose of my food and it's waste. I want to manage the entire process within the boundaries of my allotment and share the abundance freely with my community.
4. I don't want to live isolated as a family of four striking out on our own self-sufficiently. I want a community rich life, with friends of all ages, abilities and interests, whom together we can build the type of localised society we dream about.
We don't need more schools, aged care facilities, supermarkets and shopping centres. We need a new economic model that values family, volunteering, health and our ecosystems. The current one is not serving any of us, even the lucky ones either born of privilege or who hacked the system and have risen like cream to the top of a continually souring bottle of baby cow fertiliser that no ones realises passed it's 'best before' date multiple generations ago. It divides us, when we most need to be united.
Instead of investing our hard earned money (and it is hard earned because in order to make it we must segregate - mentally, physically and emotionally), into index funds or portfolios or schemes or crypto or AI or any number of material possessions a person can possibly posses, we are investing it into our community where true health and wealth abound in spades when you have the time to reap the benefits. I work less, in the monetary accruing sense of the word, so I can show up more. For my children, for my husband, for my parents, for my friends, for my neighbours, for my community, for my local environment and for myself.
Daily I continue down this path of regeneration and liberation, unpicking all the threads woven into me unknowingly throughout my life, imbedded there by a machine-like society that laid out a blueprint for living that I now know to be directions for destruction. I'm picking up that same needle that unravels and I'm restitching a new way forward, bringing together all the aspects of life that were once boxed and broken up, melding it all together into a holistic, sustainable, handmade pattern of hope. Hope for an interconnected, thriving existence for all.