The Tao of the Chicken: A Virgo New Moon Reflection

Tapping in will forces, healing currents, and unexpected teachers under the new moon and royal star

Regulus, one of the four Royal Stars of ancient Persia, shines as the healer’s guide, connected with Archangel Raphael and the direction of the North…the place where higher destiny calls us. I have written about the way finding whale also going North. Under this Virgo New Moon we are invited to open to the Divine within (Virgo is connected to the high priestess and sacred ceremony). We are reminded to listen to the heart-centered intelligence that unfailingly guides us toward beauty, truth, healing, and connection.

Astrologer Tami Brunk reminds us: change is not the enemy. We must FLOW. As I opened my farm gate this evening (day of this new moon), I looked at a sign I have there with the word flower on it. I saw FLOWer, and now I will think about flowers with yet another dimension. Resistance is so often just the trembling before the unknown. What if we are more ready than we realise? And it is only the mind that lags behind the body, the spirit, the soul?

This moon asks us to soften, to trust, to allow the currents of life to carry us, especially when we feel clumsy, resistant, or unsure. I’m reminded how often I forget that I don’t have to hold it all together, or force a path forward. Sometimes, the clarity comes not from pushing, but from surrendering into the moment as it is. May we each awaken, again and again, to the colossal field of love that holds us, even when we tense up and even when we forget…. lets get into the flow of it all.

Here at Magical Farm, the new moon has already delivered its first lesson, and I have a funny story to share. Earlier today, six rogue chickens, wing-strong, garden-scratching, and impossible to catch…became my unexpected teachers. For 90 determined minutes, I leapt, chased, and wrestled until, one by one, I caught every single one. Their will forces were immense, but I discovered mine too. This afternoon, I was reminded of my own endurance and determination, not on a fencing piste, not in a policy meeting, nor while designing futures through my studio, but here on the farm, where the forces of life make themselves known. The Tao of the Chicken: when the time comes, strength meets strength, and balance is restored.

Even more beautifully, my son Raphael joined me in the chase! Full of passion, support, laughter, and determination. With Archangel Raphael’s star shining above and Raphael’s hands beside me, I felt the healing current of will, love, and joy moving through us both.

So may this Virgo New Moon gift you too with the will forces to complete what needs finishing, and to initiate what longs to be born. We are powerful beings, woven into rhythms larger than ourselves.

If you would like to tune into your will forces consider Dandelion Flower Essence from Magical Farm to support you.

See link to the farm’s FLOWer Essence Shop here: 🌼 Dandelion Flower Essence for Strength in Flow: Hand-harvested at Magical Farm, this essence captures the spirited resilience of dandelion thriving even in wild places, just like the unexpected lessons of farm life. Dandelion helps release tension stored in the body from over-effort or resistance, supporting you to meet life’s challenges with grounded determination rather than force. It’s the perfect ally when your will is strong, but your muscles are tight reminding you that true strength moves with the current, not against it. Take when life feels like a wrestling match, and you’re ready to find power in the now.

With love, soil and soul…
Dr. Demeter

High Magic in the Soil: Planting a Venus - Jupiter - Sirius Intention for Gaia

By Dr. Demeter | With gratitude to astrologer Jaime Lee Goldstein for illuminating the cosmic timing of this moment

This week, as astrologer Jaime Lee Goldstein describes, the two brightest planets Venus and Jupiter, draw near to the brightest star Sirius! Such a conjunction, seen by ancient eyes, was not just an astronomical event; it was an opening, a moment of high magic. The benefic planets joined the “Wishing Star” in a rare, exalted union which was a signal to seed what must endure, what must be blessed, what must be healed.

At Magical Farm, I feel this “high magic” most keenly in the soil and across the farms glow. The paddocks hold the happy ducks, geese and chickens, laughter of my children, those who have convened here in joyful moments, the soft night-steps of wallabies. Here, the farm is not only a livelihood but a hearth, a place to hold family, community, and the prayers I carry for the wider world.

Yarrow basket at Magical Farm Photography by Ness Vandebourgh Photography

Rudolf Steiner spoke of imagination as the first stage of spiritual knowing, and in the Michaelic path, imagination becomes courage: the will to picture a better world and bring it into form. In biodynamics, this is lived daily, stirring the preparations, planting to the moon, tending soil as a living being, each act a quiet magic in service to the whole.

In this rare alignment, I sense a vision wanting to be planted:

  • Fields alive with bees and wildflowers, from my farm, across Tasmania, Australia and the world

  • Economies that serve the people places and planet

  • Governance as a weaving of many voices and traditions

  • A political will that bends toward beauty, justice, and reciprocity

  • A living Gaia where soil, sea, and sky are cherished kin

A High Magic Practice for August 11 and 12th…!

  1. At dawn, face the eastern sky. If you can see Venus and Jupiter, greet them; if not, close your eyes and feel their light entering you. Sirius will be near, carrying the higher heart’s purpose.

  2. Hold a seed, from your own land if possible and feel it as a vessel for your intention.

  3. Speak one clear sentence for your home, for your community, and for the earth. Keep it as distilled as the seed itself.

  4. Plant it in the soil. If you can, stir water in a figure-eight to awaken its life forces before you pour it over the planted seed.

A Collective Circle
I invite all who read this to join me, wherever you are in planting your own intention at this rare conjunction. Imagine our seeds, scattered across continents, joined by a filament of light running from Sirius through Venus and Jupiter into the soil of the Earth. This is high magic: intimate, domestic, and cosmic all at once.

The ancients knew that the brightest lights in the sky speak also to the brightest visions within us. This is high magic for the world we are willing to tend together.

✨ Magical Farm Yarrow ‘Acelia’ Essence
Gather the rare blessings of Venus, Jupiter, and Sirius into your own heart. This gentle yet powerful ally weaves protection and openness, so what is seeded in love may endure and flourish. Take it as a prayer in liquid form, a bridge between heaven’s light and the fertile soil of your life.
→ Order Yarrow ‘Acelia’ Essence from Magical Farm

✨ Full Set Offering

The Magical Farm Alchemy Set
For those who wish to journey deeper, this complete set of 17 Demeter’s Drops is handcrafted in Tasmania from herbs grown in our fresh, vibrant landscapes, infusing each drop with the life and rhythm of the land. Serving as your compass through the seasons of life, each drop supports integration, clarity, protection, and heartful action, creating a tapestry of living medicine to guide and harmonise body, mind, and spirit. Explore the full set and carry the farm’s magic, grounded in Tasmanian soil, wherever you go.
→ Order The Magical Farm Alchemy Set

Beyond the Hashtag: Why Progressive Platforms Must Build Futures, Not Just Protest

In today’s hyperconnected world, moral outrage travels fast. From War and injustice to salmon farms and destruction to ancient forests. Activists and leaders with platforms flood social media with sharp critique and heartfelt calls for justice. Yet, for all the powerful voices and viral hashtags, the conversation often stops short of what comes next. Moral clarity is necessary but not sufficient.

“When progressive leaders wield their megaphones only to condemn without creating pathways forward, they cede the future to corporate boards, militaries, and political hardliners”

The real challenge is not just to name what’s wrong but to build convivial governance, systems where communities are invited into genuine conversation, co-creating the institutions they will live within. Convivial governance treats imagination as an organ essential to democracy. It insists that governance must be of the people, not imposed from above; it thrives on dialogue, shared responsibility, and an openness to diverse futures. This methodology is urgently needed in places like Tasmania, where industrial salmon farming disrupts ecosystems and silences community voices; in forests under threat of over-extraction; and in global hotspots like Gaza, where decisions are made far from the lived experience of those most affected.

“These struggles, though geographically distant, share a common thread: the failure of top-down governance and the absence of meaningful participatory design”.

Tools for convivial governance already exist.

Yet, too often, influential thinkers like Naomi Klein illuminate the systemic roots of injustice without stepping into the generative space of scenario-building and solution design. She speaks powerfully about global crises but rarely opens her platform to the messy, grounded work of co-creating alternatives with affected communities.

Progressive leaders with reach bear an ethical responsibility: to shift from reactive outrage to proactive convivial conversation, inviting followers into structured, inclusive spaces where futures are imagined, tested, and refined together. This is how movements mature and how change becomes sustainable. Without this shift, the “day after” will always belong to someone else.

It is time to move beyond the hashtag, toward using our imagination as the most important organ of our time.

✨ Magical Farm Rosemary Essence
Awaken the clarity and courage to move from outrage to action. This bright, grounding ally sharpens vision and memory, helping you see the pathways forward and walk them with purpose. Take it when you need to weave truth into the architecture of a more just and participatory world.
→ Order Rosemary Essence from Magical Farm

✨ Full Set Offering

The Magical Farm Alchemy Set
For those who wish to journey deeper, this complete set of 17 Demeter’s Drops is handcrafted in Tasmania from herbs grown in our fresh, vibrant landscapes, infusing each drop with the life and rhythm of the land. Serving as your compass through the seasons of life, each drop supports integration, clarity, protection, and heartful action, creating a tapestry of living medicine to guide and harmonise body, mind, and spirit. Explore the full set and carry the farm’s magic, grounded in Tasmanian soil, wherever you go.
→ Order The Magical Farm Alchemy Set

About the Author
Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.

Holding Paradox, Healing Wounds, and Bridging Inner and Outer Worlds

In a world fractured by war and ideology, this essay explores the psychological, spiritual and manifested cost of binary thinking, especially in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Drawing from Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, Marx’s critique of alienation, Levinas’ ethics of eye contact, Escobar’s pluriversal design is not about flattening difference, but about making room for many worlds to co-exist and the symbolism of Chiron and Venus, it calls for the restoration of the “Third”, a space where paradox and pain can coexist without annihilation. Dr Demeter weaves personal reflection with collective insight, highlighting how language itself can wound or heal, and how imagination, as described by Steiner and Einstein, is a vital organ for integration and transformation. Yarrow, specifically Achillea millefolium, is offered as both a literal and symbolic remedy for those seeking to hold complexity, bridging intellect and embodiment, activism and reverence.

Ultimately, the essay invites a shift from slogans to soul, from splitting to staying, and from conclusion to container, where a new, reconciliatory future might take root. Visit https://magicalfarm.org/herbs-floweressences/yarrow-flower-essence or get in touch via info@magicalfarm.org.

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Who Counts As a Farmer? And why it matters for the future of our regions. 

This piece by Dr Demeter explores the urgent need to redefine who counts as a farmer in Australia’s evolving agricultural landscape. It highlights how current government support programs like the Farm Household Allowance largely exclude small-scale, regenerative, and community-based farmers, many of whom are young people building resilient regional economies through diverse, place-based food systems. The article calls for policy reform that values ecological health, social wellbeing, and cultural vitality alongside traditional economic measures, urging recognition and support for the farmers shaping a sustainable future.

✨ Magical Farm Rosemary Demeter’s Drop
For clarity, courage, and rooted action in the face of systemic obstacles. Handcrafted in Tasmania from herbs grown on our vibrant farm, this drop supports young farmers and community pioneers to stay grounded, resilient, and visionary as they nurture land, community, and local economies. Take it when you need courage to step forward and create meaningful change.

Flower Essence for this blog: https://magicalfarm.org/herbs-floweressences/rosemary-flower-essence

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Sword, Soil, Silence and Soul: Speaking from the Wound during Chiron Retrograde

by Dr Demeter | Magical Farm Tasmania | August 2025

There are some wounds that never fully close, not because we are broken, but because we are still listening. During this Chiron retrograde, I’ve been reflecting on a quiet ache that has followed me through many seasons. It’s the ache of trying to speak from a living, plural, and embodied place in a world that often only recognises binaries. Right or wrong, fast or slow, professional or emotional…

This ache isn’t just intellectual. I feel it in my throat, in my belly, and in the soil beneath my feet. It appears when I try to express something that matters, something layered and regenerative and it gets flattened, misheard, or pushed aside. Not because it lacks value, but because it doesn't fit into the dominant way of listening.

Often, the systems we are asked to work within seem unable to hear what doesn’t follow linear logic, individualism, or urgency. They struggle to hold nuance, community truth, or ideas that come from lived experience rather than institutional authority.

For me, this is where Chiron’s wound lives: in the longing to be truly heard and deeply held, even while speaking in ways that don’t conform to what the world rewards. We all have different Chrion wounds depending on where in our chart.

I’ve found guidance in unlikely places:

The sword teaches me how to hold boundaries with precision and grace, how to speak clearly, without attack.

The soil reminds me that everything meaningful takes time, decay, and transformation.


The silence shows me how to trust what is not yet fully formed.

And the soul? The soul carries the memory of what it feels like to be fully met, and keeps reaching for it, no matter how many times it has not been.

Chiron in Taurus, especially in the house of communication 3rd house, which is the case for me, invites us to stay with the discomfort of not being immediately understood. It reminds us that speaking with integrity is not about winning arguments or performing knowledge. It’s about being in relationship, with the land, with language, with each other.

This wound is not mine alone. It’s shared by many who are speaking from the edges of systems, from in-between spaces, or from bodies and traditions that are routinely dismissed. But within that wound is a medicine: the capacity to listen deeply, to honour what doesn't fit, and to compost the patterns that silence us.

So I offer this reflection as a marker in the morphic field, not to solve anything, but to signal resonance. If you have ever felt like you are both too much and not enough, too complex and too slow, or simply misunderstood for the way you communicate care, then know you are not alone.

There is another way emerging. It’s quieter, slower, more relational. It’s already growing in the compost, in the fencing hall, in the kitchen garden, in the shared breath of those willing to listen differently.

And you, my love, are part of it.


YoFence sessions, flower essence support, and regenerative farming workshops dialogue offerings are here to support you. All are welcome.
📞 0473 378 445 | 🌐 magicalfarm.org

What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?
By Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (Dr. Demeter), Magical Farm Tasmania | Regen Era Design

A Poem to Begin: 

“The Land of Forms in Triplicate”

 They paved the way with paper,
and called it governance.
Ink spilled where rivers once ran.
Strategies replaced stories.
Budgets replaced breath.

 In this land of forms in triplicate,
spirit became ‘stakeholder,’
soil became ‘asset,’
and the commons became a ‘commodity’.

Community is something to be ‘engaged.’
Healing, is something to be ‘workshopped.’
And care, is nowhere in the budget.

 But place remembers.
The roots remember.
The gardens and gutters, the creek behind the depot, they wait.

And we, people of compost and complexity are remembering too.
That governance is not a meeting: It is a meal shared, a neighbour helped and a harvest honoured.

 So we ask again:
What is your business model, Local Government?

Because if Local Government cannot hold the life of this place, it is not fit to hold our future.

Composting the Brief

For nearly twenty years, I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit rooms, usually across from a local government officer, clipboard in hand who looks me in the eye and asks: “What’s your business model?”

On the surface, the question seems reasonable. But when applied to regenerative projects such as social gardens, food prescriptions, community harvest festivals, First Nations land care, shared meals, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a subtle but powerful form of erasure. Behind it lies an ideology that insists all value must be extractable, measured, and packaged for reporting. That care must be justified. That soil must have a spreadsheet. That festivals must become outputs.

After decades of working with, alongside, and occasionally in resistance to local government, I believe it’s time to turn the question around:
What is your business model, local government?

Too often, what I see is not governance, it is performance. Policy schemes are launched in Canberra, filtered through state policy teams, passed to local councils, and translated into glossy reports by consultants. Somewhere in that chain, the actual work, the living, breathing regeneration of people and place is lost.

“We are governed by a machinery of abstraction”.

These are not “projects” to be measured by quarterly deliverables. They are civic acts of repair. They nourish relationships, regenerate ecosystems, and rebuild the social fabric that holds communities together. They are precisely what public service should exist to support. Because taxpayer funds, from all tiers of government, are not just for roads and rubbish. They are for the shared infrastructure of life: food, care, culture, and belonging.

Or are they?

If the local government insists that its role is limited to “rates, roads, and rubbish,” then we must confront a hard truth: it is abandoning its purpose. But we must also look upstream. Because much of the abstraction, bureaucracy, and performance culture we see at the local level is a direct result of state and federal frameworks, schemes designed in distant offices, bound by KPIs, and filtered through layers of reporting and compliance.

In this model, local government becomes a delivery arm, not a site of innovation or regeneration. Officers are trained to manage grants, produce engagement plans, and commission consultants and not to nurture relationships, co-design with community, redistribute resources, or respond to real-world complexity.

So we must ask: if our current system of governance cannot meet the needs of this time, if it cannot support the work of resilience, justice, and renewal, then what is it for?

Because the deeper work of climate adaptation, food system transformation, and social healing cannot be boxed into three-year funding cycles or flattened into “outputs.” It must be rooted, relational, and long-term. And it must be governed by those who live it.

This does not mean we abandon public institutions. It means we transform their role. It means shifting from control to trust. From managing community to co-creating with it, which means there is a shift from performance to participation.

If local, state, and federal governments are willing to evolve, to fund what matters, to cede power where needed, to become stewards of community-led change then there is immense hope. If not, communities will continue to build parallel systems: land trusts, energy co-ops, food commons, healing spaces. Not as resistance, but as necessity.

This essay is an invitation…

The Machinery of Abstraction

Australia has 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs). In theory, these councils should be the closest and most responsive tier of government. In practice, they are often the most entangled in the bureaucratic performance of care, not the delivery of it.

Let us say a new federal scheme is announced and it is focused on “community resilience.” It originates in Canberra. State agencies translate it into frameworks, templates, and planning guides. These are passed down to councils, where internal staff or external consultants are tasked with “community engagement.”

Engagement is held, then reports are written, diagrams are made and rarely, if ever, is meaningful funding directed to the real work the policy claims to support. The idea becomes a product and its power diluted by process. As theorists like Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, and Henri Lefebvre remind us of spectacle, abstraction, materialism and performance culture:

  • Debord wrote of governance becoming spectacle, performance over substance.


  • Illich warned of tools turning into systems of control.


  • Lefebvre described the rise of abstract space, where lived experience is overwritten by bureaucratic grids.

This is not a crisis of intention. It is a structural condition. But conditions, like soil, can be composted. And that is the work I’ve been quietly doing for well over a decade, redirecting policy briefs toward life.

A Tactic of Integrity: Redirecting the Brief

Twelve years ago, I began applying a concept I learned from the philosopher and design theorist Tony Fry: redirection of the brief. Rather than rejecting state frameworks outright, I learned how to bend them and reground them and in turn redirect them, so they served life, not paperwork.

One example: the Huon Valley Food Hub.
Originally, the council budgeted $70,000 for consultants to conduct “community engagement,” and just $10,000 for implementation. I flipped the model. We ran engagement and co-design in-house, and redirected funds into community activation.

With that $70,000, we delivered:

  • Ten farm-gate blitzes across the valley


  • A regenerative food prescription program for twelve families


  • A First Nations-led garden activation at Sacred Heart College


  • The Growing Together festival: four seasonal dinners, markets, and seed libraries


This was not just a budget tweak, it was a philosophical pivot which moved funds from consultation to participation in the community. Shifted the culture of outputs towards outcomes.

Grounded in Strategy: A Tasmanian Opportunity

The Future of Local Government Review (2023–24) presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift how local governance works. With 37 reform recommendations, ranging from voluntary amalgamations and regional service-sharing to participatory democracy and structural review, Tasmania is on the cusp of change.

The Priority Reform Program (2024–26) charts a roadmap for implementation ahead of the 2026 council elections. It offers five key pillars: governance, accountability, democracy, funding, and structure. But success depends on depth, not just design.

The Local Government Association of Tasmania (LGAT) rightly warns that top-down reform risks eroding the very local nuance councils are meant to protect. Likewise, journalists and citizens across Tasmania have resisted forced amalgamations and centralised planning power. We must be careful. We must ask not just how government is structured, but why, for whom, and to what end.

The Officer as Facilitator: Beyond Structural Reform

It’s time for a wake-up call. How can council officers, managers, planners, executives continue to prioritise paperwork over place? Strategy over soil? Reports over relationships?

This isn’t a failure of individuals. It’s a failure of the system, but systems can change.

Too often, local government reform debates get stuck on “how things are carved up”: amalgamations, shared services, and administrative boundaries dominate the conversation. Yet the more fundamental questions about what local government actually does, how it does it, and why these essential activities remain sidelined.

I hear the refrain all too often: “Local government doesn’t have enough funds.” Yet I also see bloated bureaucracies, roles created to shuffle papers rather than nurture communities, and funding lost to endless consultants and reports that gather dust.

No one is calling out the elephant in the room: the culture of local government itself. If local government is to transform, it must start with honest reckoning: recognising waste, shedding performative practices, and shifting budgets away from bureaucracy toward community resilience. Public funds must be reclaimed to support the living, breathing work of care, not the maintenance of paperwork.

In a regenerative future, council officers are not gatekeepers of grants or custodians of compliance. They become facilitators of public trust, partners in community-led change, and stewards of resources that nourish people and place. This requires reform that moves beyond rearranging structures to transforming culture, function, and purpose.

Public money must not simply “deliver programs.” It must build capacity, belonging, and resilience. Here is my usual style I offer some imaginative and practical solutions through a design methodology of scenarios: 

Seven Regenerative Scenarios for Local Government

The following scenarios offer a regenerative expansion of Tasmania’s reform process, grounded in lived examples and place-based activation.

1. Local Co-Governed Food & Health Hubs
Reform lever: Reallocate “engagement” budgets into long-term community infrastructure.
Example: Huon Valley Food Hub
Outcome: Funding follows participation, not paperwork. Healing is enabled through food, culture, and care.

2. Community-Owned Energy & Infrastructure Commons
Reform lever: Enable councils to support community-led solar, battery storage, and energy hubs.
Example: Scenario Two: Powering Regeneration (Regen Era Design Studio)
Outcome: Energy becomes a local commons. Resilience becomes a civic responsibility.

3. Regional Planning Alliances for Liveability
Reform lever: Foster inter-council collaborations across bioregions and catchments.
Example: Greater Hobart planning alliances, extended to rural and cultural corridors.
Outcome: Planning is no longer siloed. Local government plans for culture, care, and country, not just roads and bins.

4. Scaled Shared Services with Local Identity
Reform lever: Share admin services while preserving localised leadership and identity.
Example: Regional hubs for climate adaptation, emergency preparedness, asset management.
Outcome: Economies of scale without cultural erasure.

5. Place-Based Co-Design & Workforce Development
Reform lever: Reform officer training; create new jobs rooted in facilitation, regeneration, and cultural capacity.
Example: Co-design fellows, Indigenous planning roles, food system facilitators.
Outcome: Councils grow talent that knows how to work with (not manage) communities.

6. Transparent Accountability & Participatory Democracy
Reform lever: Enshrine a “Charter of Place” in legislation.
Example: Community hearings, budget transparency dashboards, regenerative indicators.
Outcome: Trust rebuilt. Communities become co-authors of their future.

7. Living Policy Pilots for Regeneration
Reform lever: Bundle grants into flexible “living lab” experiments.
Examples: Healing yards, food festivals, seed libraries, tool shares.
Outcome: Pilots judged by lived impact, not admin metrics.

Reclaiming the Public Brief

The word “brief” once meant a letter of trust, an invitation to act on behalf of the common good. What if we reclaimed that? What if the next “policy brief” was not a checklist, but a compost heap: rich with place-based wisdom, complexity, and care?

Let us name what no longer serves: the over-reliance on reports, consultants, abstraction and let us grow what will: capacity, relationship, and shared stewardship.

So I ask again:
What is your business model, local government?

Because mine is this:
Care for place and people.
Participation that grows roots, not paperwork.
Regeneration that feeds both soil and soul.

This is not just a model. It is a way of life.

And if councils adopted even a portion of this approach, we would begin to see a new kind of public service emerge, one rooted in trust, and capable of holding the complexity and beauty of real life.

About the Author

Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.

Dr Demeter – Here in the brushstrokes,the unseen becomes seen.

The cells of life speak in dots,
not isolated, but woven,
like the constellations above
and the mycelium below.

In this living tapestry,
each mark tells a story
as First Nations art has always known,
each dot a breath,
each curve a songline
of ancestors and stars,
of country and kin.

Look into the microscope:
life dances in fractals.
Peer through the telescope:
the cosmos pulses in patterns.
And here in the brushstrokes,
the unseen becomes seen.

This is a remembering,
a message passed
from sky to soil,
from pigment to presence.
It is not new,
It is always.

Con Viv

painting by Emily / Dr Demeter

The Tree That Spoke: A Living Message from the Roots

Dr Demeter: Listening to the land beyond sides, beyond slogans, toward wholeness.

In January year, as part of a land healing workshop, I found myself sitting beside a pomegranate tree. I hadn’t gone seeking visions or answers. I was simply sitting. Breathing. Letting the earth speak in her own time.

Then, without warning, something stirred. A soft, clear message emerged, not in sound, but in knowing:

“I am in misery,” the tree said.

This was not a metaphor, the tree was literally looking unwell. At its base, a fungal infection had taken hold. The trunk was split. And on one side, growing into the tree’s very body, was a piece of plastic, long embedded. A human intervention, likely intended to help, had become part of the wound.

As I sat with the tree, listening with more than ears, an image arose:

The left side of the tree was one people. The right side was another.

Two limbs of the same being. Split, but not separate.

The left was discoloured, twisted, compromised by synthetic interference. It held movement, emotion, and the ache of dispossession. The right stood straighter, more rigid, offering structure and strength, but needing the left to breathe, to flow. Neither side could live without the other. 

I asked the tree: Do you want to be pruned?
A firm no.

What was needed wasn’t division. It was healing. Not isolation, but restoration.

The tree gave me five messages from the left: change, loss, resistance, grief, yearning.
And eight from the right: resilience, stability, defence, safety, endurance, tradition, fear, and loss.
Then came the number six for both. A balance. And one word that pulsed through the roots:

Love.

Not sentimental love. Not conditional love. But the kind that lives in root systems. That remembers we belong to each other, even in pain. 

As a regenerative farmer and practitioner of biodynamics, I knew what to do. I prescribed a tree paste, a gentle, living salve made with yarrow, the warrior-healer plant. Not to remove the wound, but to protect it. To allow the tree’s own healing wisdom to rise again.

Because that’s the thing about trees: They don’t divide, they integrate. They don’t perform politics, but they live season by season.

We live in a time where people are expected to choose sides. To perform outrage or prove virtue. But the tree offered another story.

It said:

“The foundations of life are in the seed” (this was the clear message I channelled).

In reflection… “The foundations of life are in the seed” is not just a truth of nature, it is a radical invitation to reimagine how we live. From the outside, the seed may seem small, humble, even invisible, but within it lies a profoundly different resonance, one that carries the sacred codes of renewal, interconnection, and life beyond domination. This message is a call to shift our power source, from control and reaction, to reverence and regeneration, planting new ways of being that grow slowly, but transform everything.

What if we remembered that?

What if activism became a balm, not a blade?

What if we built peace the way we heal trees,
By tending the roots,
Not severing the limbs?


by Dr. Demeter
Eco-philosopher and regenerative farmer
Founder of Magical Farm Tasmania

A tree channeling by Dr Demeter…a message from the unseen


This is the Reckoning: What Ancient Wisdom and Living Systems Science Demand of Us Now

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

Con Viv

We were never meant to be alone,

The earth speaks still, in root and stone.

Four hundred years, the thread was torn,

But deeper truths are being reborn.

This is not the end, but a beginning of a reweaving,

There will certainly be much conceiving!

Of compost, courage, soil, and heart.

Awaken! It's time to wake up to life for a new start.

In a time when the earth trembles beneath our feet (the Fault Line Series I am writing certainly reflects this), ecologically, economically, politically, spiritually we are called to remember something ancient and vital: that we are not separate from life, but participants in a great, dynamic whole. This is not merely metaphor, but a cosmological orientation held across millennia by First Nations peoples the world over. And not only First Nations: all ancient cultures, from the Andes to Anatolia, from Aotearoa to Africa, held interwoven cosmologies in which land, life, spirit, and human were inseparable.

Four hundred years ago, with the birth of modernity in Europe, it was a moment often tied to the Enlightenment, colonisation, Cartesian dualism, and the scientific revolution; the ancient and woven interconnected worldview was systematically shattered. The world was reclassified as inert. The soul was extracted from matter and nature was rendered lifeless, and so it could be owned, measured, and controlled. This shift was not progress it was amnesia.

“We need rewoven philosophies of life, I often refer to Con Viv! But there are many others we can weave with”.

In recent decades, systems theorists have begun to glimpse truths that ancient cultures never forgot: that life is relational, dynamic, complex, and sacred. First Nations ontologies have long known this sacred knowledge through Country, kinship, songlines and Dreaming…and living systems science and theory is just beginning to name.

This essay explores the profound resonance between First Nations worldviews and living systems theory, and asks what it would mean to take these ontologies seriously, not as symbolic nods or ethical aspirations, but as foundations for redesigning our lives, institutions, and futures. This is not a polite invitation to explore, I propose it is a necessary reckoning…the time to wake up is now.

Living Systems and Living Country

James Grier Miller’s Living Systems Theory outlines seven nested levels of life: cell, organ, organism, group, organisation, community, society, and supranational system. Each level interacts through flows of energy, matter, information and is self-organising, adaptive, and open. In parallel, First Nations ontologies speak of relational flows between all things: humans, land, ancestors, animals, weather systems, spirits, and laws. In Australia, Country is not a passive backdrop but an animate, sentient being with agency. You don't own Country…you belong to it.

This worldview dissolves and mends the Cartesian separation of mind and body, subject and object, human and nature. It collapses the Western notion of the isolated individual and instead foregrounds what Miller would call the “relational interiority of systems”. You are not in relationship, you are relationship. And until we digest this perspective and live and feel it in our bones we will continue designing systems that kill what they claim to serve.

A Different Ontology of Time and Responsibility

In many First Nations epistemologies, the past does not lie behind us but lives within us. The Dreaming is not a closed chapter of history but a living, breathing force animating the present moment. Elders remind us that the Dreaming is at once ancestral archive and ever-unfolding story: law and pattern, song and relation. It moves in silence, in ceremony, and through those who embody its ways.

Margo Neale, editor of the First Knowledges series and senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia, does not proclaim the Dreaming with grand declarations but lives it through her presence. To her, Country is kin, not abstraction; those who walk beside her sense stories woven into her bones and guidance rising in her breath. As she moves across the land, Country itself seems to listen. Her enactment of justice is not about platforms or punishment but about reweaving the unseen threads that bind people to land, spirit to soil.

With Margo Neale, living systems are never abstract concepts but lived realities. She teaches without formal lessons, showing that the Dreaming is not confined to the past or to ritual, it lives in the way one sits by a river, listens to the wind, or speaks to a child. To carry the Dreaming as she does is to become a bridge across generations, across worlds.

This ontology of time and presence resonates deeply with living-systems theory: in both, meaning emerges through patterns, feedback loops, and relationships; the past and the future coexist in dynamic tension with the present; and the deepest form of knowledge is not mere information but embodied integration.

This is not mysticism but an urgent invitation to decolonise our land, our thinking, our language, and our institutions. It is time to relearn what our systems have forgotten.

Repatterning the Self and Society

If we took seriously the convergence of these two ontological frameworks, the implications are radical:

  • The Self becomes less about ego and more about eco. We reinhabit our bodies not as private containers but as microcosms of place, memory, and spirit.

  • Family expands from a nuclear unit to a web of intergenerational, multispecies kinship. Grandmother trees, river cousins, star siblings.

  • Community becomes not a service recipient but a dynamic living system, held together by ritual, reciprocity, and shared story.

  • Institutions must evolve from extractive bureaucracies to regenerative infrastructures. Schools become places of initiation into life’s patterns. Hospitals, spaces for soul-tending as much as symptom-management.

  • Economy ceases to be a measure of growth and becomes a practice of nourishment. Circular, foundational, seasonal, and enough!!

  • The Cosmos is not out there it is in here. Astronomy returns to cosmology; physics finds its complement in myth.

  • The Soil is not dirt, but the oldest ancestor. We listen before we plant.

“To ignore these transformations is not neutral, it is violence by neglect. We must be fierce in naming the unseen systems that are severing the roots of life. And we must be bold in creating new ones”.

Implications for Design, Policy, and Praxis

To live as if this ontology were true because it is would mean a wholesale reorientation of systems thinking from mechanistic management to sacred stewardship. It invites the co-creation of what Colombian scholar Arturo Escobar calls the pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit.

We would reimagine:

  • Education as initiation into living systems and Country.
    Governance as facilitation of local wisdom, not enforcement of central plans.

  • Health as coherence across inner and outer ecologies.

  • Justice as relational repair, not retribution.

  • Economics as a layered and grounded foundational movement of resources an organ-sation of life, not a system of extraction.

  • Activism as a regenerative force, not only resistance, but reimagining. Less protest against, more living for. A call to become composters of culture and midwives of the future.

  • Art and Story as central nervous systems of collective transformation, no longer peripheral, but essential. Through image, sound, myth, and symbol, we reweave our imaginations and seed the futures our souls remember. as a regenerative force, not only resistance, but reimagining. Less protest against, more living for. A call to become composters of culture and midwives of the future.

Importantly, it is not enough to translate First Nations knowledge into Western terms. The invitation is to unlearn, to humble ourselves before epistemologies that have held resilience across fire, flood, invasion and genocide.

Returning to Belonging

We are now living in what the ancient I Ching calls Period Nine, a time of fire, vision, feminine leadership, and truth-telling. But it is also a time of composting. Systems are breaking down. Myths are decomposing. False certainties are decaying. This is not a crisis, it is a rite of passage.

At Magical Farm Tasmania and Regen Era Studio, we have committed to this work of composting. For nearly twenty years, we have been dreaming, growing, fermenting, and tending the conditions for a regenerative way of life to emerge. And now, as Period Nine unfolds over the next two decades, we recognise this as a planetary composting cycle, clearing the old to make fertile ground for what is to come.

This is a sacred practice of continuity, rooted in land, love, and living systems. It is our offering to the cycle. And when Period One returns, it will not be as it was before but renewed by the compost of this time.

We are here to support the turning. We are not starting from scratch but we are remembering.

The convergence of First Nations ontologies and living systems theory is not just a conceptual insight. It is a threshold moment and a call to restore reverence, reciprocity, and responsibility. It asks us to remember that we are not systems managers, but participants in a sacred dance of emergence and decay.

When we re-pattern our sense of self and society through this lens, we begin to heal the split at the heart of modernity. We move from disconnection to belonging, from extraction to regeneration, from domination to deep listening.

In the language of my farm, we begin again with soil and soul.

Dr. Demeter is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place.

GLOSSARY

Ontology
The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being, existence, and reality, what kinds of things exist and how they can be grouped and related.

Epistemology
The study of knowledge: how we know what we know, the limits and sources of knowledge, and criteria for belief and justification.

The Fault Line Series: What Is Your Business Model?

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

For nearly 20 years, I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit rooms, usually across from a middle manager, clipboard in hand, who looks me in the eye and asks: What’s your business model?

The question appears benign. But when applied to regenerative community projects, like social gardens, food prescriptions with regenerative produce, food hubs, harvest festivals, and healing gardens, it reveals more than it asks. Behind it is an ideology that says value must be extractable, quantified, and packaged for reporting.

After decades of designing alongside, within, and around local government, both as a community builder and policy writer, I now feel it’s time to turn the question around: What is your business model, local government?

Because from where I sit, too often the business of governance has become a business of performance. Schemes are launched in Canberra, handed to state policy units, filtered into local strategy, and finally passed to consultants who produce reports. Somewhere in that long chain, the actual work of regeneration is lost.

But it doesn’t have to be.

The Machinery of Abstraction

Australia has 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs). In theory, these should be the closest and most responsive tier of government. In practice, they are often the most entangled in layers of policy choreography.

Let us say there is a new federal scheme focused on "resilience." It originates in Canberra, crafted with national objectives. This is then dispatched to state-level policy officers, who produce frameworks, templates, and research documents. These are then sent to the local government, where internal staff and external consultants are engaged to translate these frameworks into engagement strategies and planning briefs.

In this process, consultants are hired, community sessions are held, reports are produced, and graphics are designed. Yet rarely is meaningful funding directed toward the tangible outcomes that the policy itself claims to support. The idea becomes commodified, its meaning diluted through layers of abstraction.

Drawing on the work of theorists such as Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, and Henri Lefebvre, we can see this clearly:

  • Debord reminds us that governance has become spectacle: a theatre of documents, dashboards, and launch events.

  • Illich critiques the institutionalisation of care and life, naming how tools meant to serve living systems become means of control.

  • Lefebvre speaks of "abstract space," where lived reality is erased by grids and schedules.

This is not a crisis of bad intention, it is a structural condition. But conditions can be composted. And that is what I’ve spent the past decade doing, and through Regen Era Design plan to do further composting work. 

A Tactic of Integrity: Redirection of the Brief

Twelve years ago, I began applying a concept I learned from Tony Fry: Redirection of the Brief. It means strategically redirecting the purpose of a project or policy, not to subvert it, but to realign it with life.

One example is the Huon Valley Food Hub. The original budget allocated around $70,000 for community engagement and only $10,000 for on-ground outcomes. I flipped that model. We ran engagement and co-design in-house, and redirected the funds toward community activation.

With the $70,000, we delivered:

  • Ten farm gate blitzes across the valley

  • A regenerative food prescription program for twelve families

  • A First Nations garden activation at Sacred Heart College

  • The "Growing Together" Harvest Festival featuring four seasonal dinners, markets, and seed library installations

This was not just a tactical shift, it was a philosophical one. From consultation to participation. From paper to practice. From performance to presence.

Deep Roots: Rethinking Governance from the Soil Up

Helena Norberg-Hodge has long critiqued the impacts of global trade and centralised systems. She shows how even local governments, under pressure to "perform," replicate corporate metrics and market-based models. The result is a hollowing out of public life. Seed libraries become KPIs. Community gardens become pilot programs. Festivals become outputs. But the living relationships that sustain a place? These are rarely recognised, let alone funded.

We need a shift in governance: not toward more management, but toward regenerative participation. We need a life systems worldview that sees communities not as service recipients, but as co-creators. This means investing in what is slow, rooted, and relational. It means resourcing the invisible infrastructure of care, trust, and local knowledge.

A New Brief for the Public Good

The word "brief" once meant a letter of trust, an invitation to act on behalf of something larger than oneself. What if we reclaimed that meaning? What if the next time we crafted a policy brief, it was not a checklist but a compost heap rich with complexity, local flavour, and the wisdom of those who live it?

So I ask again:

What is your business model, local government?

Because mine is this:

  • Care for place, people and planet.

  • Participation that grows roots, not paperwork.

  • Regeneration that feeds both soil and soul.

  • Local nutrient dence food supplied to schools and those who really need it.

And that, to me, is not just a business model. It is a way of life. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.

In future writing, I will offer more 'scenarios' for how local government might evolve toward regenerative practice. But first, we must begin the composting process, naming what no longer serves, and imagining what might grow in its place. And that starts by being clear about what the problem really is. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.

If local governments changed their business model even slightly to reflect this, our entire society would begin to shift. We would see the emergence of a new kind of public service: one rooted in care, participation, and tangible outcomes. This would mean a workforce skilled not only in administration, but in co-design and place-based activation design.

It would also mean that policy schemes must begin with ground-up knowledge not the siloed abstractions of policy wonk worlds, but the lived wisdom of those who know the land, know the people, and know what actually works.

Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and farmer, and founder of Regen Era, a consulting and design studio working to reimagine public systems for the 21st century. With over 20 years of experience in community economies, policy design, and ecological regeneration, she collaborates with local, state, and federal governments to embed place-based activation, co-design, and living systems thinking into public strategy. From community gardens to climate policy, she helps redirect the brief, away from paperwork and toward people, place, and planetary wellbeing.

An Ode to the Bread Man

by Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

A Poem to Begin
He came each week with bags of bread,
No trumpet sound, no words were said.
Just loaves for birds, for geese and hen,
And care unseen by policy men.
A quiet trade, a thread of grace,
The Bread Man’s gift to time and place.

For several years, a man has come quietly to share bread with my farm. He delivers bags of out-of-date bread, not for sale, not for waste, but for my chickens, ducks, and geese. His visits have become a gentle ritual, one of those small, consistent acts that knit together the fabric of community life.

This simple act such as bread for birds is more than just an exchange. It is a living expression of the circular economy in action. What would otherwise become landfill becomes nourishment. In turn, my animals fertilise the soil, lay eggs, and play their role in the symphony of regenerative farming. All of it kept in motion by a relationship, by trust and care.

But recently, I learned that the Bread Man’s family-run business is going under. Despite years of service, of quiet contribution to the community, there is no support. No government safety net. In fact, in some ways, the systems in place have actively made it harder for small businesses like his to survive.

While global corporations receive generous subsidies, navigate regulations with armies of lawyers, and get propped up in the name of “jobs,” small-scale, heartful businesses are folding. One by one. These are not merely businesses, they are stories and places of care. They are part of the hidden relational infrastructure that actually keeps life going.

Here, I think of Ivan Illich, who wrote of conviviality, not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a radical reclaiming of tools, relationships, and knowledge systems that support human freedom and mutuality. Illich warned us decades ago that when tools, be they economic, technological, or institutional, cease to be convivial, they become destructive. They erode autonomy. They sever relationships. They make life harder under the guise of making it more efficient.

The Bread Man’s generosity is a convivial act. A countercurrent to the extractive logic of industrial food systems. He models what Illich called tools for conviviality: systems scaled to the human hand, embedded in relationships, rooted in place, and governed by mutual trust rather than distant authority.

The irony is painful: the very policies that claim to secure our futures are making it impossible for the people who actually care for life, be it through food, community, or craft to survive. Bureaucratic churn is replacing these beautiful human-centered businesses. Data replaces wisdom and compliance replaces care.

And so, this essay is a call: To bring relationships back into economics…To resist the seduction of streamlining and mechanisation and to honour the artisans, the growers, the givers, the oddballs, the ones who remember your name.

Let’s bring back the market stall, the hand-tool repairer, the baker who knows your bread. Let’s revive the practices that make life rich, not just efficient. The erosion of society is happening in these small disappearances. We must not sleep through it.

So here’s to the Bread Man!
And to every quiet contributor.
To those who still live and give with life.
May our choices, from where we shop to how we share, create a society that truly nourishes.
Not just profits, not just scale, but soul.

Con Viv in Bloom: Herbs, Community & Pluriverse Visions

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

For five consecutive years, a circle of us have gathered in the wilds of remote Tasmania: women, herbalists, permacultralists, earth-lovers, and seekers of slow, sacred ways. In these gatherings, under eucalypt canopies and beside crackling fires, we have shared food, stories, skills, seeds, and silence. Throughout the year, our connection continues through an online thread a lifeline of recipes, insights, tears, and laughter. What holds us together is not just our shared love of plants, but a collective inquiry: How do we live well and wisely in a world unraveling?

One evening, amidst this beloved circle, a question rose …. What herbs do we need to change the world?
“Comfrey,” said one herbal friend... “It reminds us of connection of knitting back what’s been torn.”…“Yarrow,” another offered…. “For integration it grows in the in-between places, like a bridge.” Then, after a soft pause, a wise herbal elder spoke. Her voice was slow and strong, rooted like a tree:
“We need all the herbs.”

Her words pierced something deep in me an echo of an ancient truth. They reminded me of the beautiful teaching of Arturo Escobar, who, drawing on Indigenous South American wisdom, speaks of “designs for the pluriverse.” He reminds us that healing will never come through one universal model but through many worlds, many ways, woven together in mutual respect and interdependence.

This circle, and this moment, encapsulate the heart of my philosophy: ‘Con Viv’ to live with life. Yes, I write often about the critique of the machine, the bureaucracy, the hollowing out of meaning by data and spin. But critique alone is not enough. We must also imagine, propose, and practice. And more than anything, we must listen to the more-than-human world. The plants our kin are not just medicine, metaphors, teachers and symbols.

To speak of comfrey, yarrow, chamomile, nettle, mugwort, elder, and calendula is to speak in the language of repair. Each herb is a thread in a wider tapestry, a mycelial strategy for healing. As fungi weave unseen networks beneath the soil, binding forests together, so too do we need a web of diverse responses to the crises we face: ecological, social, spiritual.

In that circle, we weren’t just naming herbs. We were naming possibilities. Remembering that diversity is resilience and it is not one solution, or one campaign, or one way of knowing that will heal this earth, but many.

All the herbs.

All the people.

All the ways of seeing.

May our gatherings, our gardens, our grief, and our gratitude continue to be part of this pluriversal healing. May we root deeply, reach widely, and remember that living with life means honouring complexity, not fearing it. The future is not yet written, but if we listen closely, the earth is whispering the next chapter through the plants.

With herbal hope,
Dr. Demeter
Magical Farm Tasmania

Whisper to the Earth for the World’s Wellbeing by Dr Demeter


A Blessing of Balance: Fire, Water, Earth, Air & Spirit. We gather at the edge of this moment…

By the light of Temperance,
we remember the sacred balance.
The gentle art of mixing what was broken
into something whole again. (Fire / Spirit)

By the warmth of the Sun,
we call forth joy without apology,
clarity without cruelty,
life without fear. (Fire)

By the hope of the Star,
we trust in renewal.
Even in darkness,
something luminous guides us home. (Air)

By the grace of the Waters,
we soften.
Tears, tides, and time all cleanse.
We bless the rivers, the oceans, the wombs. (Water)

By the roots of the Earth,
we come home to the body of belonging.
May our hands grow what is needed.
May our feet remember the song of the soil. (Earth)


We breathe into the ache of the Earth,
And offer our presence, not our panic.
From the East, clarity.
From the South, joy.
From the West, healing.
From the North, renewal.

May the children of tomorrow walk lightly.
May the elders of now speak gently.
May the seeds know we remembered them.

So be it.

“The Gate That Opened”

A quiet story of threshold and transformation. Amidst the winter stillness of Magical Farm, Dr Demeter reflects on an unexpected moment that opens something ancient in the heart, a remembering.
Through land, silence, and synchronicity, this piece reflects on the kind of presence that awakens us through resonance.

“The Gate That Opened”
By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

There are some moments that don’t ask to be understood but only felt. Like a change in the wind, or the way light softens just before dusk. 

At Magical Farm, we speak of thresholds. Not the ones built with hinges and latches, but those invisible ones where a breath becomes a prayer, or a glance becomes a key. The heart knows when it has crossed one, even if the mind can’t explain how.

This one came quietly, a person, a pulse, a series of moments, events, synchronicities, patterns.
My body had a recognition, even an ancient memory before the event, amongst all the modern structures and routines. There were silent witnesses that have come to the surface, the land, yarrow kin, two whales, a special friend from Central Australia. These witnesses are from past, present across wide timelines, all woven together into a silent tune, a wayfinding song that is in my bones. 

A frequency, a tuning and a moment of warmth where my inner soil shifted and there was no turning back. 

What followed was not longing, but listening. To the farm, to the sky, to the parts of myself I had placed on a high shelf for safekeeping. They did not take them down. But their presence reminded me they were still there.

And so I walked more slowly. Breathed more deeply.  Planted seeds with less ambition, but more intention. The soil seemed to meet me differently, as if it too had heard something in that encounter.

Some people arrive like a storm and others like a soft bell. And some like a mirror you didn’t know you needed. They reflect back the part of you that longed for illumination and the large shadow that needed to softly dissolve.

At Magical Farm, we say the land remembers what we forget and in fact life, all life whatever shape, form or timeline can make us remember too. 

Conviv and Happy Winter Solstice x

Composting the Day: Energetic Hygiene in an Unwell World

By Dr. Demeter, Emily Samuels Ballantyne, Magical Farm Tasmania

There are days when speaking the truth feels like eating stones.

When your words, born from reverence and care, meet blank stares, passive aggression, or institutional walls. When the energy around you shifts not because you’ve done harm, but because you’ve revealed what others are unwilling to see.

The body feels heavy. Not with self-doubt, but with the imprint of unreceived presence.

In anthroposophical understanding, this is a kind of soul gravity. The astral body, when exposed to harsh energetic or moral dissonance, may recoil leaving the physical form to hold the echo. The ache. The weariness. The sense that something has landed in your bones that doesn’t belong to you.

Its important to find ways to release and renew and not resent. As we are all on a healing path and need to have compassion for the complexity we are living in. At Magical Farm, we call energetic cleansing work “composting the day”.

It is both a practice and a prayer: to take what was difficult, even degrading, and turn it into insight, humility, and fuel for the future. To remember that inner fire, like outer fire can both destroy and illuminate.

The Weight of the Unspoken: A Somatic Field Note

You are not wrong to feel heavy.

This is the weight of having integrity in a world that often rewards performance.

It’s not always our pride that suffers when we challenge dominant systems. Sometimes, it’s our nervous system. The sympathetic surge of being ‘othered’ in a meeting. The quiet adrenaline of holding your ground. The way the body holds that tension even after the mind has let go.

In anthroposophy, the body is not separate from the soul, it is its house and instrument. What we do not release becomes residue. What we do not compost becomes rot. So please compost!

🌿 A Ritual for Releasing the Weight of the Day

To support this composting process and digestion, I offer a small, simple ritual:

Evening Grounding Tea & Earth Offering

Ingredients:
– Skullcap (to calm the mental chatter)
– Marshmallow root (to soften the inner edges)
– Lemon balm (to lift the heart field)

  1. Prepare a small pot of this blend and steep for 10–15 minutes.

  2. As it brews, step outside barefoot if possible. Place your hand on the soil, a stone, or a tree.

  3. Say quietly: “What does not serve may return to earth. May the energetic weight I carry become compost for the world’s becoming.”

  4. Sip the tea slowly. Let the body feel received. Let the sky and earth take what is no longer yours to hold, they will support you to transmute.

Compost Prayer

Let the words I could not speak
sink down into the soil.
Let the weight I did not ask for
become a seed, not a burden.

May the ache in my neck and shoulders
be a sign I still care.
May the fire in my belly
light the hearth, not the war.

I give back what is not mine.
I keep only what roots.
The rest peacefully goes to,
to earth, to time, to stars.

and finally:

In the ancient Hawian Ho‘oponopono tradition, a profound practice of reconciliation and forgiveness is a traditional four-line prayer which you can repeat:

I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

These phrases can be directed toward another person, oneself, or even toward land, memory, or spirit. In essence, it’s a practice of deep energetic cleansing.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras

I have moments of deep grief about where our world is heading. But when I feel overwhelmed, I turn to deeper time for context, to ground myself in ancient rhythm and cosmic perspective. I wanted to share one ancient framework of Feng Shui that I draw on for love, courage, knowledge, and imagination.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras is a reflective Solstice piece by Dr. Demeter that draws on ancient cosmologies, particularly Chinese Feng Shui to make sense of our current global moment. Exploring two full 180-year cycles, she reveals how the final fire phase we are now in (Period 9) offers not only cultural reckoning but the opportunity to compost 360 years of modernity. With love, courage, and cosmic guidance, this article invites us to dream forward a new Period 1 rooted in life systems remembered from ancient, land-connected cultures across the globe.

By Dr. Demeter
Founder, Magical Farm Tasmania &
Regen Era Design
Winter Solstice Almanac Entry, Year Two of Period 9

Throughout this Almanac, I draw upon ancient her-stories and philosophies to orient us toward a future rooted in pattern recognition and planetary rhythm. While much of my regenerative work is inspired by Anthroposophical philosophy, particularly Rudolf Steiner’s great epochs of human and cosmic evolution, here I lean into another lineage of wisdom: Chinese Feng Shui, an art deeply rooted in astronomical and cosmological cycles.

As with many ancient cultures, the Chinese didn’t separate architecture, ethics, and astronomy; they saw them as one flowing mandala. Feng Shui was not just about interior design; it was a practice of attunement to heavenly bodies, earthly forms, and temporal rhythms.

Now, at the turning point of Period 9, we use this system not for fortune-telling, but for wayfinding for remembering that time itself is patterned, not linear. That our current crisis is also an opportunity to compost 360 years of civilisation-building and prepare for the spiritual return of water, community, and care.

Having these cosmic guidelines gives us hope that we are on the right track. We are meant to be letting go of what no longer serves us and dreaming forward a new Period 1 one rooted not in extraction, but in life systems that have long existed in pre-modern cultures across the globe. From Andean ayllus to First Nations kinship laws, from Taoist landscape harmony to the matriarchal rhythms of early Europe these blueprints have not disappeared. They are waiting.

Period 9 helps us see them again. Fire clears the way for memory to return. not for fortune-telling, but for wayfinding, for remembering that time itself is patterned, not linear. That our current crisis is also an opportunity to compost 360 years of civilisation-building and prepare for the spiritual return of water, community, and care.

Two Feng Shui Cycles: A Compass for Civilisation

In Classical Flying Star Feng Shui, time is woven into 9 periods of 20 years each, forming a grand 180-year cycle. We are now living through the final chapter of one of these cycles: Period 9 (2024–2044). But to understand the magnitude of this moment, we must look back two full cycles, 360 years of human transformation.

Cycle One (1864–2044): The Industrial Epoch

  • Period 1 (1864–1884): Water ⛅️ — flow, birth — Dawn of modernity, mechanisation, steam.

  • Period 2 (1884–1904): Earth ⛰️ — grounding, resource — Colonial expansion, land enclosure, railways.

  • Period 3 (1904–1924): Thunder ⚡️ — uprising, youth — War, nationalism, cities surge.

  • Period 4 (1924–1944): Wind 🌬️ — change, movement — Economic depression, fascism, mass propaganda.

  • Period 5 (1944–1964): Earth ⛰️ — centre, planning — Post-war order, suburbia, welfare states.

  • Period 6 (1964–1984): Heaven ☁️ — structure, vision — Cold War, fossil fuels, industrial peak.

  • Period 7 (1984–2004): Lake 🌊 — reflection, pleasure — Neoliberalism, digitisation, global markets.

  • Period 8 (2004–2024): Mountain ⛰ — stillness, retreat — Data capitalism, ecological warnings, burnout.

  • Period 9 (2024–2044): Fire 🔥 — truth, purification — Cultural reckoning, illumination, spiritual fire.

Summary: This is the end of a civilisation forged by extraction, empire, and speed. We are now in the Fire Era, a time to burn what no longer serves and tend the sacred hearth of culture.

Another Begins (2044–2224): The Return to the Waters

  • Period 1 (2044–2064): Water ⛅️ — spiritual depth — Return of wisdom, land-based healing.

  • Period 2 (2064–2084): Earth ⛰️ — collective design — Bioregional systems, reciprocity, rooted life.

  • Period 3 (2084–2104): Thunder ⚡️ — activation, youth — Decentralised tech, cultural renewal from below.

  • Period 4 (2104–2124): Wind 🌬️ — storytelling, movement — Regenerative education, memory work, kin-making.

  • Periods 5–9 (2124–2224): To be composted and dreamt. The unknown futures seeded now. To be composted and dreamt | The unknown futures seeded now 

Summary: This next cycle will not be built on concrete and code alone. It must be designed from the compost of care, memory, and place.

Regen Era Design: Tending the Fire of Period 9

We are one year into Period 9, the final 20-year chapter before the cycle turns. This is not just a turning of time, but a turning of civilisation.

Regen Era Design (Magical farm’s design studio) lives here:

  • In the fire of cultural renewal.

  • In the compost of old systems.

  • In the preparation of vessels for the waters to come.

We are not trend-makers. We are future-weavers.

Let us design for 2044 with love, courage, knowledge, imagination and vision. It is the portal.

The Art of Peace: Activism Beyond Binaries and Performances


by Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)

Everyday Life Series; Piece 1

Synopsis:

This article examines the limitations of contemporary Green politics, particularly its propensity for urgency, reaction, and spectacle, which often disconnects it from the ecological wisdom it seeks to uphold. Drawing on Arturo Escobar's concept of the pluriverse, it advocates for design practices rooted in autonomy, emergence, and care, emphasising the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping regenerative futures.

Thank you to Ness Vandebourgh Photography for collaborating with me, for serveral years now.

The discussion delves into the physiological and spiritual significance of breath, referencing Rudolf Steiner's view of imagination as a spiritual organ of perception and the role of the vagus nerve in fostering relational awareness. It critiques the commodification of crisis, as analysed by Naomi Klein, and underscores the necessity of addressing the underlying spiritual wounds that fuel societal polarisation.

By integrating insights from thinkers like Vandana Shiva, Tyson Yunkaporta, David Abram, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the article calls for a reimagining of activism and governance, one that prioritises soil over slogans, ceremonies over campaigns, and listening to life itself. It culminates in a series of regenerative scenarios that envision systems designed for reciprocity, relationality, and belonging.

This piece is particularly relevant activists engaged in environmental campaigns. It invites a reflection on how activism can evolve beyond reactionary modes to embrace practices that are deeply rooted in ecological and spiritual consciousness.

Breath as the Seed of Imagination

Breathe.
Not the scroll-breath of panic,
but the slow breath of soil,
deep, rhythmic, remembering.

This isn’t just a paper.
It’s a seed. A signal.
A call back to what we already know
but forgot how to carry.

The world is shouting.
But wisdom is quiet.
Roots do not grow in noise.

True activism is not reaction.
It is human.
A sacred belonging
to the human spirit and the living earth.

Let your body read this too.
Let your grief have space.
Let your breath find its rhythm.

We are not here to perform.
We are here to re-weave.
To root.
To remember how to live.

The Performance of Protest

I have stood inside campaigns. I have crafted some observations. What I witnessed, time and again, was a pattern:

  • A crisis emerges.

  • Campaigns react.

  • Politicians gesture.

  • The system absorbs the outrage.

  • And the root remains untouched.

There is rarely room for the root causes: global economic entanglements, industrial legacies seeded in war, and extractive models that reproduce suffering. There is rarely space for social imagination, that precious power to see and seed a world beyond reaction.

Instead, activism itself has become enmeshed in capitalism. As Marx warned, capitalism absorbs its own critiques to perpetuate itself. Resistance becomes a brand. Dissent becomes a product. What begins as a movement can easily be co-opted as a marketing mechanism.

The capitalist system thrives on crisis. It commodifies unrest, turning rebellion into spectacle and symbols into products. As Guy Debord warned in The Society of the Spectacle, even our dissent becomes something to be watched, consumed, and sold back to us. We march, tweet, and purchase in a cycle that often reinforces the very systems we aim to dismantle. Activism, stripped of deeper relationality, risks becoming performance, loud, visible, but ultimately absorbed by the machinery of branding.

 Activism as Echo, Not Emergence

We now wear our identities like merch. Follow hashtags like liturgies. Perform concern, retweet rage, and call it change.

There is a commodification of dissent, the monetisation of suffering, and the branding of belonging, which have all distorted the deep purpose of activism: to reweave the social fabric. We are called to move beyond campaigns that perform change, toward cultures that become change.

The War in the Soul

The protest signs are louder. The camps are multiplying. The online declarations, more urgent than ever. But somewhere between the slogans and the solidarity posts, something quietly slips away: our humanity.

I write not from above, but within. Within the contradictions of activism, the ache of injustice, the mess of trying to live with integrity in a collapsing world. I know what it means to want to scream, to be furious at the systems that break bodies and silence truths. I’ve been there, policy rooms, protest lines, quiet kitchens where grief is folded into dinner.

And still, I offer a question:

What if the real war isn’t over there?
What if it’s in here?

What happens when the performance of suffering becomes part of the economy? When does conflict itself become a funding model? When causes become currency?

Campaigns Without Culture

What I have seen missing, over and over again, is a cultural substrate that holds space for dreaming. For visioning. For emergence. As Joanna Macy writes in Active Hope, we are called not to optimism, but to participation in the great turning, an active stance of courage and imagination in the face of uncertainty. Without this deeper orientation, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to transform. Activism becomes reaction instead of relation. Movement without ground. Sound without song.

Well-meaning people within the system are often bound by its architecture. The political cycle does not lend itself to soul repair, soil restoration, or long-form healing. As David Suzuki has long warned, these systems are wired for short-term gain, not ecological wisdom. They reward control over care, and performance over presence. They cannot easily direct hundreds of millions to the commons because the system was never designed for nourishment, it was designed for extraction.

In contrast, Masanobu Fukuoka’s life work reminds us that true transformation arises not through domination, but through a radical trust in nature’s own intelligence. His “do-nothing farming” was not laziness, it was rebellion. A refusal to conform to systems that seek to control what is meant to be sacred.

We need a different foundation, one that roots in relational time, not reactionary cycles. We need to reorient toward the long time: the wisdom of seven generations forward and seven generations back. As many Indigenous knowledge systems remind us, true governance is not about immediate gains, but the continuity of life.

Without foundational investment in cultural imagination, ecological belonging, and social repair, we simply replicate trauma through new slogans. We must break the loop not through more data, but through deeper dreaming.

Reclaiming the Priestess Path

Before we had parliaments and party platforms, we had vision keepers. In ancestral and First Nations cultures, dreaming councils were held. Wisdom was gathered by listening, not just to the people, but to the stars, the soil, and the spirits of place. Not activists, but oracles. Not campaigners, but weavers of what was needed seven generations ahead.

Marg O’Neill reminds us that the First Nations imagination is steeped in thousands of years of sacred observation of plants, fire, astronomy, law, design, innovation, and Country. These are not abstract ideas. They are living technologies, rooted in ritual and place. This is politics not of identity, but of lore. Sacred lore.

This is not about returning to the past. It is about remembering your presence. The priestess path is not a role, it is a rhythm. It is the ability to midwife culture rather than demand policy.

Regenerative Activism as Social Imagination

As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” We must dare to imagine again. Not simply as an escape, but as a method of survival and renewal. As John Lennon dreamed, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

We propose a new kind of activism:

  • One rooted in long rhythms, not click cycles.

  • One that composts conflict, not monetises it.

  • One that weaves policy with poetry, land with law, economics with myth.

Let us fund scenario weavers, not just frontline warriors. Let us protect imaginative space, not just reactive media.Let us reallocate philanthropy toward the roots: storytelling, ceremony, scenario, soil.

Because without a culture that knows how to dream, we will keep mistaking movement for meaning. And yet, this isn’t only a systems crisis it’s a soul crisis. Beneath the policies and protests, something deeper stirs: the war within. To change the world, we must begin with the terrain of the heart.

Underneath the Outrage:

The spectacle feeds on our attention. But healing asks for our presence”.

Breath: The Architecture of Becoming

When the breath is fast, we react.
When the breath is slow, perception changes.
The nervous system steadies. Imagination opens.
This is not performance. It is pattern recognition.

As Steiner taught, transformation begins in the etheric where breath, rhythm, and life-force shape what becomes manifest. This is activism as an organism. Alive to the seasons. Aligned with time. Rooted in moral imagination as a force of evolution.

In an age of outrage and fragmentation, the breath is revolutionary not metaphorically, but physiologically. The vagus nerve, the core of our parasympathetic system, connects brain, heart, lungs, and gut. It governs our capacity to rest, relate, and respond with presence. When we regulate the breath, we activate the body’s innate intelligence, its ability to discern, to digest, to connect.

Both Zen Buddhist practitioners and contemporary neuroscientists have arrived at the same insight: conscious breathing opens the gateway to awareness. Zazen, the practice of seated meditation, invites us to return to the breath not to escape the world, but to enter it more clearly, without illusion.

Rudolf Steiner, often miscast as merely esoteric, was in fact a trained scientist, a chemist and philosopher of deep empirical rigor. His understanding of the rhythmic system, the interplay of breath and heartbeat positioned this middle realm as the seat of human balance. When breath becomes conscious, the etheric body is strengthened, and the self becomes anchored in life. He recognised that in slowing the breath, we move closer to carbon, the element that connects us to the plant world. This isn't a poetic suggestion, it’s biochemistry. And it is sacred. 

When there is fear, reaction, and outrage, the breath becomes short and shallow anchored in the chest. But when there is love, courage, and knowledge, the breath deepens. It moves from the belly, from the soil of the body itself. This shift is not just emotional…it is biological. It is the difference between surviving and regenerating. To breathe with awareness is to refuse the pace and violence of a system that thrives on disconnection. It is a radical act of remembering: that we belong to the soil, the body, and the living field between.

Beyond the Spectacle: Reclaiming Green Politics from the Hollow Centre.

And here lies the great irony: we call it Green politics, yet so often it is driven by urgency, reactivity, and spectacle detached from the ecological wisdom it claims to honour. It speaks of the Earth but forgets to listen to her. It campaigns in weeks and quarters, while the land speaks in seasons and centuries.

Here I offer a woven basket of ideas in offering to change and decision makers from wise ones from all around the world:

As Vandana Shiva has long warned, environmentalism that fails to ground itself in soil, seed, and sovereignty risks becoming another expression of control. When Green politics aligns with corporate interests or trades spiritual depth for marketable messaging, it drifts from the Earth it claims to defend. Shiva reminds us that true regeneration begins beneath our feet with biodiversity, local knowledge, and reverence for life.

Tyson Yunkaporta pushes us further, exposing how even well-meaning activism can reproduce the logics of empire. In Sand Talk, he challenges the binary thinking of left and right, and instead calls us into pattern, relation, and kinship with land and time. “Real change,” he writes, “doesn’t look like slogans. It looks like a ceremony, like sitting still long enough for a tree to call you kin.”

David Abram, too, asks us to slow down and feel the pulse of the living Earth through our own bodies. In The Spell of the Sensuous, he reminds us that ecology is not a field of study, it is a field of perception. That the breath, the wind, the scent of soil—these are our first languages. To speak of green futures without recovering our sensual, embodied relationship with the more-than-human world is to speak in abstraction.

And Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, with luminous clarity, invites us to move not through reaction but through resurgence. For Simpson, real transformation is not policy reform, it is a return to Indigenous relationality: to land-based knowledge, to stories encoded in place, to ancestral time. “Our theories,” she writes, “are in our practices. Our practices are in our bodies.”

So what might Green politics become if it truly centred ecological systems and the worldviews of First Nations peoples?

It would move at the speed of trust. It would prioritise soil before slogans, ceremonies before campaigns. It would honour the migratory memory of whales, the slow language of fungi, the fire cycles held in Country. It would resist the performance of progress and listen, instead, to life itself.

Let us build peace like we build compost: with what we’ve lost, with what’s rotting, with what still holds life. Let us remember that true transformation is not viral. It is relational. It is embodied. It is slow.

Imagination as Organ of Design

True imagination is not escapism, it is the seedbed of form. As Rudolf Steiner taught, imagination is a spiritual organ, capable of perceiving and shaping reality through inwardly active pictures. In this sense, design becomes a moral act: not merely arranging matter, but expressing meaning, relationship, and intention.

As Arturo Escobar suggests in Designs for the Pluriverse, we must design “for the real and possible worlds envisioned by those who struggle for autonomy.” Not through domination, but through emergence, reciprocity, and care.

If the current architecture is built on control, we must imagine new foundations, an architecture of belonging. One that centres care, culture, and the commons. Where governance is relational, not extractive. Where food, energy, housing, and health are stewarded as sacred responsibilities, not commodities.

This is not utopianism. It is what Masanobu Fukuoka called “the path of return”, a remembering of our place in the web of life. As David Suzuki warns, systems built on short-term gain cannot regenerate long-term life. And as Joanna Macy teaches, Active Hope invites us to move not from optimism, but from the courage to participate in the Great Turning.

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that true regeneration is rooted in reciprocity: with the land, with each other, and with time itself. To plan for seven generations is not a poetic gesture: it is a practical, necessary act of love.

And so, offered here are these 16 scenarios not as blueprints, but as seeds. Not as forecasts, but as invitations.
Each one asks:

  • What if our systems were designed for reciprocity, not extraction?

  • What if policymaking began not with profit, but with place?

  • What if we remembered how to belong?

16 Scenarios for Regenerative Rebellion

These are not prescriptions. They are seeds.Sketches of a new spiral. A vision for seven generations forward and seven generations back, held in the palm of now.

These are the kinds of futures we must fund, not as utopia, but as necessary departures from collapse.Not from blueprints, but from living designs. To imagine differently is not indulgent…it is urgent! 

Design, in this context, is not aesthetic. It is cosmological. It is the courage to enter unknown morphic fields. To follow the intelligence of mycelium; decentralised, adaptive, relational. To let forest thinking shape our policy making. To let imagination root into governance like compost into spring soil. This is not fiction. This is what ecology has always known.That regeneration begins in pattern, not just in protest.

1. The Listening Feast
In a peri-urban eco-village, disillusioned activists host a seasonal meal with farmers, elders, and teenagers from opposing views. Each guest brings a story, not a solution. The feast becomes an act of rebellion against the algorithm.
Dialogue becomes resistance.

2. The Seed Library at the Edge of Town
An abandoned petrol station is transformed into a solar-powered seed and tool share. Once a site of extraction, now a sanctuary for regeneration. Graffiti becomes mural. Concrete cracks give rise to calendula.
The commons rise again.

3. The Spiral School
Children learn maths through moon phases, history through ancestral songs, and ethics through compost. Parents attend too, relearning what it means to relate, not just regulate.
Education becomes initiation.

4. The Boat with No Flag
A hand-built wooden boat sets out not with slogans, but with musical instruments, soil, and stories. It docks in coastal villages, offering healing songs and seasonal seeds. It follows the whales, not the war.
Movement without conquest.

5. The Mourning Hut
On the edge of a burned forest, people gather in silence. No phones. No speeches. Just grief, held by song and smoke. Activists light beeswax candles for every extinct species remembered.
Grief becomes a ritual of repair.

6. The Rewilded Union Hall
Former labour organisers, artists, and healers reclaim a derelict building and declare it a Rewilding Hub. Pay is in harvest. Power is by consensus. Strikes are sacred days of planting.
Solidarity with soil.

7. The Pomegranate Tree Circle
In a courtyard between histories, a pomegranate tree grows. Once a site of tension, the land becomes a threshold. Elders from many lineages, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, sit in a wide circle beneath its fruit-heavy branches. They bring stories, recipes, lullabies, seeds. Children play between the roots. The tree holds their silence and their singing. No slogans, no sides…just the slow weaving of soil and soul.

Peace here is not a treaty, but a tending. A return to what was once shared: water, land, song, shelter.

8. The Whale Choir
A circle of intergenerational singers gathers under the full moon near sea cliffs. They mimic whale calls, transmitting them across radio waves, into homes and hearts.
The ocean sings us home.

9. The Ghost Office
Former public servants, burned out by bureaucracy, form a shadow working group to write visionary policy from the margins. They channel the future in poetic briefs.
Governance with soul.

10. The Temporal Embassy
A bus painted like a mycelium network travels town to town. Inside: a listening booth, a tea station, a storytelling couch. People offer memories and visions to a growing archive.
Time becomes terrain.

11. The Ex-Banker’s Garden
In Berlin, a former hedge fund manager turns his villa into a permaculture site. He hosts underground salons where whistleblowers, economists, and Earth stewards plot financial transitions.
Capital composted.

12. The School Beyond Sanctions
On the edge of a war-torn zone, women and elders build a bilingual school from the rubble. They teach literacy, herbal medicine, solar cooking, and peacebuilding rituals.
Education becomes sanctuary.

13. The Desert Treaty
In North Africa, nomadic farmers displaced by climate collapse gather under tents. They trade seeds, stories, and seasonal wisdom. Enemies become allies through legumes.
Food becomes diplomacy.

14. The Underground Orchestra
Beneath a global city, youth form a rebel orchestra in a decommissioned subway. There are no lyrics, only drums, strings, whale-song and rhythm.
Culture becomes counter-infrastructure.

15. The Spiral Embassies
In global capitals, Spiral Embassies arise, hosted by elders, peacebuilders, and ecologists. They hold ritual, dialogue, and belonging for displaced people and dreamers alike.
Borders dissolve into being.

16. The Earth Council Rebellion
In a forest clearing, under planetary transits, a group gathers, scientists, mystics, farmers, coders, and storytellers. They plot not a protest, but a planetary council. A parallel framework.
Realignment with Earth law.

These are not fantasies. They are frequencies. They hum in the soul of those who remember what it means to belong to Earth.This is not a return to the past. It is a return to presence. A rebellion not just against injustice, but against disconnection.

In the words of Steiner, “Imagination is truth.” And in the whispers of ancestors and starlit seeds alike: We are already becoming the future.

Let us meet war in the soul with warmth in the soil. Let us compost the empire with ritual. Let us become the force we’ve been waiting for.

 May we rage into ritual.
Grieve into growth.
Rebel into renewal.

Dr Demeter

Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons

www.magicalfarm.org 

www.regeneracommons.org  

Dr. Demeter | Emily Samuels Ballantyne is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and farmer, and founder of Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons. She is the author of the forthcoming series Soil & Soul. Since the age of 11, Emily has been active in the global peace network Asian-Pacific Children’s Convention, serving as a Junior Ambassador, later as a Peace Ambassador in her twenties, and as a chaperone for children in her thirties.

Festive Agriculture: A day of fostering community food resilience at Magical Farm Tasmania 

by Jacob McCormack, Interdisciplinary creative and story-teller www.jacobmccormack.com

Helena Nordberg-Hodge has become renowned globally for the time she has spent taking action locally. Her pioneering shift from global to local economies began in her time spent living in Ladakhi community in Northern India. The decades spent there, as well as her studies in linguistics that in fact led her to Ladakh resulted in the creation of Local Futures – an international charity that empowers communities to regenerate ecological and social wellbeing. This is proposed mainly through shifting the economic structure and hyperlocalising such, but what remains paramount in the process of gravitating towards localisation is food. 

Food is the meridian that connects all. It allows humans to connect to earth, to the soil and the biome that generates or supports all life. It also acts as a pillar for conviviality, that is the sharing of food as a means of celebrating life. Yet food can also act as an alternative to currency, radically shifting the globalised monetised paradigm of contemporary society. 

On March 23, 2025, Festive Agriculture was hosted at Magical Farm. It was birthed by the implementation of food as connective tissue and Helena Nordberg-Hodge attending as an esteemed guest. Within the name Festive Agriculture resides the very notion that food, particularly when it grows from an agrarian application, requires celebration. This event acted as just that, but it also offered the opportunity to come together as a community and build resilience through localisation. 

It’s important to note that amidst the catastrophic weather events of flood and drought at opposite ends of Australia the flaws of a national (and often international) supply chain system have been pronounced more than ever. Not only is it vital to create food systems that afford security in their localised form, but a localised food system also allows for connection to growers and minimised environmental damage due to fewer miles expended in order to access food. 

Festive Agriculture invites us to reclaim farming as a living celebration, one that honours the cosmic and seasonal rhythms weaving through soil, sky and society. Drawing on Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic insights, ancient harvest festivals from Shinto rice-planting to Andean Inti Raymi, and Indigenous sky-country calendars, this practice understands each farm and community as a unique spiritual individuality, attuned not only to material needs but to planetary forces and ancestral wisdom. By hosting solstice celebrations, seed swaps and communal meals, Festive Agriculture weaves food into the very fabric of cultural resilience, grounding modern localisation efforts in ceremonial and convivial joy and ecological stewardship. In the southern hemisphere, it challenges us to reinterpret northern-based festivals through local seasonal arcs and First Nations cosmologies, offering fertile ground for co-created rituals that nurture both place-based identity and regenerative futures.

The day itself allowed for a full expression of what contributes to community. Palawa man Jason Andrew Smith welcomed us all onto the land with a smoking ceremony, inviting us onto it to create a new story throughout the course of the day. A musical welcome ensued, led by Arcana Rose and her accompanying harp, only for an invitation to engage in a day-long weaving exercise instructed by Bindi using local weeds and New Zealand flax. A crop swap led by Cygnet local Kate Flint introduced many new-to-the-concept folk to an altruistic exchange of all things, specifically food. This particular aspect of the event provided a focus on how it is that seasonal gluts and high quantities of resources can allow for equal abundance and sustenance for all the community.

It was then time for a communal meal as an interlude to the day’s unfurlings. A pot-luck style feast truly exemplified the potency food carries to enact and foster connection. A brimming success that transitioned into a conversation with Helena Nordberg-Hodge wrapped in the openness of a circle. Urgency was emphasised in the need to build resilience in community, especially when it comes to resources such as food, water and habitat, and yet as the conversation allowed many found the opportunity to contribute in ways that honoured them.

This discussion spilled into the mycelial exchange – a market-type arrangement of varying stalls that showcased local farmers, artists and organisations such as biodynamics Tasmania. The exchange provided further opportunity for connection that led to closing discussions and a collective moment of music and song. 

It seems easy to become tethered to the current system that disempowers and fractures the community, after all it has been set up that way intentionally so. However, events like this and adjacent expressions of communal connection allow for the true potential of life to be experienced. There is a brightness in a future ahead that presides in localisation.