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.