Ode to the Women Who Work With Life

You arrive without fanfare, with sleeves rolled and eyes awake,
carrying the science of attention into soil and society,
so the farm becomes more than production,
it becomes a place where human hearts can learn their rhythm.

Maye Emily Bruce, you remind me the flower needs no advertisement,
only the courage to be seen as itself,
the intelligence of nature held in plain language,
a kindness that does not dilute innate genius.

Lady Eve Balfour, you press your ear to the ground and say: listen,
the earth is not a resource, it is a relation,
and every economy begins where humus is made.

Elisabeth Vreede, mathematician and astronomer, who was star-wise and exact,
you keep the heavens honest,
so our thinking can be clear without becoming cold,
and our wonder can be lawful without becoming abstract.

Ita Wegman, healer of thresholds,
you show that medicine is also social courage,
a practice of meeting another human being without fear,
and letting the future enter through care.

Julia Yelton, mentor of my hands and seasons,
you taught me to trust the rhythm, the soil, atmosphere and everything in between; to do the next right task,
and to let the land educate me without rushing its answers.

And Sophia Montefiore, with colour and form,
you make the planets speak in the language of plants,
so biodynamics can be embodied,
so the cosmic becomes real,
so the farmer can remember the sky without leaving the compost heap.

In the Goetheanum, Dornach, the home of holism,
I sat beside Sophia and felt the lineage breathing,
not as hierarchy, but as companionship, reflection, brilliance and joy:
women who keep the impulse warm, workable, and free.

Here is my vow, Dr Demeter’s devotional practice:
to steep yarrow, to wait, to speak with care,
to weave boundaries that do not harden,
to cultivate warmth as a field, not a demand.

May our islands, valleys, schools, clinics, gardens, committees,
become cultural farms of the future,
where healing, education, agriculture, and social art
meet each other in truthfulness,
and the world remembers: we are ‘with life’.

With Life ‘Con Viv’ and Love,

Dr Demeter

Dr Demeter / Emily Samuels-Ballantyne and Sophia Montefiore in the Goetheanum at the 2026 Agriculture Conference

You Never Farm Alone: Collaboration from Free Will, and the cultural farms of the future

Feature on the Agriculture Conference in Dornach, Switzerland at the Goetheanum, 4–7 February 2026.

We gathered at the Goetheanum for the agriculture conference titled You Never Farm Alone, and I left feeling that what was being cultivated was not only agriculture, but relationship and a praxis of courage. Approximately 750 people came from every continent, yet the gathering felt intimate. Each morning began with Michael Letters readings, conversation, and a strengthening eurythmy practice with Stefan Hasler and Eduardo Rincon. In anthroposophic terms it felt like the “I” learning to stand inside community, without losing warmth. On one of the last evenings we all joyfully danced together in the large hall, which was such a delight.

Sophia Montefiore, Ueli Hurter and Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, in front of Rudolf Steiner’s chalkboard drawings, an atmosphere of imagination, study, and practice. Agriculture Conference ‘You Never Farm Alone’ 2026.

I attended the Cultural Farms of the Future workshop three days in a row throughout the conference. Its question was simple, courageous, and ambitious: how can farmland become a place where living communities are formed, where healing, education, agriculture and the social arts are integrated as one cultural organism. We spoke of farms as places that can hold learning, care, research, celebration, and good work, and we returned repeatedly to economics: how might we organise farm activity so value circulates rather than extracts, so farms can host people without burning out farmers, and so the social life around the farm becomes an organ of the farm itself.

The same group who ran the Cultural Farms workshop also led a panel titled Our Work with Life: Working with Life in Agriculture, Medicine, and Pedagogy, weaving integrative medicine, education, and biodynamic agriculture into one conversation. Berni Courts (Ruskin Mill Trust) spoke of education through meaningful work. Dr Martin-Günther Sterner brought the human organism into view, linking digestion, rhythm and immunity with social environment. Tobias Hartkemeyer (CSA farm Pente) spoke of co-responsibility and associative forms that make community agriculture real. Ruben Segers and Antoinette Simonart (De Kollebloem, Belgium) offered a living example of a farm as a cultural place where production and pedagogy belong together. The thread running through the conversation was practical reverence: life can be enriched through the farm organism.

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne in a eurythmy circle as part of the Cultural Farms of the Future workshop at the Goetheanum, during the Agriculture Section conference We Don’t Farm Alone, Switzerland. Photography by Emily Samuels-Ballantyne/Dr Demeter

Ueli Hurter, in his lecture on “Free Will,” named Collaboration from Free Will as a practical social principle: not compliance, not consensus-by-fatigue, but creating the conditions for people to choose the work. Then, when the weather turns (or a moment or situation tightens), cooperation comes as a willing and shared response rather than something forced. He drew on Kepler’s music of the spheres as an imagination for lawful relationship, and the evening concluded with the Turning of Time stanza from Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation: a Michaelic request to meet the present with clearer thinking and warmer hearts. In essence, technique alone won’t meet the future of agriculture; what is required is a new warmth and truthfulness between people, and this takes Michaelic courage to discover.

After Ueli’s lecture I found myself in conversation with Eduardo Rincon and turning to a small, almost disarmingly simple gesture inspired by Ueli’s lecture: to make a cup of yarrow tea! I was seeking to give his talk a Keplerian imagination through this simple idea. This Keplerian imagination is a way of perceiving that seeks the lawful relationships at work within both the cosmos and the commonplace, and trusts that these relationships can be consciously participated in, somewhere tangible to rest.

If harmony is experienced as right relationship, then we require simple, repeatable gestures that tune the human being toward listening. Yarrow offers such a gesture. As a plant long associated with boundaries, mediation, and weaving, it works quietly with the organs of the body. Likewise as we know it is quite an integrator in bio-dynamics practices for the soil and the overall farm organism. In the human experience, by steeping, waiting, and drinking, one practises a different tempo, less reaction, more receptivity; less assertion, more attunement.

In the old language of correspondences, yarrow carries a Venus quality: the principle of relationship, balance, and heart-centred communication. Through such a plant, the planetary is not abstract but intimate. The cosmos is not elsewhere; it is participating. And so a simple cup of tea becomes a way of inviting lawful order, warmth, coherence, reciprocity, into the shared field of human conversation and experiences. In this way, plants are not passive background to human development, but living partners in our co-evolution, quietly shaping the conditions through which we refine perception, relationship, and consciousness.

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at the Agriculture Section front door ‘double dome’. Photography by Evelyn

Insight and reflection questions for readers in Tasmania and beyond:
Where in your region could a cultural farm take root, not as a venue, but as a living place for learning and healing?
What would it mean to design a farm gate as a civic doorway?
Which institutions could become allies, and which habits of control would need to soften into trust?
What would you change if your measure of success included soil, children, elders, microbes, and local stories?
Who are your collaborators from free will, and how will you care for those relationships when pressure rises?

Sevenfold Learning Course Participants at the Agriculture Section building, Photography by Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

Next year’s conference will focus on the biome and nutrition, and I return to our island with renewed impulse: to weave festive agriculture and convivial farming into life, so more people can access biodynamics and culture can be reinvigorated through land connection, one honest relationship at a time. May this impulse become practice in homes, councils, and markets.

With life ‘Con Viv’ and Love,

Dr Demeter

The BD Farm in the foreground, the new preparations storage building and the Goetheanum in the background. Photo: Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

We Are All Designers: The Case for Life Systems Literacy

Design has long been understood as a professional discipline, practised within studios, universities and consultancies, shaping products, services, policies and environments. The design professions matter deeply. They influence how economies function, how cities are structured, how resources move.

Yet design did not begin with institutions. The first tools were designed, as too was language. Markets and governance systems were designed. The supermarket, the local market, the digital platform, each of these is a designed architecture of economic flow. These structures shape how money circulates, how food travels, how culture gathers, and how power concentrates or distributes.

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh: Finn, Perrie, Zach, Abe, Simone the Duck, Emily, Jenny and Noam (behind the apple tree!) from Magical Farm

We are all already designers. The question is whether we understand the living systems within which we are designing.

From an anthroposophic perspective, the human being is not separate from the social and ecological organism but an organ within it. Our daily decisions, what we eat, where we purchase, how we spend, how we organise time, how we participate in civic life are a pattern of our reality. Economic flow reflects or mirrors ecological flow. When value moves through distant, centralised supply chains it is our farmland, landscapes and communities that thin. When it circulates through local markets and small farms, relationships strengthen and resilience thickens.

Food is not simply nutrition it is in fact formative. It shapes the body; the body shapes perception; perception shapes culture and design. A culture that eats together generates cohesion. A region that grows food regeneratively restores soil, biodiversity and water cycles. Healthy land produces healthy food; healthy food supports healthy bodies; healthy bodies enable clearer perception; clearer perception supports wiser design. The loop is ecological, cultural and economic at once.

Localised, biodynamic food systems are therefore not nostalgic gestures, they are perceptual and civic infrastructure. As both farmer and design theorist, I have come to articulate this through Con Viv: convivial living systems design. Con Viv does not reject professional design; it deepens it. It asks designers to consider metabolism alongside materiality, governance alongside geometry, soil alongside system and policy. It recognises that everyday citizens are co-designers of economic and ecological futures through their habits and participation.

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh at Magical Farm Tasmania

Grow Small, Feed All campaign emerged as a structural application of this thinking, redirecting economic flows toward nourishment, decentralising value, strengthening localised food economies and restoring dignity to producers. It is not a campaign alone; it is a design proposition at regional scale, in Tasmania and possibly for other places too!?

Living Earth College is now emerging from this work as a translocal education platform dedicated to life systems literacy. Its premise is simple: soil processes, cooperative economics, phenomenological observation, real world place-based food projects coming to life as prototypes for sharing, co-design of policy and cultural practice must become foundational within design education, not peripheral.

The professional designer has a critical role to play. So too does the student, the policymaker, the farmer and the household. If life systems literacy were embedded across disciplines and daily life, design would shift from extraction toward participation. We are already shaping the future. As we are all designers, the invitation is to design consciously, in service of living systems.

Dr Demeter

First reflection on the 2026 Goetheanum Agriculture Conference

The 2026 Goetheanum Agriculture Conference has now closed, and I am sitting with a quiet, full heart. I will share photos and deeper reflections in time, and as Dr Demeter I have been in conversation with many extraordinary people here, farmers, researchers, doctors, philosophers, scientists, herbalists, compost makers, and quiet cultural stewards. There are stories coming. For now, this is a small field note from within the experience.

Dr Demeter / Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at Magical Farm Tasmania, just prior for departing for the 2026 Goetheanum Conference in Dornach Switzerland. Photography by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

People from forty-six countries gathered around a shared devotion: care for land, life, and the invisible relationships that make fertility possible. Across languages and climates, I felt a deep Con Viv truth alive, that food systems are not mechanical supply chains, but living cultural ecosystems shaped by soil, story, community, and cosmos.

Compost was spoken about as relationship, not waste management. Herbal preparations were described with reverence…. Yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, and valerian were held as mediators between Earth and sky. Many people here have simply followed their hearts into this work, often quietly, often without recognition, because the land asked them to.

Again and again, the conference returned to an ancient remembering: agriculture lives inside a cosmic conversation. Rudolf Steiner spoke of earthly life as inseparable from cosmic rhythms, and here that knowing felt practical, embodied, and quietly radical. I was also reminded of Johannes Kepler’s Music of the Spheres, and of Elisabeth Vreede’s work carrying forward the understanding that the heavens are not distant observers, but participants in earthly becoming.

What moved me most was presence. People were not performing knowledge. They were living it.

If there is one thread I carry forward into Con Viv practice, policy imagination, and the Grow Small, Feed All vision, it is this: the unseen world is asking to become visible again through how we farm, design, govern, and relate.

More soon…including voices from the conference, conversations across continents, and the quiet revolution already growing in soils around the world.

Photography by Ness Vanberburgh at Magical Farm Tasmania

Turning the Wheel from the Ground Up

There is a kind of leadership that faces outward with fire and certainty, yet forgets to turn and listen to the quiet, generative depths from which real authority arises. When power fixes its gaze only on what can be counted, traded, and controlled, it begins to sever itself from the living sources that sustain it. Decisions become fast and impressive, yet increasingly detached from consequence. The wheel keeps turning, and beneath the appearance of progress the subtle infrastructures of life such as soil fertility, trust, culture, and care, are gradually worn away. What disappears first is rarely visible on a balance sheet, yet it is precisely what makes any economy possible. When movement is oriented toward these deeper foundations, motion becomes a force of renewal.

“Is this a movement about subtle but profound movement?”

— Dr Demeter

Con Viv names this re-orientation. It is a simple way of seeing the living whole and acting from within it. Rather than separating economy, ecology, and culture, Con Viv understands them as one shared field of life. Leadership, in this light, is not command over parts but care for relationships of all kinds.

This is nowhere more visible than in our food systems. Policy after policy treats food as production, land as asset, seed as property, and farmers as operators in a global chain. Life is translated into price signals and logistics; yield stands in for nourishment, efficiency stands in for relationship, and the shared ground of life is enclosed by the language of markets.

Through a Con Viv lens, this is a narrowing of perception. Food is not a unit of output but a living meeting: soil, sun, water, labour, memory, and care arriving together each day on the table. When decisions recognise this interconnectedness, they shape the conditions for life to flourish. The work before us is to recover a clear perception of what food actually is, and to let policy grow from that perception.

Seen with this clarity, a farm is an organism: a living conversation between earth and sky, human intention and ecological process. Con Viv invites governance to become the art of strengthening coherence. Health arises when parts serve the whole and the whole nourishes the parts.

by Ness Vanderburgh Photography

From this vantage, the commodification of life appears as a thinning of reality. It values exchange while overlooking relationship, and ownership while overlooking stewardship. A different way opens when policy cultivates resilient, place-based food webs grounded in living landscapes and communities. This is Con Viv in practice: cultivating the conditions in which life can live well together.

This is also the spirit of Grow Small Feed All: directing support toward many small and medium farms, shortening supply loops, renewing regional processing, and rooting procurement in place. Diversity in landholders becomes diversity in crops, diets, and livelihoods, and risk is shared across a vibrant mosaic of producers. Here, economy is not extracted from place but circulates within it.

By Ness Vandeburgh Photography. Grow Small Feed All Campaign’ by Regen Era Design Studio

For me these ideas are grounded daily at Magical Farm Tasmania, where nothing thrives alone. Compost is community, pollination is partnership, water is memory moving through soil. Con Viv is not an abstract framework here but a daily practice. Policy becomes as practical as saving seed, keeping hedgerows, and opening pathways for young growers. Writing from this place is a laying of an inner foundation stone: thinking rooted in observation, feeling deepened into reverence, and willing expressed as steady, practical care - our 600 million dollar policy redirection has been seeded from these foundations.

From that ground, family, farm, and community form one field of responsibility. Decisions in the paddock echo at the kitchen table, the town meeting, and the policy page. In Con Viv terms, authority grows through relationship and coherence, not scale alone.

Gathering with others under the theme “You Never Farm Alone” gives language to this lived truth: autonomy and interdependence move together. A region stands in its own integrity while participating in a wider living exchange. Reciprocity becomes the organising principle, and isolation gives way to belonging.

Policy shaped from this foundation treats soil fertility as a public good, honours farmers as cultural practitioners, circulates finance locally, and measures success in biodiversity, nutrition, and belonging. These are not alternative indicators but truer ones, aligned with how living systems actually persist.

From the garden this is entirely practical. Con Viv looks like wind breaks planted for future generations, small abattoirs and mills that keep value near the land, farmer-to-farmer learning as a form of cultural renewal, school and hospital procurement that feeds regional growers, seed diversity protected as shared heritage, and regeneration rewarded as essential work.

By Ness Vandeburgh Photography.

When clarity and courage meet the everyday labour of soil and seed, food becomes nourishment, land becomes place, and policy becomes care made visible. Con Viv offers a simple compass for this complexity: strengthen the relationships that make life possible.

The wheel continues to turn, but now in conscious service of life, with movement guided not by extraction but by belonging.

With Love and Con Viv!
Dr Demeter

From Garden to Governance: Practical Wisdom for a Living Food System

To work with the Foundational Stone Meditation given by Rudolf Steiner is to experience thinking, feeling, and willing as living organs rather than abstract faculties. On the farm this is not philosophy but practice: thought becomes observation of soil and season, feeling becomes reverence for the beings who share the fields, and will becomes the steady hands that plant, mend, harvest, and feed.

by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

The meditation speaks of grounding spirit into the depths of the human heart so that action can rise again in freedom. Each morning in the garden I sense this descent and ascent as breath: compost returning matter to darkness, seedlings lifting green toward light. My family life follows the same rhythm. Care moves downward into listening, patience, and nourishment, then upward into guidance, decision, and protection.

Policy, too, must be laid like a stone in this inner foundation. When laws grow only from calculation, they hover above life and soon drift away from consequence. When they are set into the shared ground of place, work, and relationship, they hold. Writing from the farm teaches me that governance begins with attention: to animals who show when pasture is ready, to neighbours who reveal what community needs, to children who ask what kind of future we are making.

The meditation’s threefold gesture invites me to weave inner clarity, outer responsibility, and communal purpose. In human relationships this means meeting others not as roles but as souls in development. In relation to animals it means partnership rather than use, recognising their presence as part of the farm’s consciousness. In community it means shaping agreements that circulate vitality instead of extracting it.

by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

To carry this stone in the heart is to design from below, from roots and relationships, rather than from distant abstraction. Life, work, and policy then arise from the same source: a quiet centre where thinking is warmed by love and strengthened by courage, and where every decision is asked to serve the wholeness that holds us all in living reciprocity together.

Con Viv and With love,

Dr Demeter

Omoiyari 思いやり in a Time of Grief: From Outrage to the Work of Reweaving

I’m holding this piece inside a wider field than opinion. Across the Great Southern Land, there is a shared grief that does not need to be named but to be felt. When something breaks in public life, the shock moves through us in waves. This may be a moment to let that shock deepen our questions, and to return to the slow intelligence that knows how to hold life.

Earlier this year in The Island Almanac, I wrote about the Art of Peace, then about Why Outrage is not Enough for Progress. What I want to reflect on now is how we recover a praxis (an idea into practice) of relationship: a lived, everyday practice of reweaving the social fabric, human by human, until belonging becomes more normal than polarity.

Many people are enmeshed with modern conditions that can under-hold us: urban speed, industrial economic models, dislocated community, hyper-mobility, the commodification of attention, and the quiet thinning of local civic life. In that atmosphere, nervous systems become more reactive, meaning-making becomes brittle, and complexity starts to feel like danger. The pull toward binaries, good and evil, for and against, my people and your people, often arrives as a search for certainty when the ground feels unstable. Not only that, algorithms reinforce these hardened attitudes.

Through Manfred Max-Neef’s lens, conditions for hardened attitudes in our social life are a symptom of unmet human needs: protection, affection, participation, and identity. When these needs are not reliably met, we reach for substitutes that imitate safety or belonging for a moment, while narrowing the relationships that could meet those needs more deeply. The invitation is to cultivate synergistic satisfiers: forms of community life that meet multiple needs at once, so complexity becomes holdable again and the social fabric can begin to knit. Think shared gardens, local markets, cooperative projects, and convivial gatherings that return people to one another in simple, repeated ways.

Anthroposophy offers me language for diagnosing these times without collapsing into blame. It begins with the human being as more than a political identity or an economic unit: a being of spirit, soul, and will, whose health depends on balance between thinking, feeling, and doing. When culture over-trains the head and under-nourishes heart and hands, thinking can harden into ideology, feeling can spill into volatility, and the will can lose direction. Outrage can then become both a moral signal and a discharge, and without a deeper container it can scorch relationship, the very medium required for transformation.

This is why I keep returning to an older seed-story in my own life. When I was eleven, I attended a peace conference in Japan with children from fifty-six countries. Since then, I have continued supporting the Asian-Pacific Children’s Convention in Fukuoka as a peace ambassador and chaperone for Australian children. At the heart of that gathering is what they call omoiyari 思いやり: a secular ethic of considerate attention, a discipline of recognising another’s reality and responding with care as a daily practice. It is sometimes described as “sending one’s thoughts to others.” I have come to understand it as the willingness to let another person matter enough that your actions adjust around their presence.

Photography by Emily Samuels-Ballantyne, at 2011 Asian Pacific Children’s Convention in Japan

Omoiyari is practical. You notice what might help someone feel safer, lighter, more included, and you respond, often before they need to ask. You make space in conversation. You slow your pace to match someone else. You bring what will help without announcing it. You choose words that protect dignity. This is small-scale, human-scale peacebuilding.

So what does it mean to practise omoiyari in Australia, especially when grief is close and the cultural atmosphere is hot with agitation? When the collective nervous system tightens and begins scanning for certainty, the work becomes a different kind of strength: to stay with the ache without turning it into a weapon, and to build social forms that can hold the human being.

Here, Steiner’s threefold social understanding offers a useful map for cultural repair. In the threefold picture, society is healthiest when three realms can breathe in their own way: a cultural and spiritual life free enough for living thinking, education, art, and meaning-making; a rights life that treats people as equal in dignity; and an economic life that becomes associative, cooperative provisioning of needs rather than extraction as the default. When these realms collapse into one logic, community thins, people become functions, and a function cannot feed a soul.

This is also where I want to acknowledge First Nations knowledge systems with care and humility. On this continent there are deep traditions grounded in Country, kinship, reciprocity, responsibility, and continuity. Without appropriating, we can still be guided by the ethical direction: relationship is the substance of life, and place is a teacher. When we listen respectfully to what First Nations people say about community life and gentle ways of living, we are called away from abstraction and back into pattern, where repair becomes a living act carried through relationship.

From this ground, I want to offer a nurturing kind of clarity for the forward vision: softness as life-making strength, the capacity to create conditions where something good can grow. This is clarity that illuminates rather than humiliates. It is authority expressed as stewardship, through conditions that help life thrive. In anthroposophical terms, it is the heart remembering it can sense what is true, and the will learning again how to serve life instead of moving from fear.

What might this look like in practice for Australians right now? It can look like rebuilding the village layer of society as deliberate culture-making. Small, repeated gatherings that thicken trust. Shared meals. Working bees. Repair cafes. Community gardens. Parent circles. Walking groups. Spaces where people can be present with difference without being reduced to their opinion. Alongside this, it can look like a civic skill we practise: returning to breath when outrage rises, so the nervous system stays inside the body and care remains capable of relationship. It can look like investing in cultural life that nourishes, including education, arts, local storytelling, and ritual. It can look like strengthening rights life so dignity is protected in practice, not only in principle. It can look like building more cooperative economic forms, including local food systems, co-ops, local energy, and care networks, so meeting needs becomes a practice of cooperation rather than a theatre of fear.

I have witnessed both the absence and the presence of omoiyari in Australia. I have seen politics harden and pressure erode compassion. I have also seen people show up quietly for one another, and neighbours carry each other through difficult seasons. Tasmania has been one lens for me, because on an island you can feel the social atmosphere quickly, yet this is not only a Tasmanian story. It is an Australian one.

This is the heart of what I want to offer as a continuation of my earlier essays: peace is a practice, outrage is a signal, grief is a threshold. The way through is slower and more human. It is the work of reweaving, rebuilding the social fabric until the binary spell loosens, until belonging becomes more normal than contempt, and until we remember that the opposite of polarisation is relationship strong enough to hold difference.

Omoiyari is not a foreign ideal. It is an attention-practice we can speak in our own language: care, neighbourliness, mateship made real, village culture built deliberately through the choices we repeat. The invitation now is simple and practical: to become cultivators of life, creating conditions where what is most human in us can grow again.

With love and Con Viv,
Emily / Dr Demeter

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne, PhD / Dr Demeter is a Tasmanian-based regenerative designer, biodynamic herb farmer, educator, and policy-oriented researcher. Her work brings together living systems design, conviviality, and place-based governance to help communities build conditions for care, belonging, and ecological repair. She leads Magical Farm Tasmania, a small farm and learning site, and Regen Era Design Studio, a design studio supporting community scale food systems, regenerative enterprise, and public sector reform. She is also developing Con Viv, a long-form body of work and practical framework for relationship-centred agriculture and cultural renewal.

Emily’s peace activism began early. At eleven, she attended an international peace conference in Japan with children from fifty-six countries. Since then, she has continued supporting the Asian-Pacific Children’s Convention in Fukuoka as a peace ambassador and chaperone for Australian children. Her public writing and community work focus on restoring the social fabric through everyday practices of attention, cooperation, and locally rooted cultural life.

YoFence and the Living Philosophy of Magical Farm Tasmania

By Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)

At Magical Farm Tasmania, our work is as much about cultivating conviviality and community as it is about cultivating soil and soul. The farm is a living philosophy, a regenerative lifestyle experiment where community, ecology, and imagination intertwine.

Each Thursday, our landcare group gathers to restore and tend the land. Volunteers learn about regenerative farming, herbal wisdom, and biodynamic rhythms, farming in sync with the cosmos. We explore the sevenfold patterns that shape life: seven days of the week, seven chakras, seven inner planets, and seven biodynamic plants that correspond with them.

From this ecosystem grew YoFence, a practice that unites the sword and the soul, fencing and yoga. Inspired by Eastern Body, Western Mind, YoFence invites courage, conviction, and connection. The sword represents clarity and boundaries; yoga, holistic union. Together they form a living metaphor for what our world needs in 2026: a way to move beyond binaries and commodification toward authentic connection, to people, place, and planet.

In early 2026, I’ll be offering a seven-day YoFence immersion (January 1 – 7 at Urdara, Hobart), a transformative beginning to the year. Participants will explore embodied regeneration through movement, mindfulness, and nature-based ritual. It will be fun, creative, and deeply grounding.

For those who can’t join the full retreat, you’re warmly invited to participate in our Thursday Landcare days, meet our community, and experience how we are farming the future in festivity, food, and friendship.

This work also flows into the Regen Era Design Studio, our policy and design initiative rooted in the soil. We imagine new ways of shaping governance and the food system so they align with the living principles of nature itself.

YoFence has become my way of transmuting grief of a broken world into creative leadership. Like mycelium, this vision spreads quietly underground, connecting hearts, ideas, and places into one living web. To join the January 2026 immersion or volunteer with the landcare group, visit: www.magicalfarm.org/bookings

Tarkind: Painting a Living World Back Into View

We began Tarkind in 2022 as a small collective, myself and my son Zach, invertebrate biologist Dr Keith Martin-Smith, and palawa woman Gemma O’Rourke, to weave science, story, and art into everyday care for place. We are excited to announce our 2025 Tarkind community art and citizen science day! Firstly I want to share why we want to educate about living systems.

Why a living-systems lens?

In Tarkind we work from a simple conviction: life works in relationships. Fritjof Capra calls this the systems view of life: living beings, communities, and ecologies are networks of relationships whose health depends on patterns, flows, feedback, diversity, and rhythm, rather than on single parts. For Capra, this isn’t only biology or ecology; it’s also ethics and meaning. When you see the web, a quiet spiritual intuition follows: we belong to something larger. That belonging is not a doctrine; it’s a practice of attention, of noticing consequences, caring for cycles, and letting our actions be accountable to the whole.

Daniel Christian Wahl extends this into culture. His question is: what kinds of cultures help places to heal? He invites us to design for regeneration, work that leaves people and places more capable than before. That means place-sourced learning, bioregional thinking, circular use of materials, and stories that grow responsibility rather than extraction. In his frame, art, education, and landcare are not extras; they are cultural technologies that renew our capacity to live well together.

How this shapes Tarkind

• Walk, notice, name. We use iNaturalist and field journaling to see the web, Capra’s patterns are therefore made tangible.

• Paint what we felt and found. The art is how the insight lands in the body and the community; it keeps the story alive.

• Plant and repair. Regeneration is Wahl’s litmus test: did our time together leave the place more resilient?

This is also the heart of my Con Viv work, head, heart, and hand in one movement, supported by David Orr’s reminder that all education is environmental education, and Satish Kumar’s call to hold soil, soul, and society in balance.

Photography by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

Why it matters: a living-systems worldview builds tolerance (difference is an asset), love (care becomes structure: roles, rhythms, and repair), and a gentle spiritual stance (reverence for the whole we share). If more of our schools, councils, and neighbourhoods worked this way, conflict wouldn’t vanish, but it would have somewhere useful to go, into listening, making, planting, and the slow renewal of culture.

What is citizen science?

Citizen science is everyday people helping do real science. We notice, record, and share observations, photos, sounds, simple measurements, and those data feed into research, conservation planning, and education. It’s hands-on learning that turns curiosity into evidence: you don’t need a lab coat, just attention, respect for place, and a phone or notebook. For kids and adults alike, it builds ecological literacy, confidence, and a sense of belonging to the living world.

Photography by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

Who are the Great Southern BioBlitz?

The Great Southern BioBlitz (GSB) is a southern-hemisphere biodiversity event held each spring that invites communities to document as many species as possible over one long weekend using platforms like iNaturalist. Local groups host walks, workshops, and mini-surveys; participants upload what they find; volunteer identifiers help name species; and the pooled results give scientists and land managers a richer picture of local ecosystems. We collaborate with GSB to connect our Tarkind walks and art sessions to this wider effort, so every observation we make together becomes part of a bigger, shared map of life in our region.

Next event: Magical Farm × Great Southern BioBlitz × Magical Farm Landcare Group, Sunday 26 Oct 2025, 10:00–2:30. We’ll gather at Magical Farm, convoy to Allens Rivulet Track for the Bioblitz, then return for a shared lunch, Tarkind community art, and a short planting. Bring iNaturalist, warm layers, water, a plate to share, and an art canvas (large or small) + paints. Families welcome. Message me for details.

Tarkind is a reminder: when we live with life, the future stops being an abstraction and becomes something we can touch, tend, and paint together.

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.

• Barcelona’s Decidim platform empowers tens of thousands to propose and vote on policies.

• EcoPeace Middle East models cross-border cooperation between Jordan, Israel and Palestine around water resources.

• Local councils in Rojava show how self-rule can resist authoritarianism and fragmentation.

  These case studies are working examples of how conversation can turn outrage into architecture.

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.

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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.