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.

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.

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

The human world hums with tension. Meetings flare into argument, social feeds crowd into outrage, and kitchens, workplaces, and councils echo with competing voices that rarely feel heard. Con Viv, which simply means “with life,” treats this heat as living energy rather than waste. In living systems disturbance is not an error but information, so the real question becomes whether we can build vessels strong enough to hold that energy and transform it into insight, relationship, policy and practice.

Jung’s insight is helpful here. When two poles lock against each other, a “third” thing is missing. The “Third” is not a bland compromise but a new form that appears only when opposites are consciously held long enough to reveal a creative synthesis. Our public life often fails at this, since we either suppress conflict in the name of peace without truth, or inflame it in the name of truth without peace. If we want to move beyond that binary, we need containers that invite the Third to appear, which is a cultural and institutional task rather than a purely emotional one.

Anthroposophy offers a clear shape for healthy community life. It says culture thrives with freedom, our shared rules should treat people as equals, and our economy should be based on mutual support. When we mix these up, trust breaks down. When we keep them distinct and in balance, love becomes something you can build with. Roles are placed where they fit, relationships are cared for, and decisions follow a steady rhythm so care can move through a community reliably. Con Viv turns this into practice through head, heart, and hand: seeing clearly, meeting each other warmly, and making things together. We move through a simple cycle of notice, hold, transform, and act. The aim is not to remove conflict but to guide its heat into learning and useful patterns.

On the ground this looks ordinary and practical. Listening spaces give people a way to speak without fear so that heat turns into information that everyone can use. Rights containers make decision paths visible with transparent timelines, rotating facilitation, small trials that run for a set period, and a public review that invites revision rather than punishment. Mutual-aid prototyping redirects arguments into safe-to-try projects such as verge care, herb plots, walking routes, tool libraries, and shared maintenance days, so trust grows sideways through work done together. Creative activation turns disputes into raw material for theatre, music, murals, and story-gathering, since new forms often appear first in image or gesture before they can be legislated. Individual containment gives each person a way to hold strong feeling through journaling, contemplative movement, boundary practice, or a quiet walk, which is less about private self-help and more about civic hygiene that prevents projection from flooding the commons.

The virtue that names the tone of this work is Michaelic courage, a clear and warm quality of attention that meets the dragon without becoming one. In practice this looks like precision instead of blame, imagination instead of cynicism, and rhythm instead of rush. It is a kind of heart-thinking where understanding is shaped by interest in the other, which keeps the social field from hardening into camps and slogans. Conflict will not vanish, nor should it, since friction keeps systems alive. What changes is the destination of that energy. Within a living container the spark falls into a wider field and can ripen into a third thing, perhaps a pattern other places can reuse, a pilot that becomes policy, or a poem that restores language where it had collapsed.

This is the seed-vision here… Love becomes infrastructure that shapes decision making, convivial governance, and everyday interaction, while Con Viv offers a choreography for the passage from heat to practice. Jung gives us the organ of perception for the Third, and Anthroposophy gives us a social anatomy that keeps freedom, equality, and mutuality in honest relationship. Together they sketch a future life system that is robust enough to hold our heat and gentle enough to help us grow. Here, friction is fuel and the vessel that turns it into life is made, maintained, and renewed in common.

Musings