I discovered the internet work of the Sycamores today:
They live on a half-acre homestead in rural Simpsonville, Kentucky, where they grow our own food and raise chickens for eggs. By day, the two of them work on a farm, helping tend to a two-acre, chemical-free market garden. In the meantime they work together to write, podcast, and also maintain their website: www.permaculturelifestyle.com.
They are Dedicated to the pursuits of self-reliance, natural living & ecological thinking, and their blog posts and podcasts are great.
This one particular entry really strummed my heart strings, and I want to share it in part here.
"What does it mean to be illegible and irrelevant to the dominant culture of destruction and exploitation?
It means reclaiming a greater sense of autonomy, a self-directed lifestyle, freedom from the rat race and the pursuit of financial capital.
It means rejecting the distractions and false narratives that are manufactured to divide and conquer the non-elite classes of the world.
It means rebuilding our divided communities and taking direct interpersonal action to achieve harmony through the common goals and values that we all share.
We can design intentional systems and lifestyles for ourselves which generate yields that the system doesn’t understand.
We can generate non-monetary forms of capital that can’t be taxed by a system that only knows how to rationalize financial value.
If they can’t measure it, they can’t tax it.
I think that making ourselves illegible is a very practical, pragmatic way of responding to the bizarre and dysfunctional zoo of civilization.
If we don’t wish to participate in our own annihilation, then we need to put our money where our mouths are — which is to say, we need to generate and exchange value in ways that don’t involve money.
That’s liberation permaculture: the fertile intersection of ecology, anthropology, rewilding and anarchist theory. (Please don’t let the A-word scare you off!) Sustainable land design and resilient communal networks will never be organized from above. It’s up to us to make the spaces we occupy into the world we wish to see — and we can start today.
Listen to the latest episode of the Permaculture Lifestyle podcast through the blog -- or on iTunes. . . . . Permaculturelifestyle.com ✌🏼️
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