Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

In our first episode of 2025, we get inspired by Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex to watch the cult 1974 movie Zardoz, featuring Sean Connery in what appears to be a prototype for the mankini. In Galluzzo’s book, Zardoz features as a surprisingly prescient story for thinking about techno-utopias (or dystopias), degrowth and deceleration in the 21st century, as well as bringing into view an under-recognised current of “critical Aquarianism” in 1970s counterculture, distinct from both the self-centred therapeutic turn (see Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self) and the “hippie modernist cults of technology” (touched on when we discussed ‘Spaceship Earth’ in S1E4).Before we get to that, Dougald references his recent Resilience.org event with Vanessa Andreotti, who commented that before January, she regularly got questions from audiences along the lines of “What’s the evidence that modernity is dying?” Since January, no one has asked her this, which is one facet of the ways the world has changed in these months.Ed brings up Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis’s Uncertainty Experts and an increased willingness of people he deals with in institutional settings to admit to their uncertainty.This leads us onto the subject of belief and its relationship to certainty/knowing and uncertainty/mystery – and Ed points out that Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto (which he has been reading so the rest of us don’t have to) includes 113 statements that begin with “We believe”.Dougald mentions the essay on John Berger that he wrote for the first Dark Mountain book, and how Berger’s later writing – inspired by the old peasants he lived alongside in the Haute Savoie – models the possibility for “a cohabitation with mystery, not an attempt to enclose or eliminate it”.Mankinis and ManifestosAt this point, we get on to the matter of Sean Connery’s mankini and Anthony Galluzzo’s book. What Anthony is doing in drawing attention to the “critical Aquarian” current within 1970s thought has parallels with the project of our friends Elias Crim and Pete Davis with The Lost Prophets Podcast. Ed points out the shades of Ursula K. Le Guin in the storyline of Zardoz, bringing us back to ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. (Though Zed, the Connery character, is more a case of one who breaks into Omelas and fights to bring it down.)Dougald wonders about the parallels between John Boorman’s Zed and John Berger’s G. In Berger’s novel, which won the Booker prize in 1972, there’s also a central character whose name is (or sounds like) a single letter and who represents some kind of… well, phallocentric revolution. There’s also an aesthetic similarity, in that both Boorman’s film and Berger’s book pursue a cubist fragmentation of the singular perspective and linear timeline.Dougald also mentions the 1976 film which Berger wrote with Alain Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000, which speaks to the tail end of the moment of critical Aquarianism.In a key passage in Against the Vortex, Galluzzo sums up the question which united those he considers to be critical Aquarian thinkers, and its continuing relevance:How to exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions—utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth, secular immortality, and total control—in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises without sliding into the reactionary antimodernism that, for example, led certain disillusioned Western intellectuals to embrace the Iranian revolution at the end of the Seventies? While the urgency of the crises has increased a hundredfold since the 1970s, the question remains unanswered.Not a bad description of the questions we’ve been asking on The Great Humbling.Dougald picks up another element in Against the Vortex, where Galluzzo contrasts the critical Aquarian current of environmentalism represented by Illich with the technocratic, expert-centred environmentalism represented by Stewart Brand – and suggests that it would be worth bringing this into dialogue with the slightly different “genealogy of green politics” offered by Stephen Quilley in ‘Ecology “After Virtue” and After Modernity’. The main difference between these two maps is that Quilley locates neo-Malthusian environmentalism as opposed to a tech-focused mainstream environmentalism, whereas Galluzzo (following Giorgos Kallis’s Limits) identifies Malthusian thought as aligned with the logic of growth.This brings us back to Marc Andreessen and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which Ed describes as “not so much Effective Altruism as Effective Accelerationism”, partly inspired by Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism.Dougald asks where Andreessen is now on the map of tech politics in the era of Trump 2 – has he gone full Gay Space Fascism? (For those unfamiliar with the term, he recommends Jonathan Cioran’s essay for Mere Orthodoxy.) Ed quotes Elizabeth Spiers on Andreessen’s manifesto: “[It] has the pathos of the Unabomber … but lacks the ideological coherency.”Ed introduces Hard Imagination, a “dark white paper” produced by Indy Johar, David Johnston and Clare Farrell as a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. The “Lad Hybrid” DeceleratesAt this point, the Great Humbling takes an unexpected turn into Top Gear territory with the sad tale of the 2016 Volkswagen Passat GTE for which you have to take out a mortgage in order to replace the gearbox.Maybe because of reading John Michael Greer’s ‘Lords of the Fall’, in which the one-time Archdruid Report author returns to the themes of the collapse of complex societies (nod to Joseph Tainter), the counterproductive complexity of the hybrid gearbox comes to feel like a metaphor for what’s wrong with the way we’re approaching the climate crisis.David Fleming’s Lean Logic gets a mention, in particular the entry on Needs and Wants, which points out that our wants are mostly quite humble and its the needs imposed by the complexity of modern societies that are the disaster.Ed suggests the car should make a final journey to the church-in-the-ruins at Covehithe and it all gets a bit KLF for a moment.Listeners of The Great Humbling who know more about cars than Dougald are invited to offer advice.Quiet CollapsitariansWe finish up by discussing Rob Harrison-Plastow’s article, ‘Why Well-Off Brits Who Think Collapse Is Coming Still Stay Silent’, which suggests that a critical mass of middle class professionals has come to the conclusion that “the systems we rely on for survival are far more fragile than they appear, are deeply flawed and contain within them dynamics that keep us locked in to a dangerous trajectory”, but many of them are keeping quiet about this.Implicit in Harrison-Plastow’s article is the idea from Alexei Yurchak’s book about the last years of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, that revolutionary change is a two-stage process: in the first stage, everyone stops believing in the existing system; in the second, everyone realises that everyone else has stopped believing in it.Dougald asks what is meant to happen, at the point when everyone realises that everyone else (or at least, lots of others) have come to the same conclusion? There’s a risk of a kind of wishful thinking here, that if only we all realise and admit the depth of the trouble we are in, we know how to make things better. Bearing in mind the Greer/Tainter piece about the relationship between societal complexity and collapse and the example of the hybrid motor, he suggests that we need to look at the uncomfortable questions Stephen Quilley is asking about the tendency to assume the entitlements of high-tech, liberal, individualist late modernity are somehow compatible with taking seriously the implications of our ecological crisis.This brings us back to Vanessa’s comments in the Resilience event and her observation that there is an “inflated sense of agency” that haunts the imagination of the Global North that looks weird from a Brazilian perspective. In that conversation, Vanessa and Dougald tried out the contrast between this “pedestal” model of agency and a “mycelial” mode of agency.A final thought comes from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole, paraphrased by Dougald: when hate hates love, it is true to itself; when love hates hate, it betrays itself. Not thinking that hating hate can fix anything, and working out what the loving moves look like within a model of agency that isn’t self-deceiving – maybe these are our questions in this humbling spring of 2025?Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing and supporting our work in multiple ways. Check out more episodes of The Great Humbling and Homeward Bound at homewardbound.org. Learn more about Ed’s work on his website, and read more from Dougald at his Substack, Writing Home, where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

This episode is the podcast version of a live event a few weeks ago, hosted by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, where I joined Vanessa Andreotti – who some of you will know as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – to wonder about what she is up to with AI.To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well, that would be an understatement. Here, she shares more about why GTDF has chosen to work with AI and we puzzle this through with the help of stories.If you’re coming to this without any context, then I recommend checking out the first couple of items in the shownotes before heading further into the episode, which starts with me quoting Vanessa’s alter ego, Dorothy Ladybug Boss:The first thing you need to know about this book … is that it asks you to suspend both belief and disbelief.Shownotes* The Burnout from Humans website – read the book Vanessa wrote together with Aiden Cinnamon Tea and interact with Aiden for yourself.* The Wild Chatbot – read or listen to the essay in which I tell the story of how Burnout From Humans came about and my attempt to make sense of what Vanessa, Aiden and the GTDF collective are up to here.* Landing with the Land Differently – from the GTDF, an alternative to the familiar game of land acknowledgements.* Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism – Vanessa’s previous book.* Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity & Collapse with Accountability & Compassion – Vanessa’s forthcoming book, available for preorder now.If you want to support my work, including the making of Homeward Bound and the Great Humbling, then consider becoming a paid subscriber to Writing Home – where you’ll also have access to the In-Between Videos and live events like the one-off book club on Martin Buber’s I and Thou which we just ran. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey.Show Notes* Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy.* Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.* Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales.* Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth.* On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970.* The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd.* For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster.* Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’.* The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World.* James Bridle, New Dark Age.* We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it.* Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole.* Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men.* Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins, an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins.The original set of tasks goes like this:* Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us.* Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet.* Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind.* Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead.In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks:* What should we seek to use before we lose it?* What can we produce now, knowing what is coming?* What can we evolve from things we’ll lose?* What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these?* What do we need to learn and teach future generations?You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now. He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn.Show Notes* We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”.* Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health.* Jay introduces the work of Dave Hakkens and One Army – and especially the Precious Plastic project. * Talking about what we should “use before we lose” takes me to a conversation with the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett where he suggested using today’s earth-moving machines to do landscaping for permaculture that will continue to be useful long after the fossil fuel era is over.* Low-Tech Magazine.* Jay’s Stone Paper.* Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchamquic on the centring of seeds within Mayan culture. * The Decelerator supports civil society organisations to create good endings (discussed in the #DECELERATE episode of The Great Humbling).* End of the World Garden in Cornwall, created by the artist Paul Chaney.* I wrote about Cryptic Northern Refugia in this essay for Alan Garner.* Thomas Keyes’s recipe for October Black Isle Pheasant Stew appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.* Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution, by which “crabs” evolve from different directions.* Caroline Ross’s Found and Ground as an example of recovering and relearning skills. (I spoke to Caroline in Homeward Bound S1E1.)* Here’s an old post of Jay’s about his first company, Orikaso, and the fold-flat dinnerware products he invented.* Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”.* Jay’s TEDx talk, where he started sharing his thinking about biomemetic business models.* J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like?Shownotes* Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam * Andy Hamilton, New Wild Order * James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more.* Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast:* Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November* A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins, Thursday 28 November* Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship* Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga’s comment on our election day episode * Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit:* #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013)* Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019)* Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)* Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment* ‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019.* Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.”* Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!)* Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book* Jay Cousins writes on Substack at Make Kindness Easier! and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound* Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”: Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.* Andrew at Bog-down and Aster quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end:The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.Thank you for listening, sharing and responding to these episodes.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury, author of the Substack Finding Sanity. I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse:I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world.The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked.I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME, and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in.I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins, asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode.I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,Gunpowder, treason and plot.I see no reasonWhy gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot.This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament.While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?”And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation:We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.(from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’)Shownotes* The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. * “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.”* Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’.* Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project.* There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.* American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka.* Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow.* Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski.* The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson. * Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book. * Dougald’s letter from three days after the 2016 US election: ‘When the Maps Run Out’.* R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’* “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.”* Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’”* Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies.* Vanessa Chamberlin’s vision asks us: “What if we step towards the cracks?”* Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?” * Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

The hosts humorously grapple with the blunders of modern technology, using a robot vacuum mishap as a metaphor for political chaos. They explore themes of masculinity and self-discovery through a friend's one-man show, alongside discussions on environmental activism spurred by literary works like Edward Abbey's 'The Monkey Wrench Gang.' The conversation also dives into dark satire with Andrei Kirchhoff's 'Death and the Penguin,' and reflects on the complexities of forgiveness and male violence in Em Strang's 'Quinn.' It's a rich blend of literature and thought-provoking social commentary.

Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo show, since you don’t hear Katie’s questions and my answers come in stories rather than paragraphs. If you haven’t read At Work in the Ruins, then this episode is a good way into it – and if you have, then it will give you a sense of where I’ve been taken by the conversations the book led me into.It also provides some good context for Pockets, Patterns & Practices, the five-week online series that I’ll be teaching next month.Shownotes* Katie Teague’s YouTube channel with other interviews, including Joanna Macey, Jonathan Rowson and more.* Support Katie’s work through her Patreon.* Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps aka “Six Ways to Die”* Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do”* My interpretation of Eno’s definition in The Kitchen Table* At Work in the Ruins now out in paperback* Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 & 7 November 2024 and runs for five weeks. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.orgHomeward Bound theme music: ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot SessionsThanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast. Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour.* Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat* The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.We talk about how long it is since I last visited the US. Back then, I was travelling as part of an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Among my co-founders was Mary Harrington, who describes her experience the mess of that start-up experience early on in Feminism Against Progress – and it turns out that Ashley also features later on in that book.Chicago is Ashley’s hometown. She talks about how she and her husband moved away, after she got “doom-pilled”, and about their decision to return a few years later. This is partly about getting away from “spreadsheet mind”.It’s important to me to have these urban examples of what “regrowing a living culture” can look like. However much we may be working for what Chris Smaje calls a “small farm future”, there’s also a need for examples of what it looks like when we start from the places where many people find themselves. One example for me is the small community of radical hospitality in south London that Elizabeth Oldfield writes about in Fully Alive. Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box in Wyoming – and how she seems to have fallen into the role of helping Dark Mountain co-founders find their bearings in North America.We discover a mutual admiration for Richard D. Bartlett’s approach to bringing groups together – and Ashley talks about how this shaped her approach to convening co-created retreats like the one we will be holding.I look back on experiences with the community of Ivan Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators, a way of gathering around the table that is an antidote to the “conditioned air” of institutional academia. (For more on this, see Illich’s ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’.)Ashley introduces me to the concept of a Jeffersonian Dinner – and we decide we’ll host something like this on the Saturday evening of the Chicago Retreat.We talk about some of the other events I’ll be doing on the tour, including conversations with Bayo Akomolafe at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, Lewis Hyde in Boston, and with Adam Wilson of The Peasantry School Newsletter. I give a shout out to Ellie Robins’s excellent post, “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”, and quote something Lydia Catterall once said to me: “I’ve realised that there can be a gift in things you could never have asked for.” I think of that often when reading Nick Cave’s replies in The Red Hand Files.Ashley quotes something Paul Kingsnorth said years ago in a New York Times article about Dark Mountain: “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough.”We talk about using the retreat to explore examples, to invite people to bring a diversity of stories of what the work of regrowing a living culture looks like in practice – and also working out the challenges and contradictions, navigating the tensions. Ashley talks about making community in an urban neighbourhood, also about joining the La Leche League as a new mother and the sharing of experience and advice from multiple voices that she experienced in those meetings.Talking about pockets takes me to Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”, the conditions under which a group of artists become capable of making work that exceeds anything they had previously achieved on their own. (For more on this, see this post of mine and Austin Kleon’s Maps of Scenius.)It also brings me to Laura Fabrycky’s essay, ‘The Witness of the Weak Centres’, about how her admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed from a story of his individual heroism to a recognition of “the small, mysterious, slow, even weak places of life—home, family, friends” that shaped the resistance to the Nazi regime.Thanks for listening – and for reading these notes. Head over to my website to find all the details for the Chicago Retreat and the rest of the American tour.Further episodes of Homeward Bound are coming soon, along with a new series of The Great Humbling later in the autumn. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org