THE SMALL WORK
A COLLABORATIVE PATTERN
we still sing songs in honour of the collaborative pattern for being that we shifted into, a good quarter of a century ago, the pattern that led us to the flourishing world we are all thriving in now, in 2050. we write plays, novels, poetry, we hold festivals that celebrate and remind us of all the ways we re-cultured what was a pattern of domination, competition and conquering into a pattern of symbiosis, reciprocity and collaboration. in every moment, in every interaction, in every decision, we still attend to whether we are practicing patterns of mutual thriving for all of life on earth, because we saw how bad things could get for all of us, for all vulnerable beings, for all systems within the biosphere, when we let an underlying paradigm of competition form our world from the roots up. we began this work in earnest, in so many ways, back in the early 2020s at the edge of collapse. one of the philosophies and practices that got us here was what i call the small work.
SIMPLE LIVING AS A CREATIVE RESPONSE TO CRISIS
when the grand scale of the converging crises we faced felt utterly overwhelming, it seemed like we were too small to make a difference.
when people said the only way to make change was top-down, that behaviour change was too hard, that folks were only motivated by fear, we knew that we learn and change when we feel safe, calm, inspired and connected.
many of us turned to simple, sustainable living as a way forward that integrated the activism of resistance with the activism of growing another future.
many of us came to this by way of home birth, attachment parenting, homeschooling; practicing zero waste; herbal medicine, foraging; growing our food or producing our clothing, reviving traditional crafts; natural building or sustainable energy, rainwater catchment; co-housing, intergenerational, off-grid and communal living; choosing active transportation, avoiding flights; buying local, natural; supporting justice movements, diversity movements. we may have found our way in through homesteading, minimalism, downshifting, permaculture, re-skilling, re-wilding, relocalising economies, emergency preparedness, community building.
these practices often led us from one area into another, for good reason. they all moved us towards symbiosis with each other and our living systems.
meeting more of our own needs with our own hands, reclaiming practices like these from the corporate-industrial, bringing them home to our communities, these were important facets of creating the future we wanted to see.
but the actions of simple living could still remain rooted in an othering, conquering paradigm.
say,
-growing food but ‘fighting’ pests and disease
-keeping chickens without designing for their own ways of raising families
-homeschooling that compares peers rather than nurturing diverse ways of being and learning
simple living was not enough. we also needed to understand the underlying patterns that create a world in crisis, and alter them, or we’d just go on repeating ourselves.
UNDERSTANDING + SHIFTING FUNDAMENTAL PATTERNS
this activism of world-building emerged from an understanding that every part of our lives reckoned with a conquering pattern that underlies dominant culture: a model for being that systematically polarises us in competition and in hierarchy, that seeks to conquer the other and to perpetually exploit and grow for profit.
it helped us to see that we stood a chance of making another, just future if only we could shift the foundational pattern towards collaborative, reciprocal ways of being, and learn to ground all our interactions and solutions in a pattern of symbiosis — where all people, all life thrives in mutual flourishing.
STARTING AT THE ROOT
the small work emerged from the belief that changing systems effectively starts small and spreads, not top-down but roots-up. that we could create profound pattern change by actually living it. as adrienne maree brown wrote so long ago, the small is a fractal reflection of the whole.
when we started at home with the details of how we lived, we reverberated another pattern into community, bioregion and beyond. our solutions were varied and context-dependent, but they emerged from the same fundamental paradigm.
no longer waiting powerlessly for large systems to address climate justice, the small work soothed and supported us to take cultural change and regeneration into our own hands with tiny actions that were doable, shareable, desirable and inspired, so change could spread virally.
GUIDED BY SYMBIOSIS
when we were guided by a symbiotic framework we looked for mutual thriving in all actions. at first this was awkward, as in learning any new language, and then it flowed and flooded and carried all life upon its waves.
the simple life that many folks were already practicing helped speed us in become fluent in this framework. we knew it from carpooling, from running errands for neighbours while we were out. we saw it in how we already shared tools and swapped skills and gifted abundant produce from the garden. we recognised it in choosing the family bed so we could easily soothe children in the night. we felt it, out on our bicycles, or when we watched the backyard chickens happily eating scraps from the kitchen, or when we mended our clothes. we were already practicing it in so many quiet places.
then it was easier to apply symbiosis to how we raised our children, how we designed for learning and skilling, how we grew our food, how we got around, how we renovated our housing, how we cared for our elders. how we approached all our exchanges. it supported our decisions toward some existing solutions, like regenerative agriculture and sharing economies, and away from others, like the private electric car and predatory investment. it became obvious what kinds of solutions supported all of life.
with this fundamental paradigm shift, our economic and political systems could slide into states that no longer required the plunder of peoples and earth. then so much of what we already knew how to do flowed from an enough-ness economy.
so we made community composting collection systems for all of our ‘waste’, especially from compost toilets, because we saw there could never be such a concept as ‘throwing away’ on a finite planet. then we built things to last, to be easily repaired, and our culture of more became a culture of enough. then we treated fossil fuels and plastics with extreme care, used sparingly for critical things. almost overnight we could stop over-buying and over-producing, because thriving on ‘enough-ness’ didn’t require half of what we were making, and the economy would not fall over for the lack of it, nor did it exploit billions to make a few billionaires.
then it was easier to relocalise our systems, and the enormous diversity expressed in each village could flow and share between communities, because instead of othering difference, our paradigm embraced it. with people living in a state of needs-met, creativity blossomed and opened time and space for imagination to solve our troubles, now guided by a model for the mutual flourishing of all life. we were stunned by what we could accomplish, to regenerate rivers and oceans, to revive poisoned lands, to restore communities, to move into healing and recovery for all life. to collaborate with life itself.
and what we discovered, again and again, in every tiny solution in all their diverse contexts and applications that each followed a life-giving pattern, is that as the needs of all beings and living systems were met, we needed less and less, and thrived together for the simplicity of leading with all life in mind.
this was the small work in a state of fluency.
WHAT IS OUR SMALL WORK?
in a world at the edge of collapse, our profound worry would paralyse us, resistance would burn us out, but what joanna macey’s “active hope” called ‘consciousness shift + building new worlds’, opened other ways in. activism that changed systems at the root was inherently about becoming fluent in other patterns for being. the small work was necessarily minute and repetitive, which fit beautifully within the ritual nature of home. it was here that we could each take ‘worlding’ into our own hands, safely experimenting in our own lives, sharing, shifting identity from a competitive, dominating pattern to a collaborative, symbiotic pattern.
COMMUNITY ACTION
to do this work it helped to be surrounded by the new patterns. it helped if our nervous systems were regulated so that we felt calm, energised, inspired and connected. it’s hard to do this activism alone. not all of us had supportive community around us to help us become fluent in another paradigm. we needed to build it.
the small work drew inspiration from religious practices for re-culturing through ritual. repetition allowed what rebecca solnit hailed as the purpose of preaching to the choir — a deepening of conversation, galvanising action. immersion created community and built our confidence.
our practices continue to make vivid a profound interconnectedness within the limits of the system. that whatever we do affects everything else. that we are embedded, we are permeable, we are needed. the more we practiced together, the better we became at seeing what makes more life.
MY SMALL WORKS
i began my own small work by working with the details of how we live on this small farm, appleturnover, on its small island, as a little model of the earth.
i started writing essays and making films that could help us imagine and practice what was possible. the works drew on biomimicry, social permaculture, indigenous-informed wisdom, heritage skills, local knowledge, collaboration and dialogue, thinking aloud together.
the small work essays and films that i made in those years gave form to the theory that by living our activism, we could change the underlying pattern and grow the future we want to see, as we took small, continuous steps to bring the way we live into harmony with the planet.
this call to world-building activism was best served little and often; i made films as a regular dose of possibility, essays as prayers, social pieces as vitamins, drawing together a community of folk who were all doing this work together, as a cultural immersion, as part of a greater movement.
the small works would seek to answer questions that we have needed to face, like:
how can we live with water symbiotically? in a low energy future, how can we better manage our household + community designs to need less heat and energy? what does relocalised, sustainable, small scale energy look like? how can we redesign our homes to be healthy and integrated with the land, water, air and soil? how can we relocalise food systems and reclaim agriculture from the corporate-industrial? how can we get about in ways that create harmony in our bodies, our communities, the atmosphere and the land? what practices will support tree systems in extreme weather? what will we wear in a just, relocalised world? how can we work with animals in ways that meet their needs fully? in a post-growth world, what is right livelihood? how can redesign how we live so that we produce no waste? what could our role as humans in the land look like if we are neither leaving ‘nature’ alone nor exploiting it? what does it mean to live on unceded land, and how might people in this position reckon with the pitfalls of ownership, the nuclear family, investment real estate, housing shortages, and labour? what does an enough-ness economy look like and how can we practice it now? how can we generate the medicine we need from where we live? how can we culture an expectation of good maintenance, longevity and repair? how can community help us use less material and energy?
the small work deepened a conversation about sustainability and regeneration with folks all over who were overwhelmed by converging crises and seeking real change with their own hands. it was a conversation about bringing a lens of climate activism home, to hold a mirror up to how we lived and patterned our lives and its tremendous impact. the small work came alongside to talk deeply and inspire how we could take responsibility for our ‘fair share’ and ‘future care’. to relocalise, simplify, re-skill, adapt, mitigate, prepare, regenerate and heal.
WORLDING
how did we make the profound change we needed, back then, to get us to this flourishing world? we recognised that until we altered the fundamental patterns that we re-cultured every day in every interaction, and moved towards symbiosis, all beings in our biosphere would go on suffering. but we could change the root pattern instead. we started at the root, we started with ourselves, we started with what we could touch with our own hands, at home.
with each small work we answered the question, how can we do this in symbiosis?
this is how we uprooted the patterns of our dominant conquering system, sowed the seeds of a symbiotic way of being, and built the skills to grow a just world where our thriving is congruent with a thriving earth.
————————
elisa rathje lives, writes and films the small work at appleturnover, a small farm on a small island. find the journal of small work* essays + films at appleturnover.tv and @appleturnover on instagram.