Hit us

up.

Well, look, I think it's, you know, there's kind of, to me, there's, like, two different kind of vibes of magic going on.

So there's one that's very grounded in this reality.

So the five categories in the book are gardener, gossip, spinster, healer, nymph, and that is basically, like, Go out into the garden, plant a seed, watch it become a flower.

That's a very witchy thing to do.

Grow some herbs, harvest the herbs, pick a lemon, whatever it is.

going to

um let's let's kind of go through a bit of this this setting the scene so that our listeners can understand a bit more take us back to what did that um female power and freedom look like prior to the witch hunts when they could freely roam the commons and the villages

so so it was a completely kind of different structure to society like compared to the way we live today where you know you have your house where you live on your own or you live with your family and then you get in the car and you drive to your office and you do that and then you come home again and you, you know, buy food at the supermarket.

And so it's very much, you know, you're living in a village and if you've ever driven through kind of the French countryside or the English countryside and like, you know, it's like fields and fields and fields and then a cluster of houses and maybe a little bakery and something else.

And then, you know, you keep going and there's more fields and forests, and then you come across another town.

So we're talking about, um, kind of a rhythm of life that was very based around subsistence agriculture.

So you're growing or foraging, um, most of the food that you're eating, you're working in close relationship with your family and also with, um, the people in your community to, to, you know, to produce things, clothes to wear, food to eat.

And so it's a very different pace that also, because obviously there's no internet, requires you to be paying a lot of attention to kind of the cycles of the moon and the changing of the seasons, because that's how you know when to plant and when to harvest and when to put grain into storage and not.

But what was that sort of – what I was also going to bring up was that what we lost in that Enlightenment time was essentially, as you mentioned, the idea of women being community leaders.

Mm.

Like, the systems that are up against you from improving the industry feel just so entrenched.

Like, it just feels like a given.

We're gonna exploit the environment, and we're gonna exploit women's labor, and we're gonna keep producing, you know, crap, basically.

Like, you know, overproducing clothes.

And see, anyway, so I, I was at Fibershed, and I'm getting a tour of the property and, you know, behind the house there's a meadow where they're growing dye plants.

Uh, there's a stream that's, like, flowing down beside this enormous old tree, and there's a circle of stools, and, you know, where they do weaving.

So can you tell us about the commons a bit?

And not only those quarters, huh? Like media as well, women in media, it is rife right now.

Yeah, and I think that we see that, I mean, we see the archetypes kind of rear their heads when any time that this current paradigm wants to kind of clamp down and make everyone stay, you know, maintain their positions.

And so we see kind of, the advocates for women belonging in the home kind of come out of the woodwork.

So trad wives, you see it in the States.

Pauline Hanson's rhetoric isn't quite so explicit, but it's implicit in, you know, this kind of attitude of they get pregnant because they want the money, you know.

Why would they need paid maternity leave? You're not at work.

Why would you get paid? Like that kind of, that is the premise underlying that is get married and your husband will take care of you and then, you know, just deal with it.

And I guess despite all we've talked about, the undercurrent shifting?

And look, I have context to how you sort of went from writing about fashion and sustainability and fashion to writing about witches, but maybe you can do a little summary of how you found yourself writing this second book.

Yeah.

So I was on tour for my first book.

I was traveling around through America.

My first book was about the regenerative farming of natural fibers, so very much about, like, how we, um, you know, how we grow things in ways that rehabilitate the soil and are good for the landscape.

And I was visiting the head of the regenerative fiber farming movement called Fibershed, the kind of the birthplace of it, and that's outside San Francisco.

And I just had, like, an epiphany kind of moment where while I was there.

Like, I discuss them in detail, how it's influenced how I've seen myself and, and kind of engaged with the world, and I wonder what you have to share on those if you'd like.