Lammas 2025 - Newsletter
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Dear reader,
It’s Lammas - the time of the grain harvest. Where I live in mid-Wales, the fields are full of hay bales being wrapped tight in black plastic to shield them from the rains that have been with us these last few days. And strangely, the rowan berries are already out, bright orange in the hedgerows, weeks (maybe months?) too early.
This newsletter is a little different from the others. A couple of themes have been emerging in my work through at the root and in other places and I wanted to draw out some threads around transforming relationship to land and redistributing land and wealth.
It is longer and more meandering, more personal and reflective - maybe one to read with a cuppa…and if you feel moved to reply with any response / feedback / wish for ongoing slow conversations, I’d welcome that.
With love, in these times we are living through.
Katherine x
Kinship, gratitude and grief
Last weekend, I was in Hebden Bridge for the first time at a Kinship Workshop. Over this weekend, on the Yorkshire Moors and in the Calder valley surrounded by beech trees, we explored connection to land and other living beings through a series of embodiment exercises. The workshop asked these questions:
How do we: move, sense, play, feel, touch, propriocept, balance, hang, hang out, congregate, assert, negotiate, observe, wait, rest and be with others? Through experiencing or remembering our human physicality, senses, desires and close connection to others (human and non-human), we find our “place in the family of things” (Mary Oliver).
At one point, I found myself lying face down in the dirt floor of the forest, eyes closed, and my fingers found part of a tree root raised above the ground. I grabbed onto it. And gratitude came - for the tree, for its age and wisdom, for the forest and all the beings living in it and for the time to let myself slow down and connect a little which so many people don’t do / can’t do.
And grief also came. For the people being killed in a genocide that doesn’t seem to end no matter how many people rise up demanding justice and liberation for the Palestinian people, for a world that is burning with forest fires, for the ongoing oppression happening all over with its roots deep in extraction, colonialism, and histories of harm so entangled with our present.
Left: A photograph of Joanna Macy
On 19th July, Joanna Macy passed away. Macy was an activist, teacher, buddhist and elder. Her ‘work that reconnects’ speaks to these cycles of gratitude, honouring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes through the grief and going forth into some kind of action. For more about her work, check out this On Being episode: A Wild Love for the World
Working with those with resources (land + money)
Over the last six - twelve months, a lot of my work has refocused on being alongside those coordinating funds to resource social change work. This has included funders, experimental redistribution networks and those inheriting resources - both money and land - who want to redistribute that wealth and power.
Questions we have been holding across this work include what justice looks like and who decides, how to redistribute well and who decides, what power looks like in this work and how it can shift and change, what kind of redistribution is needed in order to repair and transform systems, and what feelings come up when trying to move resources.
I came to this work with a curiosity about where wealth comes from, how it passes between generations, this political moment we are in where the next 10 years will see the biggest intergenerational shift of wealth in history, and what it means to get in right relationship with the resources we have.
In terms of people doing some of this work who I would recommend checking out / who I learn from, click through to these links:
Resource Generation (US-based)
Resource Movement (Canada-based)
Resource Justice (UK-based)
The Good Ancestor Movement (UK-based)
Morgan Curtis and Justine Epstein, Ancestors and Money Cohort (US-based)
Morgan Curtis’ Ancestors and Money Resource Library (a lot more links!)
Iris Brilliant (US-based)
Right: A painting of a tree near a river, full of colour and life.
I’ve been listening to Morgan Curtis on Transmuting Ancestries of Exploitation on the For the Wild podcast. In this episode, Morgan and Ayana ‘dive deep into the need for repair, healing, and acknowledgement as we face the historical roots of modern inequity.’ Morgan speaks about how she is going about this as a person who has inherited wealth from enslavement and who wants to redistribute that wealth in a reparative way.
A change of focus for the autumn / winter
Over the last year or so, life has been a mix of research and facilitation and writing for at the root. Mostly working with groups half of the week and reading for the PhD the rest of the time, finding time to write in the gaps.
As the seasons change, I am going to be re-focussing my efforts on the PhD to try and write up what has been emerging.
That means I will be quieter in this space until next spring. Although I am hoping to connect with many of you at the Land Justice Gathering and the Oxford Real Farming Conference between now and then.
Housekeeping
One of the offerings from at the root has been a round up on social media sharing what is going on in the land justice movement (broadly defined). I am slowly untangling myself from META and this has meant leaving social media (Instagram and Facebook) over the last month. You can find me on the at the root website if you’d like to connect.
I have also decided to move from substack (and a more public facing newsletter) to this more intimate format with those of you who have signed up to receive emails from at the root. This comes from a desire to be in dialogue with those interested in this work, to explore its edges and its depths, to see if collaborations might emerge.
Thank you for reading, if you have gotten this far. And if you’d like to keep talking - click the button below.
