I know I’ve been very quiet over the Juul period and haven’t written for a while. That’s mainly been down to two things: being away and being in darkness.
I was away in November in Namibia, working with the Heritage Village Foundation and the Ju’|hoansi people of the Kalahari. Some of you may know that I spent my childhood in east and southern Africa, as my grandfather did before me. Returning there is always a kind of homecoming—a renewal of something old that stirs in my bones. Supporting the Ju’|hoansi, who are still fighting to keep alive the ancestral ways of the hunter-gatherer, humbles me every time.
Being away
The experience is as vast as the desert plains themselves. It touches the deepest, quietest parts of me. And it resists being squeezed into neat paragraphs for social media—although I try, because their survival matters, and because fundraising matters. Taking action now is, for me, a small way to counterbalance the continued colonisation of food, minerals, and everything else funnelled to the Global North from lands once inhabited by indigenous people. These communities are often left displaced, disempowered, and economically stranded.
We may feel the squeeze here in Britain, but compared to the scarcity others live with, we remain astonishingly wealthy—and obliged, I think, to act accordingly.
Being in darkness
The weeks leading up to Juul—the winter solstice—always press in on me. The plants withdraw their life force underground, animals are sleeping, birds have flown south. Persephone descends, the Cailleach rides the dark winds, and the world enters that strange liminal hush.
At that time of year, I often feel the collective psyche dim and heavy. For me, this is a season for withdrawing and reflecting. A time to ask myself how to stay in right relationship with the world as I find it. How to continue to hope in the face of what sometimes feels like a rolling tide of global grief. How to prepare for looming social and ecological upheavals without tumbling into the bunker mentality of prepping. Or should I ignore it all and try to float serenely above it?
It’s a delicate balance—to stay true to myself and to wider humanity when extremism and algorithm-driven division flare up everywhere. But slowly, as ever, I come through the solstice and back into the widening light. These past mornings the horizon has been lit early with glowing orange and magenta—a reminder that the wheel continues to turn.
What pulls me forward: community
And in all this contemplating, one word keeps presenting itself: community.
Community.
Because so much in our current political and technological climate seems engineered to fracture us – to pit neighbour against neighbour, to silence nuance, to erode empathy. We are becoming strangers to each other. And when we are strangers, we lose the ability to act with humanity.
So, as the new year begins, I’ve been thinking about the courses I want to teach—not only because this is my livelihood, but because they are one of the ways I can actively weave community back together.
I don’t want my courses to be simply “come and learn” events, with a classroom-style structure and people ticking off outcomes. I want them to be gatherings. A coming-together of curious souls in a time when the world seems intent on pulling us apart.
We will learn, yes. Our hands will be busy: foraging, making, fermenting, crafting, cooking, tending, however we need to cover the main theme of each course. We’ll share essential skills: ancestral skills, practical skills, the skills our grandchildren may quietly thank us for one day. But we’ll also talk. We’ll listen. We’ll share food and firelight. We’ll strengthen our capacity to meet an uncertain future not with fear, but with capability, camaraderie, and a grounded sense of belonging.
I truly believe this is the work now:
To rebuild community. To teach community. To remember that we are nature, not something separate from it. To restore the indigenous, earth-woven parts of ourselves that colonial modernity tried so hard to silence.
Because lasting social change has always risen from the grassroots – from people gathering, learning, creating, resisting, reimagining. From people who dare to live with hope even when the world wobbles.
A call to gather
So, this year, I’m hosting courses not only to pass on knowledge but to create a place of meeting – a hearth for those who want to explore food, plants, land connection, resilience, and the joy of being human together.
If you feel the pull of that – if you’re craving connection, or yearning for the skills that make us more rooted and less afraid – have a look at the courses on my website’s home page. Each one has its own theme, because structure helps us navigate, but the real heart of them is people coming together.
This is my invitation for 2026:
Let’s gather. Let’s learn. Let’s build the kind of community the future will need.
Mo