A Year in Ecological Time — 2025

The Year Reviewed - Returning to land, body, and the questions that wouldn’t leave

Estimated Reading Time: 2mins 40secs

There is a particular quality to the last days of the year.

Time loosens.
Edges soften.
The urgency to arrive somewhere gives way to a quieter awareness of where we already are.

This year did not end for me with a sense of completion.
It ended with a sense of returning.

Returning to land.
Returning to body.
Returning to family rhythms.
Returning to questions I had tried—unsuccessfully—to outgrow.

This is not a summary of achievements.
It is not an accounting.

It is a record of orientation.

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What the Year Quietly Asked

Much of my adult life has been lived inside frames that rewarded endurance, optimisation, and control.

Some of those frames were forged in service.
Some in professional identity.
Some in the widely praised belief that pushing harder was a form of virtue.

This year, several of those frames began to fail.

Not dramatically.
Not all at once.

They loosened through fatigue.
Through pain.
Through the slow recognition that resilience without relationship is simply another form of extraction.

I was reminded—again—that systems do not thrive when they are treated as machines.

Bodies.
Families.
Land.
Cultures.

They respond to gentle and reflective attention, not force or brilliant intellect.

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The body shouting.

The Body Would Not Be Rushed

My body became impossible to negotiate with this year.

Pain has a way of collapsing abstraction.
It reduces language to essentials.
It insists on honesty.

There was no heroic arc here.
No fix.
No clean resolution.

What emerged instead was respect.

Respect for limits.
For rhythm.
For the quiet intelligence of living things.

Healing revealed itself not as progress, but as relationship.

Light.
Sleep.
Food.
Movement.
Temperature.
Stress.
Belonging.

None of these operate in isolation.
None of them respond well to domination.

The body does not want to be conquered.
It wants to be accompanied.

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Land Changes the Shape of Attention

Spending sustained time on land reshapes the questions you ask.

You stop asking, How do I get more out of this?
And begin asking, What does this need right now?

On the farm, success looks less like efficiency and more like timing.
Less like certainty and more like reciprocity.

Grass teaches patience.
Animals teach presence.
Weather teaches humility.

And children—moving freely through all of it—demonstrate what integration looks like when it is not theorised.

This year reminded me that humans were never meant to live above systems.

We are meant to live inside them - to disolve back into them.

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Belonging, Reconsidered

One of the deeper undercurrents of this year was belonging.

Not belonging as identity.
Not belonging as ideology.

Belonging as practice.

Belonging is not something you claim.
It is something you enact.

It grows where responsibility replaces entitlement.
Where attention replaces performance.
Where place becomes known over time and through continued dialogue.

Disconnection, I’m increasingly convinced, is not primarily a psychological failure.

It is an ecological one.

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Friendships are reciprocal

What This Work Is Becoming

Human Systems Ecology began as an attempt to integrate psychology, ecology, and culture.

This year clarified that it is becoming something simpler—and more demanding.

It asks for restraint.
For intimacy with limits.
For truer stories about what humans actually need in order to thrive.

This space—this Substack—is not a brand channel.
It is a commons.

A place to think slowly.
To speak carefully.
To resist the pressure to convert insight into spectacle (or clicks, or likes, or even ‘subscribers’).

If you’re here, it’s likely because something in you is also questioning the frames that no longer hold.

That matters.

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New boudaries.

At the Edge of the Year

The year ahead does not feel like a new chapter.
It feels like a deepening of the same one.

More listening.
More attention to land and body.
More care with the stories we tell about progress, resilience, and success.

If you’ve been reading quietly—thank you.
If you’ve shared these essays—thank you.
If you’ve disagreed thoughtfully—thank you most of all.

We need spaces where complexity is allowed to breathe.

I’ll be here in the new year.
Still walking the land.
Still learning the patterns.
Still returning...