Last week I shared a luminous sunrise and coffee with our eldest. We both love the awe of a good sunrise especially at Cahore.
Welcome to my weekly notes. I write them as part of my ecology of practices. This is week 40 of 52. The structure of these notes is reflection, insight, a question for you, resources and a view to the week ahead. I don’t use AI to write my weekly notes. At the end of last year I felt very blocked in my writing creating this weekly practice was a way to attend to that and pause to create spaciousness. These notes are a place to practice outloud.
Thanks for being here let’s jump in!
Reflection
That was a good week of work. I caught up on being sick the previous week. There were standard things I got done like
- adding notes and photos to the Fethard Presentation, extra pieces of information that came up through discussion ollowed up with Fethard to send them extra information that I had promised
- Following up with potential clients with proposed plans
- Emails, phone call follow ups
If you are a regular reading my studio notes you might have noticed a delay in getting my studio notes published. I was under pressure for book keeping by our accountant, VAT had to be paid.
On Wednesday I was in Tramore with a new to me piece of work. The Irish Sustainable Schools Network Partners in Change day was inspiring and informative. I’m working with TCD on a project with ISSN, more to come on this.
They have an impressive programme in TY that building leadership, gives young people a voice and explores biodiversity loss and sustainability across systems. It is a pioneering model that creates pathways for learning outside of the curriculum in outdoor classrooms that are growing or forest spaces. The sessions are peer led – student to student. Engagement and confidence building is high. Participants get hands on. In part it tackles education and skills in food, food growing and production, horticultural skills of seed saving planting and growing, soil health and composting, nutrition, community and businesses networks and biodiversity across all the systems each of those things operate in.
I’m excited to work on it and it’s been fascinating to see across my experience the depth, breath and network I can add. More of that shortly.
I was listening to Ursula Le Guin The dispossessed, on the drive to Waterford and back. The days following I found myself thinking about profiteers, Anarres and Urras, the characters and the story telling of jumping time and planets. After my deep dive earlier in the summer on her work I’m looking forward to reading The Left Hand of Darkness. This is perhaps also in part what’s allowed me to consolidate my thoughts on a time travellers praxis.
Maynooth University were delighted with their proposal for a session during Research Week with PhDs and Post Docs on active listening and a few other gems. I was a bit taken a back when they approached me to deliver something not doughnut economics focused. For me, bringing my blend of relational somatic experiential facilitation to nurturing human nature and be collaborative is a joy. Such free rein to design something playful yet meaningful. The invitational text describes the session and ends with this text:
Prepare to find your next breakthrough not through solo, siloed work, but through the human connection right next to you, turning the pressure of isolated research into the power of collective discovery.
Roisin Markham 2025
The work with Community Wellness and Social Farming Ireland is developing well. A workshop this week was a bit more challenging then expected. The balance of opening space for a specific task and people bringing all the stuff to it. That was a familiar experience. When people just want to voice what they are thinking about any space will do. It’s part of being a facilitator. The sharing of all that need to be said and enquiring specifically about what they would and would not like to be asked about. A good session, allowing me to design clear questions. As I began sharing them to the team working on this project other suggestions and ideas had to be balanced and taken into consideration. I’m happy to keep the language in plain English at reading level 9 and advocating for a short survey of no more than 7-8 questions.
By mid Friday afternoon I’d run out of energy to do administration and financial follow up. Which is a mild disaster, but alas there is another day coming tomorrow or work wise on Monday.
I love this new campaign Reclaiming the Economy. Reclaim the economy week is a new annual week of action for people to unite to demand economies that put people and planet first, 26th of January – 1 February 2026. I’m linking into that work via Feasta and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Ireland Hub and my own economic literacy work through doughnut economics. They are doing a deep dive Monday 6 October if that’s of interest.
Ideally I’d like to offer in person events and an online education campaign. Ground it in Ireland within the network of networks like creative communities, Oxfam, CATU, FOE, GAP, Community Foundation Ireland, NWC, the PPNs and local Enviromental networks. Really challenging who is the economy in service too?
Who else would you include?
In the last month I’ve brought new economic thinking and literacy to about 280 people across conference panels, webinars, workshops, conversations across local authorities, NFP, semi-state organisations and communities.
What might be the ambition for Reclaim the Economy work across the shared Island be?
A strategic campaign run across 2-3 years it might reposition public economic thinking before our next election cycle.
I’ve also been reading Mia Birdsongs book How we show up, Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community. It really resonates with me and I’m trying not to jump into action before finishing it.
It’s been sobering to see the work of the Smud Flotilla and their illegal capture. I had hoped beyond hope that they would get to greet Palestinians on the beaches in Gaza. To lift them up. To bring humanitarian aid, strength and love. I hope an end to this genocide is immensity and those responsible will be held to account. Mostly I want people and the children of Gaza and Palestine to have access to their human rights – water, food, medicine and health, their land and fair work, peace and justice, education, play and all the things they do not have access to. I want Palestine recognised as a state. Gosh it just seems so futile to want peace and justice in light of barbaric bombing, starvation, displacement, depravity, violence, hate and racial profiling.
It we can’t stand up for human rights
how will we stand up for democracy.
Jane Goodall passing is huge, she was such an iconic figure in my teens and twenties.
The out pouring of grief and love on the death of Manchân Mangan has been phenomenal to see, In particular this two pieces of writing the first from the Book of Leves Podcaster and Poet Ceara Carney and the second from a poem from Claire Mulvany, One Wild Life both cracked my heart open.
To be Passed to the Great Mystery
With love, Clare Mulvany, 3 October, 2025.
For Manchán
I do not know what hands welcomed you, if any hands at all, but whatever reached for you, has been given a gift.
Your mouth was a cave,
glistening with unsung memories, and the way you walked across the land, tenderness in your feet,
raised the old stories from their wake.
In every soul there are moons, orbiting the earth to move tides, but yours moved mountains too.
And your voice, it had stars in it, catching light, sending it heart-bound.
The mystery will keep you now, but we will treasure you.
And when we step onto the soil, there you’ll be, whispering: cuimhigh,
remember.
Insights
I was asked by several people over the last month to review something or give advice on AI. I just reviewed a briefing document and had a lot of things to say about it. I spent at least 4 hours on one thing, giving away my labour for free. I am definitely doing this wrong!
I find myself casually sharing my knowledge and upskilling people on how to use AI. Asking and inviting people to learn through doing. It struck me I could get paid for that. My CV also does not address I have AI skills and +3 years of knowledge.
I’ve a mixed relationship to AI. As a productivity tool that burns the earth, an extractive tool that exploits labour and resources typically in the global south – LLM, large language models calling it AI or an intelligence of any sort we fool ourselves to trust it more. Generative AI tools intensively use water, energy, fossil fuels for plastic hardware, copper and rare earth minerals, people train these LLMs, it steals artists and writers work and eats the internet, pillaging the commons.
In essence it’s a giant macro running more intensely on resources then it needs to be. So I try to balance how I use it. As a tool it over eggs it all the time, bordering gushy, overtly generative. Its value needs tempering.
This week several times the breath of my experience has made its presence felt. Bringing real value to clients and my network.
I can see connections from different experience popping up as being relevant in several different spaces.
- capability and maturity modelling of new roles and expertise in big organisations
- simple wellbeing tools that I designed in large tech companies that were easy to use as a check in tool, mapping weekly spider diagrams as visual indicators
- understanding how QQI works and delivering a level 8 program successfully in 6 months, a genie in a bottle as a start up with a global learning and sector to design, formalise and professionalise a whole sector
- RHSI company admin & company secretary for 3 years around the turn of the century, gardening and a meatier horticulture
- Supporting the Association of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture Facilitators and links to Festine Lente
- Community gardens, school gardens and my muck and magic themed work and projects linking outdoor school spaces to learning and applying knowledge like science, maths, art and English. I also worked with a few schools as part of the Creative Schools. In 2013 wrote a blog about building self esteem in education and learning
- Business L&D program development and delivery for sustainability champions including how champions bring learning back to teams and business units creating easy to share and scale materials and designing thinking into mini workshops for GHG emissions, Net Zero, Sustainable procurement and supply chains, circular economy and circular thinking and the human side of change.
- The work I did with UCC on ConnectSUS for business and communities
- Bioregional Weaving Lab SE, agroecology and regenerative farming, Commonland and The four Returns – social, economic, nature and inspiration
- Wexford Enviromental Network
- Irish Doughnut Economics Network
- My networks of networks
It’s all getting threaded and woven in really interesting ways through research, workshops and networks of people, kin and knowledge.
A question for you
Would you like to join
- a time travel club to practice or experience traveling to the future and exercising our imagination muscle? meeting digitally once a month?
- a reading circle on AI, creativity and the commons? see the article I want to talk about in resources
- a Patreon where you can support my work, please select the paid membership as blindlboy says it based on soundness and care, if you enjoy read in about my work please consider supporting it for the price of a coffee.
Resources
AI Should Help Fund Creative Labor by Mariana Mazzucato and Fausto Gernone.
How small towns stay small minded: the cost of never leaving home.
From the wonderful clan at Hawkswood Positive Futurist Troupe Justin Broussard has shared Sue Towensends latest provocation
scroll all the way down, stay with it. Pick an option submit.
The Irish Government has a submission open for the for
Public Consultation on the Whole of Government Circular Economy Strategy 2026-2028 Ireland is open until 5 of November, please consider a submission. If your organisation would like support on a submission I’d be happy to work with you on it.
I’m currently half way through the document having jumped out to the National Development Framework and the Circularity Gap Report. I have notes and will be sharing my thoughts once I’ve completed my first round of reading and thinking.
A view to the week ahead
Next week sees the testing of the Social farming Survey, synthesising primary and secondary research and working towards a report to support the development of further resources.
The work with ISSN and TCD moves into gear and I’m looking forward to it also.
There are some interesting ‘what is the economy in service to?’ kinda conversations going on across different spaces but ultimately I need to get an IDEN newsletter out as there are some great things happening over the next few weeks that I want to share with a wider audience.
I’m also working on ways to have a praxis group for a future worth living into – social permaculture, participatory budgeting, deliberative democracy, being good ancestors. I’m feeling a little frayed on tenders, RFQ, applications, funding, blah blah blah. So this October as we move toward Halloween and while we are still in the abundance of Autumn I’d like more flow and less financial stress.
If you or your organisation or network need expertise in how to think differently or the human side of change I have some availability for workshop facilitation and consultancy in October. I’m only going to be saying yes to resourced work.
Past that I’m looking for strategic project or program work. I am really enjoying the mixture of research, enquiry, workshops, synthesis and writing in the work I currently have. Making the invisible visible, articulating and valuing the intangible.
I’ll continue job hunting and trying to find ways to resource myself, please do consider supporting my paid Patreon.
Have a great week.
Roisin Markham 
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