128: Jamie Rumble | Beyond the Classroom: Learning Emerges When We Stop Teaching and Start Living

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we're yet again together with Jamie. Rumble, rumble, yes, rumble, yep.

Jamie Rumble: 0:17

Yes.

Jesper Conrad: 0:17

I was just when I heard it. I was like that's weird, that's a fun name.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:21

Good name.

Jesper Conrad: 0:22

Why is your last name Rumble? That's a good question.

Jamie Rumble: 0:26

So I actually that's my stepfather's name. He adopted me when I was around, I want to say, 10 or 11 or something like that. My parents divorced when I was seven, so, yeah, my original last name is different. My original father's from Holland, so my original last name is a Dutch name, but I took my stepfather's name and I believe that it's like a Norse name by way of Scotland. Yeah, so I think it may have been like the etymology of like rumbled or something like that.

Jesper Conrad: 1:06

Okay, that can be yes, Because when I heard your name and I was like am I saying it correct? Because something can rumble.

Jesper Conrad: 1:13

Yes, yeah, I got all confused if I mispronounced it, but yeah, yeah, that that aside, we here again today because we had a really good conversation. People should go listen to the first part if they want to, or just jump into this one, and we wanted to continue it. So here we are, and if I, if I, had been super planned, I would know where we'd left off, but I didn't. So I will just hand the torch to you and hope they will do better.

Jamie Rumble: 1:43

Yeah, okay.

Jamie Rumble: 1:44

So I mean, there was so much food for thought after the first session together.

Jamie Rumble: 1:51

We, I think at some point towards the end, or one of the themes that we were talking about was the inspiration for the eco-pedagogy and planetary citizenship lens, that I'm looking at digital nomadism as an adaptation and looking at a curriculum that would actually teach that adaptation to kids in schools or future generations, given that we may be looking at a future that involves more populations in migration due to climate change or climate collapse. But one of the things we did talk about was the roots of the eco-pedagogy and planetary citizenship kind of pedagogy. I guess is from the educator Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and, as I mentioned, one of his initial works was the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and so we were kind of talking about oppression a little bit, I think towards the end and kind of it was a good dialogue and part of the pedagogy that Paolo Freire puts forth involves dialectic, like dialectical conversation. So I think that's what we were kind of doing throughout the first podcast. I'm hoping for a little bit more of that dialectic.

Jesper Conrad: 3:14

So let me jump right into it. When you say about the pedagogic when I hear that word, I'm thinking about different teaching styles. Is that correct?

Jamie Rumble: 3:28

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 3:30

Then there is we made an interview with Patrick Ferenga, who's in the whole unschooling movement, and he had looked into the world education, which come from educata, which means draw forward, and I think there's a very, very big difference in teaching and drawing something forward. Educata is what the if I understand him correct and I remember it correct is what the baby does and the mom breastfeeds, informing the body that, hey, please produce milk to me. With this in mind, I was thinking back to my schooling and I often praise the fact that I was in a class that was a test class. They made us to a test class for two years, together with a project in Denmark in my youth where we had a more holistic way of teaching, which was that we went, for example, out and visited a stream nearby and then we did all the different part of a curriculum around that. We did math on the stream, we did biologic and all these things and history.

Jesper Conrad: 4:40

Where does it come from? How had it been straightened, et cetera, et cetera. And that is one of the things I, when I look at the way teaching is done in schools, can miss that it seems like it is not a connected knowledge, and that is also you talk about the environment, where I think that if people could just put stuff together it wouldn't be so damn difficult. If you one day go out with a flag and say fight the oppression, we fight for climate change and I think I mentioned in the last one then you go over and buy something in Burger King or your big ass flag is made with something you bought for it.

Cecilie Conrad: 5:23

It's cheap shit from plastic from China.

Jesper Conrad: 5:26

Yeah, it's cheap shit from China. So it's like, hey, there's something wrong sometimes where people they think very inside these pillars. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges and one of the joys I see with living a more nomadic life but also having unschooling as a philosophy in the way we are drawing for knowledge together with our children.

Jamie Rumble: 5:54

Yeah, I'm fascinated with our children. Yeah, yeah, I'm fascinated with that concept of unschooling, partially because, well, there's a lot of inspiration behind that, for me at least. I started my master's initially in the early 2000s, when I was living in Japan and had to drop out for personal reasons, when I was living in Japan and had to drop out for personal reasons. But one of the textbooks that we read at that time was the Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. He taught have you heard of that?

Cecilie Conrad: 6:27

I've read it yeah.

Jamie Rumble: 6:28

Yeah, and that kind of just blew my mind. You know the roots of education in the West, predominantly in the West, uh, the I mean the way it was set up by conglomerates and colonial powers, essentially. We did talk a little bit about colonialism last time. So, yeah, it was a long kind of history for me to. In a sense, almost I was radicalized because I realized about my own education and the education system worldwide, or at least predominantly in the West, is based on institutions and like brick and mortar schools.

Jamie Rumble: 7:12

And I guess one of the things that I'm curious about with you know what you're doing with your family, is that you know the curriculum in the school is mobile and I believe that if we are moving into a climate collapse, reality and a nomadic reality, the schools as we know them right now will be redundant. There will be no need for kids to stay in physical schools in the future. I just don't see it as being, yeah, we need change and I think being nomadic, having nomadic schools and nomadic classes and classrooms and as well with ecopedagogy, it is that interdisciplinary approach to education, a more holistic approach to education. So I think, yeah, I'm curious to know more about your thoughts on that, and especially since you have read John Taylor Gatto how that impacted you, especially since you have read John Taylor Gatto how that impacted you.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:54

It's a little bit hard to answer the question because there's something in the framing of it, something in the way that you are thinking. I mean, I like our conversations, but I just have to say this out loud it doesn't align with how we're thinking. So we have a different basic reality, I think, from you, and the mindset that we are approaching the world with and making our choice on is different. So I don't necessarily believe or don't believe in a climate collapse. I have chosen to not care about it because there's nothing I can do about it. Anyways, I'm sure I said that in the first episode actually.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:40

So for us, it's not about walking into a potentially disastrous future and being ready for hell arriving or something like that. That whole discourse is one of the reasons I've chosen to not worry about it, not read about it, not talk about it, not be part of it.

Jesper Conrad: 10:01

Because I don't like the negativity. But, cecilia, just to make things clear, when you say there's nothing I can do about it, it sounds like you don't care, and that is not real yeah yeah, but it's just so we get that point in that. Of course it's not that you don't care.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:18

Well, I wasn't done talking. Okay, no, but it's just because I feel. I just want it to be clear that these are not the reasons we're doing the things we're doing.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:31

It's not to adapt and prepare for a dangerous future. And when I say I don't care and I don't worry about it, I don't, I don't speak that language. It's not like I don't care about the planet and I don't care about the future and I don't see that there are some major problems. And I feel I mean we've done as a family, we talked about it, we made our choices, we've decided we can stretch this far.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:58

If we want to do even better. It's too much. We're not doing that Because, of course, we could be not nomadic, or we could be nomadic walking. Then we wouldn't burn any diesel. We could start growing carrots and eating only what we produce. We could plant a forest. You know, there are lots of things we could do that would make it even better climate-wise. And, looking up, we could spend every Sunday picking up plastic.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:25

There are many things we could do. Or we could fight human trafficking. Or we could work with at-risk young people, because we have a lot of resources and knowledge. There are many things contributions we could do with at-risk young people because we have a lot of resources and knowledge. There are many things contributions we could do that we don't do. We've chosen.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:40

We go to this point and this is where we stop, and one of the things we don't do is we don't worry about it because we've worried about it and this is what we can do and that's it. So the reasons we're doing the unschooling and the nomadic life it has to do with I mean, we're more, I think, unschoolers than we're nomadic, or maybe the root cause of both is that we want to have many options and we want to have the freedom to choose what makes the most sense, and that freedom has a lot to do with what's inside in our mindset, how we function as humans. We just talked before we pressed record about how I just had a nap right before this, and I learned to nap. I couldn't do that 20 years ago. It would disturb my rhythms too much, but I have learned to do that because I want to be more adaptable.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:41

I want to be able to sleep four hours, get up, work, do what I need to do and then get some more sleep, because there's also a goodbye party tonight with a long table with people. I want to enjoy that as well.

Jamie Rumble: 12:53

So this whole.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:53

Adaptability and the ability to hold discomfort, to hold insecurity, to hold not knowing is part of my freedom, because if I can hold that, I'm free to choose options that make more sense, are more fun, make a bigger impact. So it's not just about having a vehicle that could take me in any direction, it's also about being able to have a good life inside this context. That is quite unpredictable. That is quite unpredictable and sometimes on some levels not optimal, like if it's just my hair is greasy and annoying and I want to wash it but I have to wait until tomorrow because there's just simply no shower around that I can borrow or buy or whatever. So these things are our reasons. We want to live a meaningful life, we want to be not restricted by our own psychological makeup setup and not restricted by having opted into a school setting where you know the contract is you educate my child. The child is there five days a week, 200 days a year, at eight o. You know the contract is you educate my child. The child is there five days a week, 200 days a year, at eight o'clock in the morning. And also, I wanted to say something about the unschooling, because you talked about the stream and how you learn many different things from what would traditionally be different academic areas like biology, math, history. Looking at the stream, and it was a great school you were in and the experiment was really good, but it was still a school with a curriculum. There was still a plan with that outing. There was still a plan for what exactly he needed to learn and how he needed to learn it. And we don't do that to learn it, and we don't do that. We do that if someone explicitly asks to learn a specific skill in a specific way. We will support learning a specific skill in a specific way. But we don't go to streams to talk about math, biology and history. We talk about math, biology and history when it makes sense, because we're curious and explorative and we we just want more, more out of life.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:20

That sounds so lame. We, we, because we are curious, because when we're at the stream, we wonder why is it straight for the next two kilometers? That looks weird, or what? Why are there that many butterflies right here and not over there? Or what's that weird plant, whatever it is, and we enjoy figuring it out. Or we remember a poem or a song about streams, or we remember a stream from another country and we talk about the different elevation, how the plants are different, whatever, but it's not planned, there's no curriculum and when you said this thing about schools will have to be something that moves around and whether there will be a collapse or not, whether we will have to all be nomadic or not, the whole idea of the adults or the elite of some sort knowing what the rest of us need to learn, I opposed to that idea. It's bad idea.

Jamie Rumble: 16:25

I think a prescriptive sorry, a prescriptive pedagogy to, to kind of point the way forward. That's the word, maybe.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:36

Would anyone really know the way forward? Or is it better that we all explore and we all do what we're good at and we all become really good at what we're passionate about and we try different things out? Say we have a climate collapse. Say we have a real catastrophe and we have to fix it. Climate collapse Say we have a real catastrophe and we have to fix it. Maybe we need more than one option, more than one experiment, more than one solution.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:59

Some people move around, some people build better houses where they are, some stick to the curriculum and teach 10 languages and some let completely go. Some become really good at sailing because they think it will be all sailing, and some become really good at making electricity out of something I can't even imagine right now. I think we need, if we are to, and I think we are to survive. As humanity, we're quite creative and we've adapted to many different things. Look at them. People lived in Greenland 300 years ago. How did they even survive, half of them? It baffles me. So humans are adaptable and we explore many different ways of living, and so we need to do in the future and we've always done it and we will keep doing it, and we will find different solutions. I think it's really dangerous to imagine that someone comes up with a plan and we all have to follow that plan. I agree.

Jamie Rumble: 18:03

And I think what you're pointing to, that kind of philosophy of not like an all or nothing type curriculum. You know, and I think that's one of the interesting points in history where we are right now with and I'll say that climate collapse is not some far off, distant occurrence there are many in the field of education and other fields who believe that that actually started already.

Jesper Conrad: 18:32

So we are actually in the process of witnessing it's a slow thing and we see it because it's weird, like the boiling frog syndrome. I think that's where we are.

Jamie Rumble: 18:45

Yeah, yeah. But I also think that, as you mentioned, there's not going to be just one curriculum going forward. There's no band-aid solution, and that's why I was attracted to ecopedagogy and planetary citizenship, because it is a more holistic, multidisciplinary approach versus the model that we've had pretty much for the last few decades, which is education for sustainable development, which is still focusing on development as the end goal and still seeing technology as the provider of solutions. So I do agree with you that the future, if it's nomadic or whatever semi-nomadic, or people in place, better, better design things like that, um, we're, we are, I think, needing to embrace more the kind of poly or multi-modal existence, that there's not just one way of living, there's many ways of living, and that's what I find fascinating about the, the nomad world, is that there's there was this concept initially and of the, you know the digital nomad, but the more I'm meeting and talking with nomads, I'm seeing that each person is bringing their own lived experience and their own knowledge and, um, it's a fascinating group of people to study.

Jamie Rumble: 20:11

So, yeah, I, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, that, and I think that's where we need to come together as as and my, my, I guess responsibility I feel as an educator is to promote more of these. You know multimodal ways of thinking, rather than and we talked, I think, in the last podcast or the first podcast, about the philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari of nomadology, of thinking nomadically, so we don't necessarily need to be following one particular path we can, you know, diverge, and that a lot of reality is actually emergence, like you mentioned going to the creek, and whatever emerges from that experience is what kind of captures your attention. So I do see that also as being, rather than having committing set in stone, that you allow curriculum or knowledge or whatever, or life to just emerge, and then it's rhizomatic, it's coming up where you least expect it, or or sometimes where it's needed most. Yeah, so a lot of food for thought sugartamitra we talked with.

Jesper Conrad: 21:24

He said that learning is a an emergent phenomena. It will emerge. You cannot keep it down. You can, by the way you're teaching, you can make people uninterested in learning, and that can be a challenge.

Jesper Conrad: 21:44

I would like to ask you about the planetary citizenship, because I live my life as I belong where I am, I feel at home where I am, and different places. But there's also different cultures. The world is not one culture. There's some places where I don't know the history, I don't know the religion, so all these things would make it difficult for me to go in and live as a local, because, of course, being grounded in a local culture, you actually need to have a quite big knowledge of the world around you at that point. So I I would like to hear what you mean with the word. What is meant with the word? Because probably he's thinking that's kind of how I live, but I always believe there will be not necessarily borders, but there will be cultures and history, yeah, yeah, yes, all the time, and that you cannot live like, hey, we are one big, happy family because we have many clans many families, many people on this planet.

Jamie Rumble: 23:03

Yeah, well, I think at least the evolution of curriculums, let's say, if we look at like education for sustainable development, that would be more of the globalist view of of you know. I guess global studies would maybe be an example of that, where you are compartmentalizing cultures and countries, and you mentioned about, you know, borders. I think planetary citizenship is recognizing that we are a collection of cultures and some of those cultures are also emergent, given that our reality is constantly changing but also that the borders that we've drawn are largely based on a colonial past, and so being a planetary citizen is recognizing that. You know, the borders don't necessarily count for much in a future reality, especially with climate change or climate collapse, because if you're stuck in one of those countries and your freedom to move is limited, yeah, absolutely. I think the future will involve redrawing boundaries.

Jamie Rumble: 24:10

Whether or not we have boundaries or not, I don't know. Personally, I'd prefer that we didn't have boundaries. And so there is a political aspect to ecopedagogy and planetary citizenship, because it does call into question boundaries, movement, freedom of movement. So there is, I think, a lot of folks in the environmental education space who are looking at other models, or you know more than just one model and one of them. That seems to be, if we're thinking about like more of a political reality, maybe bioregionalism makes more sense if we're going to have groups of people or groups of cultures even that are interacting and to kind of meet their needs in that space, if that space is one particular type of bioregion. Maybe that makes more sense than having you know the colonial past type borders and countries on a map like we have now.

Jesper Conrad: 25:09

Yeah, we might move in a direction of more having instead of countries than companies.

Jamie Rumble: 25:18

Well, you can dream on, but man they're strong the states and the companies.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:22

It's not like I mean, I can see what you mean and how it would make sense. I just don't see how it changes. But that's another thing I don't worry too much about because I'm definitely not going into politics.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:37

I think what we're doing if we want to somehow ping pong this with our lifestyle. One of the things that we did think about a lot before we started traveling full time. We embarked on this when our three youngest were six, nine and 12 years old time. We embarked on this when our three youngest were six, nine and 12 years old and we knew that that meant that for the little one, the majority of his childhood and for the two other, well, at least half of their childhood would be growing up on the road in different places, and for us it would also mean that we would learn to adapt a lot. And one of the benefits, one of the things because we don't do curriculum, we don't push for academics of any specific sort or musical instruments or anything that you have to rehearse 20 minutes a day and you have to learn this, that and the other.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:28

But we do think about how the frame, the way we set up our life, how that affects our children and what would be the benefits, the ideas behind it, and one of the ideas behind becoming fully nomadic was that they would become extremely adaptable and they would learn how to walk into a new culture, humbly knowing that they don't know it and open to understanding how things work here and that they might work in a way that doesn't make intuitive sense to me. That might even offend my sense of of justice, my sense of peace, my sense of happiness and and I might have to learn to navigate via some completely different navigational points than where I come from, might have to learn a language, I might have to do things with my body in a different way from what I'm used to and I have to work through those emotions, growing up like that in different cultures and contexts, and that can be locally different. Just moving from one city to another, I can also be globally moving between countries. There was a lot of thought behind that.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:47

When we started that, we thought this is a very good benefit in life, no matter where and how things evolve on this planet with humanity. This will be a good card to have on your hand. So in that way, yes, the nomadic lifestyle. You could maybe even say that that was kind of a curriculum or a design, a thing we knew they would work by design. Yeah, it wasn't the reason, but it was one of the big, big benefits that we saw from doing what we did.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:18

And it has been painful, it has been troublesome, it has had its, it's been sometimes living, it has felt like obstacles and trouble and hard work but it's never been out felt like obstacles and trouble and hard work, but it's never been out balancing the joy. We've always been happy. I'm just saying it hasn't just been, you know, happy vacation on a beach for seven years.

Jesper Conrad: 28:50

No, and then more than I think we would have had if we had lived in one place. When I look back at the time, we lived stationary instead of nomadic. It was also sometimes troublesome. Difficult Stuff happened in life, so it's just a movable life.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:06

Well, and it's the kind of problems we thought that we would get that would teach us the things we wanted to learn. I mean, in that way, there was a design thought behind it that we wanted this life and the problems would be these, but that would teach us this skill set that I would say we have today it's been a long time and that skill set we thought no matter how your life unfolds, this is a good skill set to have, it's a good mindset and it's a good skill set.

Jesper Conrad: 29:46

And then the question can you move this over to how to teach it? But we don't want to teach. No, no, no. But if you come from an educational viewpoint, then I think it's very difficult to institutionalize unschooling and a freedom mindset, because there's two things that happen. One is you separate yourself from your child and then you outsource the care of your child to someone else.

Jesper Conrad: 30:17

So there's, from the child's point of view, is a trust issue. It needs to learn to trust a stranger. That affect your relationship with your parent. How do that? Which kind of confidence or a different confidence in life does this give you compared to being in a family and learning inside the family or the small village? So this is one of the basic differences. Before we talk, what you learn, it's just a matter of you separate from your loved ones and you are told go over to this person. I don't have a relationship to this person. That is your teacher. I don't know him, I can't even remember his name. Now you are to trust this stranger in my life. This gives a basic difference in trust in life, I believe, and that is one of the things why I think it's very difficult to create the same kind of organic learning, because the basics are different.

Jamie Rumble: 32:03

Yeah, totally. There's so much to unpack with the last few minutes of what you said, and I think that's one of the reasons why echo pedagogy to me seems like it's so inclusive, like it's not necessarily prescriptive and it also includes as a practice the dialectical process, that it's an ongoing conversation, that it's not necessarily, and that's, you know, interesting for me as a researcher because I'm also trying to pin down what is ecopedagogy and there's been, you know, a little bit written about it. But one of the kind of predominant themes that's coming out is that it is not prescriptive and it is not necessarily, you know, set in stone and that it is emergent, necessarily, you know, set in stone, and that it is emergent and it is rhizomatic, and then the dialectical practice is one of the key components of it, so that there is this ongoing conversation and the needs of one particular group of people might be completely different from the needs of another group of people in a different location or even maybe in the same location. It's it's it's like more of a democratic, purely democratic process. I guess Some of the other thoughts that kind of came up through, cecilia, you were mentioning, I guess I was hearing a lot of emotional intelligence and values-based thought processes, about the way that you were educating your kids.

Jamie Rumble: 33:37

But I also thought of, like, how there's good trouble that comes from being nomadic or being in place. Even You're going to have challenges, but in my experience as well, being in Japan for 17 years there's so many challenges that kind of just pop up on a daily basis, whether it's language, culture, whatever work. And I think if you're teaching future generations to be emotionally intelligent, emotionally adaptable and have more of, like, a values-based mindset, I think that's also preparing future generations very well for, you know, for trouble, any kind of trouble, if it should arise. And it just reminds me of the concept. A lot of teachers use the concept of teachable moments and that's what that trouble seems to be. Sometimes it's like, okay, wait a minute, like this is a teachable moment. But I'm wondering your thoughts on that oh, should we fight over it?

Jesper Conrad: 34:40

I want it no, no, no, I will change mine very, very shortly but I also wanted to add to that.

Jamie Rumble: 34:45

As digital nomads, the other thing I've noticed is how so many digital nomads and and I'm kind of hearing it through you as well is that you are curating your life. Do you know what I mean? Like you are actually, yeah, and for a lot of you mentioned last time the Instagram nomads they are curating their life but also commodifying and showing you know a specific curation of their life. So just those kind of two things curation of their life.

Jesper Conrad: 35:16

So just those kind of two things. Yeah, I don't know if it's the rebellious anarchist soul in me. I do not like the word teaching. It comes from a worldview where you, as the adult, have a goal with what the one you are teaching something needs to learn.

Jamie Rumble: 35:35

I should clarify, I'm just going to jump in. So one of the things that Paolo Ferreri talks about is that the role of the teacher is actually teacher-student and the role of the student is student-teacher. So breaking down that barrier, yeah, and I feel you on the anarchist rebel soul thing. My first job at a university was canvassing for Greenpeace During the French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. And just to kind of touch on culture, to backtrack a little bit To this day, the interview with Greenpeace, and that was in london, ontario and canada. Um, one of the questions I'll never forget during my interview was I imagine that. So the interview said imagine that I'm. I am a cannibal or a headhunter. How are you going to convince me that my lifestyle is wrong? And that's. That was just a fascinating interview question for me.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:38

Both terms curating my life and teachable moments are terms that I've met many times and with both of them I don't like them for more or less the same reason. I'm not curating my life, designing it so that I'm better prepared for the future, or I look smarter on Instagram or anything like that. I, like everyone else, have a set of options. It's a quite big set. If you look at your life, you have many options. Some are nitty-gritty little detail versions of more or less the same option, but it's still options, and I have spent a lot of time a lot of it in conversation with my husband, a lot of it in conversation with my husband and children to figure out what's important and to know exactly how does my value system work. So when I have a set of options, I choose the one that makes the most sense. You could call that curating, but when people talk about curating life, it sounds as if I'm setting it up by design so that I get the best outcome, I make the most money, I learn the most, I get in front of the line, and it's actually not that I am choosing, and everybody chooses all the time, even when they don't know they're choosing. Even not choosing is a choice. So if you're not clear on your values and you're not used to thinking, stop and think. Okay, what are my options? Why am I choosing this option over that option? Does it make sense? Maybe it does.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:54

Maybe it looks like it's ridiculous to choose this option over that option, but if it makes no sense to you and the people you love and the projects you want to support, go that way. Not everyone will go that way, but some will. So if you don't know these things, you choose blindly, you choose mindlessly, you choose affected by advertising and netflix series and emotions and and fears and and I don't know habit, a lot of habit. Um, so, and and I think that's sad, so it sounds so when people say we curate our life and we think a lot, well, as long as we agree on what that means and does not mean, then I can say, yes, I curate my life, we curate our life, and we do it completely leveled with our children. It's not like Jesper and I have the first actually they have the.

Jamie Rumble: 39:49

So they're the student, teacher, teacher students as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 39:54

The thing is I don't think anyone has the authority Anyone no. So if I think teachable moments this is a big deal inside of the home, education and unschooling world that people talk about teachable moments and if you have that mindset as a mother in a homeschooling context or a father in a homeschooling world that people talk about teachable moments, and if you have that mindset as a mother in a homeschooling context or a father in a homeschooling context, you'll be like jumping at it and be this annoying.

Jamie Rumble: 40:18

Oh, there it is. It's a teachable moment.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:20

Let's have a cup of coffee and talk about colonialism. And where does the coffee come from? What temperature? It can be so annoying. You're so annoying to listen to and you're not pushing and you have this agenda of pushing and we're back to I think I mentioned foie gras last time. You're pushing things down the throat of your children. They did not ask for not interested.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:40

They're banking, they want to have a cup of coffee because they want to talk to you about something else, but you're not there for it because you're all full of your teachable moment. You want to quote someone and you want to so, and I think that whole thing, every moment in life, is a learning journey. Everything that happens, you can and will learn something from it. You don't have to step back and think what can I teach them from this walk to the creek? This?

Cecilie Conrad: 41:06

walk to the creek, because if you're there in a flow of presence and community and just open-minded interest, then you come home and you'll learn something. And maybe you can't know that in a little notebook Today we learned about these nine different beetles, but you come home smarter. It's a byproduct I say that very often. It's just a byproduct, a ripple effect of a meaningful life that you learn stuff. Sometimes you learn stuff because you sit down and want to know, but most of the things we learn in this life we learn because we're fully engaged, fully present, maybe even in a real flow around something that can totally absorb our mind and we just cannot help but keep going Teachable moments. So if I have that mindset, I'm the teacher, right, or what? Or am I looking for teachable moments and teachers all the time, or could I maybe just flow and trust what's going on around me?

Jamie Rumble: 42:12

So that's, I mean, I appreciate and agree with so many points that you just made, and I'm also wondering what role does reflection play? Because that is also a key component of ecopedagogy, and Freire's philosophy is that action is one part of life and learning and reflection is another key component. But then the dialectic also includes that. The dialectic is both action and reflection and you can't separate the two.

Jesper Conrad: 42:48

So one of the things I enjoy most by traveling and learning languages is part of the reflection. It's the wonder, is for me, the part of the reflection, it's the curiosity. I kitty people who only talk one language and at the other side I'm like oh my God, you have so many great moments ahead of you. Go learn another language. It will be a joy. Because if you go in and learn another language and if you're English speaker, I would say go learn one of the Latin languages, because there's so many roots of your words that come from Latin and if you don't know where they come from, you are using the words wrong, You're not understanding them.

Jesper Conrad: 43:38

And that's one of my big joys in life is looking at a word, seeing how, if we take the weekdays, for example, what they are in Danish, what they are in Spanish, what they are in English, then the for me fun part was to see oh, I learned about the Spanish words and, of course, the dates are also aligned with their gods of their time, the Danes. We did the clever thing. We were like oh so you have weekdays, that's cool, but we don't have Mars as the god of the fighting, as they have of the planet. We have Tjur, so that's why it's Tjur's day, which translated into Tuesday. So your English Tuesday comes from Tjur's day in Danish. That is because we took Mars.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:28

That's not Mars, that's Neapolis. Martis, martis, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 44:33

Sorry, no, no, it's fine. So these things you can only ponder and wonder about if you know the different languages, and for me that is reflection, that is, the more you learn, the more you are able to pick different stuff together and put them into this mixing bowl of of stuff that is super fun to figure out. I love the thing with the. The. The days I got I had a blast of looking into why it's called going to the loo, going to the John and all these things. For example, going to the loo comes from and I cannot pronounce it correctly it is God little loo. In French that means take care of the water when they threw out the morning bucket and that has been diverted into the loo in English because they made fun of it or use the French word or whatever. So there's so much joy in languages and that's one of the things we meet when we meet nomads. Many of them only speak English and I'm like if you really want to have fun and learn, go learn a local language.

Jesper Conrad: 45:43

And take one of the Latin ones, or Spanish, french, italian, all of them, because it's quite fun.

Cecilie Conrad: 45:50

I have a different take on the reflection, not that I disagree with you. It's fun to play with thoughts and I love learning languages and playing with words.

Jamie Rumble: 45:59

Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:00

I don't disagree.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:01

I just have a different thing I think is relevant to talk about with reflection. Relevant to talk about with reflection, which is I've noticed that the majority of our a lot of time in our family and in our life we're usually with other people. So most of the time I'd say 95% of our days we spend with more people than just the five of us. But even if we are just the five of us, a lot of time is spent talking, and so it's all carried by conversation, what you would call the education my education and my children's educations carried by all these conversations that we have between ourselves, inside our core family and with the people that we are around, and the whole reflection part. It's very easy to see that if there is an experience of some sort and it could be any sort, it could be you read a chapter in an interesting book, you played, you did a bus fight in a computer game. It took forever to win, and now you finally found this winning strategy. You won, uh, you had a social, social interaction that's hard to understand and it put you in a weird place.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:21

Could be what could be all kinds of experiences. I see that we talk about them and we talk about them until they are done. So I just had that discussion with someone today. I wonder who it was. Whatever about how a story is very long until it's settled inside. So if you have to talk about your three weeks in Thailand, thailand, when people ask you how was that, and you talk about it for an hour and a half, you can tell all the details. That's because all of the impressions, all the things that happened, they're still not settled inside. Or you had a conflict with your mother-in-law Not that I have conflicts with mine, just for the record With someone.

Jesper Conrad: 48:07

She doesn't, I actually don't. I like her mother-in-law.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:10

If you have a conflict with someone but it's over, then if you hear yourself talk about it when people ask so how did that story end? And you talk about it for an hour, it's not over Because it's not settled. And I think the conversations not for everyone, because we're not all the same. Some people need to work with their things in different ways. Some people actually settle things by drawing, some do it by running, some do it by meditating, by alone doing something that works for them, but a lot of people they do it by having these conversations and using other people and the conversation with other people as a mirror, emotionally and mentally, even spiritually.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:59

So there's a lot of reflection going on and we sometimes have a conversation and one within our family could say do we really need to talk about this again? And sometimes we actually don't. But most times someone will say, yeah, I really need to settle this, and so I don't know and I don't know why I need to. I had that yesterday. I needed to talk about something. You got a little bit annoyed, like do we really need to talk about this? I know it's annoying, but I kind of I feel the pressure.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:33

We need to talk about it, and we talked about it for about 20 minutes and I found out oh, there's the rub. And then I knew what the problem was and I could completely let go of it. So there's a lot of reflection going on all the time. We don't have time to watch tv, or anything like that.

Jesper Conrad: 49:51

We need to, but the key point in the way we are living is time. That's what you have as a nomad. That is a nomadic family. All of us are working from home. I don't go to a co-working office I I wouldn't never dream of it. I would like to sit and work from the comfort of my family to see the hours I put in. What good are they doing? Other people are happy. Stuff is happening. That is wonderful. I'm happy as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:22

And you can imagine me serving your little coffee. Yes, yes, no, no. What happened?

Jesper Conrad: 50:27

No, but so what we have is time, and I think that that is one of the things where the breaking down of the family, clans, the small villages, it has restricted people to smaller and smaller units where there's less and less dialogue. If you go in and look at the statistics of how long time does one child have with an adult per child in a school setting, then there's a lot of dialogue one-to-one. If we just do the math, it's like one child, one teacher, 24 children, eight hours. Here we have okay, we have three children, but we are two adults 24 hours, and then we sleep, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 51:14

It's a skewed math problem. It's a skewed math problem, but the idea is the same that we have time.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:18

And can I also say, if you add to that idea of the time to have the conversations the idea of the teachable moment, if I have the teachable moment mindset and agenda every time I talk with my children, how am I listening to their agenda?

Cecilie Conrad: 51:37

How am I having a conversation? Is there any time left for me to talk about my emotions, the things that bother me? Is there any time left for me to talk about the things? Or to put into the matrix it's not like it's about me all of it, obviously it's not. But what if I'm super interested in something that I just got interested in? It has nothing to do with that creek. We're walking along the creek and no one's seeing it, because we're discussing and I'll say shakespeare again, because we happen to fall into the Shakespeare trap all the time or we're discussing whatever, something in Nepal or the next knitting project, because that's what's top of mind. If I have the teachable moment mindset whenever I talk to my children and my or my husband and my time to talk with them is limited because I'm going to one job and he's going to another job, and then I have the yoga class and the wine club and all the things that I'm doing and you're in the boxing club and we see each other in this.

Cecilie Conrad: 52:37

We even have to put it in the calendar. And my kids they come home and their head is full of friends and school and extracurricular stuff and then when I talk to them I need to get them to do their chores and homework. When do we ever have this emergent flowy relation situation where we are just talking about whatever makes sense to talk about? So that's another reason I'm against this whole teachable moment mindset. Teachable moment mindset because it throws us off. And I think the teachable moment mindset for a lot of parents who let go of the school system, who might even, on top of that, be nomadic, so they're out there, but they still feel this responsibility to educate their children and they think I've met a lot of people like that. So they think, okay, but then what I do is I jump at all the teachable moments, because life is full of teachable moments.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:35

So whenever we see a butterfly, we need to learn the Latin name of it, and what flower does it need to breed, or whatever. It ruins it. It ruins the point of it, it ruins something of deep value, and there will be a day where those children who really are interested in butterflies will learn these Latin names and plants.

Jesper Conrad: 53:57

So before you ask your next question, I would like to praise you, jamie, because, a you ask wonderful questions and B you're a good listener and for for us it's kind of fun on this podcast because it's often very guest-based, where we are interviewing a guest, so it's super fun for us to just say a lot of the things we have on our mind as well yeah, well, thank you intellectual level of this yeah I think we often have a lot of chit chat, and here we can actually use the brain well, here's what I wanted to kind of reflect back to so many things.

Jamie Rumble: 54:33

I'm going to try and maybe knock them off as they kind of emerge in my head Flow, flow, state, wonder, the narrative aspect, as well as a lot of conversations about time and I would add that to. I always like to think of time as kind of more in the physics way of thinking, whereas it's time-space and I think that that's another really interesting aspect of nomadic life is that you're not just manipulating or maybe that's the wrong word manipulating, you're. You're considering your time, but you're also considering your space. But the other, I guess part of this narrative, and especially when I think about eco-pedagogy, the dialectic, even teachable moments and reflection is that I think that this approach to education or and it's an emergent approach and that's why it's so hard to define or put down, but even.

Jamie Rumble: 55:43

I think, with regards to time, it's non-linear, and so I think teachable moments as well don't necessarily need to be emerging in that moment. I think the reflection aspect of the ecopedagogical approach allows for the teachable moment to sometimes come much, much later, at a different time, maybe when you're ready, much, much later, at a different time, maybe when you're ready. But I think also when we share our narrative, when we storytell, the meaning changes as we change, and so that's why sometimes I feel like storytelling is a huge part of just being human, because we are also learning and reflecting on our own change and development and growth, and so those teachable moments are sometimes reflecting back to us. Now you're ready for this lesson, and so that's why I think the whole concept of time is nonlinear. It's like a ball of yarn sometimes where you're looping back. But I did want to also reflect to you in this area.

Jamie Rumble: 56:49

There are the indigenous people, the Mi'kmaq. They've been here for 13,000 years and I've talked to some of their educators about how they pass knowledge or, you know, teach or whatever, and there was one story that I heard where there was a grandfather, elder in his canoe, with his grandson, going down the river, and they hit a rock and capsized and had to swim ashore and you know they got all wet and cold. And the point of the story was that the grandfather knew that the rock was there but he didn't tell his grandson that that was a rock to avoid, because he wanted his grandson to learn there's a rock there. And I just I can't stop thinking about that story because I mean they could have gotten hurt. One of them could have died drowned.

Jamie Rumble: 57:43

But that is the kind of indigenous approach to maybe it's more a creating more space for the younger generation to learn or to live or to experience. And so maybe I wonder sometimes if the Western mindset of, of curating or even through like the Montessori kind of early childhood education, where you're creating provocations, you know, putting things out rather than just letting it emerge. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that. And then I had another question, I guess, on citizenship, that maybe we can kind of end on.

Jesper Conrad: 58:23

Yeah, before answering the question, I couldn't stop thinking about the word reflection. To reflect on something. Need to go look the word up, but if I understand it, as I understand it, what my imagination tells me is that you reflect yourself in something. That means you see yourself in what is shown back to you, which is kind of fun when you take it and say what reflection do I see of myself by being in this situation. So I need to figure out if it's mean what I think about reflection comes from. To reflect that means something is shown back to you, because I find that interesting as a word to use about learning, because then it is that you see something and get to see something about yourself in whatever you're studying. So me, but maybe I'm wrong about the word. I have to look it up.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:26

So that deflected. That did, but maybe the deflection is even a reflection question to be answered, so much so that I kind of even forgot how exactly is the question.

Jesper Conrad: 59:41

And you take the question again because I deflected and you said so many things, and I think the thing about time and space and when and what do we learn in this life?

Cecilie Conrad: 59:55

I would like to touch upon that now that we've lost the question.

Jamie Rumble: 59:59

Yeah, no, that's okay, and I guess it wasn't really. It was a good question, it was just a presentation, but then I lost it, so now it's mine.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:08

I trust the process. I think life is a good master. It teaches us things and I think if I'm being a little bit religious about this I think we. That's why we're here. We're here to learn, we're here to explore, we're here to expand, we're here to grow, and the reason we experience things is to learn from them, and I totally agree that we don't necessarily need to learn from the moment that we're in, or I more feel, because we will learn from the moment that we're in.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:00:45

There's no way around it. We can resist it and that will cause a lot of pain, but why would we? But what I see is I'm 50 years old now. I have four children, one of them is more than half my age, and so it's been this lifestyle for a long time. I've had a lot of experiences before I became a mom, a lot of different settings of my life, and I see how now, when I experience something, the layers of the things that come before will stack up and make a very interesting mirage. You remember these things that you look through, with all the mirrors and the little pieces they fall and it makes this beautiful pattern.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:01:29

Then you turn it a little bit as a different what I don't know the word kaleidoscope kaleidoscope, okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:01:35

So I feel like you get more and more little pieces of glass inside your kaleidoscope when, when you grow older and you have all of your experiences, especially if they have been talked about, reflected upon and and they found their peace inside, even if they don't, sometimes you have an experience, a trivial one, but it somehow pokes something that was never settled a long time ago.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:03

It could be an emotion that comes up, it could be a need, it could be a passion Some say passion, something like oh, I just really need to do this now, and that's a big stone in that thing for a while and and then it all falls into place and you turn it and some things fall out the focus, and in that way, life becomes in many ways richer and richer the older we get, especially if we have our things more or less I wouldn't want to say in order.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:34

There's no order to it and in that way it makes a lot of sense to to us to say that the things we learn from moments sometimes realized way later or utilized. Even so, what I can learn right now from this conversation is very different from what I could have learned had I had it when I was 17 years old and that's easy to understand when it's about something intellectual. But it's the same thing with emotions. It's the same thing in half an hour when I drive to the beach and jump in the water. It will be a different experience for me to do that and I will learn something and take something home with me that is different than it would have been had I not been in all kinds of other waters and other kinds of places in my life. And even other things can stack on top of that and become sometimes it's a poem, sometimes it's in the mind that you know all these things that stack and you remember and you feel.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:03:33

Sometimes you just flow and you don't think about it so that time space is and, in a way, time becomes bigger the older we get. So some of my friends who are also 50 years old, or maybe older, they are like, oh, but we're more than halfway and the time is ticking, and when can I retire? And I'm sure I'll have a bad knee 10 years. They're looking at the end.

Jamie Rumble: 1:03:59

Yeah, I'm just getting started.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:04:02

But also it's just the quality of life changes and I think time expands in a funny way and things that happen sometimes they happen now but in the past. Does that make any sense Clearing up something or changing the perspective?

Jamie Rumble: 1:04:22

Yeah, so that was my five cents for that. I still want to have that question again.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:04:24

the perspective, yeah, so that was my five cents for that.

Jesper Conrad: 1:04:28

I still want to have that question again, but also yes, but we need to get back, yeah. I will not go away from the mirror analogy.

Jamie Rumble: 1:04:37

I will take one more thing with it no, it is because you have done a lot of co-living and it had made me look a lot upon how we are together with people in life.

Jesper Conrad: 1:04:48

For example, when we lived in Denmark, sometimes my parents threw a birthday party or something. We could use a longer time in commuting back and forth than we were there. And then it's a formalized setting oh, you meet, you greet, and you sit and eat dinner, etc. Then it's a formalized setting oh, you meet, you greet, and you sit and eat dinner, et cetera. When you co-live, which a lot of nomads do, or are in close community with each other, then what happens is that you have again time, but you also, when you live together, the other persons become a mirror towards your life. And I say this I have this small saying that it is not always you see, you like what you see in the mirror, but it's not the fault of the mirror. I have had other people spewing mirrors in my life where I saw something in myself where I'm like, oh, I need to change that. I've been a mirror to other people where they saw another way of behaving, reacting in different situations, where they didn't like what they see in themselves.

Jesper Conrad: 1:05:52

Go back to the question, as I think I remember it was this about the Western world and our way of doing it. I think we have become fear and goal-orientated in our approach to teaching. We have a goal, but it's fear-based. It is kind of we want people to reach this point because we're afraid that if they don't, they will never succeed in life. Therefore, it steps down into control, not hope, and I think there's a big, big difference. I see a lot of fear in the States when we talk with people from the States, a extreme amount of fear. I see it sneaking into different countries, also Denmark. Some of the parenting is also done by fear and I am very positive, I believe in in.

Jamie Rumble: 1:06:48

If you praise and are happy, then life is better one of my favorite expressions is by river phoenix, apparently attributed to him by his brother, and he says run to the rescue with love and peace will follow. And that's kind of my, I guess, ethos when it comes to the work that I'm doing. You know, seeing that we may be in a climate collapse and rather than approaching it from a place of fear, approaching it from a place of love, that I will run to the rescue with love and that, hopefully, peace will follow, knowing that I'm not able to do this all by myself. Which is kind of bringing me to the final two questions. I had the concept of citizenship and the role of beauty, because I also love the expression by Dostoevsky, because I also love the expression by Dostoevsky beauty will save the world, and I'm wondering if that is something that is meaningful for you and also just the whole concept of being a planetary citizen what are the rights and responsibilities or any thoughts on that?

Jesper Conrad: 1:08:00

I need to be stupid. First, because the thing about beauty makes me remember a highly educated, very intelligent science journalist I worked together with. We talked about traveling and he said he loved to pee, with a perfect view, because it made him remember the beauty even better. And I actually, of course my curiosity was like oh, this place is really pretty. Will it be better if I pee? And then I've tried that a couple of times. I think he means that if you somehow anger something with a bodily reaction, then you deepen the emotion. That was maybe his point, or maybe he was just stupid, but I have done it a couple of times. Yeah, it's a really good place to pee this one. The emotion that was maybe his point, or maybe he was just stupid, but I have done it a couple of times. Yeah, it's a really good place to pee this one.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:08:48

Yeah, just don't do it at the Taj Mahal.

Jesper Conrad: 1:08:50

No, no, and not at the Eiffel Tower. They get so angry.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:08:55

Beauty and citizenship. That's a fun combo of concepts. I think we have chosen a path in life where we do not want to play with fear and we do not want to play with negativity. We do not. If we don't like the vibe, we change it or we move. We truly believe I think I can say that for both of us that if you approach all situations with love, with a clear mind, with openness, with peace, it is a beautiful situation. There is beauty to be found and the things you learn, you learn them, you absorb, you adapt and and you find the path that makes sense and is beautiful. Even.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:09:50

I mean we've been through quite a few rough times. It's not like our life is always dancing on rose petals. It's been rough as well, but I think we've become increasingly good at and we can certainly be better if, if the emotions are not aligned, if we're not happy, if we're not and you're not necessarily always happy but if you're not at least able to be level and be okay and be looking for where is the beauty in this? Where is the option? Where is the peace? Where's the energy flowing? Where can I find some sort of joy or energy movement that makes sense? Where's the light? Um, if we can't do that, if we're frustrated and agitated and all of that, anything we do will just add to that frustration and and not be helpful and not solve any problems. So we're trying to use negative emotion, negative vibration as a sort of alarm. I imagine these flashing lights you also have on your dashboard in the car if something's not really working as it should.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:11:07

You should pay attention. So why am I feeling this? Why am I experiencing this? But maybe pull over, you know, stop the car, figure out what's wrong before you keep going. And so, as soon as you get all the lights turned off and you know what's wrong with the car, you can take it to the mechanic. And in the same way, when you have this disturbed thing, you think it's in your context, but actually it's in you and you find out. So that match between the concept and me is creating this discomfort.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:11:39

Where does it come from? Once you know that, it's quite easy to solve it. Usually it can be hard work, but you know what to do. So I think that navigating towards beauty, if you want to use that concept, or navigating with love, or navigating so that you don't start a new movement before there's peace peace is a very solid plan, a strategy. It solves a lot of problems and it makes life flowy and energetic. But it takes a lot of inner work. It takes a lot of patience. Sometimes it seems like everything is falling apart around you and your job is to stop and just look at the whole thing and not act. You just want to run around and fix problems, but actually you have to fix yourself first.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:12:31

So that's a strategy we try to to put into work. We can be really hard. Sometimes we run around and fix problems and thereby making them worse. We are not perfect at all.

Jesper Conrad: 1:12:45

I am not sure I can talk about citizenship I can I don't know what I mean, no, but I have a passport yeah, um, so I think I come from when I look back, before we started traveling. I come from a place of hey man, we are just one world.

Jesper Conrad: 1:13:02

There, don't need to be any borders at all. We are one happy family on Mother Earth, gaia, the big mother, and yes, but after having traveled extensively in Europe, which is where we have traveled most, I have seen many, many natural borders that make super much sense. As I have walked from Portugal to Spain, we also wanted to walk from France to Germany, and many of these natural borders that are interesting to visit are in big-ass rivers, where it made sense that before you were able to build a big bridge there, different cultures formed on the different sides of the river. So I believe in natural borders and that cultures arises inside these. What is interesting is, how will that redefine now that we have not a lot of physical borders left, because we can either have from Denmark, they are just building a very long bridge to Germany To the tunnel, I think.

Jesper Conrad: 1:14:17

Tunnel, maybe even yeah, we have one to Sweden where earlier we should take the ferry. People now commute in a different way back and forth. It changes culture and it will have an effect and we can fly to different countries. It has not yet evolved into the way we have states. I don't know what it will do or what will happen, but I would just say that going from an earlier mindset of the world is one big, wonderful thing to see. Oh, that's actually pretty far from the top of Spain to the bottom of Spain, to the top of Africa. If you stand there and look, you can look, but you can't get over there easily. So, yes, it's different cultures.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:15:02

I think maybe the term citizenship refers to my. I'm a citizen During the. French Revolution, people called each other citizen.

Jamie Rumble: 1:15:20

If we are to be planetary citizens, what does that kind of evil?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:15:27

The thing is, I am a citizen, so I'm just trying to think what does this actually mean? Obviously, legally, right now I'm a Danish citizen. I have the passport, and that's the only passport I have. But in a way it must refer to my relation to a larger community anchored in a geographical place. And if we casually just use the word we usually refer to, what passport do you have in your back pocket when you travel? Am I a global citizen? I know that I'm a human and I'm part of humanity. I feel citizen. The word sounds like some sort of political statement. I think we've talked a lot with the kids about it, about their identity, growing up and not in one place and not with only one language and not with only one culture, and they say to us that they feel very European, that when they travel outside of Europe they clearly feel that there's something about Europe that they take with them that is not there when they are outside of Europe and they also can clearly distinguish between different areas of Europe.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:16:59

So, like feeling I'm partly this, I'm partly that. I'm actually very Danish, I'm actually Scandinavian. I know, now that I've been living outside of Scandinavia for seven years, that I have a lot of that with me and the kids feel the same the older one more than the younger one but also they feel that there are parts of this that is not theirs, that they have expanded into becoming more European than Scandinavian, that they have expanded into becoming more European than Scandinavian. I think really it's a layered thing. If I am to think about not my passport, not the legal part of it, not the borders and border control, all these things, but what is my identification with being part of the whole circus?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:17:44

I would personally say that I'm a citizen in Europe. I think I'm European, like my kids. I'm part of that, I understand it, I feel I know what I'm doing here. I might be a citizen in what is wrongly called the Western world, but I'm not sure. I think I have to use a different word if I'm expanding it to my participation as a biological entity on the planet and I would say I'm human and I'm part of humanity, I think the citizen global citizen, I don't know. Citizen global citizen, I don't know. I feel a lot of empathy with all of humanity and I feel that I'm part of something huge and very diverse and very interesting and fun and and creative and nuanced, and that is humanity in all its many different ways and forms. But I might, as maybe it's, I don't know, I don't know that that makes sense. Maybe the word has to change when it, when it becomes the global thing.

Jamie Rumble: 1:18:56

I think it is, and I think one of the aspects of, of ecopedagogy and planetary citizenship that's appealing, for me at least, is the recognition of, of of other other being, not just human but also more than human. So rivers and mountains having rights as citizens, as what as they do? I think in new zealand and maybe some other countries, they've actually bestowed upon rivers and places the rights of citizenship, and so I do see planetary citizenship as extending beyond the human. And what is that going to look like? How do we even navigate that?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:19:40

I would personally, if I was the king of everything which I fortunately am not maybe use different words. I'd say the right to exist, the right to be that might not even need the word right that tree is being and no one has the right to take that away. I mean, we all have the right to be who we are and where we are. I know that in England a lot of trees are protected, even inside people's gardens. You know, you can't just cut that tree.

Jamie Rumble: 1:20:08

Japan as well. Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:20:10

And it's very nice. But I think citizen. Now we might have to look up that word. I don't know what's up with me. I might have to have a conversation about that, but it annoys me a little bit.

Jamie Rumble: 1:20:21

Yeah, the river, yeah, I agree.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:20:27

I feel the word. We never had the beginning, the right to violate that river. It does not need a citizenship and a passport and a document and a rule book in order to flow. It's a river. It's just supposed to be here. We never had the right to ruin it and if we realized we did, we should fix it. You know, just like if you eat your mom's cupcake, maybe you should go bake some more because you made a mistake.

Jesper Conrad: 1:20:48

And that's a perfectly good way to end this on a cupcake. Thanks for listening for everyone who stayed on. It was a big question.

Jamie Rumble: 1:20:56

It was Thank you Thanks so much.