M is for Mindfulness

From the memoirs of Billie Harper, looking back on her learning journey.

When I was younger, I used to think mindfulness was something still. Quiet. Like meditation or slow breathing in the Learning Circle. And while that was part of it, the deeper truth came later—when I began to understand what it meant to be fully present with life as it is, not as I wish it to be.

Mindfulness, as it was passed down through the journals, wasn’t just a technique—it was a way of being. Diana wrote about the “early panic years,” when distractions multiplied and attention became a rare currency. She described how people would scroll, swipe, stream—anything to avoid the discomfort of being still with themselves. It was a time of numbing, not noticing.

In the years after the Collapse, mindfulness re-emerged—not as trend but as necessity. The ancestral entries from the Rebuild time, tell of people learning to feel again. They spoke of seed-saving as meditation, of grounding in bare feet, of washing clothes by hand in river water. Not because they were trying to be mindful, but because they finally were.

I remember one moment clearly. I was walking the salt flats with Liang after the first Community Accord had been signed. The wind was sharp, the sky wide and unfiltered. We said nothing for hours. Just walked. Every footstep a kind of prayer. Every breath a reminder that we were here, alive, and building something worth our attention.

Mindfulness, I’ve come to realise, is not the escape from reality—but a returning to it. Again and again. To the body, to the land, to the people in front of you.

Even now, when the days are full and the children are loud, I return. To breath, to noticing, to now.