Welcome to The Hedge School for a Complex World

As of November 2025 I have moved my writing to substack as The Hedge School in A Complex World Please come and join me there

I’m Jim Jones. I am Wayfinding in a time of Metacrisis at the meeting point of so many edges.

• A part-time PHD Candidate in Social and Ecological Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, researching the Narratives of Land-based Livelihoods
• A Narrative Ecologist and Founder/Principle Navigator at RootSense, currently working as a consultant with The Sage Practice Network
• A Warm Data Host
• A complexity and systems thinker.
• A fifteen year career in ecological conservation most recently with Surrey Wildlife Trust, specialising in Landscape and Hedgerow Ecology.
• Making the British Isles my home again after 7 years in Ontario, Canada
• A live-in carer for parents in there senior years.
• A member of the Bardic Grade of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids
• A spoon-carver, hedgelayer, basket weaver and scyther; founder of the Ontario Land Skills Network and SpoonMoot

The Hedge School for a Complex World is…..

• A place to gather my own thoughts and watch for emergence.
• A weaving of, and an inquiry into, patterns.
• Sketches from the (h)edges of living-from ecology, narrative, poetry, craft, Druidry and the everyday work of living in complexity.
• Each post, conversation, and podcast episode is an act of tending: a way of finding pattern, meaning, and belonging along the edges of modern life.
• A question: how do we live and work wisely amid entanglement?
• Here, the billhook and the pen are both tools of learning.

Welcome to the hedge—where thought grows wild and the boundary itself is alive!

Like the old Irish hedge schools, it’s informal and open-air: a few people meeting outside the institutions to learn together. For now, the posts are mostly my reflections, poems, and recordings; in time, I hope it will grow into a collaborative space for other makers, thinkers, and educators exploring the same questions.

The name doesn’t mean it’s only about hedges. The hedge is the metaphor—the living boundary where ideas, practices, and people meet. What happens here belongs to that edge: between fields, between disciplines, between ways of knowing.

You’re welcome to read quietly or join in the conversation. Every reply, story, and question is another branch in the hedge.