Crossing tracks - A Conversation with Jeppe Graugaard

Last winter I had a conversation with Jeppe Graugaard. We sat by the fire in my house and he switched on his tape recorder and though I felt bone-weary, bone-cold, exhausted by months of flu, I looked back at the track I had made over the last decades and found a kind of pattern there that made sense of things in a way I had not seen before. It sparked something alive. Although I have spent a great deal of my life interviewing people and hearing their stories, this was the first time anyone had sat down and asked me questions and was interested in the answers.This kind of attention is rare in our me-only, rush-rush world. About as rare as a ray of sun in that hard and difficult winter.

When Jeppe published our conversation in his blog a month later, just as Spring came, it was a revelation. In all honesty I can't remember saying any of this! I told him. He was now in a summerhouse in his native Denmark, writing up his Phd thesis about grassroots innovation, based on the Dark Mountain Project. I was amazed at how he had transcribed our talk almost verbatim, as he had with many other Dark Mountaineers, the thinkers, artists and activists who have helped shape this cultural network. Because I know exactly how many long painstaking hours that takes to do.

I had first met Jeppe briefly in 2009 at the first (and only) Arts and Culture meeting held by the Heart and Soul group upstairs at Take 5. We had decided to hold our first midsummer Transition party up at the Ranger's House on Mousehold Heath. He was about to research alternative currencies in Lewes and so never made it up there among the tents and trees.

But somehow our tracks crossed again: we met two years later at the Uncivilisation Festival and decided to start our own Dark Mountain Norwich group. When Rob Hopkins came to Norwich Jeppe wrote a piece about Transition for This Low Carbon Life called Reimagining the Future. He had come that winter weekend with Vanessa (who I had originally met at Occupy Norwich and asked to write for OneWorldcolumn) and we had all spoken at our Sustainable Bungay Give and Take Day about the Gift Economy. We had recently taught Trade classes - about time, about flowers, about communications and making - at the second prototype day for The Common Room at St Lawrence's Church (the third is happening today as I write). Tracks that were making a certain pattern in time and space.

Recently I took part in an on-line conversation about grassroots groups and I found myself realising that what I valued about Transition, what I valued about Dark Mountain, and all the groups I have connected with or written about were the networks of people and the shape and sense they made of my own life. Not necessarily my personal life, but a communal passage through the world that is part of an invisible pattern we can't always see. Those seemed to be more powerful and interesting than any other connections I could think if. And what I was saying in the thread was that the desire to belong to community of people in the way it is commonly understood, was not really my own desire, which is always to contribute to a radical cultural shift on this planet.

Sometimes the "communities" we think we are part of, those circles and clubs, don't necessarily make the meaningful shape that a network does. And some of the difficulties we encounter in such groups are caused by our wanting them to be our people, our family, our friends, when the kinds of people that are part of a network are not configured to provide that kind of emotional or material security. It's a freer and more dynamic exchange. We pop up in different places, in different guises over time. And when we meet, those meetings are treasured at a deep level, knowing they will not last for long. Those intense and focused conversations that happen at the edges in Transition are perhaps the most fruitful and enjoyable parts of our shared human experience. Certainly mine.

Today Jeppe is writing by a lake in Denmark and I am walking in a bluebell wood in England. We're meeting again in August at the fourth (and final) Uncivilisation Festival where Jeppe will be talking about Time Culture and I'll be talking about Rewilding the Self. I'm looking forward to that and all the conversations we'll be having around the fire under the stars.

Anyway here is the opening of our winter conversation. You can read the whole thing here.
 

Medicine Stories, Liberation and Shifting Allegience

JDG: I thought maybe a place to start was with something which you say in the beginning of your book 52 Flowers That Shook My World. Early on in the book you talk about ‘shifting allegiance’ away from civilisation towards the planet and this is something that has stuck with me. You say it happens on two levels: one is in the imagination, that’s the first step, and then it happens in the physical world when you start rearranging yourself in a way that can express that shift of allegiance. I thought maybe we could start with this, how that has turned out for you, going from living in London and being a fashion editor a long time ago to being here now. And I know that’s a very long journey and a big jump but maybe you can lay out what you think has been most important or what has been some of the most valuable stuff you learned from that process?

CDC: I am not a very linear person and I live in a very linear culture of the beginning-middle-and-end kind of stories that one is brought up with. But the stories that would grab me when I was young were the fairytales and the myths. I learnt myths very early on, the classical myths and Greek-Roman myths, which are the ones I know the best. Right from the age of seven or eight those were the things that really profoundly affected my imagination. And they don’t operate in beginning-middle-and-end. Although in some ways they use that sequence that’s not the world they operate in. They operate in this mythic, archaic dreamtime imagination, which is where I feel very much at home and which is the guiding principle of everything I write . . . .

This decade has been all about making myself at home in my own native land, which is a big practice and very hard to do in England. And part of that has been joining Transition where I’ve had to learn how to work with people and as a group in a different way. Talking about things we have been talking about today [in Sustainable Bungay] about the gift economy, about learning how to share, about learning how to give up individualism, which is a process in itself. Because even though you go travelling, you’re not necessarily working in a group. It’s still all about you. It could be about you and the great humanity or you and the great universe, you and the great planet, but it is not you and a bunch of people. Knowing the land as a people. That’s very different. That’s how we used to be.

For example, in Mexico when the Huichols walk to the mountain, they walk with the people. They are not walking as little, individual people trying to get their moment of enlightenment before they go back to the city. It’s a totally different thing: they are walking as a people. And most tribal and archaic people do this as a people, they don’t do it as individuals. You know, you might go and have your vision quest to find your name but you are coming back to the tribe, you are coming back to be one of the people, to be an integral part of it. So we’ve lost that. We’re trying to relearn it, I think. It’s on quite a humble level. Like doing things like ‘give and take’ today, community meals for fifty, it’s trying to get back to understanding what that’s like. That’s a much harder practice, I think . . . .

It has to be about heart. If you live a life governed by heart that is a different world to if you live a life governed by the rational mind. They are just different universes. So something that heart can feel and intuit, and intention being part of it, that has a currency and an agency that the rational doesn’t even recognise. It doesn’t know what you are talking about.

So, of course, if you sit down and do something with good intent - and you know that in your heart whether you have good intent or not – that has a power and agency that you cannot see but it will make all the difference. You can sit down with no intent and tick all the boxes and nothing will happen because you’ve got no good intent. Because it is not locked into what I would call the fabric of this world which we can’t see. The fabric of the world which we can’t see understands intention. That’s why some people do these strategic acts because they’re learning how to work with intention, so it makes sense within the fabric of the world.

So when they do one thing that echoes in all places… it’s like a hologram. You know, you do one thing in one tiny place and it goes in all places. That’s what I mean by making an intentional act. And that means everything, but the rational mind doesn’t understand that. It's a right [brain] hemisphere thing. We can’t even talk about it, really, but we know it. We understand it. We get a feeling for it. Transition sits down and goes “we need workshops, we need to get stats on that”. It’s all information. But that only goes so far. The point we are at is that we’ve got as far as facts and information can take us. And now something else has to kick in.

You can tell people “the Earth is coming to an end unless you do something”, well yeah, ok, that’s a piece of information. That’s not awareness. If you were aware of it you’d be going: “Right OK, what needs to be done?" That’s awareness. At least you are there, you’re going “OK, so now I know. So now I live in a different place”. That’s where Dark Mountain is. Which is why I like it. It doesn’t go in all guns blazing to try and sort everybody out. It sits on that very uncomfortable edge. It’s enough to be aware right now. Then we’ll see."

Text and photos from Remembering - Pattern Which Connects; Jeppe (left) at The Common Room, Norwich, February 2013; Dark Mountain Norwich crew in Kevin's camper van, Suffolk, July 2012; Uncivilisation Festival will take place on 15-18 August at the Sustainability Centre, Hampshire.

The NR35 Dead-Hedgers Society

It just so happened that the five of us who turned up at Richard’s on Wednesday morning in Bungay to learn how to do dead-hedging with Paul were all over 50, and so the ad hoc name we came up with for that morning’s grouping was the NR35 Dead-Hedgers Society - the Over 50s Contingent!

However, anyone of any age was welcome to join the new Transition social enterprise, NR35 (NR = Natural Resources and NR35 is the local postcode) practical dead-hedge laying session.

This involved laying out and hammering in stakes staggered along a boundary of about twenty-five feet, and then placing and roughly weaving in branches and twigs from recently coppiced trees between the stakes. Making a hedge in this way would not only provide Richard with a decent boundary, but create a refuge for wildlife. Birds like wrens will often build their nests in dead hedges. Tony found an old nest rather larger than a wren’s, which we placed in the hedge once we’d finished.

This was the first time dead-hedging for all of us except Paul, who is a professional tree surgeon, and who taught us with consummate calm and patience. I asked everyone how it had been for them:

Cathy: Well, it uses up an amazing amount of material you might think would be difficult to dispose of. And it’s delightful doing it with others.

Nick: It’s hard work and it makes you sweat, but I’m surprised how easily we managed to get a good end-product (the hedge), in  the space of 2 hours. And it’s brilliant we can go away and do it ourselves now.

Tony: Working as a team is really good fun. And it’s satisfying to start off with all this dead material and end up with a hedge.

I asked Paul how he found us as a group to teach: ”It’s been really satisfying. Everyone’s been very receptive and quick to learn the skills and techniques. The results speak for themselves: we have a very reasonable dead-hedge. I’ve seen a lot worse.”

Me: I found the whole morning instructive and really good fun. I noticed that being physically engaged in building the dead hedge you got into a kind of rhythm with everyone- I would find my hands often knew just what to do. It would have taken forever to do it from a book.

Part of dead-hedging is jumping up and down on top of the laid branches when they’re at a certain height. Cathy and I held hands and pogo-ed up and down together. Later, I realised that over the years I’ve frequently bounced up and down at our events!

Just because you’re over 50 doesn’t mean you’ve got no bounce! Or that you can’t learn a new practical skill in the course of a morning in a congenial atmosphere with fellow reskilling dead-hedgers.


For more information on Sustainable Bungay’s NR35 Natural Resources group, see here.

All images by Mark Watson: Hammering in the staggered stakes; building the hedge from the bottom up; bird’s nest; receptive and quick to learn; the finished dead-hedge; bouncing up and down on the hedge

Originally posted on Sustainable Bungay's website 10th May 2013

Welcome to the new summer edition!

On Wednesday, May 1, the new national Transition Free Press published its on-line summer edition  - 24 pages of full-on, full colour news and views. Great photographs, great articles, contributed by Transitioners and community activists working in the field.

These are stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary stuff in all kinds of places: in the city, in the wild, in books, housing co-ops, small businesses, in the park, down the pub, on the (solar- panelled) roof, underwater, even on the netball court. We're in Greece, Spain, France and Portugal; we're in Sheffield, Louth, Crystal Palace and Lostwithiel. We're also in Norwich, on sale at The Greenhouse and at events and hubs including Norwich FarmShare and this weekend's May Day Fair in Chapelfield Gardens.

Our on-line version, of course, goes everywhere and anywhere, but we feel there is nothing quite like the real thing. So if you can't put your hands on the physical paper locally, you can always subscribe for a year and receive your copy through the post.

During the next few weeks we will be publishing some of this edition's highlights on theTransition Free Press website. Meanwhile here is the introduction to give you a taste.

Welcome to issue two

Energy underpins everything we do in our industrialised societies. The high demand for gas, oil, coal or bio-fuels, as our front page story shows, is now costing the earth on which we depend for life. How we face this dilemma and reduce our need for power is the work of the Transition movement and thousands of community activists around the world.

Most of us are invisible. But, like mycorrhizzal fungi in the living soil, we are connecting and communicating across the globe, working to bring about a future where people can live fairly within ecological limits. In our summer edition we publish stories you might not ordinarily see – actions communities undertake to bring back life into neighbourhoods, to activate soils that have been deadened and contaminated, to create new networks that can hold us together in challenging times. An infrastructure you can feel but not always see.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline threatens to bring toxic crude oil through the heartland of America. Ancient trees fall to make a by-pass in a peaceful valley in Sussex. In response people rise up and take on mighty corporations and rapacious stakeholders. Sometimes that might is challenged. We won! wrote TFP columnist, Shaun Chamberlin, as the Ecological Land Co-operative finally secured planning permission for a smallholding in Devon. For a Goliath culture whose top-down business-as-usual worldview requires everyone’s assent, this may appear a small victory. But  each time we voice our dissent, each time we reclaim our fields, we realise we are not alone in our task.

Why to do we tell these stories? Because they are sparks that light a great fire inside us. Because another culture is being forged under our feet. In an abandoned warehouse in Doncaster people gather on a freezing night by a furnace to listen to a new narrative being told, along the River Dart  a group of children and elders go on a story walk in search of the future. A sunflower garden appears in a neighbourhood in Portalegre. An artist plants 100 fruit trees in a university in Loughborough. In the cities everywhere, leaves appear through the cracks and are gathered by foragers. A dominant worldview does not mean we do not have agency.

What we are not told is that there is an emergent world inside us. You can find it everywhere where there is warmth and generosity and a co-operative spirit: in community cafes, park libraries, pop-up shops, trade schools, abundance projects, repair cafes, people’s kitchens. It comes in all the colours of the rainbow, it sounds like the nightingale singing in the dark in May. For all people who sing in the dark, who stand by the land, the bird and the tree, who hold the fire until the dawn comes, this paper is for you.

Charlotte Du Cann, Editor


Images: artist and activist, Anne-Marie Culhane (People); Bee-friendly plants from the Honeyscribe project by Amy Shelton (Living Earth); Oil Change International poster (News); sunflower from neighbourhood garden in Portalegre  (Profile); TFP button by Trucie Mitchell and Chris Wells

To subscribe for a year click here   

To order a bundle of Transition Free Press contact mark@transitionfreepress.org.uk

Let's Keep the Seeds Real... and introducing Huauzontle

UPDATE 7th May: Due to hard lobbying and hundreds of thousand of people writing and sending emails in objection to the EU's "Plant Reproductive Material Law" (see below) some significant last-minute changes were written in the night before the law was presented yesterday (6th May).

These changes mitigated some of the law's more dire potential effects for seed savers and growers: "We must [however] remain vigilant to be sure it is not changed for the worse as it goes through the EU, and then is translated into UK laws."

Read The Real Seed Catalogue's update here: http://open-seeds.org/bad-seed-law/



Growing plants, particularly for food, and particularly in community, is a big part of the Transition experience and ethos. Many people in transition are active permaculturists. At the very least, most of us want to eat plants grown organically from good seed.


There are Seedy Saturdays and CSAs, and there's the joy of our Give and Grow events, where we swap both flower and vegetable seeds and produce.

Not only do we enjoy sowing it, saving it and exchanging it with each other, if we're to build any sort of resilience as we face an uncertain future, knowing how to grow our own food from a rich biodiversity will be vital.

I love swapping plants with people, whether for flowers, food or medicine. And I consider the free exchange of plants as a birthright for anybody born on this planet. It's certainly not something we should be dictated to about by seed corporations.

So when I was checking out The Real Seed Catalogue's website for the Huauzontle seeds I'm writing about here, and I found this:

URGENT CALL FOR ACTION - NEW EU SEED LAW to ban all traditional vegetable varieties unless registered and licensed! 

I felt I had to share it.

The law will be presented at the EU in one week on 6th May so do read and respond and let's make sure that great places like The Real Seed Catalogue can continue their business. This is from their website:

You'll find no F1 hybrids or genetically modified seed here - just varieties that do really well and taste great when grown by hand on a garden scale. The name of the catalogue reflects what we are working to provide: real seeds for real gardeners wanting to grow proper vegetables. Many are rare heirlooms, and because all are open-pollinated (non-hybrid) , you can save your own seed for future years, using the instructions we supply. There's no need to buy new seed every year!

You can't get better than that!

Introducing HUAUZONTLE. I haven't grown this plant - yet. I hadn't heard of it until a few days ago when I spoke to Rose in Bungay and she offered me some seeds. Rose is an ex-farmer and experienced grower who was influential in the sowing of a bee-friendly wildflower meadow with Bungay Community Bees two years ago. When she told me she had some Aztec broccoli seeds from the Real Seed Catalogue, my ears pricked up!

I wondered whether there was an Aztec name for it and discovered it was Huauzontle, an ancient and domesticated crop in the Americas, still cultivated but, like Fat Hen here (another Chenopodium), mainly considered a weed.

I've been planning a 'Mexican garden' this year (not so difficult - many of our favourite plants, vegetables and grains are natives of Mexico from sunflowers to corn). Several seeds of Cempoalxochitl have already sprouted, though I don't know if they will come true to the 'wild' Oaxaca form of Tagetes erecta I was carefully cultivating over the years, as at some point it got mixed with a yellow one from down the road, threatening to become a 'wildivated' Reydon form!

I have some Mexican Cigar plant given to me from Jenni in Bungay, and Toronjil (Agastache mexicana) and I've sown purple sunflower seeds, too. As well as Wild and Jasmine Tobaccos.

Then there''s Epazote (epazotl in Nahuatl, which translates as skunk sweat or filth, no less!), aka Mexican Tea or Wormseed. Skunk or no, Mexican bean dishes are just not the same without them.

I got mine last year from Dave Wrenn at Orchard End Organics in Kirstead (who has GREAT organic and biodynamic herbs!) and saved the seeds. They just germinated this weekend. Oh, and I must remember the chilis and tomatoes (tomatl). Though of course no chocolatl! Too hard to grow here.

This post on Huauzontle from Zester Daily based in Southern California, really made my mouth water! I must get those seeds from Rose...

And don't forget to read and respond to the URGENT CALL FOR ACTION - NEW EU SEED LAW to ban all traditional vegetable varieties unless registered and licensed. Let's keep the seeds real. Let's keep supporting people like The Real Seed Catalogue and Orchard End Herbs. Let's keep growing and giving!


STOP PRESS: Just saw on the Transition Bungay googlegroup from Kris that Avaaz have also set up a campaign objecting to the proposed EU seed legislation: We don't accept this. Let us keep our seeds EU!

Images: Huauzontle by Jim Pisarowicz (Wikipedia); Ready to cook, Huauzontle by Pabs004 (Wikipedia); Open source, open pollination, it's always a bit of a Mexican Garden here, incl. Epazote & Sunflowers, late summer 2012 by Mark Watson

Post adapted from Huauzontle - Let's Grow from Real Seeds, first published on Mark in Flowers blog Fri 26th April 2013

doing the spring shift

There it goes again. Booooooooom! 4am, April 20. Bang on time. The bittern is back in the marshes. Gotta be spring out there, right? And yes, finally it is: bursting out of its cherry-plum celandine and alexander seams. I've been tracking it since we went to the woods down at Dunwich in March. First the honeysuckle, then the foxglove, then the odd blue veronica winking along the curb. We checked out wild daffodils on the tumulus and goat willow at East Hill and they were finally in their splendour. I saw my first bumblebee and first butterfly (tortoiseshell) and sat barefoot on the doorstep, prepping veg, face in the sun.

You think it means nothing a shift of season, but after this long, dark and bitter winter Spring feels like a reprieve. We're warm for the first time in months and a feeling of lightness and happiness is flooding the house. At our first Sustainable Bungay wellbeing walk a crew of us walked around Bungay on the first really great sunny day of the year, mapping the streets and green spaces. We met at the community garden and everyone shared their favourite places, the edges of carparks and rivers, the commons, certain streets, trees and  houses.

We set off to visit the now community-owned, Falcon Meadow and  the wonky colourful Bridge Street, once the main thoroughfare and site of the Halloween pumpkin festival. We exchanged our experiences and memories, knowledge about birds, trees, history, delighted at the texture of place - brick, flint, faded wood - the river, alleyways, benches, footpaths, the pattern language of our town and finally ended up at Bungay Tea Rooms, everyone's favourite cafe, where we sat in the garden with tea and chips.

The sun shone gloriously. We felt good. Not just in ourselves, but with each other. Life was harder for all of us, but treasuring the day and this town we share made it seem all right. We mapped out the walks we are going to do this summer too, including swimming down the river Waveney and holding our annual picnic by the shore. And then Mark and I did a manita de gata (cat's paw) tidy of the community garden and delighted in all the green shoots of the herbs and plants that made it through the dark and cold.

Right now in the garden under the budding greengage tree, the coldwater champion of England and fearless Transitioner, Lucy Neal, has established her caravan. We have begun work on the book, Playing for Time and each week over the summer she is coming to stay for three days and we are hammering out the Work in the tiny crucible. Here I am sorting out the hexagonal sections that make up the centre of the book: contributions from the artists, writers and practitioners who gathered at Lumb Bank. Lucy recently wrote about our experiences on the Arts Council blog here:

http://blog.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/arts-council-england-blog/playing-time 

This week we are looking at each of those sections, starting with one that matters more than anything . .

Images: honeysuckle and foxglove in Dunwich Wood, March; arts, culture and wellbeing walk en route to Falcon Meadow, April; in Lucy's caravan; message to Mark at the wild daffodil tumulus!

Happy Mondays through the Window

Sustainable Bungay's Happy Monday at the Community Kitchen has been preparing from scratch and serving up delicious meals for 50 people every month for almost two years now, with the focus on locally-sourced ingredients and community engagement. And there's also the flowers...

Nineteen degrees! That was the temperature on Monday (15th April) late afternoon in Bungay as I dropped Charlotte off at the Community Centre where she was co-cooking the April meal as part of Sustainable Bungay’s Happy Monday crew. The highest in a very low temperature year so far. T-shirts? Outside? For months I’ve only known T-shirts as the bottom layer of several (and that’s been in bed!).

I was down for meeting and greeting people as they came in for the meal and had a couple of hours to spare, so I wandered round the back of the building and found the remnants of a garden there. Packed with tansy (I must make that old recipe, tansy pudding, one spring) and the odd fennel and lamb’s ear, and loads of red deadnettle, it was the kind of place I love, a bit of a wasteground, a bit of a garden.

I moved some of the rubbish and cleaned up a few discarded plastic jugs and containers. They might come in handy sometime.

Then I looked up, and through a window I saw the kitchen crew in the midst of preparation (it’s quite an intense experience in that Happy Monday’s kitchen, making a 2-course, multi-dish meal for 50 people from scratch in two and three quarter hours).

The menu this month was: barley and beetroot risotto, black badger peas with sundried tomato and preserved lemons, grated carrot and mustard salad and stuffed portobello mushrooms with a nettle pesto. The dessert was a chocolate crunch base topped with soaked prunes, Greek yoghurt and garnished with a sweet violet. It was delicious! And all for a fiver!

Through the window in the picture at the top you can see Margaret. Though she didn’t see me at first! Each month for Happy Monday, Margaret makes sure the tables are decked with flowers and greenery and always puts on a lovely show along with the help of one or two other people.

Yesterday she’d brought ivy, sweet violets (which also adorned the dessert), forsythias and daffodils to set the scene and we talked about everything being so late this year.

I told Margaret I’d planted some seeds from a cut flower I picked up from a roadside stall last September and they were the first to sprout of the ones I’d sown so far. The plant is a China aster called ‘Hulk’ (Callistephus chinensis ‘Hulk’) – I found that out by poring over the Chiltern Seeds 2012 catalogue from the beginning, looking at everything under Asteraceae). Luckily I only needed to go as far as ‘C’.

Margaret said she’d like to find some spare land, maybe part of an allotment that’s not being used, to grow flowers specially for Happy Mondays. Do contact us if you know of any. Meanwhile I’ve promised her to plant some of those ‘Hulks’.

“Do bees like them,” Margaret asked. “I’m trying to only sow bee-friendly plants.”

“Funny you should say that,” I replied. “I just found this picture of the Hulk on Flickr by someone called Viveka in Sweden. There’s both a bee and a hoverfly on the flowers. The picture below is of the original roadside stall bunch from last September, with the Hulk on the bottom right accompanied by dahlias, chrysanths and perennial sunflowers. The green ‘ray florets’ are actually leaves.

Images and text by Mark Watson and Josiah Meldrum: Happy Mondays through the Window, April 2013 (MW); Washing discarded plastic jugs for reuse (MW); Chocolate crunch with prunes, yoghurt and violets (JM); Violets, Forsythia and Ivy – Margaret’s flower display for April’s Happy Monday (MW); Roadside stall flowers from Suffolk, September 2012 (MW)

NB: All text and pics subject to Creative Commons with Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives license

This (amended and expanded) post first appeared on Mark in Flowers on 16th April 2013

From the Mourning of the World to Happy Mondays

This year I'm co-curating one of the stages at the Uncivilisation Festival. All manner of poetry, prose and performance will take place on the Woodland Stage, as well as workshops in the woods (programme to appear soon!) When night falls and the fires are lit, the musicians will take over. Amongst them will be singer Marmaduke Dando, who this year has compiled an album of some of wild and uncivilised music associated with the Dark Mountain Project.

From the Mourning of the World features an alternate version of Caesar, recorded specially for the album by Chris Wood, as well as celebrated artists such as Jon Boden, Chris T-T and Bethia Beadman (whose track is a duet with REM’s Mike Mills). 

Like many creative grassroot projects, Dark Mountain funds its annual anthology by crowdsourcing - a kind of community-supported publishing. You order a book (or in this case an LP) by pre-ording a copy, and this in turn pays for the production. Following the trend and in the spirit of celebrating the beautiful and the physicial, From the Mourning of the World will be a 12” double-gatefold vinyl album, with a cover by the wonderful Rima Staines. Check out the crowdfunding page here:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/from-the-mourning-of-the-world.

I'm planning to give a workshop on Earth Dreaming at Unciv this year, and there will be more about this and other creative Transition projects during 2013, from Playing for Time to the new Arts, Culture and Wellbeing group. But right now I've got to proof the upcoming second issue of Transition Free Press and go make nettle pesto and beetroot risotto for our April Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen. Stay tuned!