Entering the Fifth Zone - 2012

I confess. I am having an affair, and looking ahead as we are this week, I see it's going to become serious. I love Transition and the whole resilience thing. I have been faithful to the max to her for three years, but someone else came back into my life this month and my attention and my typing keeps wandering in her direction.

Her name is 52 Flowers That Shook My World. She is a book about plants and thanks to this blog (and Simeon who inspired me to write about it in our Sustainable Livelihoods week), the Uncivilisation Festival and Two Ravens Press, she is about to be published this summer. I love writing blogs, but there is something about the printed page. There is something about wild and medicine plants that takes me to places no meeting or community event can ever reach.

You could say the affair was inevitable given the times we are living in, where the symptoms of systemic collapse are all about us - financial markets crashing, methane spouting through the Arctic tundra. One thing I learned from experience: pushed to the edge, the best of ourselves can come to the fore. Close to death, no one worries about social niceties, about paying the mortgage or what people think of their hair. They remember the plum tree as it blossoms, or people they once cherished. And often they ask themselves: did I live life as I could, was I bold or free enough, did I love people as I could have, and the world?

52 Flowers was written at an edge time, when I had just returned from travelling. It's subtitle is A Radical Return to Earth and it looks at the steps modern people need to take to get back down to earth, the tools that will turn the tanker around as Jon put it yesterday. Most of all it considers the wild places, the fifth zone of permaculture, without which nothing in the zones closer to home and garden makes sense. It looks at the big frame in which Transition sits, the physical nature of the planet and our position in the vast wheel of time. 2012 is a big year, crunch time for civilisation, discussed as the culmination point in some spheres, as the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. It is the end of a huge cycle of time in a calendar that stretches across 5,000 years.

Oh, no, Charlotte! Not the Mayan calendar, you cry. But listen: to be truly resilient we need other ways of looking at life and ourselves if we are going to weather the storm that's brewing on the horizon. We need to connect with all our relations on the planet and know we are not just consumers and house-owners/renters, stuck in what we call History. This is how the book begins in 1991, with a Mexican plant called epazote that leads me on a journey to discover that we are more interesting, more powerful, than any of our parents or teachers or "leaders" would like us to think we are. I'm not talking woo-woo workshop or crystals here, I mean being activists for change in a real way, in our minds, bodies and hearts, in everyday life.

Here's an idea about time that I discovered on my travels. The Mayan people call the human being winclil which means vibratory root. The harmony and beauty of the spheres is perceived on earth by different “tribes” or types of human beings (which correspond to the different days of the week in their three calendars). These human roots vibrate in the fabric of life at different frequencies. Most modern human winclils however are deactivated. Lacking connection with the living systems of the planet, we vibrate only when artificially stimulated by sex and war, which creates an incoherent, low frequency. Mayan systems (such as we understand them in the modern world) activate the life-forces in order to create a high and coherent frequency. In short, instead of making noise, human beings make music. You only have to look at their textiles to know what this colourful world looks like.

In the forest where the passionflower grows, where its leaves have been used as a poultice for thousands of years, the Maya sit in small straw huts and weave patterns of extraordinary complexity, the most beautiful fabrics of the world in all the colours of the quetzal bird. In their imaginations and in their hearts they hold calendars of equal complexity, that rotate at different speeds like the stars around the sun. They have held these complex patterns inside them for thousands of years – patterns of time, of colour, of beauty. They held them before the cities came and after they fell into ruin. The temples did not hold them. The temples never do (2: Passionflower, 52 Flowers That Shook My World)

So forecasting ahead and describing what I wish to see happen, or think I might see happen (which are different things) is a year of living within a wider perspective. A year in which the bigger forces come into play, whether we like it or not. A year when Transition is understood within a frame of the wild places. When all activists, all social movements for change, are understood as vital strands in a worldwide web. As the bringers of colour and vibrancy and harmony, within a black-and-white, dissonant culture. The collective butterfly emerging from an all-consuming, caterpillar world.

On the ground I plan to continue the Social Reporting project that had its successful pilot this year, this blog, the Low Carbon Cookbook and the communications work for Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay. I'll keep spreading the word about our myriad projects and events, our community-building and low-carbon ethos that are key to resilience in downshifting and difficult times. But elsewhere I'll be coming out with 52 Flowers, speaking about life in the fifth zone, connecting with our wildness and our inner transformative abilities. This will start next month with a talk on Roots for the Plant Medicine Bed at the Library Community Garden which Mark will write about tomorrow. Watch this space!

Climbing the Temple of the Magician, Uxmal, Mexico, 1991; Wild by Jay Griffiths and Martin's woodworking tools, Uncivilisaiton Festival, August 2011; with Teresa and Cecilia in Real de Catorce, 1993, from 52 Flowers that Shook my World; fairtrade textiles from Mayan Traditions; speaking about medicine plants at Transition Camp, October 2011;

the spark that lights the stove

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"People don't want to be told about those things anymore," said Diana. We're at a Dark Mountain meeting on a dark December night in a small house in Pottergate. Nine of us, arts and science PhD students mostly, are sitting in a circle. We're working out a way we can create an event, based on Iain McGilchrist's work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

One of the characteristics of the left hemisphere is that it gets overloaded with too much information. It can only cope with one problem at a time, segregated into boxes with right and wrong, yes and no solutions. Phil, a marine biologist, who also helps run Norwich's weekly FoodCycle Cafe, has suggested we show what lies behind the industrialised food machine.

To face that kind of reality and make complex, consensus decisions you need to enter the right hemisphere and see everything it takes - plants, animals, people, land, systems, water - to bring our daily bread on to the table. You need imagination, feeling, connection and right relation. To understand all-things-at-once and undergo a complete change of heart is what sages once called illumination - the light bulb moment when everything becomes clear. It's the fire-brand that all creators steal to bring warmth and nourishment to the people.


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At The Nectar Cafe off the Unthank Road a small circle of people, Transitioners mostly, are sitting before a midwinter meal of spicy dahl, chickpea stew, millet, buckwheat, pumpkins, sprouts, parsnips, almond cheese, wild mushrooms and red bean hummus. We're closing up the year and discussing how to proceed with our Low Carbon Cookbook. I'm eating something I have never tasted in my life. It's dried curly kale that tastes of cheddar. Chewy, strange and very very more-ish*.

Jo's shelves are stacked with local herb teas and hedgerow cordials and jars and jars of lacto-fermented vegetables, chutney and salsas. A tall jar of sliced preserved carrots stands on the side, next to our brewing chai from redbush and home-made almond milk. Jo has been preparing all autumn for next year's hungry gap. Her cafe, like our Low Carbon Cookbook, is seasonal to the max. To live within these kind of constraints happily, as we have discovered, requires a whole different approach to cooking and living life. It's something that all cooks and creators find as they bridge the gap between the left and the right ways of seeing the world - the spark that lights the stove.

The spark is what you look for when you write a book, a creative way to mix that left-side heavy-duty information and the right-side possibilities of living lightly in synch with the planet. None of us wants to write an entertainment, or a text book. What makes you pick up a cookbook? we are asking each other around the table. To proceed towards a low-carbon future an imaginative relationship with the physical world is necessary, which certain key commitments have already been made. What wastes time is convincing people you think don't want to know. What we need is an encounter that illuminates the dilemma our industrialised culture is in. What we need is to be rekindled by something stronger, more alluring than any feel-bad information. Something you never thought of before, like curly kale tasting of cheese.

What you need is a practice. A spark that lights up your mind.

Field kitchen
In Japan a sixty year old farmer decided to write a book about farming and food. It is called The One Straw Revolution. For forty years, contrary to all modern Japanese agricultural practices after the war, the ex-scientist Masanobu Fukuoka tended his small fields of rice and wheat and orchards of tangerines without any pesticides or technology. He did not till or weed the soil or use machines and his fields yielded as much grain as the monoculture that surrounded his traditional hillside farm. When pests swept through the land his crops survived. He called his way of interacting with the land natural farming and maintained (until his death in 2008 aged ninety five) that a healthy body came out of a healthy environment. To keep sane and sound you needed to eat according to nature and the territory in which you live. Food that needed to be struggled for to obtain was the least beneficial. Nature or the body itself was the guide you needed to follow,“but this subtle guidance goes unheard by most people because of the clamour caused by desire and the discriminating mind.”

To restore the body requires a readaption to nature. To renovate exhausted soil or soil rendered sterile with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizer requires perseverance. It takes time for the body, revved up by an exotic, highly processed, high-fat Western diet, to reorganise and recover its natural appetite. It takes time to learn how to absorb the kind of food Fukuoka (and several contemporary Western writers on food) are talking about: plenty of plants, not much meat, not much. It takes time to break habits and to let go of the complexity of diets and science in one’s mind and the emotional reactions caused by an unnatural way of life. To engage in a way of being where food is naturally limited by place and time.

Once engaged in this process however your body self-organises in a revolutionary way: you don’t suffer from depression, anger or restlessness, you are not filled with the desires and cravings of the modern snack-and-go culture, the hostility that comes as a consequence of eating unnaturally formed plants and caged animals. However this transformative re-naturalisation process is rarely discussed. Our present Western diet, with its glamour, its comforts and its treats, fully backed by a corporate food industry, is the elephant in the room. And no one wants to go there.

Except that we have to go there, because it’s killing us and everything else in the room. The industrial food machine has substituted lifestyle for life, a way of thinking that convinces us we have a choice and that the choices we take have no consequence. But this does not mean that consequences do not exist. To continue to uphold our lifestyle, to choose cheap and convenient food, means we choose to compromise not only the natural life of eco-systems and the livelihoods of farmers everywhere (including those in East Anglia) but also the very nature of our own bodies and minds. For the future to happen we don’t need choice in the kitchen, we need to make decisions.

This decision starts as we stand at the chopping board and by the stove. It doesn’t mean facing another direction so we don’t see the elephant, it means facing reality and undergoing a radical shift of values. Reality is what we are doing everyday with our hands, our ability to ask intelligent questions: What does it mean to eat and cook in connection with the living systems, ecologically, to take account of the consequences of our actions? What does it take to live and eat within our means?

Our book is about growing food and about eating food. As well as the bring-to-share recipes, resources and carbon calculations, we look at the decisions people are making not only to re-establish links with the living world but also with each other. The industrial food machine, powered by cheap fossil fuel, has enabled some of us to dine like Roman emperors. Eating for resilience means we will eat a lot more like peasants, more simply and more often together.

This book looks at what it takes to make these kinds of practical decisions, what happens in an energy descent kitchen, what kind of food you cook in downshift cuisine. How you go about putting life back into plants, into the pot, what Hopi farmers call navoti, the life in the seed, and Mexican cooks call chispa, the spark that fires up human beings.

The pilot light that fires us all from within.

*CRISPY CURLY KALE: Marinate small pieces of curly kale in olive oil, garlic, ginger and tamari overnight. Dry in dehydrator or low oven for a couple of hours. Store in an air tight container. The key with processing any raw food is not to cook it over 39 degrees, the point at which the enzymes are destroyed. The Nectar Cafe is at 16 Onley Street, Tue-Sat, 10am-5pm.

Photos: Gwyl y Golau or the Festival of Light in Machynlleth from Ann Owen's Social Reporting post on Arts and Creativity in Transition; Masanobu Fukuoka in the field; wheel of the local food year from One Straw Revolution; chia, food plant of the future by Mark Watson

Low Carbon Celebrations 2 - Solar Power

Up before 4 this morning and on our bikes to the beach for the solstice sunrise. It had rained in the night and the air was soft and warm and filled with birdsong.

Besides one other person further down the beach with a dog, we were alone with the sea, the land, the sky and the morning.

We weren’t going to see the sun rise over the sea because there was a layer of cloud. But if you’re still and attentive you can feel the shift as the sun comes up. Then there’s an increase in light, the gold lining around the clouds intensifies, and you know that the star that powers our planet and makes life possible is there.

Anyone who gets involved in Transition becomes aware of the mighty subject of energy. We talk about it all the time. We look at where it comes from and ask how are we going to save it. What are we going to do about rising costs of food, heating, transport? Where does the food I eat and and the fuel I use originate? Who works to provide them? In what conditions? How much energy is needed to provide for our basic needs? How much as individuals and as a society do we waste on what we don’t need?

And what about that society? In our hearts we know that to continue the current consumerist and individualist lifestyle, fuelled and propelled by the availability of vast quantities of fossil fuels over the past 150 years is a logical fallacy – because, to quote Make Wealth History, “the earth can’t afford our lifestyle.” And those resources are physically limited.

But what does this mean for us as those very individualists? What do we each have to do to become the people we need to become for a fair, liveable future with the inevitable energy-constraints? What do I have to do?

How are we actually going to learn to share space, time, skills, food, ‘resources’? How do we drop centuries-old antagonistic, competitive ways of being in the world with our fellow humans? Those jealousies and envies which plague social interactions from the most intimate of friendships and relationships, to the most well-intentioned groups, because they are there, and have been for what seems like forever? How do we let go of our need to grasp, cling and be proprietorial? To own things and people all the time? How do we let go of I want what you’ve got? And move to how we make the best of what we've got - fairly, and before it's gone?

I’m not saying I have the answers to these questions. But I think to ask them is important. And then to pay attention to what comes up when we do give them time and space.


In tomorrow’s post I’ll be reporting on Sustainable Bungay’s midsummer Green Drinks which takes place tonight. The subject in honour of National Bike Week is Community Transport.


Pics: Before Summer Solstice Sunrise Southwold 2011; After Summer Solstice Sunrise Southwold 2011; In the Path of the Risen Solstice Sun; Low Carbon travel

The 6th Resistance: " It can't be done"

When we talk mindset changes, desired big geo-political changes, or new freedoms for currently oppressed groups, about the most common reaction in the mainstream seems to be: "It can't be done", ....or "....you're being too idealistic".

Of course we can all think of momentous shifts that actually have taken place historically, and against the odds: the ending of slavery, votes for women, the independence of India (from Britain), the fall of the Berlin wall..........but somehow these are often regarded as exceptional.

Yet there are numerous, but less well known, examples of small groups overcoming the "it can't be done" resistance. Take a household name like Oxfam. Years ago I used to go around schools in Norfolk giving talks about various Oxfam projects. With smaller kids especially, I liked to tell them the story of how Oxfam began. It goes like this:

In the thick of the second European war (in 1942), 2 very ordinary citizens of Oxford met in a house to decide to act on the plight of refugees in Greece, which at the time was occupied by Hitler's forces. They decided, these 2 people, to organise a local clothes collection, and before long a committee had been formed - small amounts of clothes were sent to occupied Greece to assist the refugees. The idea caught on, and larger and larger shipments of clothes were sent. Within 9 months, the shipments became so large that the U.K. Government's War Ministry (yes, it was called that), became worried enough to write to the group - called the 'Oxford Committee for Famine Relief' - worried that the clothing would fall into the hands of the occupying forces. Does this sound familiar?! The group persisted, and by the mid-1950s, it was sending clothes and money to several war-ravaged countries.

Fast forward to 2010, and Oxfam, as it became known, now works in over 80 countries and spends £235M a year.

I have a quotation on my desk: " People who say that it cannot be done, should not interrupt people who are doing it".

Doing it, may not lead to change, or some big organisation - but not doing it, can't possibly lead to anything (except sloth or supporting the status quo!). Put another way, saying "it can't be done" is a self-determining argument.

Doing it doesn't always lead to success, but it does always teach us new skills, makes us wiser, and above all keeps idealism alive. 'It' - the doing - can always be done.

The Fifth Resistance: Denial

This is a picture Mark took of my brother Matthew and his girlfriend Karen Binns and me, standing outside an English teashop in Greenwich Village. The year is 1992. I’ve been spending the winter in New York and we’re just about to take the train up to Chicago and down through the snowy wastes of the Mid-West to Santa Fe - where we'll meet Jamie Sams who will utter the immortal words:

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

It’s the first time I've come across the word. It’s not the first time I’ve come across denial of course. That’s why I’m starting with this picture from way back: because Karen, part Native American like Jamie, had a way of speaking that came directly from the heart and shook you to the core. At a farewell dinner before I broke away from my old London life, my family was chattering away in the restaurant as if nothing was happening. That’s when Karen said:

“They’re not listening. She’s out of here!”

Denial is the response to things that are happening to us we don’t like, can’t face or deal with. Our minds blank them: we minimise or project them away from ourselves. We might acknowledge the words, but not the feeling reality. This is a psychological denial. A cornerstone of childhood and addiction therapy, of 12 step programmes. Family stuff, personal stuff.

When Jamie Sams talked about denial it was within the context of the new age, during the 90s when it was widely believed that American-style inner work would turn the world around. Denial was a word bandied about like “judgement” and “transformation” and for a long time during those travelling years, I thought it signalled a wilful kind of refusal to “deal with your stuff”.

But that’s not really the reason why the people I had spent the first 36 years of my life with fell away. When I joined Transition I came to realise that denial is intricately built into our culture and that it’s social and political as much as psychological. (“People like us don’t leave the country and explore themselves”). We’re blinkered from birth by our upbringing and our education to fit what class and creed we come from and to uphold the status quo. In order for those artificial systems to work we need to dismiss a lot of contradictory evidence. Most of all we have to deny and minimise the suffering that entails. Our own humanity and the world of feeling creatures we live among.

The reason denial is a deadly resistance for Transition is that in order to shift from “oil dependency to local resilience” we need to unravel our conditioning and see the colossal difficulty we’re faced with: our home planet entering an emergency state. This is no easy matter. Our culture denies the consequences of History, of capitalism, of industrialisation at every turn. We deny the effects of our consumerism every time we shop. We leave out information, jump facts and distract ourselves with fantasies and pleasures, including the kind of spirituality that has told us that a global “shift in consciousness” is something that happens on its own keep doing the yoga. As a result we literally don’t see what is in front of our eyes. We are elsewhere in our minds.

The fact is we are all part of an empire that has been exploiting nature and other peoples for millennia and we’re facing the consequences of that domination. In order to act, we need to see, and in order to see our superior, escapist, know-it-all minds will have to cede to the kinder authority of our hearts.

The heart, unlike the mind, is infinitely flexible and can cope with many facts at once. It can cohere experience and join up the dots. It can cope with not-knowing, with letting go, with suffering, with the poignancy of leaving people and places. It is naturally empathic with other life-forms. What it needs, however, is time. It’s suppressed by a busy-busy culture that deliberately goes way too fast for its slower, more organic intelligence. And that’s the real shift as I see it. From being a mind-controlled people to heart-governed people who use their minds for what they are supposed to be used for: tools to expand consciousness.

Transition gives us a frame in which to switch tracks. It gives us a chance to undergo change and explore unknown territory, so long as we engage in it on a real and radical level. If we do the 12 steps and don’t think of it as another environmental pressure group, or in terms of our own vested interests. Or that life is going to continue in the same way, just with solar panels and bicycles. If we don’t deny the people in the room, our comrades in Transition. If we have the courage to feel everything that we have left out and take responsibility (that’s real responsibility, not guilt!) and drop everything we don’t need (yes that’s us, not them!), then something extraordinary might happen on this planet we call earth. Something all our relations have been waiting for. For a very, very long time.

Above: outside Tea and Sympathy in New York, 1992; Dandelion clock with dew, Suffolk, 2010.

Deadly Resistance #4 - "I just don't have the time"

I love this cartoon - my friend Chris had it on his desk at work, and it always made me laugh. In a wry sort of way.

Modern life, for all its benefits and pleasures, can sometimes feel like a rat-race. For twelve years I lived in London, commuting daily, first into the city, then out of the city, to industrial and commercial estates along the M4 hi-tech corridor. R and I rented a flat together, got a car, got a mortgage. We worked long hours. We ate out. At the weekends, we went shopping. Bought stuff.

And we never stopped. Never stood still. Looking back, that period of our lives is just a blur. What did we do with our time? It seemed we never had any. People talk about the modern symptom of being "cash-rich, time-poor". I'm not sure we were ever cash-rich, but time-poor, yep, I can relate to that.

Lack of time prevents us from doing. It can prevent us from getting involved with our communities, from sharing our time with others, from joining movements like Transition. And it can limit our ability to do what we know to be right. If I'm perpetually in a rush, it can seem like a reasonable thing to just jump in the car and zip over to Asda to get a loaf of bread. "I just don't have time to walk there," I'll tell myself. Food becomes "fast food", "convenience food", our streets becomes places we rush through to get to work, to the shops, to somewhere else, anywhere else; our neighbours just people that we wave to, briefly, as we hurry on our journey. Must dash. Gotta go. People to meet, things to do.

Modern life caters for, and perpetuates, this constant motion. Feeds it and feeds off it.

When I became a parent, I swapped one form of time-poverty for another. Parents of young children rarely get time to themselves, or even time to think. Yet, in a very real sense, my children forced me to slow down, to approach life at their pace. They're not interested in deadlines, they're only interested in the moment, and at its best, that moment is simply about being with you, playing, reading, cuddling, just being.

And so my children made me, happily, reappraise my own relationship with time. And if I can slow down, anyone can. It doesn't have to be children, of course. If there's something in your life that encourages you to slow down - a hobby, an interest, a commitment to someone else - then embrace it, and you may find your life the richer for it.

It doesn't always work out quite right. I have a demanding job, a family. I'm still very busy. I'm not as active a Transitioner as I'd like to be. But I've made the time, and made a start, like being part of this Blog. Making a positive choice to slow down allows me to take more notice of what's happening around me, make better choices, travel more lightly on the earth. Sure, I still have days where I feel like I'm a rat in the modern maze. But less often. And the quiet days, the still days, are the more precious for it.

The August 2009 edition of National Geographic had an article about the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula. I read:

Their culture, rooted in the nomad's need for perpetual motion, values the relative luxury of stillness and calm

We could do worse than learn to do the same.

Sloth

I’m not sure that Sloth is really the correct title for this post but it was the best that I could come up with to describe the particular Resistance to Transition that I am going to write about – and it enables me to use this nice picture of a Sloth! Maybe you can suggest a better word to describe the reluctance shown by many people to take some action – however small that action may be.

Way back in the last century I used to run a Friends of the Earth group and I still have a vivid memory of people coming to meetings and their first words would be ‘You could do xxxxx’ – only rarely did someone say ‘I will do yyyyy’. There was no shortage of great ideas – enough to keep all the FOE groups in the country busy – but a great shortage of people prepared to do some legwork.

The Sloth is inactive because its food provides very little energy, humans don’t have that excuse. The problem that I see is that since the middle of the last century people have been brought up to believe that someone else will fix every problem. Politicians will sort out the state, doctors will provide a pill for every ill, someone else will pick up the litter. In many ways our quality of life has improved, people live longer and more healthy lives but we have handed control of our lives (and our diets) to the state and to global businesses.

I understand a key tenet of Transition to be that people act as individuals to make changes to their own behaviour and that the many small actions taken by individuals builds into a big wave of change. I very much agree with the tenet and I don’t think that politicians and business are going to provide the leadership that we need but I’m worried by how few people are prepared to get involved in – well, anything really. It is so much easier to sit in front of the TV, consume unhealthy things and wait for someone else to sort out the mess.

Picture of sloth from Wikimedia commons