You don't have to be mad to be a transitioner but it helps

This politically incorrect statement used to be around every office in the '90s in the form of 'You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps'. I was out with my mother shopping in Peterborough and was surprised at how friendly everyone was and how many people she knew. It then dawned on me that she didn't know any of them and this was an aspect of her dementia. I have since heard of other neurological conditions with a similar outcome. But why do you have to have some kind of brain impediment before you will smile and say hello to someone you do not know?

Living transitionally means you may behave in ways that look a little odd. You may ask to borrow something that is really cheap to buy such as a cake tin. If you are cycling places then you tend to arrive slightly sweaty and multi-layered. You might eat strange things in the lunch break such as last nights leftovers. The other day I walked round the office asking if anyone was driving to our headquarters and felt rather embarrassed as people looked me up and down in wonderment at my lack of transport. 'Is she too poor to have a car?' 'Perhaps she has something wrong with her and is not allowed to drive'. Our company has now joined liftshare which means you can log on and find someone else going on the same journey and cadge a lift. Its kind of like a computerized hitchhiking with the knowledge that the person works for the same people as you.

You may also look generally poor by not flying abroad on holiday or buying the latest flat screen TV. So as well as being odd you will be poor and odd thereby lowering your status further.

However you will be oblivious of all this because you will be having such a good time connecting with people you share lifts, food and cake tins with. Different things will be important to you, for example I nearly crashed my car the other day ( yes I still have one) because every year I decorate the pine tree on the puppet theatre roundabout with secondhand baubles. This year I drove past looking for a place to park when I saw that someone else had already done it! I threw my head back with laughter! I have created a TRADITION.

Oh and the photograph? I just googled 'baubles' to look for someone who looked stranger than me and it didn't take long.

Don't read this if you think I might be giving you a present

So its Christmas time and I have been trying as usual to buy low carbon presents without alienating too many people. I think that Jesus would not want us to celebrate his birthday by destroying the planet that he spent all week (and possibly longer) making.

A few months ago I had all these amazing ideas for presents but with only a few days to go I am panicking slightly as not everything has quite worked out. Somethings I was going to make I never really did make and ended up on facebook playing scrabble instead. Other things didnt really turn out as they should have because they involved such random processes as boiling knitting in a washing machine. On the up side I have a new girlfriend and I decided to make her a scarf out of all the wool I had left over from various projects. You can see the result here. I am very pleased with it and she is buying me a ticket for the pantomime which I am very much looking forward to.

My brother specifically asked for a clock radio so I shall be buying that. Dad is getting a new jumper. My friends who are less specific in their requests are mostly getting the sloe vodka I made after I met Charlotte and Mark for the weekend and we collected sloes. Some other people will get crab apple jelly. At work I usually go round giving out fudge that I buy from the market. It is actually made on the market so low food miles!

I don't really do cards and I would like to say that this is to save trees or that I give the money to charity but the truth is I just can't be bothered. I don't actually see the point in giving a card to someone I will see so I have decided to send emails to anyone I won't see and tell them something that I have appreciated about them that year. I got the idea from a friend of mine who recently had a leaving do for work and said it was like being at his own funeral and hearing nice stuff about you but without having to die.

So that is really it. Oh and I have been invited to a winter solstice tree dressing which I am very excited about as I have photographed the oak tree on Mousehold heath for a number of years but never knew who dressed it and then I bumped into a woman at a conference and she invited me to join the group who do it (strangley this was still without her knowing that I had photographed it). The only trouble is she didnt tell me what time and I am wondering if I can be bothered to wait by a tree all day like someone has been stood up for a pagan ritual.

So there you have it, my guide to low carbon Christmas and I will be getting the train to Peterborough to see my family and probably finishing presents as I travel. So look out for someone sewing on the train, it may be me!

Esther Rantzen has made us all love funny shaped vegetables

If you were watching television in Britain in the '80s you will see funny shaped vegetables differently from other people. This is due to a programme called 'That's life'. If I remember rightly members of the public would send in root vegetables that looked a bit rude. So in honour of this programme I have uploaded a picture of my first carrot from farmshare. This one is rather demure I think.

Anyway if you haven't joined farm share then I would recommend it. You get fresh vegetables every week and if you have time you can chat over a cup of tea with others as you collect every Thursday. I didn't join at first because I thought I would have to a lot of digging but I can actually volunteer in different ways. So now I just have to make sure I use all the veg every week. Last night I cooked vegetable pie and as my flat mate complemented the sweetness of the carrots I was regailing her with the advantages of organically grown food when I remembered I bought them at Morrisons... well it is Wednesday, I had to restock!

the spark that lights the stove

i
"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.


ii
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

walking the time-line - a torch song

. . .in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape a servile life into the freedom of just conditions (memorial to Robert Kett, Norwich Castle)

In 2009 four of us from TN's Transition Circles– myself, Mark, Helen and Alex - began a project called The Dreaming of Norwich. We would meet up for a day, go walkabout in the city and then reconvene and share our findings. We walked along the river, through the market, visited buildings, sat in gardens, by ourselves and together. Helen photographed the streets, Mark wrote notes. Alex and I sparred under the willow trees outside Julian of Norwich's cell.

During our first journey I climbed the steps to the Castle. It was a hot day and in the meadow below the ramparts I counted 42 species of flowers and trees. Norwich Castle was built by the Norman as a fortress and overlooks the old Saxon settlement and the historical quarters of this small modernised city. I had just been reading John Berger's Hold Everything Dear about the occupation of Palestinian land, and the image of the Israeli watchtowers on the hills kept coming into my mind.

Same domination, same mindset, different century.

To find the dreaming of places requires you to shift your attention into what some call the right-hemisphere - a perception of the world brilliantly conveyed by the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and the Emissary. For a 12 minute whistlestop tour of the relationship between our left and right hemispheres and how these affect behaviour and culture do watch this video:



Kett's Rebellion
Last week some of us from Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay went with Occupy Norwich on a memorial march up to the Castle to commemorate Robert Kett and the Norfolk uprising that took place in 1549. Ian lit several flambards as we stood at the spot where Kett was killed, and listened to Andy Wood, professor of social history at the UEA, talk about the commonwealth and the people's struggle for fairness and liberty in the face of a "hard-hearted" elite. At the height of the rebellion the camp on Mousehold Heath housed 10,000 people until it was brutally suppressed by foreign soldiers under the Earl of Warwick.

Something happens at night when you gather together, when you gather beneath the citadels of power. All those experiential right-hemisphere connections that link centuries and nations, Mousehold Heath with the Occupy camp at Hay Hill, the barons with the bankers. At the Uncivilisation Festival this year all the great events - music, storytelling, performances - happened in the dark, in the woods, by candlelight and firelight.

By night we remember something else of ourselves. Something our 1066 civilisation doesn't want us to see.

The dreaming is in the people
Our year of dreaming together did not complete itself. By winter an argument had broken out between us and even though we explored our differences, using a method known as conflict resolution, we could not come to an agreement. The allegiance demanded by history and civilisation destroyed our every attempt.

That's when I realised new ways of proceeding would not be found within these kinds of self-absorbed endeavour, no matter how intelligent or well meaning, but within another context entirely.

Finding our way back
The reason I am writing about this today is because time is a mysterious thing and in order to proceed within Transition we need to see ourselves within a bigger political frame, to access our deep memory of how life works beyond the way we have been taught to look at it, as resources for the few. We live in a culture that keeps us trapped in a fearful present, afraid of looking back, afraid of looking forward (what future? is there a future?), trapped in the objectifying, separating, hierarchical world of the left hemisphere.

When you allow yourself to look back you can find treasures that you didn't see when you were fiercely embedded in the present moment (even in those conflicts many of us have experienced in Transition), what Roberto Calasso in his great work on the French Revolution, The Ruin of Kasch, calls the douceur of the past, the sweet essence of experience, tempered by time. We live on an island where time and memory have a great influence on our imaginations. Some of this is called History and is carefully managed and exploited by the custodians of civilisation. It is praised and worshipped in the form of buildings and possessions and figures of power, whilst the knowledge of how the earth and the people really are remains elsewhere, hidden from view.

In the mysterious all-encompassing universe of our right hemisphere consciousness and the empathy of the heart.

This is the part of ourselves that can make connections, that can step outside the official version of history and see the pattern of things. This is the perception, for example, that Justin Kenrick, in Land Reform: losing and recovering the Commons employs as he juxtaposes the present land-grabbing in Africa, with the historical clearances of Scotland and England.

Same domination, same mindset, different continent.

In many ways capitalism began here in East Anglia with the enclosure of the commons, said the historian, as we stood beside the plaque where Kett was hanged on a freezing December day.

As the almost-full moon appeared in the sky.

Finding our way back
Our last dreaming journey took place outside the city in the East Anglian waterlands. We walked toward the estuary, through the marshland, along the shoreline, sat in a grove of sweet chestnut trees and found a tiny slow worm basking in the autumn sun. What we concluded that day was that the medicine of the heart this majestic nut tree embodied, was key to our reestablishing proper relations with the earth.

Our quarrel, such as it was, was the quarrel that breaks out between the left and the right hemisphere when such attempts at return are made. The Master knows he needs the Emissary to carry out the task in hand, but the Emissary believes he is the master of the universe and denies any other authority exists. This is the big problem in our world. One the Kogi Elders of Colombia call the struggle between the Older and Younger Brother. It plays out in ourselves and our societies. The 1% dominator mindset that refuses to listen to anything but its own voice.

When you struggle through the conflict zone however and don't give up, that's when you realise that the dreaming of cities is not in the buildings or History, or even the land that supports them, it's held within the people. The people who live there and the visitors who come to meet them, who come together to work out a way to proceed. To walk the time-line is to remember that time lives inside human beings, who are capable of seeing in all-at-once time, in which each moment holds the key to the past and the future. Everything can be changed when we tap into this way of seeing, whether in Norwich, New York, Madrid or Cairo.

To witness the butterfly effect as it plays out in every city in the world.

For press release on the relationship between Kett's Rebellion and Occupy Norwich by Nick Watts (Sustainable Bungay) see here

Kett's Memorial March at Norwich Castle, organised by Occupy Norwich; under the torchlight; tee at Mt Elgon, Kenya by Justin Kenrick; painting of sweet chestnut, Walberswick Marshes and butterflies drinking the nectar from a city buddleia bush, from a video by Helen Wells.

the fire stealers - a love story

Today's blog is cross-posted from the Transition Network's Social Reporting project and was originally written during our People and Connections week. The pilot is now entering its twelfth and final week (see Justin Kenrick's great intro on Land Rights), but will be re-emerging in a new form in 2012.

Once upon a time the world was dark, very dark indeed and cold. The people moved around in the darkness like great lumbering beasts, afraid of everything, of the invisible forces that threatened them on every side. Then they discovered fire: they had warmth and light. They could see each other, cook meals, feast and dance and sing. How did the fire come to the people? In the Far North it was brought by the trickster bird, Raven, who stole the sun from the grandfather; in Greece by the rebel Titan, Prometheus. Both were hounded and punished for their acts of generosity. All creators follow their dangerous path and become fire-stealers by trade. They steal the fire from the gods and give it to the people. They can’t keep the fire for themselves, or it burns their house down.

Some people in Transition stand on the earth and dig the soil. They are the ones who run the the food projects. Some people look at roofs and spaces. They are the builders and organisers. Some of us write blogs and bulletins. We are the communicators. We keep the lines open, cross-reference, untangle, make live, feed back. We do this because we're good at it, but most of all because we know what happens if we don't.

The fact is our rulers, gods or government, corporate CEOs, the 1%, however you like to look at it, want to keep the fire for themselves. They like to govern over the people, but they do not like the people. They do not like you. Some part of you doesn't like you either. That's the hard part. Psychologists and mystics can chip away at that part for years, and yet the only thing that transforms us is doing the one thing it is terrified of: connecting with the heart.

The heart changes the game completely. So we are trained to be like our cold-blooded ancestors, like empire builders, to struggle in a frigid and loveless world, to attack and put each other down: criticise, mock, humiliate, dismiss. To be as successful and cruel as Alexander, as brilliant and heartless as Newton, inhuman, grasping for power, governed entirely by will and policed by terror. To bring the fire, to hold the fire, means we have to love the people, though for sure the people do not love us. We don't love in a squishy way, a mummy and daddy, best friend way, or even in a comradely, Quakery way. We love each other as fellows because we know that without these heart connections we fall big time. We end up in that cold sunless universe, without a dream to sustain us, without a voice.

And so something deeper in us pushes us out of our houses and our comfort zones to go to meetings and events and workdays. Pushes me out today into Lowestoft High Street to stand beside the striking workers, to stand by the Sustainable Bungay stall, pushes me toward the Community Centre to edit this month's Transition Norwich bulletin, though no one will thank us for it, or cares whether we do it or not.

The fact is some of us can see in the dark, and we know what's coming if we don't pass on the fire.

Climate Change

"What if climate change were about something else, so that instead of fighting for resources it made us come together. What if climate were about memory, about the snow in the mountains?" I am in the Alexandra pub in Norwich on a Friday night and we're discussing a Dark Mountain project, looking at ways to encounter climate change, beyond data and stats. Mathis and Jeppe are from the UEA, we are from Transition Norwich. I'm remembering when I first joined Transition and how, even though we talked about climate change and peak oil, it was really about people. Right from the start.

At first it was about opening my mouth. It was about going into those Heart and Soul circles and speaking about our experiences, sharing what we knew. About being welcomed into both the initiatives that have become integral to my life for the last three and a half years. About meeting a lot of people after being isolated and disenfranchised for a long time. Exploring the lexicon of Transition in a kind of wild collective jubilation, events, films, shared meals, posters and press releases. It was about our first Transition East Gathering at Downham Market, about Carol and John, Gary and Josiah, Chris and Christine.

And then it was work: about resisting those ancien regime forces that tried to pull Sustainable Bungay apart around its Unleashing in 2009; it was about standing up to those caterpillar forces pushing for censorship on our Norwich blog in 2010. Those people who kept trying to push us down and out: you don't belong here, you can't write, you are a communist/vegan/scrounger, middle class, a suspect. Learning to say I am not moving. It was engaging in the Transition Circles, reducing carbon emissions, teaching peak oil in a primary school, throwing a party, writing a cookbook, creating culture. About Andy and Elena, Helen and Tully and Tom.

And then it became about branching out, finding the connections with Dark Mountain, with Occupy, with Greenpeace, with Stopclimatechaos and the OneWorldColumn. Seeing the pattern - the butterfly emerging from the collapse. It was working at the Transition Conferences and Camps, the Sunrise Festival, Unciviliation Festival. Going to the Bee Summit, talking to politicians, standing up for our library, our recycling depot, our woods, our seas. In solidarity with indignados, with occupiers, striking workers, with the 99%. It was Mark and Trevor and Rupert, Nick and Kate, Kerry, Simeon, Jeppe and Mathis.

Connections

How you hold the connection is by learning not to take things personally and realising that sometimes you have to feel everything personally in order to know it is not. How you keep going in Transition, especially if you are the kind of communicator who brings elephants into the room, is by seeing what you do, beyond your personal involvement. By knowing that everything, and I mean everything, conspires against our holding this pattern, against bringing this warmth and this light to the people. All the rulers of Empire, all the gods of the universe.

We are trained to think in left-hemisphere ways, in ever-diminishing circles of power and hostility, to worship data and systems and hierarchy. We abide by autocratic religions, by creeds that tell us to scarifice our hearts to invisible entities, who rule the universe like Goldman Sachs. Transition is as much full of these controlling forces and egoic fantasies as any other sphere of human activity. It’s not the fault of the movement, of its ingredients or philosophy, it's what each of us brings to the meeting table, into the room, unwittingly by virtue of being human at this point in time.

In order to live in a different paradigm we need to be different people. Powerdown people, who are capable of self-organisation, warmth and generosity and who can see the universe at play in all our small moves and relationships. How I treat you is how I treat the world. To evolve our indoctrinated individualism needs to undergo a social alchemy, whose first process pushes all the dark hidden stuff into the light for ruthless examination. Our primary materia is the the nuclear force by which all Empires fuel themselves: hate thy neighbour.

We think we are smart and enlightened and know about peak oil and fractional reserve banking, but none of us have got it down about social relationships. At least no one I’ve come across in Transition. None of us love each other as we need to love each other, which is to say, without condition as people. We are all creatures of Empire, deracinated, separated, traumatised by history, educated to resist change and right-hemisphere imagination. We gush about community and sharing, but in reality we are all Wizards of Oz, running our small-minded empires from our IPhones. We say We, but it’s still Me in control 24/7, full of self-pity and self-importance, blind to the beauty and suffering of the people who stand before us. Our flesh and blood.

In 2009 conducting an inquiry into 29 initiatives of the Eastern Region for the second Transition East conference, no group reported they were without fallout and bad relations. By 2011 some of those intiatives had disappeared. The ones that flourished underwent reorganisation. Most of us are split off into small groups, working on practical and creative projects where we can shine and get on with things unimpeded. It’s not the best of all possibilities, and we know it, but don't necessarily know how to proceed.

The fact is sometimes we don't make it in Transition. Even the best of us. And that is a hard thing to acknowledge for a movement characterised by optimism and possibility. If we had a language that allowed us to recognise these difficult shifts it would be easier. The world is tranformed when we transform ourselves, and the truth is sometimes we don’t want to. Or our overworked wife doesn’t want to, our bolshy children, or the conventional small town where we tried to make it happen. Or our bodies and our minds can’t cope with the challenge. We’re too old or too sick. Many people leave or disappear without trace, And mostly it's because the old forms inside haven't wanted to change and relinquish their power over our consciousness, and the rest of us lack the lexicon and the humanity to give each other a break.

But sometimes we do change radically and come together in sudden surprising ways. And this is really a post about the people who keep linking up, and all those difficult people who challenge us, so we keep doing it, in spite of the violence of the status quo and the wrath of gods. It's about the Norwich bloggers and the Social Reporters, all the communicators and connectors. It's about the thousands of emails we write to each other and the hundreds of blogs.

It's about all the times you didn't send the email, didn't walk out of the meeting, let your antagonism and offendedness slide. It's about all those fellow feelings you have for the occupiers in Zuccotti Park and Oakland as they are truncheoned and pepper-sprayed by an increasingly militarised police force. All those times you don't go unconcious and you keep reading those difficult reports that Peter Lipman keeps sending in the small hours.

Transition is the people, because the strength and the wit to change is in the people, not the things, not the trees, not the mountains.Climate change brings us together so we can do this, because this transformation not a self-only task. We have to do this together.

So this is for all the fire-stealers and for those of us who are in it for the long haul: for Mark, for Adrienne and for Ed who made this project happen, for Chris Keene who cycled all the way to Copenhagen, for everyone at Occupy Norwich, for Nick who took me there, and to all the people in Transition who keep meeting in rooms, sitting in those circles of intent, in churches, in squares, in village halls, in the back rooms of desolate pubs on a windy night, and to those who in spite of everything keep remembering. having seen at one point in their lives the incandescent light that fills everything on this earth, each tree, each mountain, each wave that races to the shore, each beat of our hearts as they radiate outward. And for you, dear readers, all of you and all of us. We are not going to make it unless we keep connected. Hold that space. Hold that fire.

Photos: with Mark and Erik testing the rocket stoves, at Low Carbon Cookbook meeting, Norwich, Nov 2011; with Elena and fellow marchers at Great Norfolk Anti-Cuts March, December 2010; a darkling thrush, Suffolk, 2010; with Mark and Nick at the Greenpeace Fair, Sept 2011; Mark, Elinor and Gemma of Bungay Community Bees en route to London Bee Summit, Dec 2010; with Helen at the Magdalen Street Celebration; Occupy Norwich General Assembly, Nov 2011; Sustainable Bungay at The Wave. 2009.

Sharing the Load - A Permaculture Workday

Last Saturday, December 3rd, I joined a group of East Anglian perma-culturists and transitioners for a work day at Eloise and Kris's place on the Suffolk -Norfolk border.

"The idea of work days is simple and great!" said Eloise, who has been studying permaculture for the past year. "Invite your friends round to help with some big jobs or projects you want to get done in exchange for lots of nice food, company and good fun! And help on their plot another day!"

Shared work days are part of permaculture's ethos and practice, including in Transition Norwich's own permaculture group.

It was sunny, mild and dry and over twenty people had come to help out with building a new compost area, preparing raised beds, rotavating, mulching, chopping bundles of kindling in the coppiced wood area for an earth oven and making chicken tractors.

Chicken tractors are small tunnels bound together with long sticks and covered in wire netting under which you grow plants for chicken feed. The chickens can't get in whilst the plants are growing but when they're ready you make a door so they can enter. The long sticks were made straight from from the coppiced wood out of ash, oak and horse chestnut.

I went to the kitchen and made a pumpkin and carrot soup with Brenna. Her first baby was due the following week and I was really struck by how relaxed both she and her partner Callum were about it all.

There was fresh bread, delicious bean stew and coleslaw for lunch along with all sorts of cakes and biscuits. Everything was homemade and a lot of the veg homegrown. At lunchtime everyone crowded in the kitchen and the stew was devoured, but it was so filling there was no room for the pumpkin soup - no problem, it would be just right for dinner.

I was also on a deadline for This Low Carbon Life, so whilst I did cook, rotavate, help with a raised bed and take down some old runner bean stalks, my attention was rather divided. Several times I tucked myself away in Eloise's office until I'd knocked a very different post into shape from the one you see in the top picture.

Meanwhile Charlotte was seriously reskilling in the field: learning from Brenna how to make a solstice wreath (now on our front door) out of the boughs of yew, ivy, cypress, bay and holly as they sat around the fire in the yurt; from Callum, who is a carpenter, how to make a raised bed from four pieces of wood without nails (with luck we'll make our first raised bed here next year); from David - a maker and blacksmith who spent many years working in Africa on low-tech solutions - how to sharpen secateurs and shears, and to use her Opinel knife to whittle sticks into pegs; from David and Lee how to make a compost bin out of wooden pallets.

"What I really liked was being shown directly by the makers how to do these things," she said "You're finding out how to it physically, with your hands, with your eyes, listening and watching. You can ask them questions, they can guide you. This is very different from reading about how to do things in a book or on the internet."

I did learn how to use the rotavator Kris picked up for £50. And that after you rotavate you put the compost on, then the topsoil. "You can borrow it next year for your raised bed," said Kris "It can cost you £50 a time just to rent one."

I'm off to do a bit of teaching myself today with Bungay Community Bees: how to make a Yarrow herbal salve. We'll be using this year's beeswax from the group's hives (and sampling our first honey!) Gotta get going....

Pics: Hammering the psts for the pallet compost bin; Preparing raised beds; Pumpkins for soup; Lunchtime stew; Kindling; Solstice wreath