Transition Conference, Low Carbon Cat and 14 Degrees

This weekend Transitioners from all over the country have been meeting up in Devon for the yearly Transition Conference. Charlotte, Tully and Christine have all been in the action and it finishes at lunchtime today, so this week (from tomorrow) we’ll have posts from the West. There should also be a guest post or two from other initiatives, so do stay tuned.

I stayed at home holding the fort and feeding the birds and the cat - although the cat is very much feeding herself on an extremely low carbon diet with distance travelled counted in food yards. I won’t go into the details, only to say that she’s not vegetarian. Fortunately, though, she has no interest in birds and her food source is not an endangered species here in the rural outposts.

Oh, and can someone do something about the weather, please? I know it’s different from the climate, which we are all trying to do something about. But the thermometer read 14 degrees Celsius in the middle of the day last Thursday after the mists had rolled in from the sea the night before. And I was wearing a jumper. Too much!

Pic: Last Train Arrives at Lowestoft after Carbon Conversations - the mist rolling in

confessions of a transitioner or how to lose friends and alienate people

When i was at Sunday school they taught you that when you point the finger there are always three pointing back at yourself. I had forgotten this recently until a Shaman reminded me by something he said.
The other day I bumped into a facebook friend and her son who was holding a toy bear. Without thinking I looked at the label and she immediately began apologizing for buying stuff from Ikea. This filled me with shame to think that I had made someone I hardly knew feel guilty about buying a toy for their child. So this blog is about saying sorry for that and to all the people that I have made feel bad when in fact the whole point of transition is to face challenges with a positive outlook and a 'can do' attitude.
I would also like to confess that every year I buy about a thousand pounds worth of electronic equipment, yesterday I ate an Angus burger at Burger King , I have just driven hundreds of miles in a four by four and I ran over a squirrel.
But of course this doesnt make very good blog reading but perhaps an occasional confession would make us realize that transitioning is exactly that. We live in a world that demands we get everywhere fast and look a certain way and fit in with society and with fellow transitioners. I personally prefer to strike a happy medium so that everyday people find me rather odd and transioners look down on me for my takeaway food indulgences.
I will leave you with the image of a cow floating away over a field with her fellow cows shouting up ' its ok to fart, don't worry about the methane!'
kind regards
Helenofnorwich
ps it wasnt true about the squirrel

Objects of desire

I was having a chat with a friend of mine, about consumerism and the need to become more aware of its impact on the environment. We had a really good debate. It was fun. We were putting the world to rights.

Then, later that morning he happened to mention the HMV sale. They were selling the five-disc definitive boxset of Bladerunner for £6. In a limited-edition metal tin, with all three versions of the film. About a million hours of extra commentaries, interviews and documentaries, a selection of postcards and some sort of plastic hologram of a film-still. All my certainties went out of the window! All that for six quid? I love that film. I'd be mad not to rush straight out and buy it. As I reached for my coat I was virtually salivating. I’m not kidding…

In the end, I didn't buy it. But I didn't feel good about it either. The powerful thing about consumerism is that it just feels so damn good. Whether it just does of itself or whether we're conditioned to it, I don't know. I realised though that buying stuff is addictive, and when you don't feed that desire, it hurts.

It was a close thing. I got away with it this time. I know there'll be lots of other occasions when I won't. There'll be so many things I’m going to really want to buy. Sometimes I will and sometimes I won't. If breaking our addiction to constantly buying stuff feels like this, it's gonna be a tough ride.

More and more, I'm seeing books, articles, interviews that refer to the concept of affluenza, the state of mind where too much is never enough. And I don't want to be ruled by that. I want to be in control of my own mind.

So I'll keep trying. No pain, no gain, as they say.

At War with Nature

I've been reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which is described as a "thought experiment" imagining a world where humans have simply vanished. Despite this potentially rather bleak premise (depending on your point of view!) the book is actually a fascinating exploration of the lasting impact we have on our planet, for good and ill.

So there I was, sitting out on the decking in the glorious late evening sunshine, reading this book, with a cup of tea next to me, enjoying the breeze and the sight of the swallows swirling overhead. A blackbird sang from the top of a nearby tree.

Then I became aware of the sound of the washing machine in the background. And the dishwasher, both of them busily slooshing water down the drain. Water loaded with detergents, enzymes, inorganic surfactants, optical brighteners. The chapter I was reading was about how some common man-made chemicals are impossible to break down and will just last forever, unless some future microbe evolves to break them down into harmless substances. It made me realise that, intentionally or not, we are all, through hundreds of small daily actions, permanently at war with nature.

Another example. I've had eczema since I was a small child. It went for a few years in my late teens and then came back with a vengeance just after A was born. Over recent years I've used a variety of things to try and control it (see a small selection to the left). Nearly all of them have a petroleum base with a host of unpronounceable chemicals making up the rest, and (I'm guessing here) most of them probably don't biodegrade that easily... I've also tried the other stuff too - diet, allergy tests, appallingly smelly Chinese herbal stuff, accupuncture - the lot. None of them worked. But eczema is a funny thing that we still don't understand properly. A number of studies point to environmental factors. It's made me think how about how the things we put into our environment maybe have a habit of coming back to us, how maybe some of the things we do for the good of our health could actually be the things that in the longer term come back and damage our health in ways that we don't yet understand.

Reading "The World Without Us" makes me wonder about the kind of chemical legacy I'm leaving the future because of the things I do, almost unconsciously, right now, every day.

If we're all at war with nature, now is the time to start thinking about a lasting peace. Before it's too late.

Fledging

Can you be here as the bringer of space in any situation? Eckhart Tolle

Each dawn I wake to cacophony. In May there were sweet sounds, but in June there are cacklings and croakings and cawings. The jackdaws are fledging. For weeks they have been in my chimney, their parents flying around the neighbouring fields and returning, jumping in and out of that small space. Jack, jack, jack. This morning they are out on the telephone line: all eight of them, making an unholy din. How eight of these large sooty birds can fit in that brick chimney I cannot imagine. Now they are taking part in a flying lesson: how to crash land into oak trees whilst making a loud running commentary, the way all members of the crow tribe love to do.

Buckminster Fuller once said modern people are like birds in an egg: we are hatching, but we don’t know it yet. We think our world is coming to an end. Food is running out, space is running out, what can we do? Without thinking we start tapping against the limits of our containment. Breaking through the shell. I think we are like those immature crows, stuck inside a dark chimney. It’s cosy but rather squashed and stinky in there. We get fed, but we’re hot and restless inside, fighting like mad with our brothers and sisters. Peak oil! Climate change! Economic collapse! Environmental disaster! There’s a whole new world out there: a world of lightness and air. Somehow we’ve got to get out of that hole.

This picture is of my father when he was young, with three baby greenfinches on his head, the moment before fledging. It was snapped by a local reporter in Sussex where he lived before he went to university and became a lawyer in the city. When I was a child he would tell me stories about the nature he loved in those years, the birds and the trees, about the French revolution for which he had an unusual passion. Like everyone else, I inherited my father’s world, with its rules and regulations, its traditions and teatimes. This world governed by bourgeois values, the world of possessions and form. But something in those stories about the earth, about people breaking out of limitation, out of an unjust rule, made me quit that comfortable nest and seek the light and air. Within a generation, those values disappeared in me.

Millions of us on this planet dream of freedom, of a liberation from that old restrictive mindset that holds the physical world in chains. We don’t know what shape it will take. We look back at History and we shudder. We look forward and see a blank space. What can we do? We can meet within the frame of Transition to see our predicament in a way that is not bound by form. By our compulsion to repeat what we have been told by our parents and teachers. We can create conditions and ways of exchange that are not hostile. We can provide the space and the time to allow something else to happen. Something that hasn’t been done yet. Because even though people may live bound by the laws of the ancien regime, they also carry the dream of the Earth and self-governance of the people within them.

The dream they sometimes tell their children, because they cannot imagine how to live it out themselves.

Today Chris and Tom are coming to visit us and we’re going to rehearse for the Low Carbon Roadshow in the garden. We're planning to do some street theatre for the Community Arts Fair Helen was writing about that the NR3 group are hoping to organise. They’re having their first meeting tonight in St Augustine’s Street. We’re planning to create a play for Transition. It’s new territory for all of us. We’re going to start where we left off at The Earth Hour outside the Forum at Spring Equinox. Four beings coming from different futures a hundred years hence, returning to the present to work out a way forward that will be of benefit for all beings – not just the privileged few, not just the humans. A new earth. A leap from the immense space we hold inside us, from our imagination, into blue sky.

In the crow's nest: Charlotte Du Cann in a (sycamore) tree, 2010; Dicky Du Cann with birds, 1945.

Downshift

It happened last night. Just as we arrived back from our Strangers' Circle we came into the wet dark garden and the scent was everywhere. And so we opened the letter box to let the fragrance of the flowers permeate the house, come up the stairs and into our dreams.

It was the honeysuckle moment. Each flower has its moment: it spends weeks developing its individual show and then it bursts out into the world in a glorious mass of colour and beauty. When you learn to love flowers, you wait for those moments and treasure them when they arrive: the shocking moment when the bluebells shimmer in the woods like liquid fire, when the poppies ripple through the barley. Last week it was the hawthorn moment, this week we’ll head for the coast and find the sea kales flourishing in front of the nuclear power station at Sizewell. And for that moment we’ll immerse ourselves in the scent and presence of the great Krambe maritima growing in spite of all odds through the shingle. Holding a deep root in a hard time, for the flowers and for ourselves.

We had been talking about resilience, which is the subject of our new sequence of Transition Circle meetings. People talked practically and spiritually, about energy systems and political systems, about economic collapse and peak oil and how our complex global supply chains have become increasingly dependent on computerisation and special parts and therefore vulnerable. Some of us were pessimistic, not sure if we will be able to live without this stuff. Some optimistic and felt we had possibilities within us that had yet to be tapped. Resilience is the ability for eco-systems to weather shocks, to absorb their impact and regroup, adapt and hold together. We talk about community and getting into alignment with the earth, but we live with the spectre of History, where societies habitually fragment in the face of difficulties; where the rich triumph, the poor go to the wall, and those of us who speak out for love and freedom board the train for the gulag.

I have, like most people in this country, been able to avoid History and do not know how things would be in England if our social fabric breaks. I have however been through many individual shocks. A lot of them forced me to leave places and people, set-ups I had taken for granted, to look at the flimsy things I had depended on: spiritual fancies, culture, friendships, beliefs, reputation, innocence. Some of them made me abandon my biography entirely and start again. All of them broke me out of a small space. All of them made me more human. Only a heart that is broken and bitter knows how to feel beyond its personal circumstance and reach out for its fellows. When you have nothing to lose is when life opens up. When you are terrified of losing, you close down and don’t see the bigger picture, you only care for yourself, your space, your cherished beliefs about the world.

To be truly human, aligned with life, resilient, we need to hold on to what is dear and be prepared to let everything else go. To respond to that shocking moment we have to be flexible and open and to know how to work with people, so that History does not repeat itself and mash us in its maw. We have to practice thinking together, working together, exchanging things, sharing knowledge, knowing that the shocks will come and we can keep coherent and not fall apart. And like all resilient eco-systems, we need to be in communication and feedback what we experience and feel. Gathering up sweetness the way bees do from flowers. What we can’t afford to do is shut down.

So there was a different mood at Naomi and William’s last night. We discussed our wholefood co-op order and our new project, the Low Carbon Cookbook, but our usual exuberance about dishes we brought had shifted. We were no longer looking at carbon reduction in the light (sic) of reducing energy, as if our way of life was going to continue only more ecologically. We were looking at something else entirely around the kitchen table. A moment of radical change. A change which we can only look at for real when we are together, because each of us carries within us a vital component that makes that possible, both to see and to bear. Because that change is about coming together after decades of individualism. Because something about this moment is extraordinary, fragrant, unexpected yet known. Coming out of the dark, permeating the atmosphere, like honeysuckle after a storm.

Underneath the May; hawthorn flowers; honeysuckle and bumblebee door; Tully talking about resilience with the Strangers' Circle at Mangreen.

Sailing to Little Japan

I had wanted to go back there for as long as I can remember. The small cove had lingered in my imagination, beckoning me through the years. A strip of river sand with soughing wind-bent pine trees on the cliffedge and a stretch of shining water. Only accessible by boat.

And then last week I went back. Mark and I set out up the Alde River with our neighbour Philip in his gaff-rigged boat Snow Goose. Philip spent a childhood sailing on the Deben further down the coast and now we all live alongside the Blyth. To live happily in East Anglia is to be kin to the water and its relationship with the land – reedbed, estuary, broad, marsh, fen. Eastern rivers are slow-moving but tidal, tricky to navigate. The Alde is broad, so at high tide you can have a good sail if the wind is fair. I know this because I used to spend all my summers here with the friends of my youth. This place urged me to leave the city, my desk, to make a leap into freedom. For years I yearned for this scent of salt and reeds, of open water and sky and the haunting curlew’s cry.

We rounded the bend and there it was: the shoreline dotted with pied birds, a small breeze on the green water, the squiffed red pines still guarding the clifftop. Utterly beautiful in the way that East Anglia is beautiful for those of us who love the waterlands.

It was perfect, a perfect place for a picnic, as it had always been. I held the moment in my heart, and then I let it go. We couldn’t land because Snow Goose has a fixed keel and this is a shallow inlet, and so we went about and tacked upriver along Blackwater, where the rhododendrons shimmered along the bank. A swan took off and flew past us. The spell of the past broke inside.

What has this got to do with Transition – apart from the obvious fact that sailing is about as low-carbon a way of travel you can imagine, only using the dynamics of wind and tide and current and your own human ingenuity and skill? Apart from the realisation that Transition has made us socially bold and confident on almost any topic - economics to ecology - so that we could have a dynamic friendship with our neighbours that might not have happened otherwise?

It’s got to do with Transition because nostalgia, a yearning to go back to places and times in a possible future, prevents us from living in the now, where we now most urgently need to live.

Because if we don’t love where we are and who we are with we won’t make it. We’ll be looking to be someplace else all the time, wrapped up in ourselves and our great sadness. We won’t put the best of ourselves on the line. We won’t have a reason to be in this neighbourhood, with this group of people, happy to be holding this dish of humble vegetables in our hands.

My three posts this week are about loving where you are. Not escaping into a holiday Earth that requires vast amounts of fossil fuel, but making steps to belong wherever you find yourself. Getting together with people and doing things in the creative way that Helen was talking about last week, taking care of the physical world in the craftsmen’s way John was talking about, paying attention to small things and thinking of the bigger things the visionary way Mark was talking about Bolivia: what some people call hologrammic imagination. Tapping into the workings of the world.

You see, Little Japan was called Little Japan because the quirky-topped trees look like the stylised trees in Japanese paintings. Of course they are nothing to do with Japan; they’re Scot’s pine, our oldest native trees, guardians of burial grounds and often planted as windbreaks in the sandy soils of Suffolk and Norfolk . Now I know about trees I don’t need to cover the place up with cultural references. It is as it is. Just as the Alde is all rivers, The River, and we are all people, navigating with the tiller in our hands, listening to the sound of water running underneath the boat, feeling the wind on our faces, in tune with ancestral fabric of the place, with each other.

On a broad reach, coming home to who we really are.

Sailing upriver towards Snape; rigging the Snow Goose with Philip at Slaughden Quay; Mark at the tiller; approaching Little Japan.