ARCHIVE: When the experiment fails

This piece was originally written for Social Reporting Project, as part of a series looking at the 74 Transition Ingredients and Tools in The Transition Companion. Looking back at six years in the movement and now editing the sixth edition of Trnsition Free Press, this still seems a key subject. We think of Transiton as a thing, a goal, a perfect state, when it is process, something you go through and experience with others:, some of it painfully, some of it joyfully, some of it yawning and wishing the meeting would come to an end. Creativity is often the only meaningful way to navigate its existential territory.

I was going to write about Communicating with the Media, a nifty tool in the second section of The Transition Companion. I planned a practical exploration of the business of writing press releases and cultivating a positive relationship with local newspapers and radio. But then whilst Becoming the Media - creating the preview issue of the Transition Free Press - I stumbled upon a subject which was closer to home, nearer the bone. More urgent, I reckoned, than raising awareness of our local projects in the mainstream press.

The title of the second chapter is Deepening, and contains some of the harder aspects of Transition. The start up phase of initiatives is often exuberant and exciting. People are attracted to the buzz, full of hope and expectation. They stand up in rooms and declare what we (you) could do. Deepening is when you first hit the wall. Ideas and fancies about downshifting turn out not to be the reality of downshifting. Those big words fade in the light of day. You realise that you have to get on with the people in the room and do the work. Power struggles happen in deepening. Things don't go according to plan. People leave and let you down. You let people down. It's awkward because you don't know anyone in your fledgling initiative that well. The groups start to falter. What do you do?

Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it's still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

Interviewing Shaun Chamberlin for the paper, he talked about the new book, The Future We Deserve, in which 100 authors write 500 words on their take of the title:

What was interesting in it was dissensus. The recognition that Nature doesn't decide by consensus on the ideal life form before it creates it. It just creates and creates and some things work and some things don’t work and I think Transition follows that “dissensus” approach - we don’t try and have a universal plan for everything. If someone wants to do something they go and do it. As Rob wrote about the punk ethic (here's three chords, now start a band): Here’s three ingredients, go and start a Transition initiative. That is that creative energy that underlies dissensus. Let some of the projects that we undertake thrive and let some of them die and don’t feel that everything we do has to succeed.

In a creative frame, you try everything. You start with the idea of communicating some key tips about the media but then a more pressing subject comes up. So you change direction. From the creative perspective everything is material. There is no loss or failure. You carve your piece out of the mud, the clay falls to the ground, you sweep it up and use it again another time. Nothing is wasted. Everything is compost and you need that compost - those past events, meetings, open spaces, clashes, those wasted leaves, those dead heads. You need that stuff to rot down in order grow nourishing and beautiful flowers for the future.

In Deepening all the expectations of how life should be come up for examination, and it is wise to know Transition is not what you think it should be at all. But of course you don't read the manual. Your ego hits the wall, you are challenged in all directions. Most people at this stage, rather than let go of their defence systems, or their lifestyle, leave and blame Transition for not living up to their shiny idea of it. That's not the failure of Transition, it's the challenge of our society. We don't live with the messy paint box of dissensus, we live in the pure and airy ideals of the mind, and the vicious battleground of the will. I do it my way. Publish that email and be damned.

If we had heart we would realise that everything we do in Transition is to create a future that is not apocalypse, and in many ways we are blind to what this might look like. We are feeling our way ahead and "failures" are merely telling us that some paths are the ones we don't need to go down. Try again. Move your attention somewhere else.

Valuing experience

OK, so this is the theory. What about the practice? In 2009 I helped organise the second Transition East gathering in Diss and before the event interviewed 29 initiatives on the phone. I collated all the information and posted it on a regional blog. I asked everyone the same questions. How were they doing, how many people were in the initiative, what kind of town, village were they in etc? Everyone cheerfully answered the questions. Do you have any difficulties? I then asked them. There would be a hesitation and then suddenly a huge outpouring would happen. Ten minutes would turn into an hour. Up until this point no one had mentioned dificulties. We weren't sure how to handle them. But the fact is the difficulties were not "wrong". They are our experience of change, how we know what to focus on, and what not.

Today many of those initiatives do not exist. The initiative I have been in (Norwich) is a shadow of its former self. The 14 groups that began so exuberantly after our Unleashing in 2008 no longer exist. The core group disappeared. The Heart and Soul group faded away. In April the monthly bulletin was not sent out, as it had been for the last three years on the first of every month. No one noticed. Or if they did, they did not say anything.

What does this tell us? Some territories are not fertile ground for Transition. Something holds groups together and if it's missing the group will disband. At some point you realise that you need to put your time and energy into projects that feed back, and not just because you can do them or that you are expected to. You need to go with the spirit of the times, be amongst people who understand that the project matters. That communication matters. That Transition is not a hobby, a once-a-month feel good community thing, it's for real.

Some of this stuff is bitter stuff to swallow. And we don't like bitter, we like the sweet and sugary things in life, the triumphs and the happy moment. But bitter, as all medicine people will tell you, is the taste of the heart. It's what tells you what is good and not good for the system, how you grow up and take responsibility for your actions. How experience teaches us to shift out of being the haughty me-against-Them people who want to rule the universe and become fellows with all beings on the planet.

The loss of these groups told us that power struggles are not for the future, nor is old-fashioned spirituality, hierarchy of any kind, hostility or control. It taught us that you can't really co-opt the future. It doesn't belong to big business or to the institution, and it will slip out of the Empire's clutches at every turn. In Norwich we learned that our Transition Circles brought a key aspect into the fabric of Transition - personal carbon reduction. We have one circle left still meeting, but the legacy of all that great experiment lives on. It's in the comments pages of the Transiition Free Press, it's in the interview with Shaun Chamberlin. It's just taking another form, working with a new mix of people. No blame. No loss. No failure. Just celebration.

P.S. There is only one real tip I would add to the media tool in the book and it's this: journalists are people and finding the story is what we really care about.

Photos: Untitled piece by Maria Elvorith for the cover of The Future We Deserve; Banner for February edition of Transition Norwich news bulletin; Transition East Gathering 2009 at Diss; with Alexis Rowell, News Editor of Transition Free Press (photo: Sarah Nicholl)

The Free Press Gang

I should have started writing this an hour ago. I awoke in time, but I was listening to the world outside as darkness shifted into light. The stars drained from the sky, a vixen yipped, an owl called among the trees. It was silent for a while. Then it happened: a small sweet sound in the moment that Latin America calls the madrugada, the time just before dawn, and I knew it had begun. And there is such a feeling inside when you hear it, one bird singing after another, all calling out: Spring is coming, Spring is coming, I am here! Are you?

I wish I could convey in my human words the sound of the robin redbreast, as he starts up the chorus, the bird that sings through the night and through winter, against all odds and heralds the day. But you know, some things you have to experience for yourself.  What I can tell you is that soon the chaffinch and the wren will join him, and in March the blackbird too.

You see you think writing is a solitary thing but it isn't. If you sing in a choir, play ball, act in an ensemble, write, as I do for a small Transition newspaper, you know that being part of the chorus is everything.

we have to talk about comms
The dawn chorus is a song that has been going on for millions of years. It begins as the sun lights up different parts of the globe and it never stops. That's something I learned from an artist called Ansuman Biswas, whose project, Far Player is part of the book I'm editing about Transitional arts practice, Playing for Time - Making Art as if the World Mattered.

Voicing who we are and where we are in time is part of being human. For thousands of years artists and communicators have sung in the day, we've sung praises and lullabies, shared stories, and learned, through the art of writing, how to convey our thoughts and feelings across the globe. But equally as people we have been silenced. Our voices have been crushed and misshapen by a succession of Empires that have attempted to control us. Now, as we struggle within the modern vice of corporate-controlled media and marketing, many of us want to explore and voice another sound, another story. One of those stories is about the Transition movement, in essence how we, as a people and as a network, respond to the triple drivers of climate change, resource depletion and economic breakdown.

For this however, we need to talk about comms (as communications are referred to in modern organisations) because although human communication is a bio-diverse, multi-levelled exchange it is frequently treated as a monocultural one-way broadcast (I am getting my message across to Them). Sometimes it is presented as a dialogue (you can give your comments on My Message, or you can tell me how I should be communicating and I will incorporate your ideas).

But the fact is none of this is really communication: it is control of information, and you can't have communication and control in the same place. Communication is a subtle thing: you can say or write beautiful and intelligent words and yet if you have no fellow feeling, no desire to make contact, to connect, they fail utterly as communication. Likewise, if the people are not open to receive what you are saying, it also fails. Sometimes the lack of connection is because none of us really care. And sometimes that lack is due to the silo conditioning that we have all been brought up in.

For a long time, let's say almost four years, I wrote hundreds of blogs about Transition. I wrote them as part of this project which I started up and edited from 2011-2012 and as part of the Transition Norwich This Low Carbon Life community blog which ran for every day for three years. I've written news bulletins and press releases, a column for the Eastern Daily Press, a quarterly newsletter for my own TI, Sustainable Bungay, magazine articles, thousands of tweets. And all of this you could say was a way of communicating Transition. But nothing has got near to the project I am now part of, editing Transition Free Press. Because this is a publication in its own right: it is not part of a corporate strategy, or a mainstream business. It is pure editorial run by seasoned Transitioners, and in a time where the media is controlled every which way by government propaganda that is an extraordinary thing.

You can write deeply and passionately, as I found out, in a blog, but they all (including this one) only go one way: down the page. And so rather than go deeply and passionately into 'comms' and how it has or has not worked for me, I want to talk briefly about why I feel the paper reaches places other comms does not, and how writing can teach us how to live in a co-operative universe. Here are four small keys:

Latitude OK so the paper goes across, rather than down, and it is all in the same place, physically, in your hands at one time. You open at the News and end at Sport, and in between you flash past every subject Transition engages in: energy, grassroots democracy, alternative currency, CSAs, community arts, wellbeing, people, projects, plants, places . . .You can in the space of a few minutes flick through 24 pages and see what Transition means as a culture, a whole new way of living on the planet. It's a multi-voiced operation. It's a We thing. During the pilot over 100 contributors wrote stories, telling us about their projects, writing them from the field, from experience. Here I am! Here we are!

So Latitude means that in Transition you need to have all these subjects at your fingertips from the big picture to the small detail: you have to know about fracking and you have to know how to split logs. You're smart, practical, love the earth, work with your fellows, and most of all you love to listen and give value to other people's stories, as well as speak about your own. You might not know how to run an alternative currency in your own neighbourhood, but you know the people that do, you know how it works. You know that it matters.

Attitude You have to know the reader is not the enemy. The reader is someone you don't necessarily know, that you are happy to sit alongside with. You don't want to download your sorrows. If you are making a point, you learn to take it out. A lot of Transition comms can be quite evangelical, and as result non inclusive. My ecstactic moment of conversion. We are not preachers. We are writers and communicators. Writers know that the moment of inspiration lasts about one second. What matters is that you get up every morning and sing your song. You're part of that dawn chorus. I am always writing the same poem, as the poet Pablo Neruda once said, as he wrote in his house by the sea, in hiding on the run, as thousands of people stood in the stadium listening to him.

If you have got through the main struggles of Transition and are watching how the world is going you know we don't have time to carry on about our small grievances. What this person said or didn't say to us. We are writing in the face of vast opposition: a mega propaganda machine, and people - including our fellow Transitioners - who are trained to criticise every move we make toward creating a liberated and connected world. Neruda was facing the shock doctrine of Chile. The thrush, now singing outside, is facing the suburbanisation and industrialisation of the countryside. Six years on we're still singing. We're not going to stop. I'm always writing the same blog, the same editorial.

Spring is coming.

Rigour The word count on the paper is strict. On-line you can go on forever, but on TFP you stop at 500. It is also objective, particularly in the news section, so this is not your opinion about something (unless you are writing for our Talkback pages) this IS the something. Facts needs checking, quotes need finding, pictures need to be 300dpi and work as images. It needs to convey in that short space what you are talking about so that person you have been sitting next to can say to their neighbour or Transition group: hey have you heard about community hopgrowing, we could do that! and then 50 people start growing vines in their gardens and allotments (this is true by the way Farnham Hoppers grew out of a TFP story about a London hop project).

It's not time to be indulgent. It's time to listen to who else is singing in the neighbourhood.

Skillshare/Knowledge Share A big part of the paper is about sharing skills. If you want to break out of silo mentality, join in with your fellows and make yourself and your community/network resilient, you need to have a communicator on board. That means in yourself and also in your initiative. For me one of the best - and also most challenging parts - of TFP is reworking the copy with the contributors. Writing is a skill. You sometimes have a gift or a knack for it, and sometimes you have to learn it. Editing is the skill to shape and hone copy so that it works as an engaging piece of journalism, but also holds the essence of the culture we are conveying in every page: the art and beauty and intelligence of downshift.

I could carry on writing, because you know the material is abundant. There are so many stories to tell, so many projects that show what bright thing can come out of darkness and a hard winter. I want to tell you about all the great people who are in this comms network: our distributors around the UK, our contributors around the world.

And I wanted to introduce you to all our new editors: Amy Hall (News Ed), Gareth Simkins (Energy), Michaela Woollatt (Assistant Features/Education), Tess Riley and Eva Schonveld (Food and Drink). But you know I can see the deadline coming. You only get a small margin to sing your song, and you can't be late. Others are waiting for their turn. You have to be on time, the earth has to keep spinning, we have to find our note. Spring has to come.

If you want to see how I feel comms best works in Transiton: have a look at our small resilient grassroots paper. Even better if you are a Transition initiative or social enterprise, a small business or low-carbon group, do become one of our distributors and sign up for bundle. Or, if you are not connected to an initiative, do become a subscriber. Because we can't do communications without each other, dear reader. And if you have a story, do get in touch. Whatever you do don't stop singing. Because, whatever it sounds like or feels like in the hour before dawn, we are listening. We are here.

Images: above reading the paper in front of the Sailor's Reading Rooms for TFP4; winter edition front page; Assistant Features Ed Michaela Woollatt (Transition Nayland) in the field, News Ed, Amy Hall (Brighton) on the move

This post was originally published on the Transition Network

ARCHIVE: we don't need no education

What a difference a year makes! Last Autumn I was writing posts once or twice a week, deeply embedded in the Transition movement. The summer was cold and dark, noisy with jubilee and sporting glory. But as I head down to the sea on lovely day in a quieter year, I realise some things don't change, and nor does my loyalty or my creative attention to them. Here is one of the last blogs I wrote for the Social Reporting Project on a week focused on education. Extraordinary how new directions emerge in your writing before you have even thought about them . . .
    
"But Mr Biddlecombe what is god?" It's 1972, Felixstowe, Suffolk. I'm wearing a gym slip several inches too short according to the music mistress (Du Cann there are male members of the orchestra!) and I've just discovered existentialism. Julia Weatherly and I are the only atheists in a religious school and we have found our intellectual edge. Rev Biddlecombe runs the chapel where I sing in the choir and is attempting to teach us theology. I am giving him a hard time because that's what you do when you are fifteen and running up against authority and the big questions in life.

I know he won't be able to answer, and that no teacher can. The question is not there in search of an answer, it is there to challenge the boundaries of a prescribed world.We live in a world governed by education - a small mean god we worship, even without realising our faith. It schools us in the rational mind and teaches us to look at the earth through the heartless and acquisitive eyes of Empire. Depending on what kind of house we are born into we go to school to be shaped by the requirements of our hierarchical culture: to be turned into obedient factory or cannon fodder, to fill in forms, or to arrogantly rule the world.

But no matter what school we attend, all of us are programmed to see life in geometric squares, truth as scientific facts, the earth as property, our nation's history as the rightful conquest of Western civilisation. We are taught that control of the mind is always more important than real-life experience. Some of us are broken by our establishments - bullied, humiliated and made miserable, labelled as difficult or deficient in some way. Some of us become haughty and power-hungry. 

Howevwe some of us find ways to thwart the hold this god has on our imagination and our liberty. When I am fifteen I devour philosophy and literature in the bathrooms at night and start to keep a journal. I have decided to become a writer, which means I will be the one in the room asking awkward questions, bringing the mythos into play, challenging conformity at every turn. I am learning no one will ever love me for it - but I'm going to do it anyway. If only to hold open a door.

WHAT IF . . . WE NEVER WENT BACK TO SCHOOL?

"But the sea is also beautiful!" It's 2012, Stowmarket, Suffolk. I am sitting at question time at the What if . . . the sea keeps rising? event, chaired by Andrew Simms from nef. Everyone on the panel has given a slick and scientific low-down on climate change and the way it will alter our coastlines as the Arctic melts and the waters cover the earth. The sentence floats uneasily among the rigid facts and figures, among the agricultural tools of the c14th barn, signalling another route we could take - except that The Problem about Transition has just risen among the sea of heads. The Problem at question time is usually three-fold: 1) Transition is too middle class 2) what are you going to do about population? and 3) where are all the young people and We Have to Take Transition into the Schools!

I am no longer fifteen. I have learned to bite my tongue and not take the bait. I've been working within the Transition movement for four years now and know all these "questions" are memes, manifestations of the annoying defense system of the left-brain, and none of the people who utter them intend to act on their words, or indeed join an initiative.

The Transition model is big on education. Its tools and ingredients favour an academic approach: measurement, graphs, stats, mindmaps, flipcharts, trainings. In 2009 the UEA published a survey about Transition Norwich (from its mailing list) that received more attention than anything the actual Tranistioners were doing on the ground. Students and researchers have often observed our grassroots activity, as if they were in charge or separated from the meetings and projects, like anthropologists making notes on an interesting rainforest tribe. In spite of our emphasis on reskilling, learning practical stuff and giving it value, the abstract theories of the mind world are considered superior to physical experience, and for sure anything that smacks of creativity or the unquantifiable stuff of the right hemisphere.

This is not to knock learning here. But to bring attention to the limits of a logos-biased world and to question the effectiveness of such a model. Our ability to look at reality is severely hampered by our education. Our institutionalisation makes us obedient and perverse in ways that hamper our ability to act decisively. Trained to be commanded, we are waiting to be told what to do (mostly by people we are taught to think of as our responsible "superiors"). We think that if children understand climate change, everything will be sorted and we won't have to change ourselves. We don't see that the mindset that enables governments and corporations to engineer reality, the systems that makes people disassociated, hostile to one another, controlling, scornful of life, have its roots in the classroom and playground. 

We don't see that this system will resist the kinds of changes we really need to make, because it is designed to uphold the industrialised world (as Charles Eisenstein points out). I have taken Transition into schools (to give classes on Reconnection with Nature and Peak Oil in Norwich and honeybees in Bungay) and was shocked by its soul-destroying architecture and atmosphere of repression. The children were raucous, lively, friendly and also disturbing. They got Peak Oil and creation myths and pollination in a trice, and listened more-or-less quietly to the tales about the future Transition Cambridge brought with them, and happily tuned in to the spirit of the beehive. Then the bell went, and so probably did everything we said. Theatre and stories are for fun. Back to the curriculum tomorrow!

POSTCARD FROM THE SUNRISE COAST

The sea is also beautiful, and I am still a non-believer. It's the end of the summer and the newspapers are full of smug-looking schoolboys jumping into the air with their triple A results. I am not going back to school, but I can feel the season turning. Geese are coming in from Siberia in the mornings, and the evening light is turning tawny. Everywhere the fields lie bare and gold after the harvests. Floating in the deep swell, I can feel the temperature of the water dip. After six weeks the Social Reporters are returning from their summer break to a full-on autumn term. We're genning up for the Conference, looking ahead, filling in the rota. This is my last postcard from the Sunrise Coast.

No one taught me to love this old North Sea. It was there all the time when I was reading Sartre in the small hours at my boarding school, and now it is here: still mysterious, moving, unquantifiable. No one taught me to love the moon that shone through the bathroom window as I turned the pages, or my friends sleeping in the dormitory, or the feeling of being able to write about my own life, to make meaning of everything, to be autonomous and not bow down to authority.

I don't remember those lessons I learned during the day - cosines, dates, or Latin declensions. But I do remember this sea. How it changes every day, the light, its mood, the shape of the waves. How it feels when you are there, immersed in the elements, alone with the wind and sky, or alongside your fellows, as the cormorant or the seal pass by. And it feels to me that the greatest lesson we ever learn comes directly from the planet we are now trying to "save", and that if we held our love of this place and all its creatures as the basis for all our knowledge, how differently the world would look. How differently we would speak with one other, with our initiatives, with all our relations.

Images: still from The Belles of St Trinians; harvest fields outside Bungay; Plants for Bees class at Bungay Primary School, 2011; Peak Oil class at Catton Grove, 2010; still from Kes; on Aldeburgh beach, 2011

the darkness around us is deep

I am walking towards the statue of Peter Pan. It is a cold grey winter's day in a winter that seems to go on forever. I have followed this path since I was six weeks old, when my parents brought me here to see the bronze statue of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, the animals playing at his feet and the waterbirds on the Serpentine.

I don’t live in London anymore and it must have been years now since I walked past these stone fountains at Lancaster Gate. My parents' ashes are scattered among the horse chestnut trees at the water’s edge and I have come to touch base in a hard winter, when it seems my world has come to a grinding halt. Your parents can give you good reasons for being here, so long as you don’t get waylaid by happy family stories and too much psychology. My father was a lawyer but he dreamed of being a travelling writer, my mother was a secretary and a wife, but dreamed of being an artist and living in a community. I have lived out their dreams.

As a consequence I have also gone contrary to the bourgeois creed in which I was raised, betraying my Kensington Gardens upbringing, my class, education and everything about this city that was once my home. Sometimes you could think I had betrayed my parents too. But at a certain depth - the kind of depth that makes sense of everything, even a hard winter, when you lose the capacity to write and have three bouts of flu back to back - you  know that following the party line is not what you are doing on the planet at this point in time. Walking away from the party and putting down roots in the real earth is what you are doing, living like a creator, even though it condemns you to skirt like a fox on the edges of everything.

I can write this because when I walked down to the statue that day I saw a heron waiting on the dead poplar tree and I heard a mistle thrush singing in the undergrowth. The fishing bird that was my father and the singing bird that was my mother. It was one of those moments where the mystery of life touches you and shakes you to your core. And as I walked across the park I saw there were birds everywhere: parakeets in amongst the London planes, a bevy of swans down by the round pond being fed by children, a crow hopping warily at my feet. And underneath the sweet chestnut trees there were ghosts of wild flowers and long meadow grass that would never have been “allowed” when I was young. This was bird London, wild London. Something coming through the cracks you do not expect.

Afterwards I went to join Lucy at the South Bank for a meeting about the book we are working on called Playing for Time. We stood on Waterloo Bridge and Lucy told me how once she organised a huge pyrotechnic show on the river; how many officials behind those grey stern facades she had to negotiate with to allow this fiery theatre to take place. And then she took me to supper at a little Lebanese restaurant in Covent Garden before I caught my train home. Mezes and a glass of rose wine. I haven’t eaten a meal on white tablecloth for a long, long time. It was a big treat. It was a good day.

Wellbeing

I am not sure about the word wellbeing. I know about treasuring the good days. I understand destiny, living true to your solar core, aligned with the earth that gives you life. I understand honouring your mother and father, and the hard work of creators, what it takes to bring the fire through and hold it in the dark times. I understand walking out this equinox morning to greet the sun down the frosty lane with Mark. I understand about having a warrior attitude and a medicine attention, about finding your material, undertaking the hard inner work, turning the bad karma of empire and the dross of materialism into some kind gold for the future. But wellbeing as a measure of life?

Being at leisure, feeling comfortable, feeling OK about ourselves, like those well-serviced magazine women who do yoga, eat superfoods and find solace in novels? This feels like another kind of consumerism, a convenient barricading out of the hard facts, the reality that nothing we do in this industrialised culture is kind or good. Everything we touch or put in our mouths requires some other being’s suffering: from people, from forests, mountains, animals, fish, children, birds. How can you have wellbeing at the expense of others, without going into denial?

I have experienced a state of happiness, a lightness and ease with the world, which comes sometimes out of the blue, like a butterfly: floating like a starfish in the sea, lying under the goat willow on a spring day and hearing the return of the bees, countless mornings in the desert when I  lived there, a morning in Venezuela when we woke up and found ourselves in a tropical seatown with the whole day in front of us, a long long road in Arizona edged with sunflowers, a long long beach in California, with sealions in the surf and sanderlings running in and out.

So many mornings full of space and light and beauty when I was on the road, when I had money in my pocket and knew nothing about peak oil.

How do you have wellbeing in Transition when the moments of white tablecloths are few and the road is no longer open, and 2013 looks unaccountably harder and colder and poorer than 2012? When it has been grey for months on a damp, crowded island, and you have been in bed for weeks? How can you live well in times of unravelling, your own unravelling and the dear earth’s on which all  happiness depends?

Will you be there?

Here is a moment I had in Transition: One of the most successful meetings in Transition Norwich in fact in the early days when we were setting up the Heart and Soul, Arts, Culture and Wellbeing group. It was the one and only meeting we had on wellbeing.

Among the ten people who came that evening five were working or had worked for the NHS, one was a chemist and two of us knew about medicine plants. Each of us had brought an object to introduce our medicine stories: Mark brought a horse-chestnut tincture, Richard brought a quote from The Glass Bead Game and a small volume on homoeopathy. Alex brought a daisy. He had been at a seminar in the Schumacher Institute when the deep ecologist Arne Naess, then in his eighties, had surprised everyone as he leapt through the window with a daisy in his hands. It was the medicine of vigour, Alex said.

What made this meeting vigorous and deep was the reality we brought with us. Suddenly our discussions, which had been abstract workshop encounters, full of spiritual possibility and solace, had allowed our gritty experience of the world into the room. When some of us exchanged opinions about the modern medical system, Angie, who had been a nurse on intensive care for 19 years, said quietly:

“I hope when I need to be turned some of you will be there to turn me.”

And there was a silence in the small room. As we realised what it would mean for us to take our own health, our lives, into our own hands.

We don’t live in Never-Never land. We live in a place where we are all going to die. And because all living things die on Earth, change is possible. We have physical limits and the reality of time, and against those limits and time, all our greatness and nobility is tested. As modern people we are no longer initiated into the mysteries of life, where this kind of limit has meaning, and so to get to a realisation of our true path, we need to tap into those moments that come out of nowhere. I understand this as making space to honour the ancestors – the ones who went before – our lineage and making time to greet the sun on an equinox day, to light a fire around which we can gather and listen to each other’s stories. The work of the artist and the writer is to remind the people of those moments, so we do not follow the wrong god home and miss our star. So we set our sails in the right direction. The measure we have is not our personal wellbeing, it is an alignment we hold inside us that can help put a crooked thing straight.

We are the ones who carry the fire, even when it looks as if it has gone out. We know how to bury the dead, we know where the medicine plants grow, we know the meaning of dreams, we know how to speak to the officials, so a fiery show can happen on the River Thames, we recognise the bird when it sings, the warrior when he stands by the land. We honour the people who suffer themselves to undergo change, who give their gifts and do not give up. We are in all places, in all rooms. We are in Transition. We live in the towns and cities and down the lane. We are here. We are not going anywhere. Because there is nowhere else to go. This is what we remember. This the moment that matters. Right now, right here.

(Originally written for a week looking at wellbeing on the Transition Network)

Photos: the memory of sweet violets; on the tumulus with daffodils; with Beth on the beach; guerilla garden hellebore; equinox sun.(CDC/Mark Watson)

We don't need no education

"But Mr Biddlecombe what is god?" It's 1972, Felixstowe, Suffolk. I'm wearing a gym slip several inches too short according to the music mistress (Du Cann there are male members of the orchestra!) and I've just discovered existentialism. Julia Weatherly and I are the only atheists in a religious school and we have found our intellectual edge. Rev Biddlecombe runs the chapel where I sing in the choir and is attempting to teach us theology. I am giving him a hard time because that's what you do when you are fifteen and running up against authority and the big questions in life.

I know he won't be able to answer, and that no teacher can. The question is not there in search of an anwer, it is there to challenge the boundaries of a prescribed world.We live in a world governed by education - a small mean god we worship, even without realising our faith. It schools us in the rational mind and teaches us to look at the earth through the heartless and acquisitive eyes of Empire. Depending on what kind of house we are born into we go to school to be shaped by the requirements of our hierarchical culture: to be turned into obedient factory or cannon fodder, to fill in forms, or to arrogantly rule the world.

But no matter what school we attend, all of us are programmed to see life in geometric squares, truth as scientific facts, the earth as property, our nation's history as the rightful conquest of Western civilisation. We are taught that control of the mind is always more important thanl real-life experience. Some of us are broken by our establishments - bullied, humiliated and made miserable, labelled as difficult or deficient in some way. Some of us become haughty and power-hungry. Some of us find ways to thwart the hold this god has on our imagination and our liberty. When I am fifteen I devour philosophy and literature in the bathrooms at night and start to keep a journal. I have decided to become a writer, which means I will be the one in the room asking awkward questions, bringing the mythos into play, challenging conformity at every turn. I am learning no one will ever love me for it - but I'm going to do it anyway. If only to hold open a door.

WHAT IF . . . WE NEVER WENT BACK TO SCHOOL?

"But the sea is also beautiful!" It's 2012, Stowmarket, Suffolk. I am sitting at question time at the What if . . . the sea keeps rising? event, chaired by Andrew Simms. Everyone on the panel has given a slick and scientific low-down on climate change and the way it will alter our coastlines as the Arctic melts and the waters cover the earth. The sentence floats uneasily among the rigid facts and figures, among the agricultural tools of the c14th barn, signalling another route we could take - except that The Problem about Transition has just risen among the sea of heads. The Problem at question time is usually three-fold: 1) Transition is too middle class 2) what are you going to do about population? and 3) where are all the young people and We Have to Take Transition into the Schools!

I am no longer fifeen. I have learned to bite my tongue and not take the bait. I've been in Transition for four years and know all these "questions" are memes, manifestations of the annoying defense system of the left-brain, and none of the people who utter them intend to act on their words, or indeed join Transition.

Transition is big on education. Its tools and ingredients favour an academic approach: measurement, graphs, stats, mindmaps, flipcharts, trainings. In 2009 the UEA published a survey about Transition Norwich (from its mailing list) that received more attention than anything the actual Tranistioners were doing on the ground. Students and researchers have often observed our grassroots activity, as if they were in charge or separated from the meetings and projects, like anthropologists making notes on an interesting rainforest tribe. In spite of our emphasis on reskilling, learning practical stuff and giving it value, the abstract theories of the mind world are considered superior to physical experience, and for sure anything that smacks of creativity or the unquantifiable stuff of the right hemisphere.

This is not to knock learning here. But to bring attention to the limits of this approach, to our logos-biased world, and to question how we go about Transition. Our ability to look at reality is severly hampered by our education. Our instituationalisation makes us obedient and perverse in ways that hamper our ability to act decisively. Trained to be commanded, we are waiiting to be told what to do (mostly by people we are taught to think of as our responsible "superiors"). We think that if children understand climate change, everything will be sorted and we won't have to change ourselves. We don't see that the mindset that enables governments and corporations to engineer reality, the systems that makes people disassociated, hostile to one another, controlling, scornful of life, have its roots in the classroom and playground.

We don't see that this system will resist the kinds of changes we really need to make, because it is designed to uphold the industrialised world (as Charles Eisenstein points out). I have taken Transition into school (to give classes on Reconnection with Nature and Peak Oil in Norwich and honeybees in Bungay) and was shocked by its soul-destroying architecture and atmosphere of repression. The children were raucous, lively, friendly and also disturbing. They got Peak Oil and creation myths and pollination in a trice, and listened more-or-less quietly to the tales about the future Transition Cambridge brought with them, and happily tuned in to the spirit of the beehive. Then the bell went, and so probably did everything we said. Theatre and stories are for fun. Back to the curriculum tomorrow!

POSTCARD FROM THE SUNRISE COAST

The sea is also beautiful, and I am still a non-believer. It's the end of the summer and the newspapers are full of smug-looking schoolboys jumping into the air with their triple A results. I am not going back to school, but I can feel the season turning. Geese are coming in from Siberia in the mornings, and the evening light is turning tawny. Everywhere the fields lie bare and gold after the harvests. Floating in the deep swell, I can feel the temperature of the water dip. After six weeks the Social Reporters are returning from their summer break to a full-on autumn term. We're genning up for the Conference, looking ahead, filling in the rota. This is my last postcard from the Sunrise Coast.

No one taught me to love this old North Sea. It was there all the time when I was reading Sartre in the small hours at my boarding school, and now it is here: still mysterious, moving, unquantifiable. No one taught me to love the moon that shone through the bathroom window as I turned the pages, or my friends sleeping in the dormitory, or the feeling of being able to write about my own life, to make meaning of everything, to be autonomous and not bow down to authority.

I don't remember those lessons I learned during the day - cosines, dates, or Latin declensions. But I do remember this sea. How it changes every day, the light, its mood, the shape of the waves. How it feels when you are there, immersed in the elements, alone with the wind and sky, or alongside your fellows, as the cormorant or the seal pass by. And it feels to me that the greatest lesson we ever learn comes directly from the planet we are now trying to "save", and that if we held our love of this place and all its creatures as the basis for all our knowledge, how differently the world would look. How differently we would speak with one other, with our initiatives, with all our relations.

Images: still from The Belles of St Trinians; harvest fields outside Bungay; Plants for Bees class at Bungay Primary School, 2011; Peak Oil class at Catton Grove, 2010; still from Kes; on Aldeburgh beach, 2011

The Fire Sermon - postcard from the City of London

St Mary Aldemary, EC4 Down the tiny streets of Watling and Bow, the young bankers in sharp suits and shiny shoes are robustly drinking beer. Everyone has spilled out of their offices onto the pavements into the warm evening. The traffic drones down Threadneedle Street where the Old Lady of the Banks presides stonily among the glass-fronted cathedrals of the financial district, the hub of the economic world, where last winter the Occupy movement changed the dance. Though you might not notice from the look of things.

In the 1920s a young American wrote a seminal poem set in London. It captured something of the unreal nature of the modern city, and the hidden mood of a people shaken by war, of a civilisation in crisis. It suggests we live in a fragmented time and only a robust spirituality will redeem us and bring our souls together.

In 2012 another American is standing in front of a packed City church and suggesting that bringing "the sacred" into the economics of our daily lives will prevent our falling into materialism and thus the destruction of the world against which every poet warns.

Datta: what have we given?

It is an eloquent and sure-footed talk and everything the man says about "living in the gift" makes perfect sense, and yet I find the true sermon downstairs in the ladies toilet at an Indian vegetarian restaurant near the Angel. Here you can eat as much as you like for under a fiver and there are lavish descriptions of the bad things that will befall you, if you don't dine on the kind of dishes they serve at the buffet. The walls are covered with visiting beauty Queens and strict admonitions to cut down on unholy meat-consumption. Or else!

I am here with Jo and our new fellow reporter, Sara. We are all knackered by the event for some reason which has yet to come to me. The whole Sacred Economics thing has yet to come to me. How do you get a black and white text to make sense within this brightly colourful fabric in which we are tightly enmeshed? In which we think of ourselves as the 99%, but in fact are amongst the most privileged?

How is it words Eisenstein uses like gratitude, service and bond feel trapping, but words like generosity and equality bring a sense of space and freedom?

Tomorrow I will go with Jo to Edible Landscapes London in Finsbury Park and find out how to graft an Asian pear on to an English apple tree. I'm en route to a conversation with Charles Eisenstein and other Transitioners on the gift economy, joining the crowd flowing across Charing Cross bridge towards the Festival Hall:

I had not thought death had undone so many.

This is not a winter dawn in the wasteland, the twilight hour in the cruel spring of post-WW1 London, it is the South Bank in summer time: a London full of people chattering on streets and lavish restaurants and glass towers, of African fusion bands and pleasure boats, a city about to split to the seams with its hosting of the Greatest Corporate Game Show on Earth. It is hard to see any fall or alienation with all this shiny matrix stuff going on. Is this the Titantic about to sink and the band playing to the max to distract us? Who are those people huddled in a windy corner outside the Hayward, listening intently for a new narrative amongst the fragments we are telling each other about our Transition lives. Are we the lifeboat, or are we fooling ourselves?

Is it our business to graft an alien spirituality onto a native tree? Or is something else going on we just haven't yet seen?

I did not come to a conclusion that day. I fell ill with a chill and have only now recovered. So this is a belated postcard. I'll let you know if I find any answers to those questions. Meanwhile enjoy this sun!

Images: with Sara in Islington: the sermon in the toilet; with Jo and the ELL crew in Finsbury Park; overlooking the demonstration bed. Lines from The Wasteland by T.S. ELiot (1922)

Postcards from the Edge

We are now officially on our summer break! The Social Reporting crew have been posting almost daily since the beginning of the year and so, as the holiday season arrives for some of us, we are going to kick back and slip into are more spontaneous post-when-you like rhythm for the next six weeks. We'll be sending you postcards though!

Where will these postcards be from? We'll from posting from our events, our gardens, our gatherings in Transition. Places we are visiting now, places we have visited in the past, abroad and at home. We'll be posting from the city and the country, from the backyard and the beach, on the road, on two wheels, as we walk, swim, picnic, celebrate and sing. I'll be reporting from the Sunrise Festival (Somerset) and the Sunrise Coast (Suffolk) and this week from London, as I head up by train to hear Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, speak in the City. Some of our postcards will be short, and others our usual length (more of a letter really) and we'll all take turns to write when the mood and the moment takes us. It's an experiment, a break from routine and gives us some space and time, a chance to do things differently for a while. A summer breather.

What will happen in the future? Last week on a very dodgy Skype line several reporters discussed the future shape of the blog. We decided to keep our style of working around a set theme for the week, with free weekends for news and one-off posts and now have a rota for this autumn, running until the end of the year. We have some ace subjects coming up including Flying, Deep Time, Harvest, Hierarchy, the role of the Network, Livelihoods and Trees in Transition. We'll be returning with a Back to School week starting on Monday 26 August, following by the third in our series of Transition Ingredients and Tools. Then we have a fortnight around the Transition Conference, including its companion events. Seven of us will be there taking part and also reporting live from the weekend's full-on activities. We hope to be setting up our own reporting and skill-share "desk", so do come and find us.

Meanwhile we hope you will keep travelling alongside us this summer. Bonnes vacances, dear Readers, and see you soon!

P.S. We welcome ideas and guest blogs on the Project. If you'd like to send your own postcard, please get in touch and for all things editorial via charlotteducann@transitionnetwork.org.

Images: speaking about wild flowers and bees at Bungay Beehive Day, reading from 52 Flowers That Shook My World (Heather); meeting on the beach with the Dark Mountain Norwich crew, Southwold.

24 Hours of Possibility

Here comes the sun! Welcome to our photoblog for the Festival of Transition and the 24 Hours of Possibility that began at dawn today. Here I am greeting the summer solstice sun as it rises from the sea at Southwold, Suffolk (4.36am). It's a glorious day out there, at the sun's zenith in the sky, at this moment of maximum light on earth. Have a wonderful time, whatever you decide to do (or not-do) today. I'm travelling Westwards across the land and looking forward to meeting up fellow Transitioners at the Transition Tin Viillage and the Sunrise Festival. Oh, and having a dance! Wishing everyone the midsummer best. Keep an eye out for the photos as they appear here during the next 23 hours.

What if the People had a change of heart?

Today we are running our Festival of Transition blog in tandem with the Social Reporters Project. We start out with an introduction to the week (and follow on from last week's post on Development).

I am in the Museum of East Anglian life at the Festival of Transition event, What if . . . the sea keeps rising? and I want to put my hand up and ask about the rivers. Why did the government withdraw its funds for the river defences of the Ore, the Deben, the Alde, the Blyth? But the question does not happen. The woman from the Environment Agency in London is staring into her computer and talking about plans and scenarios and how some moves are less controversial than others, as we all gaze at the aerial shot of the lovely sinuous and green waterlands of coastal Suffolk.

Maybe it's because I know the answer: because when the seas did rise up in a storm surge in 2007, and there was a massive flooding of the Blyth, the environment officer told us the land was not worth much anyway. Only marsh and watermeadows for a few cows. And that the small-scale local fishing was "not economic", so it made no odds that the harbour collapsed. The money for flood protection would be secured for the big inland towns and commercial sea ports, such as Great Yarmouth and Felixstowe.

That was the moment, just before I stumbled upon Transition, that my small world cracked upon and I found myself among the people, defending the place we all loved in our separate, and now connected ways. We spoke out in village halls and protested on the beaches, and then some of us picked up our spades and began to remake the river walls ourselves. Before the advent of diggers, all the river walls were mended each winter by a few men.

Tony Butler, the musuem's curator, showed us a ditch spade from among the extraordinary set of traditional tools on the 14th century barn in which our meeting is taking place. That's when you see the past and the future in your own hands. How everything hinges ultimately on our own efforts: Who will dig the land, who will shape the land, what is it worth, and in what spirit will this work be done? Up until the 1950s half the population in Suffolk worked on the land; now it's 0.5 percent. The country has become something we understand at arm's length, a Suffolk of industrial agriculture, fringed with nature tourism and leisure. And yet in our hearts, somewhere, we know there is a deeper relationship we have with our homeland, and if we were wise, we would be seeking it out.

Festival of Transition

The Festival of Transition has been running now since May in a series of events across the country: walks in London, talks at the Bristol Green Fair, at the Hay Festival and in Manchester. They have been organised by the Transition Network and new economics foundation, as well other organisations. On Wednesday this Festival culminates in a 24 hours of possibility in which everyone has been asked to imagine what life will be like in the future and live it for that one day. Everything from small individual acts - not using a car, making something by hand - to holding a street carnival. This week on the blog we're going to share some of those actions and reflections as Transitioners across the UK.

June 20 is a big day. It's the start of the Rio+20 summit in which the future of the earth will be discussed by world leaders; it is the summer solstice, the longest day, the day of maximum light, when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky; and it's also my birthday. So in the way days are markers for time, historically, planetary, personally, this midsummer brings a shift of attention. Everything enacted, felt and imagined that day will alter the course of events thereafter.

Traditionally midsummer is a door in time, in which other dimensions, possibilities you have never thought of, slip through our imaginations into this physical world. And maybe this is why I don't ask the government officer why they are abandoning the farmland and the bird reserves, and why instead I find myself looking at Laurence Edward's The Creek Men as they float down the River Alde on the way to Snape.

We think the government will turn the planet around. But they won't. It will be the people who will turn it around. The people who love the land, who know that there is more to life than economic necessity. They will not be the people you expect.

24 hours of possibility

What am I going to do on J20? I will get up at dawn and see the sun rise in the East out of the sea at Southwold and, if it's not too windy and rough, I will jump into the waves and have my first swim of the year. I will sit in the garden and have breakfast amongst the rock roses and ceanothus thrumming with bees. Then I will travel with three students from Norwich across the country to the Sunrise Festival and watch the sun set in the West amongst the hills in Somerset. I'm on the crew for the Transition Tin Village and giving workshops on grassroots communications and medicine plants, so the day will start quietly and end in a great crescendo of dance and song and people.

But that's the outside event. What am I really doing on J20? In a recent post during our week on Development, I asked what if beauty were the driving force behind all our actions, rather than economics? What if the basis of our lives was not how the fittest survived, but the how the most lovely and loving thrived, the people and the flowers?

Looking for the bee and pyramid orchids on a roadside verge on the way home from a Bungay Community Bees farm visit, a man stopped and complained to us how the flowers were getting in the way of his vision of the road. There wasn't much there anyway, he said, and kicked the grass as if to prove the point. Richard, who knows every inch of this land, explained why this was a roadside nature reserve, while Lesley, Mark and I kept looking, eyes down. The defender of cars disappeared into his house. We found orchids everywhere.

"When they moved the green-winged orchids from the Tesco roundabout in Lowestoft they disappeared," Lesley said.

"They didn't like being moved," Richard said. "Nature has its own way."

"Maybe they didn't like Tescos, I said. And we all laughed.

The fact is life is surprising and comes up with extraordinary solutions, so long as you allow it to, so long as you don't get intimidated. If you focus on the things you love and know that nature has its own way, including your own. That's something that creators know, and all people who work with wild flowers. What if . . . the unexpected happens? That the drivers of cars don't always have the right of way, that the politicians don't always have the voice? That what you do on a summer's day alters the destiny of the planet?

Who would have imagined for one minute, for example, that the Southwold Journal one of the most traditional local papers, in one of the most conversative towns in Britain had Transition on its front page this week? People in the town have decided to resist the advance of the Costa Coffee chain in our high street and have been set back by the county council planners' recommendation. So the postmaster and chair of the local chamber of commerce, Guy Mitchell, told the reporter about the recent Totnes campaign, quoting Andrew Simms from nef (and chair of the What if . . . the Sea Keeps Rising) and Frances Northrop from TT Totnes: "Ultimately it’s the community that knows its own needs and that voice is getting louder".

So that's what I am going to do on Wednesday, I'm going to tune into the sun as it rises and listen out for that other voice as it comes through. I'm going to keep an eye out for the beautiful and the free. I'm going to hold out, for what I always hold out for, a change of heart amongst the people.

I'm going to hold open the door.

Images: Laurence Edwards The Creek Men; community toolkit from Festival of Transition; with Tristram and Reuben in the hollow oak at High Ash Farm; bee orchid on the verge outside Bungay; Mark in the Library reading the Southwold Journal.

From topic week on Festival of Transition

Brief Encounter

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star
(William Stafford: A Ritual to Read to Each Other)

"You play the cello, don't you?" boomed the editor. "Yes," I said. "Well, I played in the orchestra at school" "Oh, good," she said. "Then you can interview Segovia tomorrow".

I had a feeling I was addressed as Du Cann in the corridor that day, but maybe that's not what she actually said. Whatever, being commanded to interview the legendary guitarist on the basis of having strings-in-common was utterly petrifying. I had never done an interview in my life before. I was 22, cocky, but not that cocky.

"What shall I do?" I asked my fellow cub reporter, Rachel, who was busy writing captions about raspberry chiffon. "Buy a tape recorder," she advised.

I'm not sure that would happen now. In those days you got a job at places like Vogue with no experience and were thrown into the deep end. If you couldn't swim with style, you didn't pass the ordeal. I didn't interview Segovia in the end, but I did interview Simon Callow, just before he played in Amadeus at the National Theatre, in equally nerve-wracking circumstances. I don't know who was more shaky, him or me, as we sat in Snowdon's studio while the maestro photographer fumbled about with the camera. He took three hours to take one shot.

I learned my first lesson about interviewing that day. Which is this: while it may look as though nothing is going on and you are not in control, in fact you are clocking everything. Control is not what it's about. You are waiting for the shot or the quote, the aha moment that will turn the ship around. Sometimes you have to wait a long time to get that quote, usually after about thirty minutes fumbling around in the dark.

This week on the project is all about interviewing people. It was set up as a week by Adrienne Campbell, who couldn't do the assignment because she had to go into hospital (now thankfully out and in recovery). Her original - typically adventurous - idea was to interview someone difficult, even in opposition to Transition, and take them on in a dialogue, stand in their shoes and find out how they tick. I'm taking up the helm and introducing the week, but I haven't interviewed anyone specifically (my fellow reporters will be doing that from tomorrow). What I wanted to do was explore why we originally discussed the idea and what this standard media technique does, and how it could apply to Transition.

A writer always sells someone out, the great observer Joan Didion once wrote. That was the second lesson I learned, when I got to type up my first interview in the features dept. The heady feeling of having material and being able to fashion a story you want to tell around it. In magazine journalism the story is everything, and the writer of the interview is as key as the subject. This also held true, at that time, for television. The interview can be an investigation, a confrontation, or a dialogue in which both people can come to different conclusions about themselves and life at the end of an hour. It's a useful tool because most people enjoy the attention and will invaribly spill the beans at some point. The interviewer looks like a mouse, but is in fact a weasel, mesmerising its prey.

So I spent a decade thereafter with a tape recorder in my pocket, interviewing artists, writers, singers, fashion designers, furniture designers, chefs, craftsmen. I wasn't interested in catching people out, or unearthing scandal, but I did want to know how people made things happen. I was endlessly fascinated by form and creativity. I hung around backstage, on film sets, in studios, in bars and swanky restaurants (not great for interviews - all that clinking of glasses). I thought nothing of getting on a plane to interview people about their house in Tuscany or their latest book in Albany.

Sometimes I got the quote easily, and sometimes I had to sweat a lot for it to happen. I was nervous, even when I'd become good at it, because it's a nerve wracking business. You have to think on your feet. Some people prepare a lot beforehand, but I waded in with one or two questions up my sleeve and improvised. It's a risky style but you can push the edge that way. People let their guard down and come up with surprises. Sitting in front of the filmmaker Wim Wenders and the designer, Yojhi Yamamoto in Paris, a great silence ensued that I thought would never end. I was about to break it, when the Japanese master of the understatement turned to me and said:

Black is the colour of hysteria.

Yes!

Once you've got the quote, you have the story.

Sure thing, you might say, but what has any of this old stuff got to do with Transition? Because the interview is a great tool and a key tool if we want to become our own media. People flourish with proper attention. Anyone's story is interesting, if you can find a way to open them up, ask questions, go back in time, listen, allow. In ordinary life we don't do this. We go to meetings. We see people every day in a superficial way, we don't pay each other notice, in terms of ourselves as beings-in-Transition, in terms of sharing a storehouse of knowledge, or skills. We're too busy to give that kind of time, and maybe not generous enough to find out what our fellow transitioners actually think or feel. That meeting with a tape recorder can give an objective frame, in which everyone can go deep and far, carve out an hour when the demands of ordinary life can be put on hold. When the best of ourselves can come out.

In Transition of course we don't want to sell anyone down river, especially since we are all in the same canoe. So the interview has to change its form in many ways. When I interviewed Rob Hopkins on his whistlestop visit to Norwich last November, squeezed between breakfast and a vist to Grapes Hill Community Garden, it was more of a conversation around the role of communication and social enterprise. We are not adversaries, sitting opposite each other, we are in the same business, sitting side by side, so the interview is more of way to reflect and connect, rather than a relevation.

Interviewing Shaun Chamberlin last month for the Transition Free Press over Skype, we had a great discussion and covered a lot of intellectual ground, which was the main point of the interview. But you can't be intimate through a machine. Had we wanted to talk at a more emotional level, it would have been tough going. You need the presence of people in the room. You need those awkward silences, the sense that someone is listening.

Since the creation of the Internet many interviews no longer happen in situ, but in the format of an (emailed) question and answer session. These don't require any skill (or daring) from the journalist, apart from formulating the questions. There is no encounter and no shaping of a story. As a result the material is far more limited and you tend to get stock answers. Some of this is due to a decline in journalism, the effect of a market culture on a creative form. Some of it due to the subsequent lack of expenses that don't allow writers to visit or spend months of their time around people, as Didion or Tom Wolfe or other "new" journalists once did in the 70s and 80s, in order to research a story.

When the Social Reporting Project was set up last year, I wanted to pass on some of the skills I learned in those glossy magazine Fleet Street years, when journalism was not just about press releases and getting stories "off the wire". Ed and I ran two workshops, one at the Sunrise Festival and another at the Transition Conference. In one exercise we asked everyone to split into pairs and interview one another for five minutes about a Transition project, then feedback to the group. These events are a whirl of constant conversation: most of them disappear afterwards. But I can still remember talking about our (Sustainable) Bungay Beehive Day and hearing about the Brixton Remakery starting up, how Rebecca from Transition Crouch End organised a community processon along an underground river to celebrate Guy Fawkes and Halloween. Something sticks when you make this structure in space and time.

So although none of us are working for the mainstream press, we work alongside each other all the time. We can all of us take time and ask questions, talk to each other as if we matter. Not in terms of "I want something from you" (the manager), or "You have a problem I am going to sort out" (the therapist), but as social reporters who are in search of a new narrative. Because if I don't know you and you don't know me a certain pattern will prevail in the world - one that none of us in our hearts want to see through to its logical end. We need to speak outloud and listen in our Transition communications as beings of the future, who possess certain experiences and skills that can change that pattern. We can't do this on our own.

Take the mic. Don't miss that star.

Interview with John Galliano, The Independent, 1990; poster for the docudrama, Frost/Nixon; interviewing Ed at the Transition Conference (Mike Grenville); with Rob Hopkins at Norwich station