Being the Anchor (Pausing for Reflection on the Transition Conference)

One thing I learned from plants, I said to Dan as we headed home to Suffolk and resumed our discussion about roadside herbs, is that whatever you experience in the company of the plant that is the medicine. What makes the medicine is the looking back on that experience afterwards, the dialogue you hold about it and the story you then tell the world.

So after the whirlwind three days in Liverpool what is that story? I wanted to experience everything - the 90 minute workshops, the three hour workshops, the open mike session, talking with the friends I’ve made in Transition who I can’t see everyday - and like everyone else I couldn’t. I missed the Tree Walk, the singing Flash Mob in the canteen, the roving storytellers, the incredible bookshop in the foyer. I had a job to do: I was disseminating all the publicity and media and comms work we do in Transition. I took part in all the main events of the conference to keep pace and then I returned to the Media Action Station, liaised with Ed (web coordination), Mike (photographer), Chris (audio), David (video) and all the conference bloggers who swung by.

When I stopped running and accepted my small role in the whole pattern, that’s when everything started to make sense.

To be an anchor as a communications person means you are in the midst of the action. You report back to the studio and that dialogue makes the broadcast. Being an anchor in a medicine sense has another function: it means you are prepared to put yourself in the eye of the storm and allow that change to take place within you. You are grounding yourself wherever you are, finding your bearings, and bringing the knowledge of what you know into action. Harmonising all those different voices. And that is not an easy position. It demands all your attention, all your feelings, all your time.

We were here to enjoy ourselves, to network, to celebrate, to engage in discussions and explorations. But we were also here to work. And the work of the future means we have to break out of the repeating patterns of the past and live life urgently and for real and not as we have been taught as a theory in our heads.



The conference was a metaphor for Transition, the kinds of pressures we have to withstand, the break-out moves we have to make. Held in Hope University (an ex-Catholic teaching college) the modern buildings kept us in their scholastic corridors and meeting rooms. We spilled out onto the lawns at midnight like noisy students and experienced a certain pressure that in many ways felt like a final exam. You might not know (unless you made that journey) that you were actually in Liverpool. It was hard to find home, said Jo and Inez at the final plenary in the chapel. Or feel close to the earth. Even Jay Griffiths' eloquent talk about wildness felt strangely academic.

We were people in a fishbowl with ideas, responses, theories, we had exercises and workshops and games that enabled us to come together and design a future of energy descent. Beyond the glass windows and the air conditioning lay the real world. What brought it into the room were the messages that came from the outside, particularly those political stories from Transition Heathrow and from Transition Barcelona who on Sunday night showed us videos of the extraordinary uprisings that have been taking place in the main square. How thousands of people in response to the financial and political crises of the times have come together and started to discuss a different way of doing things. Earth care, people care, fairshare.



This is the story of our times: the people who have been working for years persistently, in activism, in Transition, in permaculture and medicine, who suddenly when the moment comes, bring those principles into action. In the city squares of the world the people are gathering to design a future that they want. A democracy that is not dictated from above. One that comes out of neighbourhood, community ownership, sharing of resources, consensus decision making, participation, communication. One that is immediately local, but connects with people everywhere on the planet in the same situation. It self-organises because the people who hold those principles in place put themselves in anchor positions. They hold the change. This is not leadership or control, nor is it random and chaotic. It’s another function entirely.

Last year Nicole Foss in her talk said there will be people in the future who you might not have noticed before, because in the industrialised, push-and-shove, hierarchical culture we inhabit, they are given no value or are taken for granted. But in a time of turbulence their presence becomes known. They are the anchor people who stabilise, who connect, who include, who cohere, who make sense in a time when everything seems to be falling apart. Who bring lightness and possibility in a a time which appears heavy and dark. Who, because they know what to do, so does everyone else.


(click play and press cc for English subtitles)

When the police forced the people out of the Plaza Catalunya the spirit of what had taken place went into 23 neighbourhoods in the city and fired everyone into discussions and community-based actions. People got together to prevent the police evicting their neighbours (thousands of homes have been repossessed by the banks). Groups went into the countryside and took the news of what was happening which had not been reported by the mass media. They are walking now through Spain, going from village to village telling the story.

We met in Liverpool and now we’re returning to our villages and towns and neighbourhoods, telling the story of how things could be different in our words and actions. There are many stories that emerged out of the conference and I hope to relate all of them over the coming months. Today this was the one I chose to tell. Because Transition happens for real when we go out and join in the square with our fellows. When we put our feet on the earth and make ourselves at home. That's not a given, it's a task for everyone who longs for change. I could finally relax at the conference about not experiencing everything because as people came by and told me their experiences they became mine too. Transition is not an individualist story: it's a composite one, many stories told by many people.

Time to stand up and speak. Time to become our own media.

Group photo at Hope University; interview with Ben Branwyn by David Wilcox; interview with Mike Grenville by Ed Mitchell; Video about Plaza Catalunya from Duncan Crowley's blog (Barcelona en Transicio)

Key Messages from the Edge

What's the story of the conference? Hard to see when you're in the midst of the action. Last year Stoneleigh's talk on the financial crisis burst upon the scene and shocked us into looking at the future as a unified group. This year the strands are many and subtle and require time for unpicking, remembering, letting rise to the surface. So I'll sketch out some themes and fill them out tomorrow. One common response to a weekend of full on networking and activities and celebrations was the need for key core messages so here are a few:

MOOD OF THE MOMENT Calm. Focused. Mature. Engaged were the key words from Ben Brangwyn, Peter Lipman and Rob Hopkins of the Network. A willingness to get engaged at a deeper and more committed level. A lot of the discussion is happening at the edges. Like the conversation about livelihoods, the national hubs getting together and organising themselves as networks, the people from Barcelona and Madrid talking about Transition in the squares of Spain. Here's Rob with the book of the conference, David Fleming's, Lean Logic - A Dictionary of the Future and How to Survive It.

A WILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT CHALLENGES The Big Group Process took two hours yesterday in the chapel and food court. Walk if this question means something to you, called out Jo. Stay where you are if not. Have you experienced conflict in your imitative? Everyone was walking . . . and laughing ruefully. Walk if this has brought rewards. We kept walking . . .

WHAT KIND OF CULTURE DO YOU WANT TO CREATE? Question posed by Nick Osborne (Glastonbury) talking about the invisible beliefs and structures that shape our conversations in groups. How much are we prepared to go beyond the superficial. The courageous people who bring the debate into a deeper and more authentic space. Here is an interview with David on a workshop he held later on Group Dynamics:



COMMUNICATIONS Jamming about editorial with many groups. Showing our community blog on a workshop about websites. Meeting (and recruiting) social reporters and guest editors. Discussing communications strategy for the network. Resources for initiatives. Collating key messages particularly to do with the economic recession. What we want to say. What we need to say at this point in time.

ENGAGING YOUNGER PEOPLE Another hot topic was the dynamic between self-organisation and control and how younger people break the crystallised structures of older generations. Is Transition getting too set in its ways was the question asked by one of the Social Reporting crew, Caroline Jackson (Lancaster) in her conference blog, Move Over.

This was the first conference that included children. Samadi will be the youngest blogger on the block when the Social Reporting pilot kicks off in September (and a great drummer too). Here he is discussing websites with Ed on Saturday.

Meanwhile the last workshops are now taking place and the final plenary about to begin. I've just been the cameraman for a really interesting interview with Ben Brangwyn about this year's themes which I'll upload tomorrow. Check out the Transition Conference blog if you have time.

Hasta la vista!

Poster by Transition Barcelona; Rob Hopkins by Mike Grenville; interview by David Wilcox; Cartoon to demonstate the communcations strategy by Chris Wells; Samadi and Ed

Let it grow where it wants to grow

Here I am back at the Media Station, talking to Susan Upton from Transition Fejoe Omstilling in Denmark, showing her how to blog. Kerry is writing up yesterday's events opposite me (just posted - see below!) And Simeon (see above taking part in Rob Hopkins' workshop on Transition ingredients) is also planning a post (if there is time). It's a multi-post Sunday!

Behind me the conference comms group is engaged in working out a Transition media strategy (here's Peter and Chris transcribing yesterday's theme group meeting). We're meeting again after lunch after a hard morning's Big Group Process work. Watch this space!

Transition ingredients workshop; Peter and Chris mull over media; Kerry and fellow Glasgow Transitioner at lunch

Leaving for Liverpool

En route. We left around 11. Dan (Transition Ipswich) picked me up in our rain-drenched lane and we talked medicine plants non-stop (he’s a herbalist) as we wound down small Suffolk lanes until we got to Diss to collect Gary and then more windy Norfolk lanes until we found the last member of the Transition East road crew, Simeon (Norwich). And then we hit the A11. It was serious motorway driving after that.

It’s a long way to Liverpool, across flat and industrialised country, potato fields and wheat, windowless distribution centres and coal-fired power stations.

We talked Transition - economics, politics, community farms - as the towns and flowers flashed past, Cambridge, Crewe, Birmingham Derby. Rosebay willowherb, soapwort, Himalayan balsam, great mullein. The M6 got snarled up. Transport tweets went flying as.the Transition Network bus got held up outside Wolverhampton and we got stuck at Stoke. " If we don’t make it by 7 you’ll be punished," said Dan. "What with?" I asked. "The Archers," he replied "And a gin and tonic". A150, M6, M62 and finally Hope University.

The gin was delicious. Lemon, no ice,

Full-on meetings began immediately. Here’s Mike Grenville (Forest Row) discussing one of today’s fishbowl sessions on Activism with Adrienne Campbell (Lewes) and Ian Westmoreland (Heathrow).Off camera I’m discussing the two workshops I’m helping run on Communications and the Media this morning with Chris Wells (Kensal to Kilburn) and Social Reporting with Ed and David Wilcox. We're also inviting people in the bar to interview each other on video and then uploading on the Transition network site.

What are you expecting from the conference? Haven’t asked myself that question yet. One thing I do know it’s a busy day ahead. I’ll keep you posted from our Media Action Station between sessions. . . .but first breakfast!

Later. Can you believe it it's now 7pm and I'm off in search of supper. Not stopped or had any time to blog AT ALL: theme group preparation, meeting, mapping, singing, interviewing, workshops, fishbowl (on financial instability), lunch, meeting Kerry, 5 Rhythms dancing. Am at the Station opposite Ed uploading videos, next to Chris and Paul working out a media strategy. We're all off to find some supper . . .

11.30pm The bar is in uproar as the band play their last song (especially from the Portuguese delegation). Outside my window everyone is still sitting on the lawn discussing the day's events. Jay Griffiths who gave a talk on the Politics of Kindness, the Transition film crew, the storytellers, the conference organisers, people from initiatives all round the world. Transition Barcelona are telling everyone about the Indignados of Spain. If there is a different mood this conference it is undoubtedly to do with politics and finance and finding a language in which to discuss these things among ourselves and those we meet.

Walking to the Chinese take-away down the street with Helen (Matlock) we discussed social enterprises and living on the edge and how her initiative's CSA has been paying for her organisational skills in food and wood. "It's not time for playing anymore," said Mike. "It's got to work."

Meanwhile the singers outside my window are singing through the night:

Hey Jude don't be afraid, Take a sad song and make it better . . . well, we are in Liverpool.

Photos: Still from Of Time and the City by Terence Davies; Transition East gang about to hit the A11; which way?; Mike, Adrienne and Ian in the bar, Hope University, Liverpool; singing a welcome song from Guinea at the morning gathering; Peter Lipman interviewed by David Wilcox.

Stoneleigh Revisited

Last night we listened to the second half of the Stoneleigh talk at the 2010 Transition Conference, where Transitioners asked questions about the coming bursting of the finanical bubble.

At about midnight the cat jumped up to be let out of the window. And I looked outside into the warm starry night, into the garden and across the fields and marsh to the sea beyond. What has any of that got to do with this? The moon was a bright sickle over the trees and Jupiter shone brilliantly. On the horizon the oil tanker lights flickered.

The recording was of Nicole Foss responding to questions put to her after what was for many a wake-up call to global financial instability. This thing is going to blow! We knew in our minds that unregulated markets had created virtual wealth, but we hadn’t faced the reality of its consequences.

What should any of us do? Well, some of those answers were practical: putting cash aside and waiting until the price of land came down, investing in tools. Making sure you were in a place where your face fitted. Some of them were ways of seeing the decade that lies ahead, opening ourselves to the reality of a financial deflation. The way Greece is being pushed to the periphery of the eurozone, the way feed-in tariff guarrantees are unlikely to be upheld, that Governments do not play fair and fascism is likely.

But the ones that struck me were those to do with the people in Transition. Those of us who were mentally prepared for such times, showing communities there are other ways of doing things and recognising individuals who may have no money or seeming skills, but are incredible social beings. Who can hold a centre, when everything else falls apart.

Yesterday Helen rang me and said she couldn’t write the blog this week. She is inundated with Knit-In squares. A thousand of them in all the colours of the rainbow. Her original plan to have enough squares for a mammoth woolly to hang over the County Hall balcony for the Pride celebrations has come true. She has been sent squares from all over the world as well as all corners of Norwich. “It caught people’s imaginations,” she said.

In Bungay this week people are coming to the Library to see our Transition community garden being built. A plan was drawn up after the permaculture course in January but the working party had been waiting for funds. Out of the blue Sustainable Bungay was given £500 by the Bungay Society and so now we can forge ahead with the brickwork for the raised beds. Our fruit trees have just arrived in huge pots, between the rainbutts and the plantswap tables. Suddenly everything is ready to go!

In between the cracks of the system different things can happen. Seeds that were lying dormant, that you never thought were there, break through. You can’t expect them, but you can notice them. You can open your window at night and see Jupiter blazing in the heavens.

Because as well as the imminent financial meltdown there is also a new mood out there in the bigger picture. Of a possibility of something else happening. This is not a grandiose thing that has come out of board rooms, universities and temples. It comes from the bottom up, from the streets and shanty towns, from the people at the end of the line. People pulling together, reinventing their lives and their neighbourhooda. Something that’s happening everywhere - from small moves in East Anglia to the big movements in South America. From Mark on this blog to Oliver Stone’s new documentary, South of the Border.

To tap into that mood is important because if things really go to the wall the way Stoneleigh talks about and within a short timeframe, we’re going to need to hold together. And what holds us together are not the sentiments of Empire, nor the bullying tactics of corporations, nor the glitterati of society, but something far more ordinary. Something that catches the imagination, sparked by people you would never expect to matter. Who have been working in the community and on the land all along. The people in charge of the lifeboat.

The new push: photo op for the Bungay bike strategy outside the Library Courtyard; looking at the big picture in the Big Group process, Day 2, 2010 Transition Network conference; seakale flourishing outside tSizewell Power Station against all odds.

The Reality Crunch

Last week a shock wave rippled through 2010 Transition Network conference. A last minute change to the programme, an intense 90 minute lecture titled Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil brought an inconvenient truth to light: we are facing a reality crunch, in which a global financial collapse is the defining event.

The intellectual rationale behind economic expansion has shaped our society for decades. Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics underpinned the pattern of corporate rule throughout the world since the 70s. In the aggressive defence of free markets the rich have become immensely rich, the poor more numerous, and public services everywhere have been dismantled in favour of the private sector. It's a pattern this week's Budget is set to uphold.

But even though we are a civilisation obsessed by money, the financial system itself is rarely discussed. Though banker and credit crunch have became household terms, it's not until you look at the relation between credit and real wealth that you realise you are looking at a chimera and at some point it's going to disappear into desert sand.

With the exploitation of fossil fuels the financial bubble has expanded like never before in history. 1600 trillion dollars of virtual money in 30 years. For every slice of real wealth pie that exists there are one hundred claims. Because credit expansion is built on illusion the spell eventually breaks and deflation sets in. Credit disappears, house prices go down, prices for essentials go up. People start hoarding and without the lubricant of money trade halts. What do we need to do now? Nicole Foss (who writes as 'Stoneleigh' in the financial blog, The Automatic Earth) advised a packed lecture hall: look at your structural dependency, deal with debt, and make relationships you can trust.

In a workshop the next day 300 Transitioners looked at the future. We explored in images and words what would happen in one year's time, then five, then ten. What did it mean that we had so much debt? Everywhere you saw a split between breakdown and breakthrough, fall and transcendence; in amongst the dark scribblings emerged butterflies and the phoenix.

What we experienced after the shock was a different pattern emerging within ourselves. We were shifting from individualism towards community. We realised that if everything was falling apart we needed to be coherent. In a time of strife we needed to be harmonious. The culture of the credit bubble – with its exclusive dwellings and high-maintenance lifestyle, the Shangri-La of every shopping mall in the kingdom – was ceding to one where people had very little except the wealth they had inside - a wealth they were prepared to share.

It's a pattern that is emerging everywhere. Countries that have weathered the free market zeal that brings corporations and the IMF into play forces them to hand over real wealth – their natural resources – and reduce their vibrant people into a voiceless underclass, are turning their fortunes round. It's a pattern of neighbourhood engagement, workers' co-operatives and localised networks that foster the diversity and inventiveness that make all eco-systems resilient. Instead of being shut-off and in competition the people are getting together and working out how to rebuild their lives.

Meanwhile it becomes clear in Britain that we have a government that for all its talk of Big Society is not here for the majority, but to protect the priviledged. There will be no bail out for ordinary people, so we will have help ourselves. And the first step is to realise we are not on our own: there are billions of us in the same boat. This lifeboat called Earth.

This piece was originally published by the Eastern Daily Press as part of the collective weekly OneWorld Column,

The Stoneleigh Effect

On the red wall in the old students’ union there were sign-up lists for all the workshops – Zero Carbon Farm, Tales for Transition, Community Ownership of Assets, Wild Zones. DIY streets... One at the end was covered in signatures. The title was Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil.

Nicole Foss writes under the name Stoneleigh on the influential blog, The Automatic Earth. Unlike most disciplines which only look at their subject on its own terms, Stoneleigh looks at the Big Picture, and the the Big Picture in 2010 from the financial and resource perspective is looking none too good. In fact it became obvious through this intense one and a half hour lecture that we are facing a meltdown, within which the financial collapse (already set in motion in 2008) is the defining event. This is because finanical markets move far more quickly than resource markets. They change in the speed of an email or a phone call. Fear spreads like contagion and positive feedback is the rule.

The graphs came and went. The patterns of deflation were spelled out. Bubbles burst through the centuries, pyramids collapsed. With fossil fuels the bubble has expanded like never before in history. 1600 trillion dollars of virtual money in 30 years. For every slice of financial cake that exists there are now one hundred claims. Because these expansions are built, as Stoneleigh pointed out, not on the reality of wealth, but on a perception of money. At some point the spell breaks. We are running off a cliff and our legs are still working, but very soon we’re going to look down and realise there is nothing to hold us up. We fall bigtime.

We looked at the screen: credit disppearing, affordability descreasing, house prices going down, prices for essentials going up. People hoarding and the lack of lubricant money halting the interactive flow of goods and services. What do we need to do now? Stoneleigh advises us: look at your structural dependency, deal with debt, and make relationships you can trust. In effect, be part of Transition.

The lecture hall was packed and everyone sat in a stunned kind of silence. Afterwards we reeled out to a second leg of Open Space and after lunch the next day entered a Big Group Process in the Great Hall. It was a new Transition experiment. We gathered into our “home groups” (groups of eight people formed at the Mapping of the initiatives at the start of the conference) and looked collectively into the future. We explored what we felt would happen in one year’s time, then five, then ten. We closed our eyes and put ourselves in a frame to see what would lie ahead, as Sophy asked questions. What does it mean we are so much in debt? What are our feelings about what is coming? Then we discussed the matter between ourselves and drew our thoughts in images and words. At the end we held up our sheets of paper in a living gallery. 2011, 2015, 2020. Everywhere there was a split between breakdown and breakthrough, fall and transcendence. In amongst the dark scribbling emerged butterflies and the phoenix. Through the dualities of hope and despair, the good ship Transition sailed on towards the future.

The Stoneleigh effect rippled through the weekend. It was the most talked about event. Not because most of us are unaware that things were going to change radically, but because the reality of the figures made the reality of what we might experience come home to everyone in the room.

Transition is well known for its positive outlook, for the fact it sees an opportunity for living very differently on the planet as fossil fuels become scarce and costly. It deliberately steers a different course of activism from environmental or social protest against the old powers; it does not encourage endtimes glee, the mind's arrogant dismissal of life. It works very hard to make new connections between human beings, to forge resilient communities, to enter the field of possibilities rather than follow a trajectory that we have been trained to see is the only way. But the fact is none of this can happen without the old structures that hold that trajectory in place breaking up.

You don’t get to the butterfly without the caterpillar dissolving. And that dissolve is what we were looking at in the Stoneleigh graphs as they dipped. It was the pattern of collapse of a civilisation.

Resilience, the key concept of Transition, is the ability to weather shock, to adapt and still thrive. This is the kind of unexpected shock we will have to weather, as Sophy explained later. The lecture was a last minute addition to the programme and interrupted the Open Space sessons; it sent people reeling and some to sit for hours in circles talking about their experiences. It influenced the way we thought, what was discussed around the tables, under trees, at the bar. But in many ways it was a relief, we didn’t have to be Pollyannas anymore. It was OK to talk about the difficulties we will face. Because it was clear we were all going to face them. That made a difference. Because instead of being alone, we will be together.

That evening I went swimming with Adrienne. There were five of us and we met up in the canteen in the self-organising style of the conference. The river Dart runs through a wooded valley, free flowing, tan-coloured with dark mossy rocks on either side. We went down a track through the trees and jumped naked into the cold wild water and swam together upsteam, and then floated back with the current. The sun spiralled through the green leaves and I remembered a long, long time ago a moment in Australia: a boy had fallen into the rainforest pool from the cliff and I was beside him waiting for the shock to subside and a turtle swam by and I heard the wind blow through the gum trees and looked up and saw a group of men, women and children standing naked in the water, in complete syncronicity with everything around them and there was a peace and a silence between us that seemed to stretch to infinity and I realised I was looking at the future.

Because who knows what happens when we take off our clothes, divest ourselves of our caterpillar lives, what butterflies we might become? Who could predict that I would have met Adrienne again after 25 years and that we had so many deep and shared experiences to talk about in a way that we could never have known in our careless city youth? What underlying pattern brought us together, connected the totem bird of the Conference, a fledging jackdaw with the fledging jackdaws I wrote about in the blog before I came? What patterns of strength do we find within us when the shock subsides, what depth of feeling, what intelligence and skill arises when other possibilites lie ahead?

What wings do we discover when we look down and see there is only space beneath us?

Photos: Sophy introducing the conference in the Great Hall (Ed Mitchell); Tully before the Stoneleigh lecture; mapping the future; Adrienne facilitating our Communication and Media session; bottom up initiative - swimming upriver (Mike Grenville).

A Pattern Language

There was a seismic shift underway. This was the fourth conference and Transition was no longer at its start-up phase. There are now 350 official initiatives world-wide and hundreds more beginning. Some of these initiatives have been active for years (TN has been active for three). So we’ve got experiences and feedback that are meaningful for the whole enterprise. Up to this point Transition has been structured by a 12-step process – a guide for people and communities starting to respond to those drivers of peak oil and climate change (and the “third driver” of economic breakdown). This year the Transition Network broadened its territory. We were no longer on an energy-descending ladder but standing within a complex weave of essential elements: the subtitle of the conference was introducing a new way of explaining Transition.

A Pattern Language was inspired by an architectural book of the same name written by Chritopher Alexander out of Berkeley in the 70s. Almost an academic cult classic it takes key elements of buildings and settlements, villages and cities and looks at what makes them work. Why, as Rob Hopkins says in his introductory workshop, walking through Sienna you feel joyful and Slough wretched. The book’s dynamic comes from a system of cross-references – a forerunner as Hopkins pointed out of the hyperlink process on computers. How everything from sunlight through windows to market squares relates in a harmonious way, so that you want to be in those rooms and neighbourhoods in the same way you might want to be in a wood or by the sea. It’s a design system, but one that has been organically-formed. It takes as its strength thousands of years of people living together. A vernacular way of life.

The pattern language of Transition was displayed down one of the corridors at the Seale Hayne college and so we walked down them together, discussing and writing notes over them. Because with our experience we can respond to this new structure, strengthen and enliven it. This is not an empty workshop exercise: it has meaning because we are attempting something new. We’re feeling our way to reassemble some key elements that have been within humanity for thousands of years and we’re looking at the ones that work and make us feel OK about living together within a time of turbulence, a time of radical social change. We’re looking for some base notes that underpin a new kind of society that speaks to people everywhere and can be as diversely spoken (as it was at the Conference) everywhere from Norwich to Sao Paulo, from Bungay to Fife, island, city or remote village, north or south.

So where the original Pattern Language is based on things, on nouns, Transition’s Pattern Language is based on activities, on verbs on doing things together. You can download the work-in-progress here (8MB pdf). Many of these are the words and phrases we have had quickly to master and manifest: speaking in public, working with local businesses, great reskilling, great unleashing, food coops, energy descent action plans. Each of the 63-patterns contains a challenge and a solution and all follow a sequence of 6 evolutionary phases - from the groundwork before an initiative begins to Scaling Up. It starts with the personal shock of peak oil discovery and ends where grassroots initatives begin to dialogue with the “top-down” structure and influence how things can shift from an oil-dependent civilisation to a new resilient way of exchanging and interacting as a people, in synch with the eco-systems of the earth.

Transition is about working-together in the face of immense physical and emotional challenges, learning to take matters into our own hands. It’s about creating a way of living that is fair both to the planet and to its peoples. One in which we are by virtue of our task capable of divesting a heavy, materialistic way of life for one of necessary lightness and simplicity. One which will require us to let go of our illusions of grandeur and separation and face a common reality - to transform within and without us the consequences of the power-hungry, acquisitive, high-drive, domineering Western world.

We need to be conversant, fluid with this language because it is what we have in common, what will enable us to hold together when everything else is falling apart. It is the language that makes it easy, for example, for 300 people from diverse places to be in complete harmony with one another. This is because we are speaking to one another from the material. Not just our mind’s opinion of Transition, but words that match our physical and emotional shared experience of Transition – a language spoken by people who matter, who have the matter in hand. Patterns of language that configure a different world. Because the network of Transition is communication, and we can’t weather this shift on our own.

Why we can’t create the future on our own I’ll be reporting about tomorrow . . how the 2010 Transition Conference received its own shock and how some of that reality came home. Meanwhile if you'd like to read more about the Conference do check out Rob Hopkins's blog http://www.transitionculture.org/ or the Network's coverage on http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

Sun solutions and break-out circle by Ed Mitchell; annotated Patterns in the corridor; spiral dance by Mike Grenville.

On the Road (to Totnes)

I hadn't been out of the region for a long time. In fact this journey to the 2010 Transition Network Conference was going to be my third venture beyond East Anglia in eight years! Six hours cross-county in midsummer by train. Moon daisy country, elder blossom country.

I had forgotten: England is beautiful. Even before the train drew into Newton Abbot we had been past the green Chiltern hills and the willowy Thames, through the tree-clad valleys of Somerset and along the boat-sprinkled estuaries and red-cliffed Devon coast. It's a cliche I know, but the sea really did sparkle, and those hills did shine. It took my breath away.

300 people converging and tuning into Transition took my breath away. The conference was almost three days long, with workshops, lectures, lunch, dinner, meetings, process, discussion, break-out, breakdown, big group, small group, spiral dance, free form dance, open mic, opening up . . .

There are several highlights I'll be reporting on during the next few days: Pattern Language (a new way of explaining Transition), Stoneleigh's shocking report on the Economic collapse, meeting my old friend Adrienne Campbell from Transition Lewes and how five of us went swimming without our clothes up the River Dart.

Meanwhile here's a pic by Ed Mitchell of the man in action at the introductory workshop on Pattern Language. Stay tuned!

On the Rhododendron Road in the East; Rob Hopkins at the Seale Hayne Agricultural College in the West.