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

rita, mark, josiah (and me) too - coming together in groups #1

In the last post of our Sustainable Relationships week (and a half!) we consider perhaps the most challenging relationship of all: with our fellow Transitioners. Here are some reflections posted yesterday on the Social Reporting Project in response to The Transition Companion's first Ingredient.

When Rob Hopkins launched the new Transition Com- panion on twitter, the question I asked in 140 characters was which of the 82 ingredients and tools did he consider the most important: "working in groups" was his reply.

Coming Together in Groups is the first ingredient in the book's storehouse; it is the essential thread that runs through the whole movement and distinguishes it in many ways. There are all manner of protest and campaign groups, political and philosophical movements and most of them are organised by small configurations of people. However in these groups the bigger picture is held to be the key unifying factor: us against them. In Transition the social fabric of the group (us) is considered priority. Because this is not an individual or a mass response to peak oil, climate change and economic recession, this is a community-led response, and learning to work in community is one of the hardest tasks we face. If we are serious about responding resiliently to the challenges of those drivers and powering down we have to learn to break out of our chronic individualism and work as a crew in dynamic and creative ways.

This is not to say Transitioners have it down. We so don't. Everyone in Transition can tell you how their respective groups or projects have formed and stormed and fallen by the wayside. How people clashed, initiatives dissolved, all manner of disaster tales. I am no exception, I have been in theme groups that fell apart, lost my temper, my cool, been foolish, been excluded from a core group, taken part in projects that did not happen in spite of everyone's talent and good intention. And I have also been in a core group for three years that has weathered the storm and prospered, and taken part in projects that have undergone radical shifts and succeeded in every way (and still do). I have sorrowed and rejoiced in equal parts, lost valuable colleagues and gained friends. And most of all, like everyone else disenfranchised and unrooted by modern society, I have found myself through these communal experiences, belonging to my neighbourhood and my native land in ways I could not have imagined.

So partly to explore this topic (in our week on Ingredients and Tools Part 1) and partly in response to Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's statement (in yesterday's post) that Transition has "failed" in galvanising everyone to take part, I would like to share an insight I had when I was eleven years old.

Breaking form

Every Saturday at school we had a film afternoon at the lecture hall. It was the big highlight of the week: sitting in the dark watching the flickering screen, seeing places I didn't know and people whose lives I would never experience. One of these was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. It was an old-fashioned Hollywood film, cheesy in many ways, and looking at it now I would probably wince at all its imperialist and religious overtones. But there was a scene in it that has stayed with me all my life. The film depicts a true story of a maid who becomes a missionary in China during the war with Japan. At the beginning of the film Gladys (played improbably by Ingrid Bergman) works to helps break this practice of footbinding that had been imposed on women (by women) for a thousand years. A group of women look at her in silence, and then two old women step forward. She shakes her head as the pain, unleashed from decades in captivity, will be immense. Let the younger ones do it, she tells them. But the elders know that if they have the courage to go first, the rest will follow.

There are many who say our current social and environmental problems are political, caused by capitalism and a dominant global hegemony, and this is true. But we can cannot really change these larger outer structures, unless we deal with the inner ones as well. Mostly our problems are perpetuated by a kind of cultural footbinding that has been in place for thousands of years. We are broken as children and as communities: our natural relationships with the world and each other are severed and we are enmeshed in unnatural ways of behaving and relating with one another. Hierarchical, hostile, subservient to the rulers of civilisation, we play out these constrictions daily, mostly unconsciously. And no matter what the rhetoric or rules of good governance we decide between ourselves, when we come together as groups these invisible forces control us and our endeavours unless we consciously dissolve them and unbind ourselves.

As individuals we can do this as a practice, with ourselves or within our relationships. In groups getting out of these binds is more of a challenge. Even naming them out loud is hard. We are advised in the Companion to seek outside help with the conflict that it inevitably arises, but most of us do not know the world of counselling, or want to engage in it. We feel these antagonisms between ourselves, as we come to meet: the feelings of repression or gloom. We find ourselves acting out roles that are not our own, scapegoating people or being scapegoated, taking the flack, taking too much responsibility, being excluded from communications, forming elite bands, being treated as a volunteer. Haughty, subservient, dismissive, flaky, silent, babbling, critical, self-important. Mostly we feel alone and under pressure. Me against Them.

Sometimes it feels as if the very fabric of the places we meet in - the pub, community centre or council chamber - impose their own restrictions upon our working together in harmony. As we struggle to bring in new ideas we find ourselves defaulting to the civic or feudal shapes the ancien regime has imposed on people through history. We find our fellow Transitioners disappearing into mental abstract realms or spiritual fantasy, preferring ideas to reality. Our contributions to the Bungay newsletter sound like dreary notices from the Parish magazine.

"Why are you writing like a member of the W.I?" I cry exasperated to Mark as we assemble everyone's copy.

"I don't know," he says. "It just comes out like that!"

If we are lucky we like each other. If we are determined we keep meeting each other come what may, keep inventing new and creative ways to do Transition. If we are "elder" enough we take off our binds, get over ourselves, cut the slack, be unremittingly generous. If we are wise we read the excellent essay, written in the 70's about the Women's movement, The Tyranny of Structurelessness and realise that our "cages" sometimes feel comfortable to us, the only thing we can count on, and that liberation from the known is scary, often painful and always challenging.

If we are smart, we do these things ourselves first, like Ghandians, and know the consequences of freedom, before we urge anyone to do the same (or criticise them for not doing it). We show everyone what the future looks like by living it conspicuously everyday. We don't lose heart. We know that one day our small local enterprises will join up, link together and make an extraordinary map across the world. Bearing this in mind, we get on with the business at hand.

Ten tips for coming (and keeping) together as groups

Taken from my experiences in the Bungay core group and the Transition Norwich bloggers

keep your doors open invite people to join meetings and the enterprise - network with other groups outside transition

keep insisting on a co-operative structure people have different roles but equality is key - value everyone, include everyone (that's you too!)

communicate, communicate, communicate keep those channels open, no secrets - remember if you are in control you are not in communication

do not react wait three days before you reply to THAT REALLY ANNOYING EMAIL

keep working together eating together, drinking together - even when you don't want to

share everything community culture starts here - vegetables, eggs, tools, knowledge, skills, books, cars

maintain a rhythm keep putting out that daily blog, that monthly green drinks/film night, quarterly newsletter on time

make a commitment to the project you love do that thing with all your heart

allow space and time for everything to unfold especially the tough parts - let go and hold on (that's a Zen one!)

awareness see this ingredient as the quicksilver of the social alchemy that is Transition - without this group the future you desire will not take place anytime soon, the old business-as-usual order will prevail

Like all pioneers of something new and radical we need to know we are breaking form. And that creating a new infrastructure - from local food systems to alternative media - is hard work, but that endurance furthers. Every time.

Wishing everyone the best in all your groups wherever you are. Come together, right now!

Coming Together as Groups is the first ingredient of The Transition Companion by Rob Hopkins (Green Books). All ingredients are available on-line as resources and also as playing cards.

Photos: Cathy, me, Eloise and Kate in Margaret's garden at Sustainable Bungay core group meeting; poster for Inn of the Sixth Happiness; cycling with Bungay core group; meeting fellow blogger, Kerry at the Bicycle Cafe, Norwich; last night at Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen.

I am another yourself

There are several crucial relationships we sustain in life, from the relationship we have with ourselves as individuals to the one we have as a collective with the planet. But the one I want to focus on today is the one you have with the person who stays with you no matter how hard the wind blows. Your partner, husband, friend, colleague, compadre, the one who walks beside you, who feels they have always been with you, without whom you could not make this passage through life.

Here is a picture of my fellow voyager and Transtioner, Mark Watson at the beginning of our travelling years. It's in Guatemala, 1991. We have just left our old lives behind. We have left family, friends, given up our work, sold everything we own and gone on the road. We are writing a book together. The town is beautiful, the sun is shining, the houses are painted in the colours of the rainbow, but our inner worlds are in turmoil, as all kinds of monsters, lurking beneath the facade of the life we once knew, are now coming up for transformation.

We are realising that this journey we have undertaken is as much about the inner world as it is the outer. As we wake up in Central America we find ourselves battling with the history stored in our bodies and dreams, with class and sexuality, with our ancestors and relations, with the Irish famine, with the Victorian workhouse, with the silent wars of our grandparents, with our own childhoods, with past lovers and school bullies, with the archetypes of Mummy and Daddy, god and goddess, with the karma of generations. We are working these things out in a country that is just coming out of the horrors imposed on it by an imperialist shock doctrine. We don't know about that history yet, though we can feel its invisible legacy, as we sit facing one another with the volcanoes all around us.

Many modern relationships are unsustainable. High maintenance, fragile, hierarchical, about power and profit and pleasure. Making sure that the people near you give you what you desire - parents, partners, children - worrying about what your neighbours and colleagues think. Making sure you don't encounter the pain of your inner worlds and compensating for a lack of connection to the earth with possessions and holidays and distractions.

It's not anyone's fault. It's how we have been brought up in an individualist Empire which trains us to be heartless and competitive, to battle with our wills and egos and to escape into our minds. We are not brought up to be our own true beings, governed by our hearts, in synch with the living systems, in relationship with all creatures, all plants, all peoples. We confuse control and fantasy with love. It wasn't until I left the city and my native land that I realised I was a very different person than my family and my friends wanted me to be and that my whole life up to that point (I was 35) was hemmed in by those contracts. It was a kind of gaolbreak Mark and I were attempting in Guatemala.

Why am I writing about something that began in a faraway country between two people 20 years ago ? Because in Transition we need to be different kinds of human beings to weather the storm that is coming. To be honest a blog post is way too small a space to describe the complex untanglings that release us from the constricting, conventional moulds society puts us in. It's not about washing up (or washing up liquid - those "green" matters that divide modern households), or romance or even psychology, it's a lifework you decide to undertake together, in the same spirit you join Transition.

We need to know how to work together, and having unsustainable relationships where we go unconscious and act out the hostile, undealt-with parts of ourselves, hinders (and sometimes destroys) that kind of fellowship. We need to learn to live in relationship with all beings, as initiatives and communities, and foster the kind of relationships where we are free to be ourselves and at the same time fully aware of the other people in the room. Not as projections to suit ourselves and our ideals, but as fellows without whom you cannot make it through the night. To be aware that we are, all of us, changing the inner structure of ourselves, as much as we are our use of energy or water. Powering down those archetypes of empire inside us, as we come to meet each other in completely new configurations.

If we are lucky we have a partner we can do this work with. If we are lucky we have enough time and space to go deep into what it really means for men and women, of all cultures and upbringings, to forge a harmony between them. To turn the legacy of darkness we carry inside into light and warmth. But many of us do not. Some of us have partners and families and friends who do not see it our way at all and contradict our every move. Equally some of us now find ourselves amongst people who feel kin to us in ways we find hard to describe.

Many times I have felt like leaving Transition, flouncing off in the way I used to with lovers (how dare they speak to me/treat me like that!) but every time I have stayed. I would have kept travelling forever if I could, remained in the country (like Chris) that I loved more than my own.

But history is demanding something more from me, from all of us. It's demanding a return. And those of us who know that, deep inside the core of ourselves, need to hold to that feeling, as we turn to swim against the flow, like the salmon returning to the source of his origin. We need to know we are not alone in our endeavours, we are not alone in our houses, in our small neighbourhoods. That each of us carries a piece of the future inside our hearts, the colour of the rainbow. What powers us is not fossil fuel or hatred, ambition or prize, but the one thing that will turn the world around, that turns everything around at the breaking point, as the darkness closes in. It turned our relationship around as it hit the rocks in Guatemala, at the point we realised we were in it for the long haul and would never make it till dawn unless we made a vital opening move.

Your heart holds the key to my liberation.

Transition only happens because of you. Because of us.

Mark in Antigua, Guatemala, 1991; myself in the same town and year; later in conversation, Merida, Mexico; with Karen and Mark in New York, 1992; social reporters in Finsbury Park, 2012; with this Low Carbon Life crew, Norwich, 2011

From topic week on Relationships in Transition

the fire stealers - a love story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change

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

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

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

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

Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town . . .

"It’s definitely the stick," said Mark as he stood with a piece of wood in his hands. It had been inadver- tently donated at Sustainable Bungay's Give and Take Day and suddenly reappeared in our hallway. From the outside it looked like a shiny broom handle but it wasn't: it was a fighting stick belonging to a young man mortified by its disappearance. But you’d have to be a warrior to know that.

It’s an ordinary summer's evening in a Transition town. We’re on our way to our monthly core group meeting. First we have to drop off the stick at Kate’s and have some supper with Nick.

“You share your lives in the blogosphere and I’d like to share some of what I do," Nick said as he began to fill a box full of July veg - onions and garlic, fennel, beetroot, fresh eggs and blackcurrant jam. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank some squash wine, ate a delicious bean salad and talked about the financial crisis.

You have to be in Transition to truly appreciate Nick's house – kale and courgettes in the front garden, sorrel around the door, a garage with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and shelves full of preserves, giant tanks of rainwater, chickens, cupboards and windowsills with kegs of homemade wine, a stack of books on economics. It’s not what it looks like, but what is behind everything you see. What it took to get there. The bare aesthetic of downshift.

Years ago I interviewed a man called Tommy Roberts. I was working for a glossy magazine at the time and the subject of the article was Taste, that indefinable quality that distinguished one person or house from the next. What is Taste? I asked various arbiters of style, fashion designers and editors, owners of grand and important properties. Tommy was once a designer of natty suits in the 60’s when he was known as Mr Freedom but at that time had a shop under Centrepoint full of zany, brightly coloured modern furniture: Taste is the Japanese room with one beautiful vase in the corner, he told me. A lifetime of taking away makes that room. It’s what you don’t have that defines taste.

We live in a have and have-not culture and our value systems are entirely based around possessions. Not just the things those designers were talking about back in the 1980s when materialism and property began its great boom – wallpaper and watches and John Fowler’s "pleasing decay" - but a personal warehouse of business connections, children, communities, garden flowers, Hollywood stars, holiday countries. My special world.

"Well, you’re rich in other ways," said the man at the Financial Instability workshop at the Transition Conference after I had detailed my downshift from The World of Interiors to Sustainable Bungay.
"I really am not rich", I replied.
"You are rich in social relationships", he insisted, frustrated with my density. "In quality time. You are abundant in other ways."
"I have very little", I replied. (which is not strictly true because like most people in this country I have chairs and tables, pots and pans and all manner of basic essentials). "What is wrong with nothing? Why do we have to be wealthy at all?"

What I wanted to say was I had spent a lot of time clearing out that room. And I didn’t replace the things I used to own with different things - with people or experiences, or a low-carbon lifestyle - but had learned to love space and time and the freedom that lack of ownership brought.

In downshift less is not more in the way we once understood Japanese style. Less means you take everything you don’t need away, so that what really matters is left. It means you don’t have because having is no longer important. What becomes important is that freedom of movement and living a deliberate life.

It’s an ordinary evening in a Transition town and we’re on our way to our meeting at the Library. But first we have to meet at the pub with the Community Bee Group to celebrate the success of our Beehive Day (which I’ll write about tomorrow) and then unload Eloise’s van full of information boards and select some just picked fruit from the back of Cathy’s car. Cathy runs the Abundance project and swapping our produce and plants- at our meetings, in the Library community garden- has become a way of life. So here we are in the car park with a stack of boards and punnets of cherry-plums and blackberries meeting in a damp summer in a difficult time, swifts whizzing round the roofs, echinacea flowers full of bees.

At the Transition Conference we all did an exercise. We had to imagine a group we longed to be with in the future. I am no good at visioning and all I could think about was the fact I would be 65 in ten years time and how weird that was. And then I realised I don’t long for a group of people because I am already with those people and I had met them three years ago in the theatre down the street from here. And what was difficult to feedback to my fellow Transitioners in the canteen in Liverpool was the fact that it wasn’t the individuals in the initiative that made us matter to one another, the way we are used to people mattering in our lives, as special friends, or heroes, support systems, as possessions and dependencies. My important relationships.

It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why – sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen. When that’s going on you don’t need possessions to compensate for your isolation, to anchor your introverted fantasy world. You don’t need data or climate science to persuade your tricky mind. You just need to tune in and act.

If you passed by Bungay Library tonight you’d notice the lights were on and if you peered in you might see a group of people around a table, eating plums and laughing, one person intently writing notes, one speaking, another occasionally calling order and everyone else paying attention. None of us look as if we are arbiters of taste, or abundant, or full of well-being or anything else the modern world puts a price on or gives value to. We’re obviously not important members of the community with homes-to-die-for, or great jobs or cars. We appear utterly ordinary and so we are. Ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.

You can’t see the field from the outside, you have to feel it from the inside. You recognise it when you are in it because you are doing it along with everyone else. In fact you can’t be in it unless you are doing it.That’s the real shift. The move from individualism to group collaboration for the good of the whole is primarily a personal shift, away from ownership and control, into a field of exchange and communication and reciprocity, into give and take. And that’s a whole new lexicon of being. It’s not a replacement of things, it’s a move. A let go and a join in.

Because Transition is not a noun, it’s a verb.

Photos: echinacea by the carpark; with squash wine in Nick's kitchen; rainwater storage; Cathy's Abundance fruit; Nick with harvested herbs.

Medicine of the Heart

I once loved a man called Marko who had scars all the way down one side of his body. He was an artist and photographer from Slovenia. He climbed mountains and down into caves and sometimes for his art would scale cathedrals and towers and stage all kinds of death-defying happenings. During one of these events he tore across an icy lake at high speed in a gas-fired chariot and it blew up underneath him. His body was covered in burns and he lay inert in a hospital bed for weeks. He thought he was going to die.

One day, the nurses put a little baby in his room. The baby was completely wrapped in bandages. Marko was six feet seven and when he told me the story I imagined them there lying together in that hospital at the brink of a civil war, the tall man and the tiny baby and how in that encounter something extraordinary happened. The man started to struggle for his life.

The nurses put the baby there on purpose, he told me. I had given up. But when I saw the baby was worse off than myself I had to make the effort. My heart went to her.

This is a medicine story. And if I could tell you all the medicine stories I heard in my travelling days I would. Because those stories are about how life turns around just as you think it’s about to end. We need more than anything now these stories of restoration and regeneration because they hold an opportunity. If there is one theme that unites them all it is this: the transformation moment comes when you realise it’s not just about you.

Here is one of another kind: I am in Italy aged 29 and a man called Francis is putting a wild pigeon in my hands. It was caught in the chicken coop today. When you hold something in your hands, you are responsible for its freedom, he is telling me. You have to know what that feels like. Years later when we have parted ways and our life journeys have taken us to opposite sides of the world, I will ring Francis as he lies dying and he will describe to me the shape of his room and the terrace garden he has made outside. And that night I will dream of a wild pigeon that is beating itself against the window in my room and I will go to the window and set it free.

I didn’t know what to write today: I was going to write about ringing up my MP to talk about the NHS reforms, about Micheal Moore’s documentary Sicko and the terrifying consequences of privatisation. I was going to write about the EU’s directive on herbal remedies which has effectively banned thousands of years of human relationship with medicine plants.

I was going to show all the herbs you can still grow or find outside your door that help with all those ailments the pharmaceutical companies claim are dangerous unless licensed: thyme (anti-bacterial), rosemary (tonic), marigold (lymph cleanser), chamomile (anti-inflammatory), st johns wort (spirit reviver), nettle (mineral boost) dandelion (urinary tract), elder flowers (fever and chills) and berries (immune booster). How the best thing I ever did for my inner well-being was to banish self-pity and the feeling of having done something wrong. I was going to talk about how our global industrialised food system causes so many modern illnesses: heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, allergies, the collapse of the immune system, depression, attention-deficit and other childhood difficulties and that to radically change what we eat is not only better for ourselves but also the planet and the people of the world. And then I began thinking about medicine.

Medicine is not the same as health, nor is it to be confused with healing. At one time there was a lot of talk about healing the planet and “dealing with your stuff”. But most of us didn’t deal with it, or if we did it never did what we imagined it would: make everything OK in the world. We sat at the edge of our neuroses and complained about our parents not treating us right. We went to therapists to take the pain away. We did special diets and exercises, looked at our reflections in the mirror and said we loved ourselves, laid our hands on each other’s bodies, imagined we were important shamans, said mantras and meditated, and still the world was burning in front of our eyes.

Now we don’t have time or money or resources to lie on the psychotherapist’s couch or fly off into the Amazon rainforest for ceremonies. We have to wise up quick and see that health is not a personal quest for a better life anymore. To face the reality that climate change and peak oil bring to communities everywhere means we have to become physically resilient, mentally agile and emotionally clear. We need to make wise decisions, to deal with complexity, to see the world in terms of systems (rather than in black/white, good/bad polarity) and for this we need to be fired up. We need to be deeply and powerfully connected to that place inside where the medicine stories speak to us. We need our hearts.

In industrial societies we are taught to think in data and facts and figures, to be non-aligned with natural life. We are programmed to be out of step with the rhythm of our own blood and heartbeat, out of time with the rhythm of the year. We are trained to sit still and escape into our minds, into the feel-good places with artificial sounds and frequencies. Unconnected to our real selves, to our wild and free spirits, we remain trapped in ways that are hard to see or articulate. Shrinking away from the hostilities of the world we live in a contracted state that is also a state of emergency, locked into the repeat cycles of grief, hope and despair. The living systems of our bodies which need to be in harmony with the living systems all around us are artificially set apart.

To be truly healthy, as Paul and Mark have already suggested this week, we need to realign ourselves with the natural world, relax, slow down and step out of those concrete boxes that keep us hemmed in. This is as much a work of imagination and feeling as it is physically walking outside the door. The shapes of earth are round, sinuous, warm, fluid; they’ve got rhythm and colour, depth and movement. They are shaped like mountains, like snaking rivers, rippling grasses, the undulating coastlines, our bellies, our hair. Everything in nature beats in accordance with our hearts. Everything has correspondence and is related by its kinship.

The shapes of civilisations on the other hand are unforgiving: hard-edged, geometric, superficial, exaggerated and cold, their colours, harsh and unreal. None of them bear relation to us, except to our indoctrinated minds. We are educated to believe that the artificial systems of our civilisation are superior to the living systems of earth and that our natural correspondence with them is not only unnecessary but dangerous. These systems require huge amounts of energy from both ourselves and the planet to uphold. Because they are mechanical however they are always entropic. At some point the strain they exert on the natural systems creates too much toxic by-product and those toxins begin to affect the whole. We get sick. The world gets sick.

Many of us are aware of this. Some of us are aware that these artificial systems are poised to break up, unless we radically reconfigure the ways we use energy and consume resources. What we’re not necessarily aware of is the kind of medicine the earth and ourselves possess. And that between us we have the knowledge and the wherewithal to rectify koyanisqaatsi , our world out of balance. But to do this we have to give up the control of our minds, our obsession with power, and above all we have to give up our hostility. We have to come from a deep and fiery place inside in everything we do and be prepared to let everything go.

In this endeavour the way we have been artificially configured works against us: the world’s empire keeps up its hostile broadcast, 24/7: it dictates our thoughts, runs through our emotional bodies. We experience everything personally, but it isn’t personal. Our fears are not unique psychological problems, but the result of being socially intimidated into a particular perception of the world and giving our vital life-force to uphold it.

The empire shuts us all down, keeps us small and silent in its low repressive vibration. Stuck inside our interior narratives, we allow the old power structures to hold sway. Everyone tells us it is our problem, that we don’t fit, don’t succeed, don’t feel at home inside our own skins. We feel overwhelmed by responsibility. We close down, protecting ourselves from civilisation’s furious gods and systems, while we wait for a magical elixir, for the paradigm to shift miraculously on its own. But the fact is it doesn’t shift on its own. We have to shift. We have to move our bodies, our minds and most of all our feelings and make space in that fearful clutter that lives in our heads and our bodies.

We have to move out from our defensive positions, from our stuck inner worlds to be the kind of bold, radiant individuals that can deal with the challenges of powerdown, of constructing a just and meaningful low-carbon world. That's a big medicine. Maybe the strongest and bitterest medicine we ever came up with as a species.

In modern life health is considered as a physical concern and sometimes a mental one. We know it objectively as something that goes right or wrong with our bodies. We fear sickness and old age and keep death at arm’s length. We look at our human form critically, obsessively, as if it were a defective genetic machine that needs servicing, rather than a fluid mysterious intelligence that shares the same asymmetric shapes as moving clouds or ocean waves or the tail of a tiger. As a touchstone for an extraordinary work of alchemy.

We live most of our lives on that head and body vertical axis, whereas most of our meaning, our connection with life and with each other, with all creatures on the planet, happens on the horizontal one: the axis of feeling and spirit and the bridge between the two, our hearts. If there is a crisis in the world it is because our hearts as a people have not been in play. You cannot connect with the restorative capacities of earth with the moral, monodimensional, clocktime, right-and-wrong mindset of the industrial world, you access it with your creative ancestral imagination, with your deep, feeling heart as people have done for thousands of years.

To connect with that heart is the work of medicine. It’s a story of empathy and a story of liberation. Something stifled in us needs to come alive, break out and remember. We need an encounter with life to do this. We need to rekindle a relationship with all living forms, with our own form, know our breath as the breath of life, like the wind that blows through the leaves, learn to be fluid, not hold on to things, experience time and neighbourhood in a different way. And to recognise everyone who crosses our path as kin. As someone who can open the door.

Listen! Francis said and put an egg in my hands. I put it to my ear Tap tap tap: a chick was pecking its way out of its shell into the unimagined vastness of the world. I had been wrapped up in myself, far away from earth, and suddenly I was looking into his eyes. I wanted to get through to you, he said.

Pictures: wild rose, Hen Reedbeds, 2010; wild hops and blue lupines, medicine jars, Arizona, 2001; swimming with Marko, Ecuador, 1992; foxgloves, Sizewell Belts, 2011; morning glory 2010