Varanasi

Last month in a rainswept and flooded Cumbria we launched Dark Mountain: Issue 14 - TERRA into the world, a co-production between three editors - Nick Hunt, Nancy Campbell and myself - three 'scouts' from different regions and over 60 writers and artists. It's  a travel edition collection that looks at journeys, place and belonging in times of diaspora and descent. You can read the introduction and several extracts from TERRA over on the Dark Mountain website, meanwhile here is a piece I wrote for the book on giving up flying and a life on the road, and a return to my 'native' land.


It is hard to know that this magic carpet exists and that one will no longer fly on it.

– Jean Cocteau (Opium)

‘The way these people are living is not what I had in mind’

– Sun Father, Zuni creation myth

I’m sitting under the peepal tree in the deer park in Sarnath. Dark-tuniced Tibetan students, white-clad nuns, orange-robed monks, many-coloured tourists move around the tree, and contemplate the statues of the Buddha and his five disciples with their piled-up Aryan locks. It was here the Buddha delivered his first teaching. His words are carved in slabs of stone in different gold-scripted languages. The inscription reads that after declaring the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the devas in all the invisible circles above the Earth shook with fear.

Nirvana is sometimes translated as a ‘return to the shining void’ or ‘extinction’, in the sense of blowing out a flame, no longer fuelling the fire. By ending the anguish and desires of the ego, the Buddha’s path to extinction introduced death into the eternal world of the devas. It meant their realms would cease to exist, because human beings would not be clothing and feeding them any more. If people could liberate themselves from the wheel of karma, the devas’ shows would come to an end. They would lose all their hiding places.

Afterwards I go to Varanasi, leaving the calm of Sarnath for the crowded streets of India’s oldest city. Rachel told me: ‘If you don’t go now, you will never go.’ It is 2006 and I have just received the last of the inheritance from my dead father. I don’t know it yet but a whole way of life is about to come to an end.

In Varanasi I get out of the tuk-tuk and walk towards the river. Suddenly the narrow street opens out to the vast opal-coloured stretch of the Ganges – the pitted ochre buildings of the teeming ghats and the emptiness of the shore on the further side. It is shining in the morning light and the light suffuses everything. ‘Here I am!’ I say, half to myself, half to the river and feel, in that moment, complete.

‘You are thinking too much,’ says a tall young man behind me. ‘A man will approach,’ Rachel instructed. ‘Go with him.’ I smile and agree to follow his guided path, down the steps, towards the burning ghats, to his friend the astrologer, up to the towers where he points out the view down the river with its steps full of devotees, boats, bullocks, monkeys and the morning.

At the ashram of Kali, we sit in the shade of a mango tree and smoke hemp flowers.

‘When I saw you, I was dazzled! How beautiful,’ he whispers, and runs his hand up my back, as if I were a horse. ‘You are tired and I am a young man. You need some of my Shiva power.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, and laughed.

I might have gone with him in another time, for the adventure, to have lain in Kali’s rose garden in Shiva’s city. But something is coming to an end. The boy said, I will take you out onto the Ganges and sing to you. We took the boat into the middle of the river, and as he rowed towards the empty shore, his face grew suddenly sulky and dark, like all men who do not get what they desire. The City of Light hovered before me. The most beautiful city in the world. The shining hub of the wheel where all things began, and where all things come to an end.

Here I am, I thought. A great humming arose from the ancient city, three thousand years of human karma coming to an end, as the boat drifted past the shore on the further side. For years I had wanted to come to Varanasi. And here it was. Everything I had ever dreamed of. And then it was time to go home.

You will dream of me, the boy said, as we parted company on the bank. I smiled and wished him well, because I knew I would not. I would not even remember his name.

When we fly over London, the buildings below the plane appear grey and oppressive. No one smiles at the train station. It is silent, cold, hostile. My head fills with antagonistic thoughts. But wheeling our suitcases down the lane, the night wind stirs the ash and oak trees above us, I can smell the spring, the feel of the ground beneath my feet, a force pulling me towards the earth.

‘Almost there Charlie,’ says Mark.

SELVA

How did this begin? Lying in a hot leafy hut, frogs croaking in the Peruvian rainforest, a certain line comes to me: My circus life unclawed me.

I am ‘on location’ with a fashion team and the two models have gone on strike because they feel (as African-Americans) they are being exploited by the ‘indigenous is hip this season’ story. The German photographer is arguing with them. He is not pleased with our abundant backdrop. Selva is too green, he says. Tonight we drank a strange alluring brew the lodge owner had made and swam naked in the Amazon, heedless of piranha, crocodile and electric eel, and watched a slim boat go out and point its prows to the full moon. I am writing another line in my notebook that is not a caption:

Tonight there are no dreams because there are no dreamers.

I went to South America by mistake: Eric Newby was supposed to cover the story but he had fallen ill and so I went to Lima as the replacement travel writer. After that I was sent to New Mexico with the team and wrote a story about beans and adobe and Georgia O’Keefe – and somehow, between the forest and desert and mountains, those big spaces got inside me. Afterwards I could not fit back into my box-shaped London life.

When I left the city I found out how plants can open up your imagination in a way no book can ever do, how mountains can speak to you in your dreams. I encountered people I would never have met in the bars and offices of my own country. People who were learning about the indigenous spirit of things, who tussled with their nation’s karma, who walked an ancestral path in their own way.

Though we longed to be the people who could love the Earth with song and dance, with feather and prayer, we were not born those people. We had work to do in the places we least wanted to go. Turtle Island, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, pushed us all out like birds from the nest, into an unmapped territory that felt like a kind of Antarctica. Go back to where you came from, they said, and deal with your shit.

What I hadn’t realised was that the people in the canoe in the rainforest that night were on their way to an ayahuasca ceremony, and that when the planet makes contact with you and shows you its inner splendour it demands something in return that you are not sure you know how to give. That when Georgia O’Keefe said ‘New Mexico will itch you for the rest of your life’, she wasn’t talking about holidays.

TERRA

How did it stop?

‘Your carbon debt is massive,’ said Josiah. I am writing about a low-carbon group that has decided to cut its personal emissions by half the national average, which in 2008 is eight tonnes. Last night we gathered around the kitchen table with our transport bills. I can just about make the target if I use the car for short journeys but taking a plane anywhere blows it completely. We are eight people who have read the data, we know the facts about climate change. We know we are among the five per cent of the world who have stepped on a plane and that one return flight to New York would take up one of those four tonnes and then some. Across the sky, contrails from 100,000 planes leach out carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, lead and black carbon into the atmosphere each day and we know that no amount of creative accounting can reverse the planetary feedback loops that say what goes around comes around.

And yet in spite of this the dissonance is palpable in the room, as the prospect of NO HOLIDAYS ANYWHERE INTERESTING OR SUNNY is veering into view. When you realise that even travelling to that small island in the inky Aegean would take four days by train and boat. Even if you did have the money which, this being the kali yuga, you no longer do.

My carbon debt is massive. I have touched down in La Paz and New York, in Tokyo, Kingston, Santiago de Chile, Kauai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Delhi – but now in a small town in East Anglia I am learning to love the patterns of neighbourhood, of reed bed and market square, to build a culture of sharing and humble return. We meet to unpick our fossil-fuelled lives and find ourselves at the place that stops all our endeavours – a realm that hovers on every magazine page and screen, luring us into its world of turquoise seas and swimming pools, of white tablecloths and limousines. Come, fly here, a voice whispers in our ear.

I don’t know about Buddhism but I know all about devas. I am someone who used to drag huge Globe-trotter suitcases full of fairy frocks across the planet, I know what devas like to eat and what sparkly places they like to go, and exactly what it takes to blow out that flame. I know that illusions are the last thing you give up when you are up against it: your special moment, your little winter break, that romantic destination. What would life be without these treats?

It is the flying and not just the flying. It is the technology of flight, the ease, the speed, that fits the pace and dominion of the capitalist pleasuredome. But it is also the ancient illusion that we can treat the world like a plaything, as if we have a right to reward ourselves for our slavery to GDP with a visit to the market at Marrakesh, or a trek in Nepal, a quick trip to Iceland, or Bali, or Florida. A never-never land culture without ethical or spiritual constraint.

Industrialisation has made us restless and dissatisfied. We live in terror of missing out and finding ourselves in the wrong hotel. We want all our journeys to be outer ones, full of leisure and luxury; none of us wants to go inside, unlock the Pandora’s box of our small histories and suffer. We would rather sacrifice any number of wild creatures or trees than extinct our adolescent selves, let whole kingdoms of fish and people fall, so long as we can keep holding that boarding pass in our hands, our sense of entitlement, our five per cent exceptionalism, our trophy holiday.

The reality is we don’t want to land.

KARMA

In the backrooms of England some of us despair: we have become no-fly-zone outcasts, enemies of promise. The initiative that had once cut its teeth on radical energy descent has settled into a cosy community haven, where you can hold conversations about carbon reduction and still fly to Copenhagen for the day to go swimming.

The taboo-breaking marks us as ‘the difficult people’ in the room, the people who ask awkward questions. Sometimes we are unable even to ask the question, an invisible force preventing us from opening our mouths.

Silently we face our friends who justify ‘love miles’ (he was dying, she was getting married); artists who justify exhibitions (I have to share my work); climate scientists who justify conferences (I have to exchange ideas); yoga princesses who justify retreats (I have to be with my guru) in a civilisation where governments can hold conversations about emissions targets and still keep building runways and not taxing aviation fuel (we have to serve the economy). We did the offsetting, the flyers chorus, absolving themselves in the way medieval sinners once paid for indulgences. We’re not good like you.

Sometimes I want to say very loudly: YOU ARE ASLEEP AND YOU NEED SOME OF MY KALI POWERDOWN, and stick out my very long red tongue.

SELVA 2

Rachel no longer stays in the room on Dr Jain’s roof terrace that overlooks the deer park in Sarnath, among the drying sheets and pots of holy basil. She lives in a small wood on the edge of the neighbouring market town and runs her own guesthouse. I remembered the story she once told us about her friends who lived on an ancient pilgrimage route in India. The path ran by a river she said and it was the most beautiful setting you could imagine, full of trees and flowers and birds. One year however her friends moved to an ugly industrial city. ‘How could you leave?’ she asked them. ‘Our work is here,’ they replied simply. ‘This place needs us.’

Last summer our paths crossed after many years, and the three of us had an intense conversation in the way we used to when we could all afford to travel the world. She told me in India there are five ages, that begin with our youth and end with the time of ‘Going into the Forest’. ‘What happens before old age?’ I asked her. ‘Preparing to Go into the Forest,’ she said and we laughed.

CASA

I lived out of a suitcase for ten years. I gave up many things to be on that road – a house, a family, a career, some kind of reputation – and I regret none of it. I got to see the Earth in all of her loveliness. I went to break out of a restricted city life that hemmed in my real self like a Victorian dress. After I broke the stays I became like a lover who could never have enough of wide open spaces, of the pepper trees leaning towards the red sand of the Elqui valley (the boys riding horseback down the street), or the roar of the Pacific at Mazatlán, bus stations on a tropical morning, the volcano rising above the hot spring, hummingbird and cactus. It was in these places, those borrowed houses, I could empty myself, bring a silence and a space that had been full of ghosts and other people’s words.

But at some point you have to be in relationship, you have to settle down and give up your interesting freewheeling life. You don’t want to, but it is time, your time and the times you live in, the payback time, when all our small karmas come to roost and that joystick is no longer in our hands. To love a country that is Not-Home with all its breathtaking geography and sweet fruit costs nothing; to love this polluted, crowded island with all the responsibility of descent on your shoulders costs everything.

So you go home. And home is not a place you want to go, or that you like even. Here I am on the east coast of a country I spent a lifetime getting away from and have not moved for 16 years. In the seatown there are 1400 houses and only 500 of them are lived in: the rest serve wealthy weekenders who pay nothing for the roads or cash-strapped libraries, or the feudal history of place that weighs down invisibly on those who inhabit the region. The visitors are having a ‘Southwold’ experience with local beer and fish and chips, and £100,000 beach huts. A perfect backdrop. No strings attached. A hideaway where you can step out of the door and feel free.

Except you learn, when you come home and live in a place, that nothing is free. Some person, some bird, some plant, some insect is paying for that weekend, that fortnight, with their lives, and now that person is you. Yes you, renter, with your second-hand coat and low-income lifestyle, who cares for you anyway?

Nothing has ever said you belong here, or anywhere you have found yourself. You were always the wrong class, the wrong gender, too white, too privileged. You went to the wrong university, didn’t write enough books, wrote too many of the wrong sort. Never knew the right people, or maybe you did once, but then you missed the party and it was the wrong time. It’s always the wrong time. At some point you realise it’s not about belonging, it’s about being at home in your own skin, on this Earth, wherever you land, and deciding to pay the debt, your family’s debt, your culture’s debt, stretching back through the centuries. The buck stops here, you say. I’m not going anywhere.

NIRVANA

‘We could go to la Casa de los Azulejos,’ said Mark, as we both in that moment find ourselves in a dark-panelled dining room surrounded by businessmen in suits and chattering families. It was where we liked to go for breakfast in Mexico City in our travelling years. There are white tablecloths and waitresses with paper wings the colour of sugared almonds flying past with trays of huevos rancheros and pan dulce. A glass of maracuyá juice sits on the table in front of me and for one moment time stands still. Outside the blue sky arches above the Alameda, above the the megalopolis, stretching out towards the Sierra Madre, backbone of America, towards the forests of glowworms and jaguars, towards the ever-moving oceans of the world.

‘Ah, yes,’ I say. ‘But after breakfast, what would we do?’

Images: above 'Shrine at Varanasi' by Juhi Saklani from her story Rooted about defending the street trees of India. Left: A pocketbook for troubled times: Dark Mountain Issue 14 - TERRA is available from the online shop for £19.99; the London launch will take place at The Baldwin Gallery on 22nd November. Do come!

Medicine People - Arizona 1994 - 2001

The sky island rises above the desert floor; a ring of mountains known as The Mules. The town within its rocky arms appears, at first glance, unremarkable: a collection of small wooden shacks scattered up a red hillside, down a gulch, with narrow steep streets, skinny metal staircases, a red-bricked main street with a few old-fashioned storefronts; an alternative cafe, a co-op store, a library with oak floors, a parking lot shaded with ash trees and desert willow. By the highway that winds through the mountains there is a “hell’s hole” where European immigrants once mined for copper; in the abandoned gardens the fruit trees they planted still grow - pomegranates, mulberries, figs. Everyone that lives here has been somebody somewhere else. One day they woke up in the city and the desert called them. They got sick, or cried too much, or had a dream, or like me, met someone on a film set who said it was funky place full of artists, full of thorny attitude.

There is something that calls you: in the luminous space that surrounds the border town, in the mineral mountains, in the prickliness of the people. Something that brings you to be tempered in the alchemical furnace of the desert. To gaze up at the stars that burn bright in the obsidian sky. Outside the thorn bush and cactus keep their independent positions in the flat lands and in the canyons. Keep your distance! they say to each other with their formidable spines. Stay out of my way! And yet standing amongst them you have never felt so together in your life.

For seven years 1994 - 2001 I came with Mark to this old mining town in the Chihuahua desert. We rented apartments, bought thrift store furniture and made friends with those fierce independent spiky people. This is a postcard and if I could put everything I loved about this place into it I would. But that’s for a book.

What I want to say is I learned a lot of things here I couldn't have done if I'd stayed in my conventional London life. England is a time place, cold and damp and saturated with ghosts and history, obsessed with form, always looking back. Arizona is hot and dry. It's all about space and opportunity and looking forward. My old friend Carol went into the desert when she was 40 years old. Everyone had left her and she had to start again. She sat down in the middle of nowhere and cried for a long time. Then she put her hands into the earth and her hands formed bricks out of the red mud. She built a house with those adobe bricks and then she lived there.

To start again you have to find a new point of departure. I had left the city and my old life and I had to learn another way and this is where I learned it. I learned medicine plants, I learned to live in a straw bale house without A/C or a telephone or a lock on the door. I learned to hold my own and come to my own conclusions about the empire, as I watched chain gangs working along the highway, when the sulphuric acid from the mine’s slag heaps stung my eyes, when I heard immigrant families running down the streets at dawn and helicopters searching for them, when found young men standing in the garden, lost and collapsing with thirst and exhaustion, having walked and hitched all the way from El Salvador.

I learned from real hippies who had settled here in the 70s: flower girls who had come out of Haight Ashbury, artists who had walked away from fame in New York, who had spent ten years travelling in a bus across America, radical lesbians, activists, poets, the first permaculturists, the first people to build compost toilets and grow organic vegetables. People who had put themselves on the line and weren't going back. They were tough and bitter when I met them, living in rooms full of books with painted floorboards and a wood stove. And I spent winter and summers in those rooms in an old miner’s hotel, in an adobe roundhouse, in a yurt. I lived among medicine plants on the edge of the wild desert and I listened to their stories. They passed everything on. Everything that worked and everything that didn’t.

It was not paradise. It was an immense red land with an immense blue sky, where you could drive out down a road edged with sunflowers all the way down into Mexico and feel entirely free. But, of course, no one was entirely free. “Little roads not immune from grief,” Carmen used to call them. This was Apache territory, the last tribe on Turtle Island to stand against the white invaders. They lived in warrior bands in these sky islands like mountain lions, red bands tied around their heads, men and women smoking the rough leaves of wild tobacco.

What I learned from Arizona was about keeping a flame of a different world alive in spite of circumstances. How you do this without losing heart. How to endure alongside the earth and all its creatures. How to withstand the shocks of history and keep your humanity intact. To live a medicine life. How to wait in the long afternoons, to live without comfort or convenience. How to walk through the territory and not be afraid of snakes and scorpions, of flash floods or a bear or the border patrol asking you, what are you doing out here? How to look them in the eye and say:

Why officer I'm looking at a flower, what are you doing?

I'm looking at this scrawny stick because underground it has a vast reservoir stored in its tap root that can keep it going through this summer drought and tonight when we are sleeping it will unfold its white lotus-like flowers as it does once a year. And all the moths in the desert will be summoned by its extraordinary fragrance. I'm learning to be like that flower that some call Queen of the Night and the Apaches call Pain in the Heart.

When I returned to England I brought that medicine with me. It's a bitter medicine because it's got broken heart in there and shattered illusions, dreams that didn't work out and loss. But the medicine of the heart is bitter, because it's our experience that will really come to matter in Transition. Not just our obvious skills and abilities, but those some of us learned while we were out travelling in the far-flung places, on the road, waiting in a desert town for destiny to knock on the door.

Photos: Bisbee, Arizona and coral bean flowers; Mark and the San Jose mountains; soaptree yucca flowers; medicine jars with hop tree flowers and wild lupines.

A Useless Generation

This is a picture of a bridge in a place I used to live in the desert called Turtle Ranch. It’s made from scrap wood and metal and leads across a wash that is usually dry but in the monsoon season roars with rainwater from the mountains. The house was built by hand from adobe and mesquite, old glasshouse frames and by a pragmatic attitude that some might call pioneer and others recognise as a mix of 70s ideology, permaculture and a Transcendental connection with nature that Chris Hull talked about in his post on rainwater last week. It had a rough beauty all of its own.

Today we live in different times and different places. The spirit of the enterprise that led many to live closer to the land and to take matters into their own hands has dissipated. “I am part of the most useless generation that ever walked this planet. I’m very good at moving pixels around on a screen… and fixing bikes…” laughed Ben Brangwyn at Transition Norwich’s Unleashing almost two years ago. And though there are amongst us skilled gardeners, menders and darners, people who are fully aware of the consequences of their actions, we live within a time of bourgeois tastes, where shops and services for everything abound. To travel and live in another’s country, on borrowed time, is easy. To downshift and live in a house where everything is chipped, cracked and falling apart is challenging, especially when you are the only one in your street doing it.

Last month, just before our Give-and-Take Day in Bungay, my friend-in-Transition Elinor gave me a night-dress that she had been given that didn’t fit. And I can’t tell you what that felt like to wear something that hasn’t come from a charity shop. No one had worn it before me. It was fresh, clean, and a clear sky blue. It belonged to me utterly.

We live in a culture that loves such moments. And we would be foolish if we didn’t recognise their power, for it builds on our every desire to inhabit the lovely and the new, to escape into a realm far away from the toil and sweat of human existence, the ugliness of the world.

We would be foolish if we didn’t recognise how easy it is to throw things away that break, to ring up and ask someone else to unblock your drains, mend your machines, to clean your windows. To lord over what we control and possess like haughty princesses.

We would be foolish if we didn’t realise all our desires to pull ourselves out of poverty (as most of our families have through history) was a powerful motivating factor in our present materialism. And that to put on recycled clothes and to eat off cracked plates as a necessity meets strong social resistance in ourselves, as well as an instilled fear of humiliation.

We would be foolish if we didn’t face the fact that we like to lead lives that keep us apart from our neighbours, secluded in our fairy towers, no matter what platitudes we utter about community.

Only if we have another kind of attitude, one that matches the idealistic, individualistic 70s can we actually make this Transition voluntarily and with good cheer. In 2010 that’s a planetary awareness and an innate sense of social justice for our fellows. We can’t do this within the consumer dream. Because the cultural aesthetic of the clean and the new and exclusive is too strong. We have to put our values in another dimension entirely and think differently. We have to expand our consciousness in a way that human beings that never done before together. Because engaging in our collective intelligence will be more absorbing, more urgent, more satisfying, a greater work, more completely useful than feeding those desires for individual pleasure and possession. Our attention will shift naturally and we won’t worry anymore about the colour of the wallpaper, or the state of our shoes.

We’ll be too busy making do and mending those broken relationships with the planet. Making bridges across the invisible divides that separate us from one another, with parts we discarded on the dustheaps long ago.

Bridge at Bisbee Junction, Arizona; Give and Take Day at the Chaucer Club, Bungay; Heavenly Blue morning glory.

Zero Carbon Holiday

“It’s an attitude,” I explained to Philip in the lane, talking about tents and The Holiday.
“Ah,” said Philip,” Bonnes vacances.”

We're not-going on a zero-carbon holiday. We’ve put the tent up in the garden and are taking turns to sleep under the greengage tree, moored in the long grass sprinkled with wild carrot. It’s a good space inside. A mattress, a stool, a wooden box for a table, a candle, a coloured mat, a glass of water. In spaces like these you don’t need much. There is something magical about their containment. Yurt, shed, studio, tree house, den, cabanas with rooves of leaves and a communal kitchen down the hill. Thousands of tent-dwellers are having this experience right now in fields and festivals everywhere in England, as they listen to the wind move around their small shelters like the rigging of a ship, as they step out each morning, bare feet on dewy grass. Fresh air. Sunrise. Mist. Today it feels like everything will be all right.

Half of our diseases are in our heads, and half in our houses.

That’s what Andy told me. He was reading a quote from the man who began the Woodcraft Folk in 1912. Ernest Thompson Seton advocated living as much as possible outdoors in tune with the elements. When Andy came down last Friday with Ollie and Antony, we walked along the windy cliff edge and jumped in the rough sea, and then we came home and talked in the tent. The boys played cards and whittled sticks. I made tea. It started to rain, and though there were five of us and it’s only a three person tent, it felt just fine.

That’s what I mean about attitude. Everything gets pared down. You do what is necessary. And that simplicity brings out the best in everyone. You feel connected to the planet and to your fellows. Most of our lives we do what is unnecessary. We work to maintain an empire that creates massively complex earth-damaging, people-damaging systems - systems of technology, systems of commerce, of psychology, of addiction, power struggles. But, like our bodies, what we really need, is neither fancy dishes with extravagant ingredients, nor junk food with a hundred additives, what we hunger for is simple fare. What we long for are picnics and campfires, blackberries and wild greens, sitting under trees, swimming in the river, walking on the earth, sleeping outside with the stars above our heads.

And maybe for the odd weekend, maybe for two weeks of the year, if we are lucky, we get to live this life we were constructed to lead. We call it holiday. But maybe it should be recognised as sanity.

If we could get a taste of that simplicity, that outdoor existence, and value it above everything, our lives would be much happier, We would be less stressed and less conflicted. But we would have to look hard at this indoor life first: these houses and our heads full of complicated nonsense – and find ways to deconstruct them. The houses are demanding and expensive. They suck up energy and time, need constant cleaning and decorating. They are full of machines that need servicing and replacing. Sometimes in our Carbon Conversations a feeling of hopelessness would come into the room. It felt out of our hands. It did our heads in. As if the lifestyle were running our lives, rather than ourselves.

Big house, big head, small world.

Last August Andy and the boys came and put their tent up in the garden and their visit sparked off an idea. Maybe there was a way we could chart this carbon cutting journey we were embarking on together (then called Transition Norwich 2.0) that would treasure all our small independent moves. This Low-Carbon Life was born. My first regular blog post (The Reality Business) in November was written from this tent. Since then, like some of my fellow bloggers, I have completed a year of reducing my carbon emissions by half. Done a cycle of Carbon Conversations. We’ve looked at electricity bills and car logs, swapped stories and useful tips. Now some of us are moving outside: we’ve started to dig gardens, chop firewood, swap vegetables and clothes, organise wholefood co-ops – working to create a culture that is stronger than the allure of the energy-sucking pleasuredome.

Where do we go from here? One thing I’ve realised: this attitude is a good place to start, where life does not feel out of our hands, or hopeless or ignoble, the place the poet calls:

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything

We have to start where we feel things are all right. Where we are valued for what we do. Small tent, large universe.


Andy, Ollie and Mark (and Anthony) playing Go Fish in the Tent (rescued last year from Latitude Recycling point); Sustainable Bungay Summer Picnic; Mark taken by Andy at Covehithe.

Wheels of Fire

4.38am sunrise on the sunrise coast, East Anglia. The sky is banked up with cloud yet the light has a presence that is palpable. It emanates over dawn-coloured water, pulsing on the horizon. We stand at the tide-line and sense its unmistakable appearance. All over England today people have climbed hills and beacons and tors, lit fires through the night and waited for this moment. We can’t see the sun but we know it’s there. Not because we have clocks but because we can feel it with our bodies.

It’s a short journey to the sea from my house, about 2 miles, and the most frequent journey I make on my bike. When you’re cutting carbon, this is the kind of journey that represents a typical Transition decision: two wheels or four? It’s so easy to take the car and not to cycle or walk into town (30 minutes). But of course every time you do, you encounter the life of the neighbourhood and the earth all around you: sounds, scents, colour, people, creatures, insects, trees. Every time you experience your own vigour: the life force that lives coiled up in your cells, that hums through your blood, your breath, the strength of your form, your sense of balance. Reconnect with the fire that burns within, that infinite light. Everything in fact that makes you want to be alive, to know the world immediately, directly.

This morning we had the whole world (and the roads) to ourselves: the scent of elderflowers and wild rose in the lane, mock orange as we sped by the sleeping houses, fennel in the dunes, the purple opium poppies in the allotments, red sorrel on the Common, wrens singing in gardens, larks over the marshes, the slow roar of the invisible sea before the dunes, and then the hugeness of sea and sky

It’s a fast moment, the moment of summer solstice but suddenly it’s as if the year opens out and everything expands towards an infinite horizon. You think it’s going to dip down like one of those peak oil/finanacial downturn graphs, but it doesn’t. It broadens out. It’s no longer the young dappled summer of the woods and green meadows. It’s the high golden summer of the seashore and the waterlands. Soon I’ll be making this journey with my thermos and swimming towel. Three months of cycling down and watching the sun come up over the horizon. And everywhere people half naked and happily immersed in the physical elements of sun, sea and sand. The summer of summer holidays.

I got a blue bike for my birthday when I was eight years old. And I loved it in the manner of all children, because it meant independence and freedom. I was an acrobatic child, climbed trees and scaffolding and rooftops, somersaulted over gates, jumped stairs and spent hours inventing balletic bicycle routines in the street where I lived in the city. Something of that physical ease and happiness I kept with me all my life and even now I like the reckless feeling of going downhill, or swerving corners, one finger on the handlebar. And all bikes I’ve owned have been blue ever since.

Last week I went to see Barry to get my brakes fixed. I had been using an innovative stopping technique with my feet and was wearing out my shoes. I was thinking about getting another bike. Barry showed me a vintage Raleigh that had just come in. It was beautifully made and in pristine condition - stainless steel wheels, dark forest green with a basket and a bell. A classic shape, but rather slow looking. He mentioned a price. It was a bargain. I hesitated.

“Not exactly a BMW,” I said (Barry once sold us his very beautiful scarlet and chrome E reg in the days before we discovered peak oil).
“A Rolls Royce,” he pronounced.

It was a lovely machine, but when I tried it out down the sandy track by the garage something heavy and depressing came over me. It seemed to take an age to turn a corner. And then I realised: it was an old lady’s bike. I had visions of bowling sedately along the seafront with long skirts and cardigan, and I shuddered. And even though it was my 54th birthday yesterday I couldn’t quite do that sit-up-and-beg thing.

“I’m just a drop handlebar kind of girl,” I told him.
“Head down, bum in the air,” he said.
“Something like that,” I laughed. And sprang happily back on my second hand 5-speed Sun bike, terminally rusty from an encounter with the sea waves. Without a helmet, without a care.

Summer solstice: sunrise on the beach at Southwold; rock rose fire; solstice bonfire at Barsham, by Mark Watson

Sailing to Little Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bird Singing in the Dark

I discovered so much of who I am,
Sitting in deserts in the sand,
Nothing and no-one to get in the way, no bills to pay.
I love lying in the sun and swimming in warm sea,
I don`t want to think about all the places I will never see,
Living is hard and flying is easy..
What will you do ?
What will we do ?

(Flying by Shannon Smy, Seize the Day)

I’m in Chapelfield Gardens dancing next to Christine at the Zero Carbon Festival, as Chris Keene’s epic journey from Wales to Copenhagen passes through Norwich. I’m at Speaker’s Corner holding a Climate Emergency banner with Mark, just after John McDonnell's speech about the third runway at Heathrow. There’s the same song playing and the same movement happening inside. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced yet in Transition. The song is about giving up flying, about the singer not flying to see her grandmother in America, and her sister in Australia. It’s a real song. And she’s out there singing it on show to the world.

Flying is a burning Transition topic because it’s so high-carbon. In our Transition Circle meetings it was the one subject that silenced the room. Because if you’re cutting your carbon emissions by half the national average, as those of usin TN2 decided we’d do this year (and a further half next year) there is no way you can fly. In December Not Flying was discussed at length in Transition Culture with 83 comments. In January Adrienne Campbell of Transition Lewes spoke eloquently about her difficulties with other people flying in her blog, 100 monkeys. How far does our conscience about the planet take us? Does it give us the right to challenge each other? Or is something else happening we can’t see just yet?

Tully’s right, flying is not just about figures, useful though they are. It’s about ethics and relationship and the fact that when you stop flying you’re not just giving up pleasure or people you’re giving up whole continents. Whole parts of your being that flourish in the big wild places, that can expand to the further rim of deserts and oceans and climb the mountain peaks. All the ancestor places, medicine places, wisdom trees, dreamtime.

The airports are gateways and run like a litany over my tongue: La Paz, Kingstown, Santiago de Chile, Kauai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Dehli . . . I’m like one of those shops with outlets in every destination. I could hide it. But that would be lying. I could off-set my conscience and say these flights were for work. Which they were. But the fact of the matter was I loved to fly. I was a travel writer both trade and by inclination and for ten years I lived out of a suitcase.

I took a lot of planes. I was only was in danger once (nearly crashed in El Salvador en route to Honduras). Only lost my cool once, riotously drunk and delayed in Newark one snowy New Year's eve (did the conga round the Virgin Airways jumbo with my fellow passengers - Ay! )Shortest flight? The one in the picture that took me from the Caribbean port of Cartegena into Gabriel Garcia Marquez country. Longest? 24 hours to Lima en route to Macchu Picchu and the rainforest for a fashion shoot. Lots of fashion shoots and interview work, dragging vast blue Globetrotter suitcases and typewriters (this was before internet). Difficult photographers with delicate cameras. Immigration snarling at us (won't miss those guys). Paris, Milan. New York (again). A host of American runways rising to meet me: Los Angeles, Alburqueque, Phoenix, Des Moines, Dallas, Houston . . .

I didn't get security with all my travelling, but I had a life that I wanted to live and I got to love the world the way some people love children, which is to say absolutely, knowing that you give part of your heart away when you do. I couldn’t have gone without those aeroplanes, that’s the truth of it. And so rather than sorrowing or hiding the fact, I’ll come clean and say I am thankful that I could. They were the best of times. There isn’t a day really that goes by without my thinking of those places and thanking this beloved earth for letting me experience her in all her absolute glory.

I know now that nothing will replace the feeling of Mexico, nor Arizona, nor the sound of tropical rains falling. To cope with the reality of that you have to access your heart. Only your heart can cope with that kind of loss. Because travelling takes you to places inside yourself that Western rationality and justification don’t go.

For a long time I wrestled with what I had gained from staying home in East Anglia for the last eight years (with the exception of one flight to India, one train journey to London) and I looked about me and I couldn’t see it. How was my life better? Was I now looking forward to an increasingly depressing life without any money or work or heating, or the ability to travel much beyond my own lane? Or was I missing something? And I lay awake for hours last night thinking. And then I got it. When I stopped flying around the world, I came home. Because there was nowhere else to go. I had come to the end of the line. And I realised that to live a good life, I had to love that place at the end of the line. And that was hard.

Life is hard and flying is easy. One day you wake up and realise that the future you took for granted went and disappeared, and only when there was no possibility of escape, did you face reality and begin the real work which is to see the world afresh with your heart. Right here, now.

It’s a small inner revolution that will turn everything around. But so long as we can fly away from difficulty, keeping that sparkling holiday destination in our minds, we won’t land and engage in this task. We’ll keep flying off into never-never land. Our obligation as human beings to value life on earth – which all civilisations ignore - has to be fulfilled. To love youth and success in our culture is easy, to love your own reflection in the mirror, with its wrinkled face and second hand coat is hard. To stay indoors in your coccoon, surrounded by shimmering screens and soft music is easy, to speak with your neighbour and the one you live with is hard. To love the places that are Not-Home, those beautiful deserts and mountains, those Other landscapes and cultures laid out like delights in a bazaar costs us nothing. To love this polluted, crowded island with all the responsibility for Transition on our shoulders costs us everything.

But looking at the earth, and the course our Titanic culture is taking us what else can we do? Arundhati Roy wrote a beautiful line that's often quoted and forms the last line of 'The Transition Timeline': another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe. In the big green places where the tropical breezes blow through the papaya trees you can feel this breath upon your whole body. In East Anglia in February, with people pressing in on all sides, it’s a struggle. But sometimes you get a little help.

Three thousand miles away in Africa the migrants are preparing for take off. By April thousands of them will be touching down in Southern Britain. They’ll be following the flight paths of their ancestors and arriving in woods and scrublands as they have for thousands of years. One night I’ll wake up and steal down the lane and as I turn the curve of the road by the barley field, I’ll hear a sound that goes out for miles across the dark land jug jug jug. And I never know whether it is this song with its two hundred variations, or the fact this small insignificant brown bird sings at midnight that grabs my imagination and my heart so. But whichever, I know somewhere inside we are like the nightingale. And insignificant though we all are in Transition, grounded and struggling, we have to know that when we make our downshifting moves, our heart-felt decisions, we are like the bird singing in the dark and that there are people who are listening out for that sound.

Because when they hear it they'll know that after a long, cold lonely winter, our Spring is truly come.

On the road in the 90s: taking the plane from Cartagena to Mompos, Colombia. Sacred fig tree. Mompos.
The trip to Mexico that changed everything. Café in Valladolid, just before visiting the ancient Mayan cenote.