EARTHLINES: Halcyon Days

Happy Summer Solstice everyone! My copy of EarthLines magazine arrived today, so I am publishing the column I wrote for the previous Spring issue - an upside down post, as it was written at the turn of the year. Today it is a beautiful midsummer day and we got up at dawn to see the sun rise over the sea. Outside the barley fields are stippled with poppies, the larks are singing, grass snakes basking on the compost, the garden filled with peas and beans and clover, roses and long grasses. Later we will have a picnic in the dunes and go for a swim. It's been a hard time in a fallow year, but today is a day of light and air, a blue day, and I am walking out . . .

Today is a halcyon day, one of the fourteen that fall each side of the winter solstice. Years ago it was believed that on such days, the mythic Alcyone, transformed into a kingfisher, could nest by the shore in peace because the god of the winds her father had calmed the waves.

I am taking an unusual break in a stormy time. Outside the rivers are retracting from the flooded meadows, and the sun is low and radiant in the sky; its tawny light suffuses everything. I am attempting to tame the huge hedges that surround the garden with a pair of shears: hawthorn, elm, oak, cypress, ivy. Pausing for breath something comes to me I do not expect. The fragrance of violets, and the sound of a blackbird singing quietly to himself in the rockrose. Spring embedded in winter.

Sometimes we need a lucky break, a halcyon day when we can rethink things and notice what is under our feet, or lies embedded deep inside ourselves. Sometimes this comes in the form of a stranger, reminding you of something you had forgotten, and sometime a handful of midwinter days you wrest for yourself, so you can practice your song for another year.

An alchemical conversation
I’m talking with Chris Thornton from South Australia. He has driven from his native Midlands to hold a conversation about Transition and communications which is the subject of his PhD. He is researching how Transition can make a space, to reconfigure our sense of self, as creatures that live in the wider social and biological sphere. How communications can shape a new kind of personal narrative, that includes human and non-human others.

How do we do that in a culture that is focussed entirely on individualism and perceives the world – including the wild world – as objects under our control?

How do you start to fulfil your objectives? he asks me. I laugh and say it doesn’t really work like that, with agendas and remits, from theory. Look, I say and point to the box that sits on a table between us. It’s filled with differed coloured apples evenly spaced from one another and lined with the summer edition of the newspaper I have been working on all year.

Here are the apples we picked in the orchards of the Emmaus community in Ditchingham on a sunny day last week. You can read everything into that box. You can read relocalisation and climate change and the economic downturn; the fact I am storing apples to last all winter in my larder. And if you look at the page, it’s an interview with Anne-Marie Culhane about the Abundance project.

That’s where, like many people, I first came across the idea of redistributing fruit in the community and started to write about it. It’s the basis of all the grassroots media I have been involved in. Now think about an 24/7 apple bought in a supermarket, flown in from Chile or somewhere you have never been. That apple doesn’t say anything. It is just an object that you eat every day, as a global consumer. These apples however say everything about us as activists, our reconnection with neighbourhood, winter, the earth. They are all about relationship. Key to taking us back into that relationship is the artist.

Gary Snyder once said that artists act like mycorrhizal fungi, transforming old dead thoughts and liberating energy from the forest floor. They are integral to the vitality and meaning of the community in which they live. That’s why, for me, any kind of redemptive cultural shift has to have creativity at its heart.
Sometimes you wait a long, long time for someone to ask you for the knowledge you have been holding in your heart, it seems for an aeon.

Outside, after the conversation, nothing has changed. It’s the same world. My inbox is still flooded with requests to save the tiger, the rainforest, the NHS, how we can halt another fossil fuel frenzy from destroying another pristine place on earth. But something inside has changed. A knot has untied. I realise I'm not waiting anymore.

An alchemical meeting
I am in Bethnal Green with fourteen contributors to the book, Playing for Time. We are exploring a section of the book about transitional arts practice, how it can be defined through the diverse practices of the people in this room. On the floor is a map of the book with its many sections laid out in bold aboriginal colours: land, water, rites of passage, food growing, activism, ancestors, reclamation . . .

Is this a key tenet of a collaborative practice? we ask each other in pairs, as we test nineteen of them out. I have a small clipboard with Change written on it, Anne-Marie has one with Thinking in Systems. We are engaging in a dialogue, how allowing change keeps a door open for other things to come in and how the artist has to hold that possibility no matter how hard the wind is blowing to shut everything down in the room.
When you think within the ecological systems of the earth, you are not stuck in the tramlines of argument, I say suddenly, you are not stuck in an old story. Maybe it’s not even about a narrative with a linear sequence, but takes another shape entirely.

Anne-Marie laughs. Outside the leaves of the cherry trees have turned amber and gold and float past the elegant 18th century windows. Sometimes you don’t know what you know until someone asks you the question and then waits for the answer.

We learn to wait because we don’t know the answer yet. It is not where you think it is. Some of it is embedded in the apples in the room, and some in the spark that reignites the relationships we once had by virtue of being human on this planet. One thing I know: it’s the artist who hosts the space in which that reconnection happens.

An alchemical space

Next year I am curating a garden. It’s a small garden in a small town, created four years ago by my local Transition initiative, Sustainable Bungay. It sits in the courtyard of the local Library, and this winter I am designing a programme of events and workshops around the plants in its central bed: woad, indigo, dyer’s greenweed, yarrow, St John’s wort. Each plant in the Dye Garden is a portal through which to look at our key relationships with plants: the fashion industry (cotton), the use of colour (madder), the rural world (hemp). We are surrounded by textiles and yet we never consider them. What would the world look like if we did?

One tenet I learned from paying attention to dreams: if you stop and pay attention to small things great riches will be revealed. The humble leaves of woad become a doorway into the fabric of the world. The plant takes you back in time, to the archaic and medieval worlds, it puts colour and yarn and imagination and belonging back into your hands. Takes you into blue.

The technological world goes so fast and furiously that we never get to look deeply and truly at the wonder of ordinary things. We never really know what we know. So though we imagine we can only properly experience the world by visiting every desert, hill and city, we only ever know it superficially as consumers. You can’t possess the earth, you can only behold its beauty and complexity when you become part of its vast and interlocking systems. You might catch it just for a moment, but that moment brings everything your heart desires into play. You just have to make the time and the space.

EarthLines is a magazine dedicated to nature, and today I wish I could write more about the natural world, which is the deep love of my life. I wish I could tell you I have spent this year up the wild mountains of Britain, or followed a Blue Ridge creek in the course of a year, or followed the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor across Europe, and then written of all my adventures. I wish I could share the insights I once had under a madrone tree, or the medicinal properties of wild indigo.

But the truth of the matter is I have spent this year working with people, in small spaces, editing pages of a book and a newspaper, and all my encounters with the wild world have been ones that have caught me unawares. A summer dawn among the dunes, a sea holly bush covered in blue and tortoishell butterflies, swimming down the Waveney alongside rainbow-finned fish. A deer in the headlamps as we travelled home down the back lanes. The bright new moon and Venus just before the storm surge. The big places, deserts and the hills of other geographies, now lie deep inside in my memory: Mexico, Arizona, Chile, Greece. They frame every small action in my home country. Sometimes the scent of violets brings them back. A kingfisher spring in sere winter.

Why do I not strike out more into the wind-rippling marshes, march along the Eastern seaboard, catalogue the mushrooms as I once did in my local wood? Some part of me knows that unless we can join forces as a band or network we will lose hold of the places and creatures we love, that to connect in the spirit of regeneration we need conversations and gatherings, an alchemical space where things can turn around and we can forge another identity for ourselves as a people. Where we can let go of the arguments that divide us and divest ourselves of an old and unkind story.

What breaks up the false dominion of monoculture is the presence of diversity and kinship, the sound of many different voices in unity. The meadow, Darwin once observed, is resilient because of the beneficial connections between each plant, insect and organism that flourishes there. To thrive in a hard time we need to know ourselves as that chalk land meadow; we need to be that coral reef, we need to be that primary forest and the mycorrhizal fungi on the leafy floor. We enter the system by paying close attention to our home country, to the small places, at the edges of things, in the spaces where there are no agendas, in the question and the pause, your laugh out of the blue on a halcyon day.

www,earthlines.org.uk

Images: summer solstice sun, Southwold beach 2012 (Mark Watson); gathering fruit for Abundance project, Grow Sheffield; The Dye Garden, Bungay Community Library; cover of EarthLines 9

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Today is the day of emergence when the ground springs awake and the winter turns. I'm writing this in Totnes at day break. There's a robin singing outside in the garden and I'm getting ready to take part in another kind of chorus. It's my third invitation: it came, like the rest, completely unexpected, when Rob Hopkins asked me to come and discuss the new Transition book (working title The Transition Companion), based on the Patterns Directory he and many others have been compiling on the Network for the last two months. People are converging from all over the UK to take part in this workshop (I'll be reporting on our meetings in our Transition Themes week later this month).

I met my friend Adrienne on the train at Reading and we talked non-stop about our respective initiatives. She told me about how the groups move and change, what kinds of extraordinary and diverse people are in them, how when she met Ben Brangwyn (whose house we are staying in) in Lewes in 2006 they both realised how massive Transition was going to be, how it is at that moment when you realise that it is the only thing that makes sense of the world, the only thing you want to do with your life. The breakthrough moment.

Gotta put that stuff in the book, I said.

It's the moment of emergence when the roots stir and the shoots move upward. Everything stored and consolidated in the winter comes awake. Through the mist the late sun burnished the green-mantled hills of the West, the old man's beard shone whitely, the hazel trees lit their golden candles. Under one of these hills so the legend goes, Arthur's warriors lie sleeping, hazel staves in their hands, ready to awaken when the kingdom needs defending.

There's a new mood in the land right now. People are waking up, I'm waking up, realising what lies at stake as things we took for granted are being taken away: our forests, our health service, our schools, our libraries. At Bungay Library we're having a Read-In this Saturday. Adrienne just took part in a Tea Party protest outside her local Boots (recently the high street store has become corporate and moved its finances off-shore, so now pays only 3% tax and is set to take over sections of the NHS as it is privatized). These are the kinds of moves we pay attention to in this blog, in the OneWorldColumn, in our conversations. It's important we realise this together. In a depressed low vibration everything disperses and separates. No one communicates. Nothing seems possible. A people who are alone and hopeless are easy to control and to sell consumer dreams to. In a high spirit of convergence, in the feeling of engagement, your energies, thoughts and feelings soar. The mood shifts, everything becomes possible. That's the real mood of Transition.

Gotta go now and get ready for that meeting. Take some of that mood with me. Have a beautiful day!

Photos: hazel catkins, Suffolk; tree protest, Forest of Dean.

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.

Dancing at Lughnasa

Happy gathering
Happy harvest
Happy dancing
One and All!

Dancing with Kerry and Elena around the stone circle at Mangreen at Summer Solstice; walking the ley through the barleyfield; sunrise on the sunrise coast

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