transition and fiddle music - expressing ourselves and serving others.

Autumn moves to winter and Edinburgh has again been witnessing four seasons in one day: dark, overcast on thursday, bright, warm spells on Friday; gusty rain Saturday; and driech and cold yesterday, the perfect time to visit friends and sit next to their woodburning stove, warmed by soup and tea and a glass of plum vodka.

The transition conference took place over this weekend - and my impressions of it were as fleeting and varied as of the weather. Some of the highlights - as ever - were the parts not included in the programme - the little child playing with my notebook and preventing me from writing, my fiddle lesson in the middle of the day - the chat with friends, the impromptu balkan tunes at the ceilidh on friday, the cycle ride up to pollock halls through holyrood park on friday morning, so near-blinded by the morning sunshine that i got off my bike to push it, dwarfed by salisbury crags to my left shoulder.

I enjoy transition as much for the connections it brings; the conversations both picking up old threads, and starting new and for the sense of community it provides by being with and meeting others with similar values...

And at the same time - it can feel like a bubble. Hence my need to dip in and out. Friday, in particular, I had been left inspired by a talk about the Bakery in Dunbar, set up by sustaining dunbar by a community share issue - but was left cold by a later discussion where Transition Support wanted to focus discussion on how to continue when their funding runs out next March.

"How do we involve more people", ran this particular discussion, the subtext being to my mind, "Why don't more people get the idea of transition?". Or another variant of the same discussion: "How do we make sure poor / deprived people and communities get involved."

It depends where you're starting from. Doesn't a question like this assume that transition has all the answers, and others do not? And how disappointing to go to workshops and discussions where there was no time for people to introduce themselves first. Although the transition thinking may be all about abundance, and creativity and fun, could it not be deeply patronising to assume that a project without the transition label is not a creative and interesting one that transition in turn could learn from... For every person who might find the ideas and language of transition inspiring, could there not be another one who finds it confusing, even alienating?

It makes me think of the aboriginal quote."If you have come here to help me, you can leave. But if you have come to help yourself, maybe we can work together."

Going back to my fiddle lesson on Friday, we played chords of two strings together. In Classical music this is called 'double stops'; in traditional Shetland playing it is called 'open strings' - as Morag, my teacher explained, the sound is open and free - like the tree-less Shetland landscape itself. For me, this kind of playing, and the community that it involves; because it involves a relationship between student and teacher, and all leads to playing with others, to the fine balance of solo tunes and group harmonies; leaves my heart uplifted and my spirit purposeful.

Luckily, two later transition talks also more than answered my misgivings, left me feeling recharged and optimistic by the end of the weekend.

Gehan McLeod, from Galgael, whose integrity shined through as she described the work based in Govan Glasgow of traditional wood-work and ship-building that has arisen out of a community of road-protests at Pollock Halls, filling a gap for 'work and for meaning' left by the demise of the ship-building industry in this area. This is a working class movement, and is about people re-claiming responsibility, not about being spoon-fed. "The antidote to consumerism", she said, "is production". And craft itself can build and repair neural pathways, even well after childhood.

Galgael, she explained, comes out of two words. Gal - the 'strange' Norse, embraced by the Gael - the 'heartland people'. The name GalGael breaks down the divisions between us and them - because it recognises that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all.

And Alistair McIntosh, whose talk I missed, but got to read about through Mari Cruz's blog of the conference, gave a beautiful context and insight. His theme was 'the indigeous': that indigenous people can connect with their land, and that others can connect with their own sense of being indigenous.

Mari says, "Indigenous people are just human beings who feel in control of the place they live in. Indigenous people are those who keep in control of the plot of the land. Alistiar plays beautifully with the two meanings of plot in English: "scheme" and "piece of land". Indigenous people are just human beings who feel they belong to a community, who are connected to their communities."

In the video link, Alistair pointed out the need to respect what is already there, to root in the community, and above all to serve. "What are you serving", he asks. And says that the answer is most powerfully found when a sense of responsbility comes out of a sense of identity and a sense of values.

Transition is so good at inspiration, but what comes next is perhaps more difficult: the need to do the daily tasks that take care of the things and the people around us. But maybe this can be where we both build community, and find our common (physical and metaphorical) ground: more fully alive and expressed as ourselves.

autumn leaves

compost, meditation and community

Today Edinburgh was bathed in autumn sunshine. I cycled 8 miles from Leith to Colinton, on the border of the Pentland Hills - uphill all the way. A group of us were visiting Colinton Community Compost.

The project is a residential home for a group of folk with learning disabilities - and composting is one activity they do. This is how it describes itself.

"The project provides meaningful work for adults with learning disabilities. We promote home composting and run a local kerbside collection of garden waste. Our final products include compost, worm casts, leaf moulds, woodchip, horse manure and firewood. We are currently negotiating a partnership with Edingburgh City Council and our plans include processing food waste and initiating a network of community composting sites around Edinburgh."

It was a beautiful place. I'd pushed my bike up the final steep gradient of the hill, and reached a wooden hut. I felt instantly that I was stepping into the earth, that beautiful fertile rich smell of mulch and berries and autumn soil heavy in th air. And the siting of the project, right on the verge of a disused quarry, with steaming heaps of compost on the brink of the hill, gave me a feeling of being safely cocooned and grounded at the same time as being opened up to the hills and view of the sea where I had started my journey.

I had that same grounding and stretching feeling doing yoga yesterday; and at my meditation group on Thursday, being part of something bigger than myself and being connected and interconnected with others. The teaching on Thursday was about impermanence, and several people spoke of the beautiful transience of autumn leaves. "By leaves we live", said Suzanne. It is a central quote of her play 'Leave to Remain', in which she pays tribute to the death of her mother. She told me she found the quote in the Poetry Library. "When I rise, let me rise like a bird; and when I fall, let me fall like a leaf, gracefully".

And the thing that I know but find hard to articulate; that I seem only to be able to glimpse; is that this impermanence and this interconnection - interbeing - are different aspects of the same thing. My buddhist teacher Thay - Thich Nath Hanh - speaks of the way he sees a cloud in a piece of paper - because the paper comes from the tree that cannot grow without rain. Maybe this non-self is the essence of our humanity.

All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;
Like drops of dew, or flashes of lightning;
Thusly should they be contemplated.

But at the heart of this impermanence is love. Someone else offered this Mary Oliver quote:

"to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go"
— Mary Oliver

The paradox of meditation for me is this: that I feel both more myself and less my 'self', in this practice I am fortunate to share with others.

Coming back to the compost - what else can embody impermanence so perfectly - I think back to the gardening day last month. It was lovely, a group of us all working together. Actually, I did more cooking than gardening. And of course making lots of cups of tea. We had some slate left over from repairing the roof last year, and we used it to make paths, taking up the mouldy carpet between the raised beds, laying down some plastic sheeting for an impermeable ground layer, then covering the sheet with shards of slate. I used the bigger pieces as a border, thinking of my friend Rachel's community mosaics (you can see pics at http://www.thirdrock.moonfruit.com), the beautiful way she creates patterns and gets people working together through inspiring them so gently.

For me there was some significance in working together, feeling like we were jointly creating something, and had a similar vision we were aiming for. But I also wonder about the ways in which it is possible to hide in a group, assume a mask, and be inauthentic. Living in a housing cooperative there have been many blessings but also so many power struggles, perhaps it is just one way of living together cooperatively, and perhaps my journey will teach me others.

Community Energy on the doorstep in Edinburgh

http://edinburghcommunityenergy.wordpress.com/

Having been investigating community energy schemes further afield, it's nice to discover plans for a community energy cooperative in Leith.

Stop Press: Intro to Permaculture Course places in Brixton this weekend

The excellent folks at Transition Town Brixton are running an introduction to Permaculture course - led by Pippa Johns from the Brighton Permaculture Network. Saturday in the community greenhouses and Sunday on a nearby estate to start to think about putting the ideas into practice. There are a couple of last-minute places available...

More here:
http://www.site.transitiontownbrixton.org/

Pleasure Principle 2 - reclaiming our own stories

Ps/ When I say pleasure principle, better be careful with my definitions, I don't mean just pursuing pleasure at the expense of all things, or abdicating all responsibility etc..

What I mean, instead, is 2 things: Firstly, being true to our experiences of what causes pain and what causes pleasure. It's when we share our stories that we can best reclaim our experiences and talk more honestly with each other about the kinds of lives and futures we really want. (Driving cars, for example, may sometimes be fun on an open road on a sunny day, but is not generally liberating for most people stuck somewhere around the M25. It's expensive, tedious, tiring and polluting.) And Secondly, that life is meant to be, at root, a joyful experience. As one Sanskrit teaching pronouces (and my own struggling meditation practice reminds me): Underneath all the boredom, underneath all the irritation, what remains is JOY.

The Pleasure Principle as design ethic

Yesterday I read The Vagina Monologues for the first time - compelling reading from cover to cover. It's an amazing, moving, searingly honest and often funny series of first-person accounts from women about their experiences of their vaginas - from menstruation to sex to physical violence. Brings a taboo subject to the open with a spirit of love. Why should we feel ashamed of our bodies?

So - how is this relevant to what I'm working on? Well, I think it's all about celebrating the pleasure principle, and being grounded in our bodies. Reading the first-hand accounts of other people made me feel more grounded and connected to myself,and to my own experiences, and by extension to other people. More human, you might say.

In the afternoon, I also read a series of pamphlets on environmental economics written by the pioneering think-tank new economics foundation. Although undoubtably brilliant, they were dense, hard to read, and very intellectual: a bit like the prime ministerial debates on the telly.

In short - they made me switch off, physically contract, and get a slight headache, though I made a mental note to self: must get my head round this later, as an awful lot of good sense and clever thinking was contained therein.

Of course, the two books written deliberately in different styles, and for different reasons and occasions, but maybe it's just worth remembering the pleasure principle as a design ethic when we're talking about communicating ecology - after all, ecology is all about connection too...