Beth Tilston is my new hero

Can non-friends on Facebook view her mouthwatering 'Mobile Uploads' album?

And I think this wins the prize for the most interesting facebook conversation I've ever read. 

Beth Tilston

Grrrrrrr

June 21 at 2:16pm ·  · 

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    Christiane Lechner what happend?
    

    June 21 at 3:45pm · 
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    Beth Tilston Things are not happening fast enough...
    

    June 21 at 4:15pm · 
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    Christiane Lechner i know what you mean. a friend of mine texted me the other day "hast du es eilig, gehe langsam" - "are you in a hurry, walk slowly" (kind of :)
    

    June 21 at 8:09pm · 
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    Paul Kingsnorth When Greece collapses in a few weeks, things will start happening pretty fast ;-)
    

    June 21 at 9:35pm · 
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    Beth Tilston Just watching that on the news. They're going to take everyone with them, aren't they. If they don't collapse, the alternative is to sell all their public services and basically be sucked into a black hole of (even more) debt. Learnt the word peonage the other day, seems appropriate.
    

    June 21 at 10:31pm · 
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    Paul Kingsnorth This is the north being structurally adjusted, the way the south has been for decades. The people of greece have to pay for decades for the fuck-ups of bankers and for the obsession with the Euro that the EU's leader's have. It's a fantasy coming up against the buffers of reality. They have to default, because their people refuse to become peons. The century is just starting to get interesting!
    

    June 21 at 10:51pm · 
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    Beth Tilston http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/greek-crisis-athens-rural-migration?cat=world&type=article
    
    http://democracystreet.blogspot.com/2011/05/back-in-midlands.html
    

    June 21 at 11:36pm · 
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    Paul Kingsnorth Good links. I wonder what the possibilities are for a new ruralism? When the banks collapse again this question may become more urgent:
    
    http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/06/22/its-time-to-plan-for-the-imminent-banking-collapse-and-its-aftermath/
    

    June 22 at 9:50am · 
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    Beth Tilston It'll be interesting to find out... My feeling is that we are more fucked than most in this respect given that we're an extremely populous country, we have little left of rural skills and culture, the land is owned by toffs who have had it since Biblical times and it is largely occupied by the people who caused the crisis in the first place (at least it is down here).
    

    June 22 at 8:47pm · 
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    Paul Kingsnorth Yes, quite agree - and we also have far less contact with the land than others, given that we were torn from it first. We were the first modern landless nation. Also, I just found out that England has 9% tree cover, while the EU average is 44%! Christ.
    

    June 22 at 10:09pm · 
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    Ian Lawton we're also more fucked than most because what little revolutionary spirit we have has been asleep for longer than everybody else's ... gonna have to learn to farm again very fast i guess - we will have to run to the country when the state finances collapse along with a couple of 'too big to fail' banks ... this is all quite mad isn't it!?
    

    June 22 at 11:27pm · 
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    Beth Tilston 
    

    I think people will just starve in the cities for a bit as they're starting to now. Or perhaps they'll move out of the big cities to smaller ones where it's cheaper. I don't think people will get 'back to the land' until we see the end of industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture doesn't need people. I reckon there will be a growth in people working in woodlands before there is in people working in fields. Wood is a fuel, after all. Though if we only have 9% tree cover left - maybe not...

    
    
    

    June 22 at 11:49pm · 
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    Paul Kingsnorth 
    

    I think land prices are the biggest issue actually. I think there would be a flood of back to the landers if it were affordable. the internet has put info about how to work land and grow food at all our fingertips - we're all started from nothing, after all. The demand for allotments would have been unthinkable ten years ago. If the land were not all locked up by landowners and yuppies - which is an issue of population density, history and economics - things would be different. But also, yes, I think the cities may start starving first. Must go and buy that farm ...

    
    
    

    June 23 at 9:28am · 
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    Ian Lawton 
    

    nevertheless i'm hoping we get desperate enough that the landgrabs start. I've always thought that the thirst for allotments is probably driven by a half conscious intuition that we are likely to starve to death in the near future ... landrights are going to become a major issue that's for sure ... i recently bought 'this land is our land' by marion shoard, not read it yet, have you read alastair macintosh's 'soil and soul' beth? ... anyway here's hopin for some Diggers radicalism... ""The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land." Gerrard Winstanley

    
    
    

    June 23 at 9:57am · 

True for me some days

Joanna Macy workshop 3 April

doing some promo for the fella...

The Work That Reconnects

What’s Possible?

When:        Sunday 3rd April 1-6pm

Where:       Angel, Islington   

What:

A series of interactive activities, meditations, rituals and practical tools inspired and developed by visionary deep ecologist Joanna Macy, encouraging us to express our feelings and find new ways of seeing our place and purpose on this planet.

The Work That Reconnects is a framework that helps people connect to ourselves, each other and the natural world. It offers skills and strategies to nurture the emergence of creative responses and transform our concerns and worries into collaborative action.

For more information visit www.joannamacy.net/

Facilitators

Kevin Frea is a trained and experienced facilitator of the Work that Reconnects. He is an environmental activist, teacher, life coach and vegan with a Masters degree from the Centre for Human Ecology in Glasgow.

Michael Margolin has worked as a garden educator, organic farmer and facilitator of various fields that are helping to create a more sustainable world. He has trained in Vipassana meditation for five years, is an experienced contact improvisation dancer and is currently training in Action Theatre, an improvisational theatre form.

Donations are encouraged!

Reserve your place to receive further details, address and directions:

Michael   michael_j_margolin@riseup.net

Kevin      Kevin@humanecologist.org, 07716246672

Natural Rhythms

thanks to scienceblogs for the pic

There's a conversation thread meandering around at the moment about 'natural rhythms.'

My friends and I seem to be talking about rest, seasonal patterns, the rise and fall of energy.

Last week all I wanted to do was sleep and eat. I wasn't the only one. Did you feel that way?

This week the low ebb of energy persists and I'm juggling good intentions with the lure of coffee and sugar to prop me up. Struggle.

This morning I thought of my friend Alastair who worked for a year as a gardener and facilitator at Embercombe, a stay-in-yurts-and-sit-by-fires-and-find-your-purpose kind of place in Devon. Away from the stuff of modern life, he noticed strong differences in his available energy at different times, although his sleep, diet and activities were consistent. After a while he began to notice cycles in his energy, and a correlation with the cycles of the moon: that his energy would rise as the moon waxed towards fullness, and wane when it waned.

That might sound like something from the wacky bucket but perhaps that feeling is a symptom of the masculine slant in the ideosphere. I bleed each month on the full moon. For women it is obvious that at least one of the natural cycles of our bodies is pitched to the rhythm of the moon.

So I had a google at breakfast and found this from the very helpful teachers at Woodlands Junior School in Kent.

So last week, sleep-and-eat-and-drown-in-coffee in an unsuccessful attempt to prop up waning energy week, the moon was waning to a close.

This week it's beginning to wax so energy should be picking up! I don't see that yet. But I'm starting to feel it writing this :)

So my question now is, if this is one of the natural rhythms we may experience, what do we do with that?

An obvious answer would be to just do less when our energy wanes and do more when it waxes. Which is tricky in practice because professional deadlines and social calendars are not pitched to the lunar cycle and sometimes you just have to push on.

But just maybe they increasingly could be. No-one notices, for example, what time I arrive and leave work; the emphasis is on me meeting my targets not which hours I meet them in, and my irregularity is expected and predictable. So I do have some flexibility to do more when I 'wax' and less when I 'wane.'

Hummm..

I'm going to keep an eye on this one....

The Project

Hello.

I like this blog.

I like all the comments from friends and strangers.

I haven't written in it for a while.

I have been Getting Practical.

A project team has amassed. They are lovely and it feels precious and beautiful.

We are (probably) going to Buy Land and Do Stuff.

Every three months or thearabouts we have an open meeting where anyone can come and that's currently the way that new people get involved. I guess the next one would be sometime in February or March.

Although that might be developing because I think we're going to start a DIY Church

yes a CHURCH

where you can be anything from a devout Jew to an athiest

and still come along and play

I think we're going to make up our own sermons

or something.

Anyway.

About this project.

We had a couple of days of visioning.

We came up with these key ideas / principles in popularity order:

1. A SPIRE! (14)
2. Personal growth and development (13)
3. Elemental living and a healthy relationship with nature (13)
4. Personal autonomy (11)
5. Creativity / emergence (improvisation / process oriented) (9)
6. In all our dealings we aim to embody: honesty, tolerance, openness, respect, and something else I can't read (8)
7. Resilience, self-provision, sustainability (8)
8. Collective joy (7)
9. Collaboration and mutual support (7)
10. Inreach and outreach (6)
11. Enduring relationship with place (6)
12. Collective purpose and endeavour (6)
13. Concentric circles of belonging / variety of relationships (5)
14. Play (2)

We don't have a website or anything yet.

The Great Reskilling

more here

The winter quiescence

I've just started to read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

Just the forward, so far, by Thomas Berry.

He writes of "the springtime singing of the birds, the summertime showers, the autumn ripening, and the winter quiescence."

Quiescence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 may refer to:

• In fluid mechanics, it refers to the state of a fluid that lacks any movement
• The G₀ phase of a cell in the cell cycle; quiescence is the state of a cell when it is not dividing
• In neuron bursting, it refers to the quiet phase of a spike train when a neuron is not emitting bursts or singlets
• In plants, it is the non-active state of a seed in which the only requirement for seed germination is water and oxygen; Contrast with Dormancy
• In behavioral neuroscience or zoology, quiescence refers to a behavior where an animal is vigilant but relaxed and immobile. This may be related to a recuperative response after an encounter with a predator
• In volcanology, when an active volcano is not actually erupting
• An electronic amplifier or filter is said to be in a quiescent state when no signal is applied to its input
• Quiescence search, In Game searching (adversarial search) in artificial intelligence, a quiescent state is one in which a game is considered stable and unlikely to change drastically the next few plays
• In computer science is a data item that is not actively being changed

I feel this. Do you? Right now. All I want is to stay home. Why go out and do all these things and see all these people when I could stay home and practice piano, and cook, and read, and feel like I have contentment and everything I need in abundance?

And even that is fairly busy. I could go further into not-doing. The autumn leaves are almost all gone. The winter quiescence is drawing me in...