What does YOUR life look like?

I talked with Sion this morning for 45 mins. We spoke via our computers using skype - which even allowed us to talk while seeing each other via small but functional web cameras. while sitting on opposite sides of the world.

Sion was wanting to ask about the community garden project he had visited while on Waiheke a few months ago. Sion was bringing his refined and accurate recording skills and would attend all the meetings of the various food groups on Waiheke, then produce amazing records of our conversation like this one from the Food Hui we had at Piritahi Marae which has since spawned a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Group.

It was hard for him to get his questions in until he told me his laptop battery was getting very low. As he sat in an echo-filled rock-walled library building in an Edinburgh University, I kept quizzing him about his circumstance there in Edinburgh, and asking for pictures of where he lived (the other day he’d mentioned cleaning up dog poo in the downstairs of his tenement building in an email)...

This is a building very like the one he is living in. They are layed out in a U shape at the back to enclose some land for growing.

There are about 25 people in his block and they are having the first neighbour gathering in a few days, so I suggested he show them something on his computer screen. I pointed him to these great clips of Rob Hopkins speaking to The International Forum on Globalisation.

This is three clips totalling 18 mins, which describe remarkably well the Transition Towns concept, and the why. Here is part one.

Part Two
Part Three

It was recorded last year but is no less relevant and one can see the changes that have happened in the last 18 months. We shared the ideas and lessons learnt from The Big InTent Festival we had recently - as an awareness raising and dialogue building event it was fabulous!

I have a feeling that in the coming 12 months we will see changes at a speed and variety we may never have seen before in living memory. We are already seeing it and I don’t see it about to back off the pedal anyday soon. 200 species a day gone, 700 billion dollar payments to crooked bankers, headlines shouting “Power bills up — and so are directors’ fees”, ice caps melting. These are some of the things which keep me awake.

So imagine a population of 500,000 people, with one third of them living in buildings like this, starting to figure out how to keep themselves warm, and where their food might come from when the price of industrially sourced food is no longer tenable. If they have something on their side it might be the spirit of the people and the history of hardy souls who have passed before them on those Scottish hills and valleys. The stone buildings engender a certain knowing - that some things don’t change much. I wonder if that’s one of the ways people manage to set aside the urgency and continue as though nothing was happening.

And how are we doing on Waiheke? Well over the last year we have added three more community gardens, a public orchard, the beginnings of a CSA project. More people are engaged with one another. Some meaty and real conversations are taking place now, while knowledge is being shared, questions are asked, gardens get planted and plants get tended, and as events are planned. We are all deepening in our appreciation of one another.

It was a blast being back to Scotland - made possible through my little EeePC laptop that Blair Rogers and brother Tony Rogers of peakprovidence.com kindly loaned me for two years. I was last in Scotland more than 30 years ago, but remember well driving along a windy road on the way to Findhorn, through 12 foot high (4 metre) vertical walls of snow created by the snow plough clearing the road of snow drifts. Living in a stone building requires a lot of clothes, or a fireplace, electricity, gas or oil, to keep you warm. They are looking at and beginning to install a makeshift double glazing to start with, but how to insulate a stone wall - with its thermal mass, but little insulation value?

Sitting in my 70 year old timber framed and clad, iron roofed, converted railway cottage at 5am, and trying to put myself into a tenement building in Edinburgh was a stretch but the conversation, the pictures and hearing the background sounds made it remarkably real. I would recommend to anyone the experience of connecting across distances, geographical, environmental, social and physical in order to taste a little of another’s view of the world. It is refreshing and in this case made me appreciate more than ever the circumstance in which I find myself at this time.

And as we were signing off we sent each other some web addresses of cool things that are happening in our places. Sion gave me this www.nearbuyme.com and I shared this www.ooooby.com - wow what an exchange!