Transition – 1 – Beyond Forest Gardens

We received a forwarded post from a friend in the UK today, from their local ‘transition’ group. It was a link to a blog about a forest garden project as part of the community transition initiative.

A community forest garden is a vital cog in the wheel of transition, that we must inevitably spin into. It is a transition from oil based consumption and materialistic lifestyles and emerge into simple satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, local sustainability and smaller group inter-dependence. 

There’s no doubt that big changes are pushing their heads above ground and that we must begin now to prepare.  If we do we WILL ride this wave and emerge refreshed and renewed.. landing on new shores of potential. 

To us, as long time observers of the social shifts, it does seem that we, today, are present to a crumbling of ‘what was’ and an emergence into a new way. 

As information spreads and things seem to happen much much more quickly [people can connect, share ideas, start groups, research through the internet] more people are aware.   Ideas are beginning to synchronize like women who live together experiencing their menstrual cycles synching with each other.  

We are being pushed towards finding creative alternatives for our basic needs which are safety, shelter, food, wellness and connection to other from intimate, family, friends, neighbors into the community and beyond.

And it seems that the place to begin is really at grass roots, one or two people, adding more as the idea spreads, neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to community, community to other communities…and our role exists within our individual community yet as part of the entire whole…ain’t that cool!

 Forest Food Gardens are one part of the great web of emergence.  It is one [jolly good]  way of ensuring abundant, localized community  food and wellness.

Natural Building methods and all the variants thereof offer effective, localized, low cost and resource friendly solutions to providing shelter for all

Shared Land in the form of people offering parts of their land for community shelter/food growing spaces knowing that they will be supported and helped by the community as their generosity melts the divide between have’s and have not’s..

Shared Labor in the form of people working on projects and knowing that they will be fed and sheltered as they help create an abundant world for future generations not just for themselves.

Free energy solutions from those who are fascinated by experimenting with solar/wind, magnetic, water and whatever power.  Like this we can step over the  spirallingly expensive grid electricity and gas-fuelled transportation.

Connection to Other and Community  is the spirit that fuels us to come together and pool our resources, ideas and skills. It is also the spirit that connects one community to another and thus springs the spider network of local communities, trading, bartering, sharing, caring helping….

Living v Working to Live.  In living we bypass the ’middle man’.   Instead of going to work for someone to earn ‘money’ to pay for heat, light, food, entertainment, transport and keeping up with ‘them’, we will expend our energy on living.  

We forsee that there will be a shift towards people using their ‘time’ to dig, plant and tend food forests, collect herbs and concoct tinctures, preserve and prepare food, collect wood, tend the fires, build homes, care for the livestock, school the children…..

This alone would consitute a good enough ‘work’ day. The fruit of your labor is the home, the eggs,the warmth, the nutrition, the healing and the children delighting in playing in ’secret’ hidey hole under the large fruit bushes. 

We are going to have to learn to make do with less, be more independent and self-sustaining, become more hardy and resiliant and come up with creative ways to utilize what we do have in abundance.

And thankfully, something we humans have in abundance is the ability to transcend through adversity via creativity and soar to heights of magnificence and when we pull together.   The evidence is there.

Past Evidence of the Great Human Spirit

A friend’s mother who grew up in the Great Depression of the 30’s said to us the other day ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about the ‘great depression’ and how people had to live – that’s the way we’d always lived.    Rural folk know how to survive, how to adapt, make-do and use the natural resources. And they know how to pull together as a community from taking food to bereaved neighbors to sharing the surplus of their gardens with those less well off.   They had no other choice.  It was live off the land or die!  And they had a sense of caring for their community.

Anyone in the UK who knows someone who is in their 80’s will have heard tales of how they managed in the 40’s WW2.   Food shortages, nightly bombings in big cities, people being made homeless in an instant were all part of their everyday reality.  A woman recalls how living rurally they had lots of orchards. During WW2 her father dug up the orchards, by himself with the help of a neighbor’s son and planted vegetables that he gave away to locals so that they would have fresh food to eat.

Riding the Wave of Transition Together

So how do we begin to energize a transition wave in our community.   And before you get all scared about official stuff, there is none.   One of the pleasures of living in the rural South is that people just do things… they aren’t too fussed about what the officials think.    They don’t get all bogged down in ‘what about the codes’ or ‘you can’t do that’.  

Here are some initial guidelines…

1.  We have to find our bliss, the thing we love doing that fit into this new kind of living

2.  We may need to develop new skills or link together with others to pool our skills

3.  We have to work with the greater good in mind, knowing that we will be taken care of as long as we are genuine and doing the right thing

4.  We can’t just sit around talking, we have to start doing NOW.  We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how it is and what’s going on and now we are acting.  We went out into the world and connected and followed the leads and found the like-minded energies and we asked for connections, help, guidance…and it comes in

5. We have to be prepared for a bumpy ride as we shift gears, but we must also allow ourselves to experience the vision of living a more natural, earth-based, community centred life… and all the joys that it brings.   There really is nothing like good honest labor to have that feeling of being in the moment and alive. 

 The increasing research and talk around global warming, carbon footprints, oil running out aka post-peak oil combined with evident economic challenges [to use a mildly inoffensive word] and price-hikes everywhere is making a pretty LOUD statement.They are the result of people waking up and getting that we can’t go on living the way we do.

Across the globe people are preparing for transition. There’s even official transition sites and examples of what people in communities are doing to create a more earth-based less oil dependent life.

Forest Food Gardens are part of a transition initiative that is designed to help communities become less reliant on oil derivatives which includes all manufactured items, electrical goods, grid lighting and heating, truck/plane/rail transported food and more reliant on producing what they need for themselves within the community.

THIS is NOT THAT

Please don’t start to label this and compare it to any political movement.  It is not that way.  This is NOT that other ‘c’ word.  It is about human challenges, emergence, freedom and working together and finding creative solutions.

We don’t just need to create food, we need to find ways to harness free energy, build affordable or even free shelter, utilize our land for the community, share our labor and the fruits of that collective labor.  And NO this is NOT anything like the com****** word.    That was awful.   That system was heirarchical and worse still hypocritical. This is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

This can and will become a global initiative.  The global initiative will not be orchestrated at global level.  It will consist of each individual playing the instrument they play best and all coming together in harmony with others to allow community initiatives to unfold.  We like to think of this transition as a harmonic emergence of humans, a return to earth.  H.E.R.E.

More on the topic of Community Transition

Transition 2 – The just do it’s 12 steps to creating a self-organizing community initiative coming soon

How to set an initiative in motion and avoid energy sapping bureaucracy whilst surprizing and then  inspiring the authorities with what you all achieve.

© 2010, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes