Patterns in Conference
By conference-2010 14th June 2010
From Charlotte Du Cann:
This year pattern has replaced steps. We’re no longer energetically descending a 12 step ladder starting up a Transition town, we’re standing amid a complex interweaving of elements that make up Transition itself. Perceiving the original movement we’re making in the Big Picture.
At the Conference I find myself standing amid this weave, experiencing verbs: reeling from the Stoneleigh affect, dancing with strangers, exchanging knowledge in the queue for breakfast, immersing myself in the red earth, green hill territory the Transition heartland, sleeping on a hard floor, joining in with circles and spirals, opening up to everything that’s happening- even watching football (haven’t done that since 1966!), talking, talking, talking (not for nothing our totem bird for the conference was the sociable and talkative jackdaw).
Language is what we have in common. Where are you from? no longer means what kind of social class you are. It implies a question: how is your initiative doing? Our lexicon is not made of abstract terms, the rhetoric of politicians, or possessive nouns, the acquisition of a consumer age, but actions related to real things we’re doing in our home towns, villages and cities.
Storytelling, speaking out loud, sowing seeds. And most of all coming together in resilience.
In the Big Group process where we could write and draw what we saw coming in the future, what struck me most was how instinctively we looked, not for what distinguished us but what we have in common, finding links where non existed before, dissolving walls that have keep us separate in our minds, forming patterns of coherence within chaos, patterns of harmony within strife, holding hands across the divide. Coming (and sometimes swimming) Home.
We are the rising sun/we are the ones we are waiting for – Spiral Dance in the quad; bottom up initiative – swimming upriver in the Dart.