Tuesday 14th May saw a good turn-out to hear from Jason Lewis, world-class adventurer, who circumnavigated the world under his own steam - hiking, skating, kayaking, pedaling, and cycling.

It was a great evening, hearing about the trip and some of the insights it gave Jason, from climate change, sustainability, personal commitment to your goals, coping with various potential disasters, to our sense of global citizenship and often narrow personal identity. Packed with amusing and often farcical turns and twists of fate, the tale of Jason and his friend's endeavour to cross the earth by human power, and with so little advance financial support,  was humbling and inspiring.

I think we would have all quite happily brought our sleeping bags to the hall and sat up all night hearing about the whole trip - anything less than a sleep-over just couldn't do those 14 years justice.

For me, it was a riveting and incredible talk, and all told with such immediacy and warmth too. I think loads of us went away brimming with questions and wowed by the fact that a pub plan concocted over beers in Paris with a mate, and so little kayaking experience could, with enthusiasm and commitment, yield such an amazing voyage - and it felt like we only had the smallest taste of some of those experiences in the time we had.

Did my husband and I get home and right away start reading the book out loud in the kitchen and rolling about at some of the brilliant descriptions? Yes we did!

If you missed out on the talk you can find the book : Jason Lewis - The Expedition 1 : Dark Waters by Billyfish Books.

Lou Brown - TTT Food Group / Office staff

The learnings that most remain with me now were around the need for balance within groups: balancing power with responsibility, balancing vision of where the group is going in its work with acknowledgment of where the group may be struggling with personal feelings and conflicts. Earth care balanced with people care, social power within a group being earned but also being passed on, a commitment to equality that still recognises some members’ greater skills and input, building a culture of feedback and accountability. We looked at consensus process as a tool, and when that might not be the best tool to use. And we talked about how “brainstorming” of new and creative ideas then needs to be followed with grounding these ideas in reality, including a chance for others to raise and explore their concerns before proposals are finalised. And how conflict may be inevitable in groups but can also be a source of innovation, providing that the group has both the structures and the group culture to address conflicts in the most helpful way, including guidelines for positive critique.

All this and more is covered in Starhawk’s most recent book “The Empowerment Manual”, a copy of which (signed by her) is now available to borrow from Totnes Library.  A free and extremely useful download chapter about decision-making processes and how to do consensus process is available from her website www.starhawk.org, and a useful guide to sustainable critique can found at http://wearewalkinginbeauty.org/Walking_in_Beauty/Sustainable_Critique.html

Social permaculture and good group process is not of course only the territory of Inner Transition groups. All groups are built on human relationships, and all relationships can involve conflict and difference, just because we are all such unique and different people, with unique and different visions and values. And we all need appreciation of our work sometimes. Attention to these human needs sooner rather than later, and skills in how to balance all these factors, are something all groups can benefit from thinking about.

Sylvia Rose

We reflected on the long winter and the sudden shift to spring, the flow between stillness and movement, the nature of Transition and Wellbeing and their relationship to inner and outer worldviews. And we explored some big questions..

sometimes it seemed like spring would never come..

We started with walking and recalling the winter and feeling the shift into spring. Hilary Bee  invited us to walk around the space, remembering the journey since last October, the clocks going back. Some felt the resistance to winter. Others remember the pleasure of drawing in, no pressure to be out and doing.. how long it was.. how cold, still in April.. more rain, more wind, more biting easterly siberian weather.. and spring brings the joy of sunshine, growth, nature bursting forth..

And for some questions like - am I ready to be going out into the world more? What if I don’t know what I’m putting my energy into?

This linked to the wider theme of action and stillness – something I’ve been exploring a lot recently. Seeing something about health – for humans, for living systems, for a project – that it needs different qualities or energies – of making things happen and surrendering to the flow, of action and stillness; of putting its message out and listening. I’ve been part of the Saying Hello group in TTT, who are deeply interested in listening, in making connections, and in being aware of both parts of communication, inward and outward. It’s been lovely to be with people who are so committed to hearing what the other has to say and building relationships across our differences.

It was a record year for rain.. how does it affect us when the weather is so unusual?

At the Inner transition meeting we were also reflecting on the big arcs of change we are part of.. feeling the long winter as a result of climate change, the floods, the wind.. those who are outdoors more, or more rural feeling it more – is that true? The big historical arc we are witnessing, as economic growth based on using up the earth’s resources comes to an end, and our whole culture has to make a shift. The things we were talking about and planning for back in 2006 – and that many were looking at long before – are with us right now, we are living through the days and months of what Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning. Facing big questions. How to share a diminishing pie? Will some of the most rich and powerful go on taking more and more? What’s the alternative? What is the effect of all the millions of people and projects and actions around the world who are stepping forward to make a difference, to create a different way of living?

There were several people at the meeting involved in the Network of Wellbeing (NOW) project which started here in Totnes last year. We talked about well being and Transition. That Transition often starts with things like the need reducing our energy consumption and increasing how much local food we eat - and people find that they get to know their neighbours and feel better about themselves and where they live. In contrast, NOW starts with the five elements of wellbeing that NEF researched which are:

Give

Keep learning

Stay active

Connect

Take notice

From this intention a number of projects have started involving food growing, as well as alleviating poverty and others.

sunshine breaks through winter clouds over Dartmoor

There were some big questions asked – what would someone look like who had completed the Inner Transition? Is it us? (We thought, probably not..!) How about the ways that inner work are becoming mainstream – someone mentioned Mindfulness which is  becoming increasingly used in business as well as schools, hospitals, and as a life skill many are learning in their own time.

I have often thought that Mindfulness – the capacity to step back from what’s happening inside and just observe it instead of reacting automatically – is the first skill of inner transition. If we don’t have awareness of what is going on we have no space or possibility to do anything different, we are simply acting on autopilot all the time. It’s the first requirement for choosing change – to be able to see the current pattern. And the first step to spiritual or personal growth.

And it mirrors the whole cultural question that Transition raises. Can we observe and then question the automatic assumptions of our culture – that we have to get back to growth. Can we ask, is economic growth even what we want now?

A second core skill also named is empathy – being able to be aware of another’s experience, and feel something with them. Perhaps “Do as you would be done by” is the one commandment we need..

Thanks to all who came for an unexpected, far ranging, stimulating and connecting evening.

Sophy Banks

Now almost obsolete, the term husbandry dates back to the Middle Ages. One - the better known - meaning is ‘the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals’. A second definition lies at the core of Transition in the ‘care, management and conservation of nature and natural resources,’ and it is this that clearly drives a passion in Carole and Jonty - a passion they communicate to their students, who range from local schoolchildren to gourmet chefs come to establish connections between the food they serve on a plate and the place that nurtures it into being.

The site is at Liddy Ball (a hill just off the A383 between Ashburton and Newton Abbot, or a hill between Hay Tor and Denbury Hill if you want to think outside the box of a car). It was a series of pasture fields when they arrived, overgrown with brambles and bracken, the soil poor and thin. Now organised into different zones, it has several meeting spaces and classrooms, housed in yurts and the beautifully-designed home/schoolroom they have built at the top of the hill, around the hub of a spacious kitchen. Different kinds of organic vegetable growing are demonstrated in an area just south of the main building, and there are pigs, sheep, goats and chickens for meat, fibre and eggs, and trials of different types of wheat. Salads are grown in a polytunnel through the winter, and sold to restaurants, along with meat and seasonal vegetables. The school is particularly keen to promote the use of perennials and so is teaching its students how to grow and cook mashua (a tuber that also has edible leaves), oca de peru and other unfamiliar crops that might do well in our climate.

The site has no mains electricity and relies on solar PV and, soon, a small cluster of wind turbines to feed a shed full of batteries - with freezers full of meat the power needed to run them can not be lost for long. Water is also sourced on site. Jonty was keen to show us their Neolithic well, with water as sweet as the day it was dug, and told us how they move water around the site with ditches and channels (swales), making sure rainwater doesn’t just run off the hill and down into the valley. Eventually they hope to use power generated by the water flowing downhill to pump it back up to the pond at the top. This careful and considered use of the gifts the site has given them, and seeing the way the soil has responded to a bit of care, were inspiring to see, and gave us plenty to talk and think about; it was only reluctantly that we tore ourselves away from the place, well past the time we had agreed with them for our visit, after a delicious lunch in that gorgeous kitchen, with its central island table that encourages communication and fellowship.

Our Neolithic predecessors put up a ridge of earth along the crest of that hill, thousands of years ago, to protect the southern slope from the worst of the north winds, roaring across from Hay Tor. There was something profoundly moving in finding such an ancient site now sheltering, housing and feeding people who are committed to using the same intelligent care and husbandry to find a new way for our own age.

(You may be interested to know that Teignbridge District Council was so impressed with what the school wanted to achieve that, in order to make it possible, they created a whole new planning category. Carole and Jonty hopes this means that eventually there could be other husbandry schools set up all over the country.)

Sophie Galleymore Bird

Tuesday 30th April at the Transition Town Totnes Artist Network (TTTAN) Creative Salon we were inspired by the hand-work, creativity and treading lightly practices of three transition artists: Toby Fairlove with his handmade yurts, Yuli Somme with her felts shrouds/coffins, and film maker Emilio Mula. The conversations that were part of these presentations were deeply touching and thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed the details that Toby brought to the entire sensuous and long slow thoughtful process of building a yurt. I also LOVED heartfully considering the beauty and inevitability of our deaths and how we can make our funerals and are rites of passage as deeply embedded in community building and transition values as possible.

It's always interesting to see how the paradigm from which we are tranisitioning at the moment's has a similarly throw away/disposable attitude toward things like birth and death as well as stuff. This whole conversation and approach is about redressing that and taking our rites back into the communities and families and "tribe" that we are and re-humanising the entire process.

We also engaged in dynamic  inquiry together with the fine guidance of animator/film maker Emilio Mula. We gathered around the table with drinks and olives exploring what transition values permeate our practices and our lives. We explored what was essential in this for each of us. We looked at how for most all of us the questions were much more important that the "answers" per se and gave much more scope for us as creatives to support transition and effect resourceful resilient change in our communities. Especially interesting was the list that we made at the very end of this to give a word or a phrase describing this essential quality of transition art. It was to the noted that none of these words were so much about "beauty" so much as the manner in which our processes were engaged. This shared value and realisation and clarification had an enlivening and a lightening effect on all of us.

As I write these words, I come across these words from Satish Kumar's Path Without Destination book which feel completely in synch with the mood of the evening and what we are, as transition artists and beings, exploring and endeavouring to live.

Beauty brings joy. Beauty is the source of bliss. ... There is no destination. Beauty is not something that we achieve tomorrow. Beauty is not a distant goal. Or distant achievement. Beauty is the divine walk. When you make something with your hands, with love, with imagination, and with your heart, it is beautiful. But when we make something only to be used, we lose the sense of beauty. That is what our industrial culture is good at: mass-produced goods, mass-produced houses, mass-produced food. Ugliness. Our civilization creates a tremendous amount of ugliness. And when you create ugliness, you also create waste. You drink your tea from polystyrene, and throw it away. It is not beautiful, it is trash. Landfills are filled with this trash. If you create a glass that is beautiful to look at, it is not just drinking, it is an aesthetic experience. An experience of beauty.
-Satish Kumar, Path Without Destination

YES. Beauty is indeed the divine walk.

Katheryn Trenshaw - TTAN

The target audience are those people who are not currently supporting the independent shops on the High Street, and in line with the recent economic Blueprint this work will contribute to diverting 10% spend from non-local businesses. The Food Hub has undergone a couple of trials and is in the process of recruiting a project manager. The project will create a co-operative between producers and consumers , thereby bringing greater understanding and loyalty with each other and encouraging consumers to have a stronger connection with where their food comes from.

One participant wrote:

In our household the weekly shopping usually includes several trips to local shops, plus a larger supermarket trip for items that tend to be much cheaper such as pasta, tins, beer, wine, yoghurt, sauces etc. We priorities buying organic meat and dairy, try to buy as many organic vegetables as
possible, and buy organic staples when it’s practical and not excessively expensive. We also prefer to buy local and seasonal, but this can expensive and hard to find even in local independent shops.

We became interested in the Totnes Food Hub for several reasons;

• Convenient pick up time and location.
• Good value for money. We get regular emails from the Food Hub giving information on the producers and showing price comparisons. For example the lamb sold by the Food Hub is significantly cheaper than a comparable local organic option and a very similar price to supermarket lamb from New Zealand.
• Easy online ordering system. Hopefully when the Food Hub expands its range of products the convenience of ordering online and collecting once a week will replace our weekly supermarket shop.
• Based on trust rather than labels. It’s possible to meet the producers at the weekly collection and speak to them about their methods. We are happy to buy non-certified food as we have been given information about the producers and are confident in the standards set by the Food Hub.

At the moment the Food Hub is in an early trial phase, but we have been impressed with both the quality of the food that we have bought and with how easy weekly ordering and collection has been. If the trial is successful and the scheme is expanded to include more producers then we would certainly make a weekly Food Hub order a big part of our shopping routine.

Another wrote:

What can a crocodile attack, a year paddling a tiny boat, and getting hit by a car and left for dead say about how we should live our daily lives?

On Tuesday 14^th May in Totnes Methodist Church at 7:30-10pm, world-circumnavigator, Jason Lewis, will tell tales of daring adventures on the high seas, as well as how he realised during his 13 year trip that living sustainably is the only answer to rising sea levels, mass species extinction, and catastrophic climate chaos.

Jason Lewis crossed the world using only human power – biking, hiking, skating, swimming, rowing, and pedaling across the oceans. He realised that surviving humanity’s environmental dilemma comes down to our ability to live as part of a closed system. Don’t miss this chance to hear all about Jason’s incredible journey and the lessons he found.

Jason is a fascinating speaker to be visiting Totnes. His message appeals to everyone, whether you are interested in adventure and exploration or sustainability and living life with more meaning.   His ability to engage with people, particularly young adults, is great.  This incredible journey, his commitment and perseverance, and the way that he lives his life post-adventure have inspired people all over the world. Jason explores the issues of our time with offbeat humour, and stories of white-knuckle adventure that will have you on the edge of your seat. Definitely not to be missed!

Jason Lewis’ talk will take place on Tuesday 14^th May at 7:30-10pm in the Totnes Methodist Church. Cost: £5/ 4/ 3. For more information ring Lou on 01803 867358 or see www.transitiontowntotnes.org

We can't promise a lucrative commission but we are offering a prize for the chosen design and a mention in despatches. If you are interested please take a look at the design brief here. This also includes contact details for further information.

Brief for Transition Homes Community Land Trust Logo Design

We need an eye-catching design for the Transition Homes logo that includes the organisation title and strapline as above and an image. This combination of text and image should complement information designed to help people understand what the Transition Homes project is all about...

So what are we about?

* Low cost, sustainable homes built with local materials such as straw, timber and earth

* On site food production, coppice, forest garden, reed bed waste water system.

* Permaculture and Transition design principles

* Wildlife friendly

* By the community for the community

* Project lead by an experienced and competent team

* Exciting!

The design should include no more than 4 colours and be adaptable for use as a header on A4 letters, on business cards, on A4 tri-folded (as a header for one column on A4 landscape split into 3 columns) and in larger formats (the final artwork will therefore need to be high resolution).

The design should be memorable so that it helps form and becomes strongly associated with a Transition Homes brand image. Cross-referencing to other Transition Town Totnes / Transition Network images would be an advantage.

We know that this is a lot to ask – particularly since the design should be as simple as possible!

 For further information contact: Chris Bird 01803 866835 / 07929454409 cbirduk@gmail.com