The future is already here, it's just...
I’m starting my deep dive into what we can learn from utopian fiction with what Wikipedia says: is considered a classic of utopian speculative science fiction as well as a feminist classic.” The strange folk of Good Reads are pretty divided on its merits.
Take a breath. Imagine yourself, for a moment, in the not too distant future. You have an errand to run; maybe you need to get a key cut. You head to your nearest town centre or high street. Secretly, you often find yourself concocting or volunteering for errands, as it's so nice to potter there for a while.
There is a place, comfortably settled on the top of a hill near Matlock, where the seeds of a renaissance in our relationship to land are being sown.
Or, London provides
People say London is a mean place, but I’ve never found that to be true. You open yourself up to it and it opens itself up to you.
Overwhelmed with multiple sadnesses on the Picadilly Line, I take a moment just to cry on a bench at Leicester Square station, eyes closed, feeling the waves of people tumble past me.
People came to the picnic. They brought food to share – an abundance of food! The facepainter worked so hard and with such good grace. The kids were friendly and the primary school food festival was tasty and fun.
It worked! People stepped up, with practical help, food, encouragement and ideas. The question now is: what's the next step? How do we keep weaving these threads together, keep momentum up, build the positive bubble around the park to protect it from neglect and harm?
To be pondered.
Tomorrow is the day of the community picnic. It is, on the face of it, relatively straightforward: we’ve chosen a day, put up some (beautiful) posters, and said to people: “come! bring food to share with your neighbours”.
I come here a lot. Tottenham Cemetery, a place from the past, full of long dead folk memorialised in stone.
It's also one of the most alive places I know, full of birds, squirrels, wildflowers, lichens and moss, gently dismantling and composting the stone expressions of love, regret, and grief. Large friendly trees lined in formal avenues, their crowns touching and alive with the breeze. In stormy weather it can be scary, the tall trees billowing and thrashing in the wind.
(NB I originally posted this on Medium in March 2023, but it feels like it fits better here)
Some reflections on six months of freelance life
“Time is always a member of the team”, said Ellie wisely at the end of one of the Catalyst steering group meetings last week. That perfect droplet of wisdom has stuck with me since. So much that feels hard resolves itself with the passing of time, either by becoming easier, or by helping you realise it wasn’t necessary at all. Ripeness is key.
I often talk about my work as creating bubbles of the future world I want to see in the here and now.
This blog is a place for me to dig more into what those bubbles feel like, and what they mean. I want to explore and challenge my own thinking about how change happens and how we can act into the world we want to see.