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.

I first read this many years ago, and loved the ecological, liberatory utopia that makes up the “future” part of the book. So much stuck with me, to the point that on re-reading it I found that there were things that I had kind of internalised as my own ideas but that had clearly come from this book. I also realised I had blocked out just how bleak the “present day” (1970s New York), portions of the story were.

A tiny spoiler free synopsis

Connie Ramos is unjustly consigned to a series of vicious psychiatric hospitals. The “present day” parts of the book pull no punches about how oppressive and violent society can be to everyone – but particularly people of colour, women, people with mental health issues, and people who resist. She finds that she has a special kind of power which means she can communicate with Luciente, a visitor from the future (2137) settlement of Mattapoisett, who can pull Connie into the future and show her around.

One of the (valid, I think) critiques of this book is that it is really didactic, with Luciente basically explaining everything to Connie, and Connie reacting with a kind of predictable 20th Century disbelief, joy or horror, depending on the situation. I personally quite like this but I can see how it’s grating if you are less into this kind of thing than me! Anyway, it’s useful for our purposes:

How is society organised?

Mattapoisett is one of a number of settlements or villages in a decentralised, anarchist-type society that has managed to achieve almost all of the goals of the 60s and 70s feminist movements, and many of the aspirations of more recent social justice movements. It’s a solarpunk kinda place, with a polyamorous, permacultural and decolonial twist, and a dose of sortition.

Work is a key part of it, but differently conceived of to today:

“Grasp, after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do, counting money and moving it about, making people do what they don’t want or bashing them for doing what they want, we have lots of people to work. Kids work, old folks work, women and men work. We put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the soil, keeping up its health and fertility. With most everybody at it part time, nobody breaks their back and grubs dawn to dust like old-time farmers…. Instance, in March I might work sixteen hours. In December, four …”.

There is a lot of suitably futuristic technology – from flying buses to machines that print compostable costumes, called flimsies, for the many celebrations and parties that the community has. Everyone has a “kenner”, a smartwatch-esque device that can tell you things, locate people, and call them. There are “holis”, like immersive movies, that also function like zoom calls, allowing people to have visual contact and meetings across distances.

Despite this, “our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours,” Luciente said seriously, looking with shining black gaze, merry, alert in a way that cast grace notes around her words. “We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste … nothing. You might say our—you’d say religion?—ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees.” “We learned a lot from societies that people used to call primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated.” Jackrabbit paced, frowning. “We tried to learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying—” “Yeah, and you still go crazy. You still get sick. You grow old. You die. I thought in a hundred and fifty years some of these problems would be solved, anyhow!” “But Connie, some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a problem!?”

People use gender neutral pronouns – per, and person – and the concept of the nuclear family has been left long in the past. Romantic relationships abound – with one person often having many at the same time – and have been separated from raising children. Children all have 3 parents – and live altogether mostly in a special “children’s house”, and childbearing has been outsourced to a piece of technology called “the breeder”. One of the things that initially outrages Connie is the sight of a man breastfeeding.

“She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk”.

How do people work together?

There don’t seem to be organisations in the way we think of them – it certainly feels like a place with no limited liability. But people get a lot of stuff done.

There are area-level “planning councils”, with people chosen by lot for a year-long term. Decisions are made in the planning councils by deliberation, supported by people fulfilling the roles of Earth Advocate and Animal Advocate. As Luciente puts it:

“We arrive with the needs of each village and try to divide scarce resources justly. Often we must visit the spot. Next level is regional planning. Reps chosen by lot from township level go to the regional to discuss gross decisions. The needs go up and the possibilities come down. If people are chilled by a decision, they go and argue. Or they barter directly with people needing the same resources, and compromise”.

This is a place with no final authority, a place with many arguments, disagreements and compromises. If a compromise can’t be reached and one village or group wins over another, then the winners host the losers, hold a party for them and give them presents. Everyone knows what it’s like to be on the winning and losing side of an argument. There are a lot of meetings – but as Luciente says:

“How can people control their lives without spending a lot of time in meetings?”

How is power dealt with?

There’s a hard edge to this place. The society is at war, with an undefined, but definitely partly cybernetic, enemy. Everyone is trained in and contributes to defence, and goes off to join the army for periods of time.

For more internal conflicts, there are rotating “people’s judges”, not from the village, who referee between interpersonal disputes. People often “crit” each other’s behaviour and the impact of it, and the community can intervene in interpersonal disputes that are affecting others. As one of the people’s judges says:

“We believe many actions fail because of inner tensions. To get revenge against someone an individual thinks wronged per, individuals have offered up nations to conquest. Individuals have devoted whole lives to pursuing vengeance. People have chosen defeat sooner than victory, with credit going to an enemy. The social fabric means a lot to us”.

Murders and assaults still happen, and the legal framework seems to be broadly one of restorative justice. The “crosser”, the victim, or their family, and the judge work out a sentence – “maybe exile, remote labour. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard […] You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous”.

But – “Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them”.

What’s the role of the individual vs the group?

One of things I found so compelling about this vision when I first read the book is that while the society is deeply communitarian, there is a great deal of individual freedom. Children go through a rite of passage around the age of 13, choose a new name for themselves, and are then full members of the community.

People get to live in individual small huts or houses, nearby but not with their “mems” – their family and friends. People choose what to study – often moving village to study with particular people or learn particular skills. Then, “whenever we decide we’re ripe to join a work base, we fuse as full members. We share the exciting jobs and the dull jobs. We don’t think telling people what to do is a real world skill.”

Luciente, Connie’s guide, is a plant geneticist. Certain villages are known for certain products or professions. Art is highly valued and making art is an important part of people’s lives.

“Madness” is openly talked about and there are “madhouses” where people can be for a while, to heal, with no stigma.

One of the key skills that is taught early to children is “inknowing” – the ability to control the nervous system through breathing and other “easercises”.

“we want to get used to knowing exactly what we feel, so we don’t shove on other people what’s coming from inside”.

I like the fact that the non-coercive nature of the place is shown as taking a lot of time and energy. The core ideas that “Person must not do what person cannot do” and “Per must do what per needs to do” are complex, cultural things. Connie is consistently baffled by the lack of control, of centralisation, of coercion, and it’s this that feels at the heart of the utopia to me.

Some prompts for thinking:

What is the kind of internal work that we need to do today so we don’t “shove onto other people what’s coming from inside”?

If lots of meetings is key to people being in control of their lives, what are the right kind of meetings? Are we having them?

How can we learn to give feedback in direct and loving ways?

In a world with limited resources, is it inevitable that some people will lose out? What would the equivalent of the “winning” side hosting the “losing” side to a party be?

How does the thought of there being no final authority, no-one actually “in control” make you feel? Do you believe we can collectively negotiate our way to a better future?

You stop to smell the new flowers in the planters that mark the beginning of the high street and watch with interest as a signwriter puts the finishing touches on the frontage of a new family-run restaurant that’s opening in a long empty shop. The cobblers is busy when you arrive and they ask you to leave your key and come back in 20 minutes.

You wander over to the Commons Cafe for a coffee and a snack, remembering when the department store in the building closed down and how everyone was certain this was the end of the town. Today it’s a thriving community cafe and retail space on the ground floor, with workspace above. You come here to hotdesk sometimes, and enjoy the knowledge that the rent you pay is being reinvested in the building and the street. As you’re drinking your coffee you check out the noticeboards and note the next Community Partnership meeting in your diary. You’ve had an idea about how to make the bike parking at the other end of the street better (it’s getting full these days!), and you know the Partnership will listen, and be able to make a difference.

You spot a friend who hands you a flyer for the club night they’re planning in the railway arches behind the high street. This reminds you you’ve been meaning to mount your speakers on your wall at home, so after your coffee you pop into the Library and borrow a power drill for the next week. After picking up the latest community newspaper, you meander back down the street and pick up some bits for tea from the greengrocer and the newly opened Asian supermarket.

Your shiny new key is waiting when you get back to the cobblers, and you wander home, already planning your next visit.

**I wrote this as part of the Community Improvement Districts guidance, but it was cut! And this is the (imo far more boring) thing I replaced it with…

The CID approach is one that needs imagination and creative thinking. So, imagine with us for a moment.

Imagine if local people had a meaningful way of influencing what happens in their town centres – from planting, to street art, to the use of empty shops and the way bike and car parking is arranged.

Imagine if we could all meet our needs as people on our local high streets, from places to meet your neighbours, to seeing live music, to picking up our groceries, or meeting friends for food.

Imagine if there were ways community businesses with great ideas could easily access property.

Imagine if high street regeneration was led by local community organisations, not dominated by commercial interests which draw profits away from the town, into the pockets of distant shareholders. Imagine the groundswell of creativity and potential.

This isn’t science fiction. Communities across the country are taking a leading role in their high streets and town centres. CIDs are one way to do this – where might your imagination take you?

High Leas Farm is home to Woven Earth, a project seeking to re-embed humans in the landscape. It’s a holistic restoration project that weaves together Regenerative Production, Wilding and Nature Connection.

“Holistic Restoration seeks to reunite people and the more-than-human world.  It acknowledges that we are a part of nature and that by engaging in our forgotten ecological roles we can heal ecosystems as well as supporting ourselves and others to be happier and healthier.”

This is super exciting to me. So much talk of rewilding implies that we humans are separate from nature, and often directly dangerous to it. What’s exciting to me in the approach at Woven Earth is the recognition that humans are actually a keystone species in the landscape, and that therefore we are part of the future of the land, not just its past.

I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of a group that met at the farm at the beginning of July, exploring what it would mean to re-learn interdependence with the land. There was a real range of people there, from academics to agricultural specialists to psychologists to eco-linguists, and it felt like everyone was hungry for some real in-depth conversations with what it might really mean to belong to the land.

I hope there’s more of this to come, but for now, some of my key reflections are:

• There’s a real sense of being in partnership with the land – of using science, observation and intuition to work out what the land wants and needs. There are purple thistles springing up on the site would usually be considered weeds, but here are welcomed as soil decompactors, and a delicacy for the sheep. Close observation of grazing habits shows that the sheep are enjoying the thistle flowers, which apparently is not seen as normal. Turns out the sheep know what they want too.
• The plans for the site are all about creating a mosaic of dynamic land use, with hubs and nodes of activity moving throughout the site. There are plans to move some of the grassland into woodland, and bring some of the woodland back into grassland, creating a dynamism. This mosaic approach makes me think of how we can create more mosaic lives and livelihoods. Rob and Mim, the wonderful team behind the project, are clear that they are unlikely to make a living solely from the land use, but the projects that spring from it can create sustainable livelihoods. What other kinds of patchwork lives could we build that include a relationship with the land but aren’t totally dependent on extracting from it?
• So many of the ideas we talked about feel new, but are actually very ancient knowledge (or intuition). Mim mentioned that sometimes they talk about the farm being “on world” and everything else being “off world”, and in the midst of these ancient connections I really began to feel like I was in the future.
  

A bubble of possibility, up a hill, regenerating and restoring much more than the land.

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.

A light touch on my shoulder. A young woman sits down next to me, offers a tissue – gratefully accepted – and a hug – gracefully declined. Another touch, and she’s off about her day.

You can find the village in the city – and in the future city I hope there are lots of opportunities for this kind of random encounter. We all need the kindness of strangers, the reach of human empathy from someone not steeped in your own context. Too often we try and design those out, but if you create the opportunities for people to make random connections, they will step into them.

I feel a little better already.

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.

It will be held in our local park, and is nominally organised by the “friends” of the park, of which I am nominally the secretary. We’ve got some money from the local council to print posters and pay for a facepainter (and public liability insurance). A local mum has surpassed herself making some really lovely posters, which are now adorning trees in the neighbourhood:

But in many ways this is not straightforward at all. It is an attempt to cast ourselves forward into the future we want to see, into a future where sharing food with neighbours is commonplace, and doesn’t need posters. It is an attempt to start to re-weave the social fabric of a place that often feels neglected.

It’s an attempt to will a “friends” group into being – as in reality there are only two of us, doing monthly litter picks, sometimes with others. It’s an attempt to overcome the fact that a troubled, passionate, angry local man has decided we are getting in the way of his attempts to improve the park, and who has been abusive to both of us, repeatedly.

It is an attempt to cast a spell.

A spell that says

we can come together

we can re-find neighbourliness

there is a “we”

there is an “us”

we can build interdependence here

we can re-learn how to live, here

we belong here, all of us

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.

It's a place that bears the scars of austerity, of a lack of resource to care. Graves are collapsing into the ground. Stone angels have lost their heads. Fallen tree branches block paths.

It's a spacious place, quiet even though just a stone's throw away from the high road. I'm definitely not the only one who finds solace here.

This place feels to me like a vision of one kind of future, one where there is much less central resource to get things done. One where we let nature do what it does best and burst through,  take over, “rewild”. There's beauty in this but fear too: how can we collectively maintain the things that are important to us? What's the right balance of wildness and cultivation?

Under the cobblestones, the beach. Under the gravestones,  the roots. The soil here is fertile.

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.

When I launched myself into freelance life six months ago I had grand plans to write fortnightly, to record my learning, to carve out the time to reflect. In a turn of events that will surprise no-one, that hasn’t happened. My grand plans been have been evaporated by the heat of busy-ness, insights floating away unrecorded, like steam from a cup of tea. Luckily, though, I have still been drinking that tea, and slowly digesting it.

Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash (my cups of tea are nowhere near this elegant)

Time is always a member of the team. And part of its role on my team is to remind me that there is a right time for everything: that maybe demanding that insights come fortnightly is unreasonable, but to trust that they will come.

I have learnt all sorts of things in this past six months: from time management to tech stacks. But the internet is full of this kind of advice (I’ve read most of it, I reckon!). What I’m really interested in is the sticky, human, messy stuff. And I realise that the past six months for me have been just as much about leaving a beloved organisation — Shared Assets, as about reinventing myself as an independent operator. Through that, there are three sticky topics, that, like a persistent wasp and a jar of honey, I keep coming back to.

Photo by Arwin Neil Baichoo on Unsplash. Sticky. but delicious.

an abundance mindset: easy to say, hard to have

We live in a world where people talk a lot about having an abundance mindset. And I think I have one! But it is hard to maintain: both in terms of trusting that I am doing good work, and in navigating when to say yes and no. I’ve worked as a consultant in small cash strapped organisations for years now, so some of this is very familiar: always feeling slightly on the back foot, always needing to have just a bit more work than is comfortable in the pipeline. The strange superstition of consultancy: always wondering where the next bit of work will come from, always worrying that if you say no to this thing, then nothing will ever come your way again.

I also wonder how much of this orientation to doubt and hesitancy and humility I infused into Shared Assets. I’m still a non-executive director, and at the last board meeting we were talking about how Shared Assets is now 10 years old, not a scrappy start up any more. It has power, and can start to act into that. I feel that one of the advantages of me leaving is it opens up more space for people to step into that power. But that is partly my challenge in this new phase of my life: to find and value my own power with integrity.

learning to build porosity

In my mid 20s I ended up inside a controlling relationship that ended with almost hilarious amounts of drama and left me with both a lot of debt and an enduring dislike of West Ham United. I remember coming out of that feeling that I had “lost my edges”, that my sense of who I was and what I would tolerate, or what was right, had been eroded. I’ve been keen to hold onto my boundaries ever since.

Photo by 筑瑄 （as nickname） on Unsplash

I’m lucky enough to be doing the Capra Course, (with some colleagues from Catalyst) and have been learning mind-bending things about the systems view of life and evolution. An insight that has really tickled my imagination is the insight that the membrane of a cell — its boundary — is a key part of what makes it alive. But that boundary is not fixed and immovable. It is porous, it lets in what it needs and lets out what it doesn’t. It discerns. I have a far stronger sense of my core self now than I did 20 years ago. And I’m coming to see that building my ability to be porous, to let the necessary insights in but keep unnecessary clutter out, is a key task for my next 20 years. Building my capacity for discerning porosity feels like something that might unlock the abundance mindset I’m finding it hard to glibly embody.

cultivating pockets of possibility

I’ve only just left the Shared Assets slack channels. I had been realised I had been using them like a very niche form of social media, lurking around the edges to keep up with what was happening, to be close to the quality of the conversation. I realise that what I had been missing was the feeling of being in a pocket of the kind of world I want to live in. At its best working inside Shared Assets feels a bit like being from the future, like being in a bubble of shared hope and possibility. It has taken me a couple of months to realise that I missed that terribly, not the work so much, but the vibes.

Another brain-tickle from the Capra Course is that according to the systems view of life, the ancestors of what are now our cells evolved inside tiny bubbles — vesicles — that had been formed within the primordial soup. Inside those bubbles, there were far more intense and complex interactions, happening more often, and as the bubbles became larger and more complex they often split into smaller ones. To cut a multi-millenia-long story short, complex life began to evolve.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

We are currently swimming in a systemic soup based on dominance, hierarchy and exclusion. There are many evolutionary bubbles where a new world of respect, regeneration and liberation is being cultivated in this soup, but depending on where you, are they can be hard to see. I’ve split off from the Shared Assets bubble, and I have an image of myself bobbing along, trying to find other bubbles and to help join them together. The work we are doing as the Catalyst steering group is definitely one of those evolutionary bubbles: a thoughtful, intense space full of ambition, care and laughter. I see flashes of those vibes at Digital Commons, and I am wondering how I can contribute to building more of these low ego, high intention spaces.

This loops back to one of the ideas I had about freelance life — that there is something, some kind of quality of work that you can only do when you are connecting, joining the dots between things rather than being purely associated with one organisational bubble.

Me and my teammate Time will be exploring all of these as we bob along over the next few months, seeking out those vibes. And, maybe, when the time is both right and ripe, I will write more about it!

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.

What kind of world is it that I want to see? A more just, liberated one. A world where us as humans are in right relationship with each other and the ecosystems that sustain us. A world where regenerative, reparative relationships to each other, to technology in all its forms and to the land and our more than human kin are the norm.

There's a universe in all of this, though, and I want to take the time to dig in. As a sci-fi fan I'm deeply inspired by adrienne maree brown's statement that “all organising is science fiction”, and I want to look at my work and the work of people I admire through that lens.

I also want a space that will act as a safe reflecting space for me – one away from the noise and posturing of LinkedIn, and the nagging distractions of Medium. I’m expecting that this will cover everything from reflections on organisational development and facilitation strategies to the true meaning of baking bread, but let’s see what emerges…

#worldview #gettingstarted