All Hands on Deck - from Control to Relationship

What does chaos look like? The first thing I think of are the riots and mayhem Joe was talking about on Monday. A mass version of the mountain climbing panic and freakout in Catriona’s post yesterday. Aimless running amok, nothing making sense. Things falling apart and the centre not holding. But that's not its only face.

Some years ago I was hired by a poetry organisation to do front-of-house at the opening party of the annual three day festival. It was a question of turning up an hour before the party, greeting the poets and guests, making sure they were made welcome and had a drink and someone to talk to.

I turned up at the temporary office of the festival and encountered the organisers in a state of immobility. They had been working for months preparing the main event and from dawn till past dusk for the last few weeks. Over the road at the party venue, nothing was prepared. There was food and wine to be organised, the glasses were in a locked hall half a mile up the road and the person with the key had just left the main office fifteen miles away. There was under an hour to go.

When I consider my own response to chaos, it's more an inability to respond in the face of an overwhelm of stimulus. Too much going on all at once, can't deal with it, can't control it, slow down, even freeze. I think that's what terror looks like. When it happens on a mass scale we get the kinds of horrors of history that repeat themselves over the centuries like Sebald's Rings of Saturn. We get wars; we get the Titanic.

I also know what it's like to be the agent who enters a situation, sees what's needed and responds immediately and effectively, getting things organised, getting the right people in the right places and the job done. That poetry party happened, on time, with drinks and food and fifty people being made welcome and enjoying themselves. It took a couple of us coming in from the outside, getting galvanised and literally moving the energy that had got stuck.

But this was a professional event, part of a prestigious poetry festival. The show HAD to happen. Everyone was delighted for us to get things moving. The benefits were immediate and obvious. Disaster was avoided.

Unlike the poetry festival where the aim was to entertain and which was run according to a conventional top-down hierarchical structure, the aim of Transition is to build community resilience in non-hierarchical ways working together from the bottom up wherever we are, in response to major planetary crises: energy constraints, changing climate patterns and the meltdown of the growth economy. To assist the emergence of a new world.

The individual and social resistance to even looking at these things is great, as Adrienne wrote in Wednesday's post. We don’t want to be disturbed; and instead of responding to the fact the Titanic is sinking, keep insisting that "it's the best bloody ship in the world. Pass me another poetry festival."

If the present chaos reflects the old caterpillar social structures breaking down and the imaginal cells of the new butterfly getting stronger (see Mike’s introductory piece from Sunday) this means the break-up of previously known forms of being - a move away from hierarchy, control and management of people into equality, relationship and self-organisation in both our individual and social lives.

Too much control leads to stasis, an inability to act or respond, a form of primary obsessional slowness. It also leaves people out of the decision-making process and keeps the old structures in place. We need to get moving, work together in a different way.

In this context I’d like to mention three of Sustainable Bungay’s events which illustrate this move: Our Give and Take Days, the Bungay Beehive Day and the Transition Towns Waveney Greenpeace Tea Tent. To read more click on the paragraph titles.

Give and Take Days
We hold two Give and Take Days a year in a local community space. People bring their unwanted household goods, furniture, books and clothes – anything in good nick –and everything gets swapped all for free. If we had a waste group this would be it. The aim is to keep as much stuff from landfill as possible; what’s not taken goes to local charity shops.

The first Give and Take was organised mainly by Kate. It went really well but she found it too stressful on her own. Since then a group of us take on various tasks and roles: publicity for the event, collecting and delivering large items, setting up display boards and tables, clearing up at the end. The day then self-organises, it’s lighter and more fun for everyone.

As regular events taking place in the centre of town, the Give and Take days have also helped embed Sustainable Bungay in the fabric of the place. Since the first one in March 2009, distrust ("oh, that Alternative Green Group” plus sharp intake of breath) and even antagonism, has given way to acceptance and many more people in the town joining in.

Bungay Beehive Day

In July this year Bungay Community Bees held the first Bungay Beehive Day. This was truly a collective effort, from the planning meetings which began eight months before to the making of the letters for the marquee banner at MIDNIGHT the night before, to the write up “Reflections and Celebrations”, which all five main organisers contributed to.

Everyone worked hard in true bee style, arranging for speakers, publicising the day, setting up hive and photo displays, securing the marquee, running bee and flower talks and walks. We worked out together which areas we were each responsible for and got on with it whilst keeping in communication with each other. As a result, although it was hard work, there was a lot of harmony between us, people turned up to help out and the day was a real success with speakers and beekeepers of all different kinds and hundreds of visitors.

It was the opposite of community chaos: coherent, well-organised, inclusive and energetic with none of the zoned-out spaciness that happens in some events or in shopping centres.

Transition Towns Tea Tent at the Waveney Greenpeace Fair

This was one of my favourite events this year. Sustainable Bungay took on the tea tent at the annual September Waveney Greenpeace Fair, and we worked with Greenpeace, Transition Diss and Transition East on a transitional day that was great fun, self-organising (not the same as doing no work, by the way!), self-financing and where everybody was in charge of the decision making. Nick was the central co-ordinator but was not at all controlling, so whether you were doing the flowers or the washing up there was no sense of being a volunteer separate from the event, (one of my least favourite things in any group). We were all in it together, we worked together, had a dance together, sold all the cakes by 3.30 and served hot tea for another hour and a half to a packed tent when it rained.

This is community building with small things and small moves. Preparations for and responses to communities in chaos, learning different ways of being and working with each other, being the mushrooms helping old forms to break up so something new can emerge. Finding people and building resilient relationships, as Nicole Foss said in her Norwich lecture in March.

And not being immobilised by those old separatist caterpillar power behaviours when they rear their heads.

Pics: Not rioting in Bungay (yet) - Charlotte, Josiah, Nick Give and Take in September 2011; the first Give and Take Day March 2009; Bungay Beehive Day banner, collectively made; Philip's Bumblebee talk at Beehive Day; Lesley doing dishes and the Transition Towns Tea Tent, Waveney Greenpeace Fair September 2011, organised by Sustainable Bungay; Peacock butterfly on buddleia, tnnorwich twitter pic