bigger picture

Lancaster must be a city – it’s got a cathedral and a market and a city council.  Proof enough!  But of a Saturday we all go "into town” and every seeming stranger that we meet there,  knows someone who knows someone that you know.

Growing is fun,  eating is interesting, saving energy by wearing an extra jumper means saving money but buildings and the construction of new buildings, particularly new homes, is the unlovely, the technical and the very expensive side of being in Transition.  Yet when it comes to saving CO2 it is key.

One of the great things about being a social reporter is that it gives me a firm connection to people from other transition initiatives. I get to know them through their writing and occasionally we even meet face to face.

I first read Cloud Atlas a few summers ago, on sticky tube journeys and the top of the 168 bus, sun shimmering over Waterloo Bridge as I crossed the Thames, sometimes missing my stop I was so engrossed, the words combining with the music on my ipod then - Arcade Fire's 'Neighbourhood' songs and 'Flux' by Bloc Party.

Ah Scotland, the land of haggis, whisky, bagpipes and Robbie Burns.

Flowers? You're eating, flowers? Said as if you've admitted to eating your own boogas. And at first it does seem wrong. I remember being handed a mallow flower stuffed with hummous a couple of years ago and finding big resistance. I believe I scowled at the flower in question for quite some time before deciding to give it a try.

What can I not do without?? That’s easy as I think about it with some guilt frequently. I also sometimes try to imagine life without it and feel a pang of anticipatory loss and grief….

The only real experience I have of a life without money came I was quite young.  My father was a war pensioner and as a family we lived in the expectation of the “20^th” of the month when the brown envelope came, addressed to Captain Marriott.

The bigger picture underpins the whole of the Transition movement for me. It’s the reason why I engaged in the first place and the context for my participation.

How big does the bigger picture need to be? Where does it start? Take the Universe; that’s pretty big, ever expanding as a matter of fact. Can I really get my head around a place that is so large that it is endless and still see where I fit in, have influence? At this time in my life, I do not, so let’s scale down to our solar system: one sun, about nine planets, and several moons.