Later

The true picture emerges. In between all the wonderful recollecting of Scotland, my body was apparently beseiged by a force of spiky, green and inherently evil viruses. How they breached my immaculate immune system, I cannot immediately say. Perhaps it was the fact that I was walking around London the day before yesterday wearing a cotton dress and my winter coat was unbuttoned? I dunno!
Anyway, I felt mildly, even pleasantly lazy this morning and decided to stay at home tucked up in bed.
Several hours later, I look up from my dream of Edinburgh, to find my nose has been blocked by the bastards, and they are slowly driving cold steel swords through the muscles of my legs, back, arms and shoulders. They have strapped up my head so that it feels like it will soon implode, and they've put something in my eyes that makes everything look very swimmy if I change my focus.
This is the second time in the past two months that I have encountered this marauding, pillaging, stinking, evil, godless army, and both times I have felt utterly god forsaken and cast aside by the saints Comfort, Peace, Calm and Productivity.
I would rouse myself, under better conditions, and say ohfuckit, let's fight them off! Pour ginger tea on top of them! Stab them with Vitamin C! Boil them in hot salt gargles. And then rest, knowing that victory is close at hand.
Currently though, all I am doing is lying in bed and groaning. I wish I was doing exactly the same, but under a vastly different set of circumstances.
Bah. Humbug.
If anyone out there has survived a similar set of circumstances, kindly let me know how you did in the bastards.

Edinburgh

My memory of Edinburgh has suddenly been revived. Here is a list of the ones that have burned themselves into me.
Climbing onto the top of Calton Hill and sitting on a stone bench. The sunshine, filtered through the crystal air, that unbelievable light, that unbelievable cold wind. The brown and grey hills looking wildly and darkly at the horizon, where the sea shone aquamarine at the Firth of Forth. Faraway, faraway. Everywhere along the hillside, stone buildings crumbling, crumbling, and winding stairs, grey, stone, winding, winding, snakelike, carrying you from the city to the sky.

Princes Street in the morning sunshine. The memorial of Sir Walter Scott, with his statuesque face looking down at passersby.

Stone turrets everywhere, guilded with golden sun, blackened in places by Time, and topped with high, proud flags, flying in the wind. The whole thing ringed with those proud browngrey hills.

Winding stone streets. Stairways snaking through covered dark alleyways. The perfect place to steal a dark kiss with an electric stranger, covered within the dark corners of this darkly luminescent city. Stone everywhere, moss dripping emerald in thick, damp veins through it. The wind singing along the narrow streets and up the narrow stairs, and high above it all, the seablue sky peppered with gulls.

Down the steps from Princes Street next to Princes Street Mall, when you turn to the left, there's a tiny sandwich place tucked into the stone. It's warm and filled with orange light, like the insides of a witches cave when the cauldron is good. Good witches. They made us a sandwich - a huge love affair of crusty bread coddled with warm butter and bacon. Gorgeous.

Bagpipes. If the light is pure because it filtered through that air, music is even purer. High notes of bagpipe song. I stopped on the bridge just outside the Scottish National Gallery and watched and watched the horizon, the bridges, the Firth, the piper, the light. And listened and listened and thought, in that moment, I found Middle Earth. Transported, transfixed, I could have stood there forever.
Later, Mark and I stood amongst a crowd who'd gathered around a piper accompanied by two men playing African drums. Scottish songs, but set to bagpipes and African drums! It worked! The sunlight made the whole world golden. I looked up at Mark and he looked like a prince. I danced. In the street. And I wasn't the only one.

The green lawns full of benches just behind Sir Walter's statue. Where I sat alone and smoked a cigarette and ate a hotdog and shut my eyes, bathing in the thrill of being in this place.

I could go on and on. I could go back again and again.

Is this the right decision?

I will not be watching the Olympics.
Forget the whys and why-nots. I might still change my mind.

For now, the one thing that will not change is the sadness I feel. My memories of the Olympics are painted in colours of warmth and love; when I was a child, and we didn't have a TV, my parents would rent a set just in time for the Games. I would sit in between them late into the light in a warm, golden room, and we would marvel at records being broken, hopes being broken, hopes being surpassed. We would ride on the ecstasy of it all, the drama of it. That was what the Olympics were to me then - just human drama, the best kind of display of emotion, power and desire.

Then, a few years later, we went for my first holiday in Europe. We made a trip to Olympia to the site of the original stadium. All the youngish people in the group were persuaded to take part in a friendly, symbolic race. The winner got a wreath of olive leaves, woven then and there by the tour guide. I came third. I ran as fast as I've ever run. I ran in Olympia!

None of that drama, emotion, or joy, will eclipse the horror I feel when I remember that the torch has passed through lands covered in blood. The runners have gone through landscapes of misery, fear, death, torture, deceit, where what I thought was the greatest human drama has given way to the greatest of human suffering. I will not name the lands here. Each country has had it's share and some of them are still in the middle of it while this torch passes through them.
The whole world becomes united by the flame, but the whole world is falling apart and we know it.
I will have to find that joy somewhere else, it is not here anymore.
Sad.
One more day, one more step towards the darkness.

Eureka!

I have it! I have it!
No, not the dratted social capital questionnaire that I have been trying for weeks now to get around to writing. No, it is not the goal that I have trapped underneath triumphant fingers, flying over my keyboard.
It is the reason why I may be incapable of getting an intuitive grasp of social capital research.
The reason is this:
I am not a socialised person. Not one for mutually benefical collective action. Given the choice, I will spend hours alone, with my head pressed to a problem, trying to figure it out. If someone needs help, I will provide it. I would rather die than ask for real help when I really need it ('Please can I vent over email today' does not count.)
My general stock of trust, solidarity, cooperative behaviour and social networks is suspended listlessly just below the 'average' watermark.
To sum up:
I might never do the kind of incisive PhD that requires the subject matter to have gotten under my skin and into my cells.

So then?
So what?

One Step Closer - U2

I'm 'round the corner from anything that's real
I'm across the road from hope
I'm under a bridge in a rip tide
That's taken everything I call my own

(whisper, whisper, in a way only Bono can know)
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing

I'm on an island at a busy intersection
I can't go forward, I can't turn back
Can't see the future
It's getting away from me
I just watch the tail lights glowing

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
Knowing, knowing

I'm hanging out to dry
With my old clothes
Finger still red with the prick of an old rose
Well the heart that hurts
Is a heart that beats
Can you hear the drummer slowing?

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
To knowing, to knowing, to knowing

Schumacher College London Seminar

These are the notes I took at the a Seminar on Sustainability organised by Schumacher College, Devon, in London.
Personal impressions to follow in subsequent post. For now, here's the notes.

On the meaning of the term 'sustainable development':

* Yes, it has been hijacked by thousands of different, sometimes even contradictory uses. No, we do not need to abandon it altogether. To do so would be to be held hostage to these contradictory meanings which have gradually become hostage to it.

* We view 'sustainability' as living without hindering Earth's ongoing evolutionary processes. This means reducing our tread on the land to the barest minimum. Generally, living within our means. Gaining the same amount of - or more - fullfillment from each other, our communities, our surroundings, as we currently seem to gain from objects, cash transactions and material flows. This does not mean that we completely de-materialize our lifestyles. This would be the opposite extreme and not desirable or effective in the long term. It means that we begin to develop our crippled, latent sense of place, love of place, a recognition of the Earth's sentience and soulfullness. It means that we should switch from our current trajectory of economic growth - one based on scarcity, exponentially increasing demand, and individualism, to one based on cooperation, a sense of community, creativity, and abundance.

* The most urgent task in this endeavor is recovering lives of meaning. This is largely the task of a vastly reformed education system.

* How do you reconcile the personal with the political?

There is no distinction!

The way we come to this conclusion is by observing the process our students at Schumacher College go through.

First, they uncover their personal sense of connection with the Earth. Their personal sense of it, their embeddeness within it. In a tangible, physical way. Then, inevitably, they examine how their current lives 'fit' within this alternative perspective. This does not imply an automatic 'shift' to that perspective - but inevitably, the feeling of connection, embeddeness, and love of place tends to create a strong bond to this 'other way of seeing' oneself - as part of something greater, vaster, intelligent and loving. The process of examining how one lives one's life is often painful, long drawn out and uncomfortable. Everyday actions that one normally takes for granted begin to appear misguided. If the person then takes the decision to create alternatives to these unsustainable actions - to change their behaviour, to not blindly be part of something because 'everybody else does it too', this is the beginning of political action. His sense of right and wrong begins to become conscious. His actions begin to be motivated by a sense of love, rather than unexamined habit. And once on this path, the individual becomes an unstoppable force.

On development - Vandana Shiva and Gustavo Esteva:

* Three false assumptions regarding 'development' dominate current thinking:

1. Financial transactions indicate economic development. Low financial transactions - or an absence of financial transactions - denotes an undeveloped or underdeveloped society.

2. The 'developing countries' are intrinsically backward. They therefore need external help - and a 'push from the outside' if they are to overcome their present state.

3. The powerful have a right to design the lives of the weak.

* Living within local means is an effective antidote to globalisation. While not everything can be sourced locally, it is enough to stipulate that whatever can be sourced locally is given preference to that which comes from far away. Localization is also an antidote to localism. Today, we observe that the more globalized your economy, the more parochial your consciousness becomes. We want to localize the flows of environmental goods and services - and globalize consciousness and solidarity.

On agriculture and GM crops - Vandana Shiva and Gustavo Esteva:

* Remember that GM does not create traits. It simply relocates them.

* Flood, drought and salt resistant varieties already exist - their use has been pushed to the margins, their availability has been commercialized. To the detriment of both societies which were once empowered holders of local knowledge, adept at selective breeding and active monitering, as well as the environment. Typically, when one of the two loses out, so does the other. What is socially unjust is inevitably environmentally unjust, somewhere or the other.

* Seeds need to be brought back into the commons.

On environmental education - David Orr and Karen Blincoe:

What does environmental education need to impart?

- Above all, a love for the planet. This is a basic starting point, from which all other education must flow.

- Second, we need to give students the practical skills to deal with the upcomming period of transition.

- Third, we need to devise a list of what analytical skills they might need.

Above all, though, they will need a sense of hope. Optimism is essentially a prediction. There is no reason to look at the current data and be optimistic. There is, however, every reason to be hopeful. But hope in this case is a verb with it's sleeves rolled up. In the end, it is hopeful people who will save the world. It is not optimists, and it is certainly not pessimists who will do this.

We fail our students by not showing them their individual potential as human beings. If education can show people their own uniqueness and then highlight where they fit into the larger scheme of things, it can produce purposeful, directed and positive human beings. Show them that they are already complete! Lacking in nothing! Full of creative, unique potential. And then teach them how to recognize, develop, and love themselves for it. Teach them how to go out and be forces in the world. Passive education - listening, note-taking, reading and writing exams deadens their sense of active potential, delays it, numbs it.

What advice do you have for students within the current system?

- Use the system. Don't let the system use you. Don't become a product.

- Find out what you need to know - and then go after it and learn it.

- Don't become a technician, learning processes. Learn something deeper!

- Have fun! Do other things. Be brave. Start something of your own.

For every act of specilization, we need an act of synthesis. Rigour in lateral, connective, 'pattern' thinking is a key skill to develop.

_______________________________________
For A.

I saw some beautiful images today...

Earth at work, Earth at play,
and thought at the end of it all
(just before: God I'd better get back to work!)
that we are all dying slowly, We are all dying fast.
What does anything matter after all?

Friends. When I had none, I was always complaining, always lonely. Or so I thought. Now I have some; still complaining, still lonely. Could it be true, what I read ages ago? At the heart of all loneliness is a deep and unfulfilled desire for union with one's own lost self.'
Could that be why we pick friends, lovers, lives, books that seem to be other versions of ourself?
And is that why I feel alone? - Because mine are all different, different, different?