Harvest time: notes at the end of my sabbatical

A very small portion of our apple harvest

Tomorrow is my first day back at work after five months.

It’s not a coincidence that it’s also the equinox this week: a period of the year associated with harvest, gratitude and also finding new balance.

Over the last week or so I’ve been gathering in some of my reflections from the last five months. I’ve used the structure of the permaculture design web, from Looby Macnamara’s People and Permaculture, and first introduced to me through this blog from Lorna Prescott. These are tentative notes — I haven’t referenced or linked everything — although I hope there are no uncredited borrowings. The nature of a blog means this is also frustratingly linear: the web involves multiple criss-crossing journeys and it might have been better to present this in Miro, for example. But I have been prioritising my own thinking, rather than the presentation.

These reflections also focus on what is new or emerging. Beneath all of this is a bedrock of love, support, creativity and inspiration in my immediate family. It runs through every theme.

If you’re curious — but don’t want to read it all — skip down to the section on ideas and principles.

The Design Web, by Looby Macnamara

“It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental. How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?” Adrienne Maree Brown

“Ben Okri writes that “there is a time for hope and there is a time for realism. But what is needed now is beyond hope and realism. This is a time when we ought to dedicate ourselves to bringing about the greatest shift in human consciousness and in the way we live.” [Cited by Cassie Robinson]

Summary / key insights:

• I need to step into a new phase of my career that is much more about making space for others. This is partly to do with my age / career stage (I am in a unique position to act as a bridge), and also where the energy in the environmental justice movement is. It’s also to do with privilege — and my responsibilities here.
• There is an urgency about the great unravelling — and / but the capabilities we need to design for it are the same as the ones that are best placed to prevent it happening.
• Tending to my spiritual life has become much more important — and I have a more expansive notion of what this means (for examples, in the rituals and practices that cause us to pause, take notice, give thanks, connect).

Vision

Where do I feel the call of the future?

• Looking down, into the soil, into extraordinary abundance of the living world, capacity to be both teacher and participant in our systems. Long-time academy podcast was brilliant on this: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-long-time-academy/id1589516917
• There is no avoiding deep unravelling / disruption. There is an urgency about adaptation — developing full range of capabilities we need — to be able to navigate these times.
• In the role of the arts, creative practice to act as the glue, provide translations, navigate discomfort. Artists ‘like earthworms’ oxygenating the soil. The role of artists in the consumer-citizen transition. And in liberation practice: e.g. https://www.maiagroup.co/about-us

What is more possible now? [thank you Lorna Prescott and the co-lab Dudley team for this prompt]

• The ‘thin veneer of insanity’ between us and a really exciting world (Jon Alexander) is getting thinner all the time. The injustices are so apparent — the doors are already opening.
• For me personally: to come in fresh, ask questions, approach with curiosity.
• To act with urgency.
• To make the case for climate action as a justice issue.
• Building the power of the ‘moderate flank’ (see Rupert Read’s recent work).
• I am older and in a different phase in life, and more secure: I can step back to allow space for others.

What are the (new / emerging) abundances I would like to create in my life?

• How can I continue to develop my 21st century competencies (not ‘skills’ but “abilities to meet important challenges in a complex world” OECD, cited in O’Hara and Leicester). Confidence in complexity. Persons of tomorrow are: “less concerned with doing the right thing’ according to standard procedure than they are with really doing the right thing in the moment, in specific cases, with the individuals involved at the time. In a disciplined yet engaging way they are always pushing boundaries, including their own. They dance at the edge.”
• How can I nurture life force within me : desire to create, to be part of solutions, to nourish and to nurture? (And how can I avoid a cycle of erosion associated with time spent in the digital realm?)
• How can I coach and support people around me with the tools I have available to achieve more than I could alone?
• A greater abundance of imagination — and imaginative possibilities: https://www.jrf.org.uk/society/emerging-futures. Staying open to the power of the imagination — and opening that up for others — is crucial: https://cassierobinson.medium.com/change-happens-if-our-collective-imagination-changes-7a1c0475a578
• How can I acknowledge and make space / courage for the things I am longing to do? (Even if they scare me a little) e.g. more long-distance cycling, making more art?

My life is also already full of abundance — of love, community, wisdom, food (apples) — these are also to cherish (see gratitude).

Helps

Where are my (emerging) sources of energy?

• Being part of a singing, music-making community, co-creating new (old) rituals to see us through.
• A sit-spot practice. Making space for slow observation, emergence.
• Spending time on the allotment in general.
• Being with people of different generations.
• Being in France — connecting with the other part of my brain , differently forged identity. Firing the different neuron connections. Speaking and listening to other languages in general.

What resources do I have?

• I built a creative space and workbench. Full of art materials — all out of reclaimed materials. I built it myself (confidence)
• Lots of green space — including access to community allotment.
• Neighbourhood connections.
• Networks (too many?): On Purpose, local networks (e.g. Bristol Green Capital), Systems Innovation network (https://www.systemsinnovation.network/), Bristol Innovators Group. What else? Women in Sustainability.
• Colleagues — a team to work with.

What tools do I have in my toolbox?

• Permaculture design framework and principles
• Systems thinking tools
• Design Council (revised) systemic design framework (and the processes that sit with this). A toolbox of innovation tools for different phases in design process. (E.g. Unschools Disruptive Design Handbook)
• Appreciative inquiry: where are things working, how can we grow and nurture that?
• Facilitation skills. Holding space. Art of hosting tools. Community organising tools — thanks to Community Colab.
• Futures Literacy tools. (Watch Loes Damhof’s recent TedX).
• New frameworks for monitoring and evaluation e.g. 3D framework (exploring width (influence), length (persistence) and depth (embeddedness) of a project. (Thanks to Deborah Benham)
• Coaching / mentoring tools (see in particular Catalyse Change resources)
• Management training tools and resources
• Innovation management tools (see here: https://maryistevens.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-learning-journey-managing-technological-innovation-6f36226b77d5 — and see John Bessant’s resources)
• Uncertain times planner and workbook (from Cassie Robinson and Ella Saltmarshe)

Limits

What is holding me back? Could hold me back?

• Felt strongly the need for (collective) projects to target and focus my energy.
• I can no longer try to keep up with everything — need to turn this into an opportunity.
• My superpower — to remember names / connections all the time — is fading (ageing / peri-menopausal brain?). What are the opportunities here?
• I find it hard to to see or acknowledge my own growth: I assume that I have always thought x or y, or been able to do things (don’t see the journey), and place undue emphasis on the things that are not working for me yet, or that I haven’t yet ‘achieved’.
• I stay silent on social media (and lots of other places) because I either don’t feel confident in my facts, or I don’t have the energy for the follow up. (This holds me back in one place — but is it really holding me back? Thinking about deep vs. wide change).
• Limiting beliefs: I hold back from diving in deep (sometimes). This is sometimes because I fear over-promising and under-delivering.
• The ‘gremlins’ (see below).
• Not having a ‘tribe’? The right tribe? Too many tribes? (But not sure what this is / looks like)
• I don’t always find it easy to articulate quickly and succinctly my work / core purpose. A more confident spiel might help build connections more quickly.

What have I / would I like to let go of?

• Guilt about the things I haven’t done, haven’t read etc. during this time. The risks I haven’t taken.
• Concern about status.
• The language of innovation — as opposed to experiments? Innovation feels more solidly ‘professional’ but is deeply problematic. It’s often presented in a growth-based extractive framework, and there are big limits to innovation: innovation is often presented as a solution to challenges that are really regulatory, or political. For example, we don’t have the leakiest, coldest homes in Europe because of a failure of innovation, although innovation could partner with political will to make the transition more swiftly.

Patterns

What patterns have I observed (spirals of erosion or abundance)?

• The more I am away from a screen, the less time I want to spend at it. The reverse is also true — digital interfaces are where my ‘gremlins’ hang out: “the voices within [us] that stop us doing what we intuitively want to do. […] That likes us to stay in the familiarity of our comfort zone.” (Looby Macnamara, People and Permaculture). They are nourished by limiting beliefs.
• As you step away from climate activism it becomes less and less visible. People have retreated into Internet ‘niches’: specific chatboards / algorithms / private discussions. Most new people I met did not know what FoE does, even people who had heard of us.
• The less space I make for creativity (music making and listening) the less interest I take in it (cycle of erosion)
• The model / pattern of the subject-consumer-citizen story (Jon Alexander) is a very helpful analytical frame — for creating new patterns of abundance.

What new patterns would I like to create?

• A regular pattern of activity grounded in natural cycles. Taking time to recognise the solstices and equinoxes (and cross-quarter festivals), cycles of birth and death.
• A healthy relationship to on-screen / off-screen.
• Be more systematic in my documenting and recording: spot less, record more. Keep better records of learning etc. at work, and be more disciplined about testing and learning. Role model this.
• Consider how I can keep be more observant in my personal life, or maintain systems where they are in place. (Maintain hte ‘biotime’ diary, habit tracker — but also reading logs etc.)
• Sustain patterns of healthy observation — yoga, sit-spots — into new routine. Cultivating my powers of observation and ability to maintain distance between self and work in the world.
• Actively make time for joy. Being deliberate in listening to music etc.
• Imagination as a muscle — keep working this. Build the creative scrapbook.

5 sacred questions for observation (thank you Deborah Benham):

1. What do you notice?
2. What does that tell you?
3. What does that tell you on a deeper level?
4. How does that help me?
5. How does that help me help others?

Ideas

What am I curious about?

• How can we make new / better use of artists? (As part of a transition)
• How can I make use of new tools e.g. moral imaginations?
• What would need to be true for FoE to become a genuine ‘Citizen NGO’ i.e. “a means for many more people to organise together to deliver outcomes.”
• There are programmes to coach young people to be changemakers. Where are the opportunities to coach / support adults to be changemakers / step into their power?
• Where are the places that people can come together now (and especially in the winter)? How are they hosted / supported? How will they manage? (New wave of climate emergency centres — but what about the existing civic spaces. What kind of invitations are we opening?
• Could the 8 Shields framework be useful for thinking? What more could I draw from this?

What new ideas or ways of thinking are important to me? How has my worldview changed?

• No longer thinking about ‘nature’, but living systems. And integration into living systems as a fundamental practice of citizenship. (See Miles Richardson’s work on this).
• Becoming ‘naturalised’ to place (Robin Wall Kimmerer): “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”
• Innovation as fundamentally a coaching practice. Always been there, but interested to see it foregrounded in the work of other agencies, practices etc.
• Kate Raworth — “never push on closed door.” Focus on where the energy is.
• Futures literacy: holding the tension between systems for planning / preparation and systems for exploration. Learning to identify and work skillfully with assumptions. The task of “revealing the anticipatory assumptions that determine why and how futures are imagined.”
• Actively cultivating the skills of emergence: staying open to openness.
• What if I saw myself as an artist? How would that change my practice.
• The internal wildness — ‘ego’ as a ‘strange collective of wild creatures, full of life’ — need to be nurtured and observed, not dominated (Baptiste Morizot). Permaculture of the self. Liberty / freedom not as an abstract quality, but the capacity to arrange your environment to shape your desire.

“ Je suis une forêt — un jardin permacole, là où les morales classiques voulaient que je sois un impeccable jardin à la française, […] et là où la morale néolibérale exige que je sois une parcelle de monoculture à haut rendement.” (Baptise Morizot)

• David Fleming: Surviving the Future : Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. Flawed and brilliant in equal measure. (And links to the podcast that took me there). The urgent work of today is two-fold: look after ecologies and build the informal economies.

What are my sources of new ideas?

I don’t think these have changed fundamentally — my bandwidth for new content has shrunk if anything (depth not breadth), but…

• Following more people on instagram — more different to me
• Workshops / events e.g. Stir to Action conference, Transition conference, New Frontiers confernce (Joseph Rowntree Emerging Futures programme)
• New (to me) podcasts: For the Wild, Frontiers of Commoning, Long Time Academy, The YIKES podcast
• Newsletters

What inspires me now?

• Polycultures — in beautiful practice, and as metaphor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDs3TEFpVE
• The Civic Square vision, and their partnership with Centre for Alternative Technology. (“We can model the world of our longing” -Ruth Ben-Tovim, Art of Invitation workshop).
• Doughnut Economics Action Lab — and the tools they are making available for mapping neighbourhood resilience.
• Ubele initative https://www.ubele.org/our-work/black-rootz
• East Quay in Watchet
• Jay Jordan and Isabelle Frémeaux— and the experimental arts-based practice of the ZAD
• Wasteground circus (here’s the feedback I sent after the show: The Wasteground Circus was one of the few shows I’ve seen (maybe the
  only show) that situated itself in a plausible and compelling vision of
  the near future (with echoes of Octavia Butler’s Parables, and the
  Noughts and Crosses books, with their stark economic apartheid). But
  what the show did for me was bring to life the absolute necessity of
  embodied play, and of celebrating the possibility of the human body in
  the coming emergency. We will all need the circus of hopes and dreams in the coming years, and it made me what to create my own jar of playful dreams on which to draw.)

Principles

Which principles (permaculture or otherwise) speak to me most?

• Use and value edges and the marginal: Maureen o’Hara, Graham Leicester Dancing on the Edge: https://www.triarchypress.net/dancing-at-the-edge.html. How can I make sure I stay on my edge, in the uncomfortable places? How can I /we maximise the opportunity of a marginal position in the organisation?
• Produce no waste: every event needs a waste strategy! Also — how can I prevent time being wasted in my life? Prevent wasted energy in our team / work.
• Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: building a learning culture in everything I do, getting better at observing and recording the feedback I receive from the world. Developing yoga practice — and the self-awareness that comes from this — as tool to support wider feedback culture.

What are the most important principles to govern the work I do / apply to how I spend my time? [N.b. are these aligned to strategy?]

• Does this feel uncomfortable? Am I / are we working on my / our edge? (‘if you are comfortable today, if you are safe, if you are well in these times of crisis, it means that you are protected by privilege’ Farzana Khan)
• Are we being generous and building collaboration? Does this work build partnerships that grow our capacity to act? (“If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning […] We would organise with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas / organisations all the time we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, grow through fusion not competition.” AMB p. 10)
• Does this work build the adaptive capacity of communities, with an emphasis on those most vulnerable in the transition / unravelling? (Adaptive capacities includes capacity for imagination, and belonging)
• Does this work bring us (me) joy? Is it joyful?

And a question: what would it look like to conduct principles focused-evaluation on these points? For me, for team.

Integration

Where is there inter-dependence in my life, and how can I nourish this?

• Everywhere ! what is my role in the (professional) forest at this stage in my life and development? Is this time to transition into new way of being : focus more on coaching / catalysing / convening. Donna Haraway’s thinking explicitly situates this too. (Becoming compost for each other etc.)
• Continuing to build inter-dependence in our community.
• There is inter-dependence in our team: we are all stronger together. How can we put aside ego / questions of territory to build to our unique strengths?
• Around childcare
• Around earthcare — especially at the allotment. How can I continue to learn from this?

How can I integrate the information I have gathered / will gather?

• Make the space for a regular reflective practice (and integrate this visually e.g. use record of photos on my phone)
• Create and tend to my home wall of inspiration. Make this a place for gathering.
• Is are.na a valuable tool for online gathering? Worth experimenting.

What are my needs and what systems can I put in place to meet those needs?

• I need more joy in the everyday when I return to work: more play, more music, more laughter. Can we incorporate this into our designs? Can I incorporate into my daily life. It doesn’t all have to be so serious all the time.
• I need strong systems — that are not wholly dependent on me.

Where and how can I combine those systems? (So they are meeting more than one need).

Action

What new action am I planning as a consequence of my sabbatical?

• Take into work a spirit of curiosity — and a commitment to rigorous observation (which is hard e.g. through habit tracking)
• Action-learning?
• Tracking my habits to stay on a good course — for example maintaining a sit-spot practice

Momentum

How will I maintain momentum? What support do I need?

• Using the coaching and peer support resources available to me.
• Think about building a positive support network around me. A community of practice.
• For next steps: consider taking part in a learning marathon or a permaculture design course.

Appreciation

What am I grateful for about this time?

• The love and support of my family, and financial security that has made this possible.
• The opportunity to step away from the work, and the organisation.
• The opportunity to spend more time outside — and to come back refreshed.
• The opportunity to spend more time with my daughter, at a time of transitions for her.
• Lyndall Farley — coaching wisdom about sabbaticals.
• The opportunity to travel for longer — being light-footed. And rebuild connections in France.
• The opportunity to prepare properly for new people living with us — rather than rushing into it.
• The seasonal framing: spring to solstice.

What do I appreciate more about the people around me and the place where I am?

• Our many and inter-linked vulnerabilities
• Our networks of culture-building (e.g. choir)

Reflection

What has come up through the process of this reflection?

• In general I have wanted to do, more than write.

What questions are coming up for me?

• How can I step into a new phase life (late adulthood), in which I have all the opportunities? How can I use this time to step back and allow others to step in? (Opportunities for reverse mentoring, job-sharing with young person etc.)
• What does depth require from me, now, at this time?
• How can I nourish my creativity — as part of building the regenerative culture we need?
• What is the role of ‘innovation’ — often conceived in an extractive lineage — in the transition / unravelling? How can we reframe innovation to foreground the knowledges and experiences of people who are constantly innovating to find solutions in unliveable situations?
• How can my team provide places of safe uncertainty / discomfort in the organisation?
• How can I take more risks?

Pause

How will I continue to honour rest?

• Maitaining time (Sundays?) for pause.
• The sit spot practice