Wednesday 15 August 2018

Community Rising - Step one

Community Rising - Step one
                                                        
  
  It’s been a while since my last blog and for those of you who have enjoyed my thoughts over the last few years, I apologise. I am hoping to now make amends and start blogging more regularly. The issue was that I have been formulating a plan and it has taken rather a while to come to fruition. Even now it is only in an embryonic state.
As I have been quiet for so long I feel my thoughts will come rather like a dam breaking, so I will split them into a few separate blogs and hope then to pull them altogether when the timing is right. I would like to start by filling you in with the whole story to giving you an understanding of where this all came from. 
I have been in Frome for five years and have enjoyed every minute, its vibrancy and sense of community is powerful and invigorating. I arrived in 2013 around the time that Russell Brand was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman and I was hugely inspired by his words. He spoke of building a new political way of working and this excited me as I have dreamed of this since I was 15. I never believed it possible but hearing his words and his confidence in the idea that he had no idea how it would happen or what the new landscape would look like, I knew he was on to something. He was working with evolution and not revolution - which always end in tears. This beautifully mirrored what was happening in Frome. Here, a group of individuals, who wished to drop party politics, came together and reformed the archaic system we have in our towns and replaced it with something progressive and effective. This was given a vote of confidence by the people of Frome as in the first elections, 11 out of 17 new independents gained seats and in the second they were voted in across all the wards.
I began to get the feeling that anything was possible. Inspired and energised I put out a call to gather together all like minded people to see what we could do. I wanted to create a Unity Party, a political movement for change. However, I was too premature in every way and particularly in myself. I had much to learn. So I immersed myself in Frome life, the community and the various groups that were working within it and gained a degree of understanding and had a great deal of fun at the same time.
I also had a lot of ‘life’ to contend with, losing my father and my partner losing both parents, was only a part of the list of what’s being going on. I learned to understand that everything has its time and that nothing can be rushed.
By the beginning of 2018 I had connected with TreeSisters, (about ten years later than everyone else I know!) and that hit me like a brick. ‘TreeSisters is a global network of women who donate monthly to fund the restoration of our tropical forests as a collective expression of planetary care.’ I find their work incredibly inspiring and the wealth of knowledge I have gained about myself and about our history as women in this country still amazes and horrifies me.
I feel like the whole year has been nurturing me. I attended a course at Hawkwood College, in Stroud, with Andrew Harvey, the founder/director of the institute of sacred activism, and a talk at the same college by Miki Kashtan, an International teacher, who guides people into leadership through discovering their ‘fearless heart’. At this point I realised I had shirked any kind of leadership roles in life all my life. It is time to step up.
I also have learned that we can do nothing by ourselves. The TreeSisters taught me many things but one important thing is that we must gather our community together and can only operate being supported at all times.
So if you have any interest in my work, which I will explain over the coming months, I am going to be asking for some support. I sincerely hope I can entice you in even if it is just for the smallest thing. 
I would like to thank you for reading this far and in anticipation of what may be yet to come.