Inspiration

Well, what can I say.

I've just had two fantastic, inspiring days.

Yesterday, Leela and I went to our first session at the family playgroup at the local Steiner School. It was beautiful. I struggle to find another, more suitable word, but it was beautiful. I loved the flow of it all, the soft-edginess, the gentleness... When we arrived, the group coordinator (I don't know how else to 'title' her!) was kneading dough. We sat down together around the table, just a few of us to begin with, but others joined progressively. We were all handed little blobs of dough and bowls of flour, raisins and sunflower seeds, which we started making little bread rolls from. Leela poked, squished and stuck on raisins, all the time watching what the other children were doing so intently. Later we chopped apples for making into apple butter. We spent a longer period just playing together, sharing toys, exploring the room. There were a few tensions between the toddlers who all wanted to play with the same thing, but that's just to be expected I guess. Then after a gradually introduced song, we sat together again and ate the bread and a spiced apple butter made the day before. Finally, we sat in a circle, and had an interactive story time. We heard about Tom and Maia and their adventures out in nature. We sang a few songs and used our hands to tell the story. After that, it was time to pass around a candle for the children to greet, before we sang a goodbye song. What amazed me was the sheer fluidity of it. No-one at any point stood up and said 'right, now we're going to do this', yet it all worked beautifully and we all seemed to know what was going on. Three hours passed by and I felt totally immersed in the moment. I look forward to next Friday morning!

Then today we visited Lammas. Lammas is a low-impact development project which I'm pretty sure is the first of it's kind in the UK. You can read more about the project here (they'll do a better job of it than me!). I met Simon Dale, one of the members of the Lammas community, at the Buddhafield Festival in 2007 where I practically lived in the permaculture tent for the whole 5 days. Simon opened my eyes up to being more open-minded when it comes to designing buildings. Who says that they have to be box shaped, with separate rooms? A home or building can be any shape and layout that you could possibly imagine (quite literally, a real exercise in thinking outside the box). After meeting them at the festival I started following their activites, albeit remotely, through their website and from email updates from Simon. Even so, I didn't manage to visit, until today.

Let's just say, I was just a HUGE bit excited.

There was a tour starting at 2pm, so I had a lift from a relative of mine from Narberth (who wants to use similar building techniques as some seen at Lammas for some eco-cottages I hope to help him with). We walked around the whole site. It was much bigger than I had imagined and so many buildings are going up right now. Although it has only been happening 'on the ground' for around a year now, so much has been done to the land. They have roads, terraces for buildings, barns in various stages of completion, yurts, benders, polytunnels... and have planted over 6,000 trees on site already! It was truly amazing and inspiring.

So I came home this evening feeling like 'yes! I could do something like that!' and boy do I want to try. I suffer from a horrible habit of self-doubt, but seeing things in the flesh and being around people with the guts to just DO it makes me feel super empowered. So watch this space... things are stirring.

{Apologies for the lack of pics from the last couple of days though as the camera batteries are still pooped. Hope you like these pics from my 2007 Permaculture Design Course on the Isle of Man!}