New Beginnings

As some of you know, I'm starting a new chapter of my life this month.

I'm the new Community Coordinator at Braziers Park – an intriguing intentional community and many other things, between Oxford and Reading. I've been visiting for a few months, and it feels like a good fit.

I will also continue working on the larger ideas I want to pursue here, about economic sustainability and transportation bottlenecks. Braziers Park feels like a good place to do that: at the heart of an engaging community, surrounded by activities focussed on living life more intensely and more meaningfully, all questioning and exploring alternatives.

I finally have a place to stand.

I've been thinking a lot about community, and how we handle conflict, over the past year. I keep encountering what feels like an increased brittleness, and pervasive conflict avoidance, since I moved back to the UK. I know this is partly the impacts of austerity and COVID, but partly a shifting level of expectations for me: my expectations seems to have risen, while maybe other peoples' have fallen. This will be a good place, and role, to understand that better.

I'm probably more sensitive to cultural differences than most. I also haven't lived consistently in Britain for a long time – and distance makes a difference. I left for South Africa in 2002, then lived mostly in Kenya, where I was born, since. These countries were profoundly impacted by British colonialism of course, but in subtly different ways. Everything always needs disaggregating. Culture and societies aren't monolithic, and so much depends on class, location, specific communities, family systems – and groups create their own microcultures all the time.

Braziers was founded in 1950 to develop something quite countercultural at the time – explicitly acknowledging the importance of our feelings. Some of the initial ideas, formally separating emotional and logical people into separate decision-making processes, seem strange and clumsy now. Braziers recently celebrated 75 years as a 'School of Integratative Social Research' but I suspect our intellectual legacy is intriguingly eccentric, eclectic, but ultimately shallow. I don't want this to be yet another place drowning in misplaced nostalgia; there is urgent stuff we need to build for the future. I was initially sceptical, and I still plan to threaten to set fire to our archives, if that would be helpful.

And yet...

A bit like opening a computer with a completely different operating system, while I recognise the pieces, the keyboard, screen, and some icons, everything does work in a subtly different way to what I'd expect. I'll be listening and learning, growing, a lot over the next few months, because there is something distinctive here which feels important, and worth building on. Good people are repeatedly drawn here, and it clearly changes lives, even if it isn't having the wider impact I want to see. This is particularly important for me to explore deeper, given my role here.

A few related half-baked thoughts.

Braziers has an old manor house at it's core, with a foundation stone of 1688 in the basement, and later Strawberry Gothic additions. However I seem to be immune to it's charms. This seems partly because I have already lived for several years at Magdalen, which is simply older, grander, more beautiful, and better maintained. It also may be because I'm generally quite sceptical about British elite culture and heritage, given what I know about the history and global impacts.

Anyway, it's interesting to notice how other new people, including our current largely European and Australian volunteer team, are charmed and intrigued by the place. I'm interested in what that may cloak or distract from, and also what I'm personally missing without even realising it. Since I'm often thinking about cultural biases and filters, it's important to notice my own.

I'm thinking a lot about cultural practices, and how they relate to more formal structures. We're a community of very different people, with some high turnover but also some long-term incumbency. We are all going through personal growth in different ways, as we also try to engage with the wider world. As we used to say in my AVP non-violence training days, conflict is natural – but violence doesn't have to be. How can we create and renew a healthy culture, and environment for learning?

(I wish David Gee was still with us, and just up the road in Oxford, to talk this out with. I am still a little shocked to hear of his death last year.)

The fragility of US norms vs laws is also on my mind – a formal system of rules is not as strong, useful or protective as people who have studied such things sometimes imagine. I learnt this myself long ago, studying formal politics while working with refugees in the Balkans. It has been interesting to reengage with Quaker practices and collective wisdom on this, over the year, but find similar weaknesses. I don't think we have found good collective alternatives yet.

I am sad we don't have natural water on the site, which is elevated and on chalk. When I came earlier in the year, for interviews and a few short stays, the birdlife, newts and froglets were a joy. It's incredibly dry at the moment. I do get to swim in the Thames nearby quite often, but that is tinged by concerns about pollution. I'm a late convert to swimming, let alone wild swimming, but have been enchanted by the Fobney Marshians this year, and their guerrilla rewilding activities near Reading. Local stewardship, and a shared enjoyment, of nature. (Shhh, I'm watching a hummingbird hawk-moth on lavender in our loggia as I type this.)

For the first time in a few years, I have briefly felt like using my SLR camera equipment. I used to take a lot of photos, and this was very important to me, but gradually I stopped. The reasons are complicated, but the transition has sometimes puzzled me, as losing so many elements of my past self has. Baby steps, but perhaps I'll rediscover my joy in this...

Some personal but very meaningful news. I had to leave my very dear but bonkers cat Shuri in Kenya, when I left just over a year ago. This was incredibly difficult for me. Keeping cats alive kept me alive, kept me going, over the past decade. Shuri was practically born into my hands, and she was the closest I have to family now, but I struggled to find a good home for her.

I knew things were unsettled at her temporary home, but I wasn't getting any updates for over nine months. I knew that Shuri is incredibly headstrong, and a survivor, but this left a hole in my heart.

And last week I finally got an update – and direct contact with her new human. Shuri is fine, bossing everyone around, getting the attention she deserves, and I feel incredibly relieved. This was a huge weight I was carrying, but with no way to address it.

I plan to share something half-baked every few weeks, just to organise my thoughts, and share some of my journey with people I care about, and vice versa.

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