'How to tell a story with one image?' by Pamela

I found it today.

 

A huge willow woven heart

(In local craft shop window)

Called me over,

Across the white and black

Of the zebra crossing.

Huge willow woven heart

Beat loud enough

To command my entry  

Into the Beauty of Many Hearts.

Orange and green made-from-felt hearts,

Red- woolly- knitted hearts,

Ceramic- glass- turquoise hearts,

Recycled- materials hearts,

Ruffled- multi- textured hearts,

Glittery- hearts,

Hanging- on- a- thread- hearts.

Well, it is two days before

Valentines Day.

Then I found it,

Or did it find me?

I knew we were meant to meet immediately

In a basket of lesser hearts,

(No disrespect meant

But somehow,

In comparison,

They were…

Small and nondescript.

To me, anyway.)

There it was.

I found My Very Own Heart

Large Black Felt Heart

Edged and held together with

Red wool blanket stitches.

Scattered shiny red buttons

Of various sizes,

All round, with four small black holes

Stitched on

With red cotton.

What else

Was On my Very Own Heart

That tells my whole story?

Red embroidery thread on black felt,

Describes red feathers…

Or are they leaves?

Small red beads as berries,

Holly or rowan or both.

In the centre…

In the very centre…

Oh joy of joys…

White Thread Bird.

Dainty white stitches for curly tail,

Open wings and beak

Lined with small fluffs

Of white felt.

Delicately beautified with

White pearl and

Gleaming silver beads.

A Bird of Peace.

As if that were not enough,

In between 

Two upper black felt curves

(Which shape any heart,

Though not always edged with

Red wool blanket stitches)

There was

A small red heart

Within 

Large Black One.

It’s purpose was to hold in place

A white hanging ribbon.

In delight..

I held the ribbon

So

Black Heart hangs from the heavens

On a shaft of white silver light.

Beneath,

At the bottom point

Which every heart may reach…

Were two small silver bells.

If Black, Red and White Heart

Were shaken,

Silver bells sing.

I left the shop

Called ‘Beautify Me’

With my Valentines Heart

It is how I would like to end my story.

'The Feast of Life' by Sheila

At the feast of life I feel as if I have gorged myself whilst others starved. 

 I live in the most beautiful place, I have a wonderful family and a fabulous lifestyle. I have been a mother for 27 years, an autonomous home schooler for 20 years and a foster carer for 10 years. The youngest of my four children will be 16 next week, and I have a very loving relationship with all my family. 

There has been a lot of luck involved of course, but luck is also what you make of it. My husband and I have shouldered crises that would have finished many couples. We are stickers! We have made all our own bread for over 20 years, even taking it on holiday. Perhaps it is the bread that has kept us both so healthy.

Now I stand at the threshold that all parents reach - I am no longer a parent of children. My role of 27 years is drawing to a close, I have space in my agenda. Having had my spirit fed so plentifully for so long I yearn to give something back, to support other families and nurture other children, to share some of the wisdom that I believe I've accumulated. I have written a book and I have been trying to get myself out there, but it's hard. I have a soft underbelly; and I'm scared. How easy it would be to withdraw, claim to have tried and failed. Get on with my luxurious life. But I have spent years gorging myself at the feast of life whilst others have starved and if I don't do something I will be ashamed.

Maybe I could open up my home. I have a spare bedroom and space for campers, I could run courses, or support groups, at the very least I could show people how to bake bread and make peanut butter. If someone with my awareness and good fortune can't give back who can?

Desire and fear course through my veins in equal measure, as Mumford says “If my enemy was bigger than my apathy I could have won!”

'Diggers and Dreamers' by Pamela

These days we try to create community on computers.

I will imagine us all sitting warming our hands and cheeks around a fire on the screen. It is glowing orange and red on a cold and windy black night. We snuggle up to our mouse to ‘google search’ a wide view of a starry sky.

Sitting around a real shared fire was more my idea of community when I moved to the countryside almost twenty years ago…and we did. You know, with wood and streaming eyes from the smoke. Well, not on cold and windy black nights…in fact only on warm and balmy summer nights. Survival did not depend on whether the chocolate had melted properly around the bananas wrapped in aluminium foil (placed carefully in the glowing embers of the fire). That was after the chicken thighs had eventually been cooked in the indoor kitchen oven. It had taken the barbecue too long to either burn to a cinder or leave the centre pink and raw.

The ideals of ‘back to nature’ were always pitched against the reasons human beings had invented technology to make most things easier. I discovered that young, fit and full of energy were the main requirements to living sustainably.

Our young earnest couple who lived in a caravan in the middle of a large field had a vision of converting the world to pumpkins ( they came from Australia) They wanted to fill the field with pumpkins and make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin smoothies etc. to sell at festivals and eventually have their own Pumpkin Restaurant. He then tragically had a stroke, in his early thirties, becoming partly paralysed.. Pumpkin Dream Ended. So did their marriage. Like I said, young fit and full of energy is the main requirement to ‘working with nature’.

Any age, shape and fitness can sit on the computer and talk to the rest of the world. As my teenage children do…even on a warm and balmy summer evening when I would much prefer they came and ate melted chocolate on mushy hot bananas.

When they were younger, the chocolate was a strong enough pull to have them sitting out and enjoying poking a stick into the fire, or even better melting a pink marshmallow in the flames, so the outside went dark and crunchy and the inside was soft and gooey. But not now, as teenagers, addiction to face book, tweeting etc, are even stronger than addiction to sugar.

So why am I telling you this slightly cynical tale?

I guess I have become more of a realist since my dream to ‘live in the country’ began twenty or so years ago. 

My new husband and I (both in our mid thirties) researched many communities around Great Britain, from a book called ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ The title was to show that there were different kinds of people attempting to make new pioneering ways of life Those who tend to focus on the here and now practical things that need doing (diggers) and those who see the vision and hold the dream of new possibilities (dreamers). I was definitely in the dreaming section. Fortunately husband is enough of a digger for a balance.

How many times have I crashed from the idealism of how humanity might be to the pain and grief of how we actually are?

The fights over where the fire was to be built, by whom, from what and where?

Power politics and fixed opinions create just as much conflict within a community of environmentalists in rural West Wales  as well…anywhere else. It did eventually lead me to train as a mediator in my endeavour to see how we can respect and meet each others needs. It had not been my idea of idyllic ‘life in the country’ for war to be waged over where the ducks can splosh around without putting diverse wildlife at risk. 

In fact, I would say that the last twenty years of living the dream  have slowly but imperceptibly transformed this dreamer. I hope not into a cynic, but one who has developed a reality check of time, patience, endurance, and practical application required to do just about anything.  

We need each other, to overcome why the google search for ‘community sitting under a starry night’ ended up with a ‘no connection…please try again’.

Even computer communities have their problems.  

[Click here to visit the Diggers and Dreamers website if you are interested in exploring intentional communities and alterntaive living in the UK ]