As I write, I am sitting in a museum garden, with a hundred different plants used for textile-dyeing, cooking, beautifying, wellbeing, healing, smelling sweet and even pest control. The sun is hot and there’s a reassuring amount of buzzing in the flowers around me. As always, I’m learning, thinking and planning.
Every year, I spend a week in a cathedral town, singing choral music and chilling out. This year, despite the physical and emotional pleasure of singing in a glorious acoustic, and the excuse to mooch around charity shops, read books and sit in lovely gardens, I am really wishing to be back home.
I’m experiencing a sense of dislocation – of having been removed from the flow of life in our own community garden, from the routines of commune meetings and political education, from an ethics-focused and behaviour-challenging social environment, from a town where poverty is normal and from the momentum of creating.
It’s like being in a very pleasant waiting room. With a gift shop.
We had what you could call a rather ‘contrasting’ hiatus a couple of weeks ago: in the early hours, the police raided the community garden to arrest a crew from the Reclaim the Power protest camp, who had mustered there overnight, before heading off to occupy a site close to Drax power station for the camp.
Quite apart from the outrageous suppression of dissent, including pre-emptive arrests, and apart from how gutting it was for the camp to be cancelled after the amount of work, hope and resources they’d put in, there was (and might be more) various collateral damage for us:
Four commune-associated folks happened also to be staying at the farm and were also arrested and had their belongings seized for evidence.
The police sealed the site off for two days, first awaiting a search warrant, then searching.
The council and third sector offices across the car park were sealed off for a day, with workers being informed the farm was a crime scene and that there had been a major incident.
Folks in the commune house were variously unprepared for, or inexperienced in, potential police raids on the house (which didn’t happen, fortunately) and had to escape to a less stressful place for several days.
Folks from the wider farm community were upset that the site had been used for such a risky endeavour without their consent or knowledge.
The council is in the middle of an ‘asset review’, which we were already mildly anxious about, since the community garden is council land.
Questions arise from this. The commune aims to be 100 – 200 people living together on a site with food-growing, various workshops and communal spaces and collective businesses.
We will likely need political and community support to make this vision a reality.
We also want to be a hub of ecological defence and revolutionary political education, promoting autonomy from state/capitalism through collective power and learning from revolutionary movements around the world.
Can we make these aims compatible at this early stage in our development? Or at any stage?
Can we strike a balance that maintains good relations with the authorities while being explicitly anti-establishment? Could a more subtle approach still lead to the revolutionary culture we’re trying to create, or would we forget ourselves or become too risk-averse along the way?
We need a lot of people who want to be tied to the land, who want to be focused on the community itself – will those people be put off from living in an explicitly political environment with its inherent risks?
What about the wider community, our neighbours? We’ll already be trying to counter prejudices around how weird we are socially, will they also keep their distance on grounds of risk?
Who is the community that we must prioritise at this stage? What practices will we need to set to nurture that community?
Of course, this was always a concern, but my hope was that we’d be big enough to handle mild state friction before it got us. Maybe we’re lucky enough to be still small enough to handle it – perhaps this history will provide clarity for prospective members engaging with us and positively impact how we shape our systems and organisational structure.
This is what’s in my head and pulling me away from the transcendent music and soaring architecture. The need for earthly and prompt decision-making and culture-making before events make them for us. The need for healing and bonding fractious relationships, so that we are resilient, drawing strength from one another.
I take a certain amount of inspiration from the ritual and seriousness of the church service, of professing one’s belief and declaring intentions. I don’t believe in gods in general (and religion in particular) but I do think that belief in something carries great power, both in personal strength and in community strength.
Each day, as we gather for Evensong, I voice one line from the Chorister’s Prayer: ‘Grant that what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives.’
Learning wherever we are, and taking inspiration where we find it, seems essential for gaining the knowledge and faith we’ll need in testing times.
We can never have all relevant information and no decisions ever get implemented without unintended consequences. All we can do is develop the wisdom and the courage to keep addressing challenges and try to keep ahead of the game. As they say in Kurdish, ‘Serkeftin!’ – ‘Victory!’