Revolutionary Thoughts: Doing it Together

I am a lone wolf by nature. Who loves community.

In truth I find trust hard. And know I can rely on myself to get shit done. I prefer to motor on ahead than spend hours in meetings where no decisions are reached, or pandering to egos that want the power but not the work that comes with it.

For my 20s independence and self sufficiency was my intention in every area of my life. I wanted to live a self-sufficient life - growing and making all our own food, clothes, education... everything... but in a perfect intentional community. A strange combination.

I get a lot done, and done my way. But somewhere along the line realised my energy was not as infinite as my vision. I got burnt out a lot. And felt isolated.

Last night I was going through in my head the various work I've done. The things I started or helped make happen - arts festivals, play group, a school, a women's group, a magazine, a chocolate business, classes of all kinds...

Last night though I led, and did a lot of behind the scenes leg work for, our new red tent, it wasn't just me - we are all in it together - co creating... Just like I realised like a bolt between the eyes, as I wa freaking out about metaphorical tables and chairs with this big secret growth that's going on here in Dreaming Aloud world...  it's not just me... I am supported. There are lots of us, invested in it together. Collaboration. Shared responsibility. Shared visioning.. shared work.

And again this morning, whilst I have put in a lot of time and energy in to the continued unfurling of our red tent... I feel the co-creative energy there -  it's as though its unfolding by magic, as each woman weaves in her ideas and quilts and needs....

I cannot tell you how beautiful the space looked last night. The floor covered in red cloths and handmade quilts, soft pillows every where, a beautifully co created centre piece and twinkling nightlights. We each did our bit to create this magic, and set up and clear up were easy, stress free... a collaborative loving joy.

And I recognise that was there before... collaboration... but I didn't trust it to take my weight... for people to do what they said... part me, part them... but it usually ended in tears and burn out...

But now I'm really seeing and feeling, online and offline the beauty of collaboration in all areas of my work... now I have a wide circle of dreamers, conspirators and collaborators who are on the same page. We are standing in our authentic power. We value honest, clear communication. And it is pure magic. Weaving different people's energies together to co-create things much bigger than any of us can do alone. We hold each other, and each others visions, with clear agreements as to what we can do or give. And we are all blessed by the creations that unfold.

Here's to doing it together!

Tell me how are you with collaboration? Does it come naturally? Are you inclined to go it alone? Do you burn out? Have you got a strong circle of collaborators or are you still looking? 

What are you giving your sister in the Philippines this Christmas?

And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy

Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime

But say a prayer, pray for the other ones

At Christmastime it's hard, but when you're having fun

There's a world outside your window

And it's a world of dread and fear

Where the only water flowing 

Is the bitter sting of tears

And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom

Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you.

Feed the World

As I was driving my daughter to pre-school this morning through our beautiful local area in our new car, wrapped up warm, this song came on the radio, and I burst into tears.

Only the day before Mr DA and I had been talking of the future, our future, our kids' future and what this world might look like in twenty years time.

We are not filled with hope for the big picture. But we are resourceful.

And we know that we live in one of the safest and most fertile countries in the world. With lots of space and natural resources. 

And as I read the paper that evening there were stories... stories of hunger, of women being raped just for being women, of rising levels of homelessness, of whole populations displaced by war, of political work camps in North Korea holding 200,000 in conditions which make the Nazis not look too bad.

Now. Right now. All over the world. Not stories at all but realities.

You know this. Of course you do. It's why you avoid the papers and the news. Because it's hard to function on a diet of despair.

And in terms of keeping a positive mental headspace avoiding the news is a Good Thing.

But that doesn't stop all this stuff actually happening.

And so as I sit here giving thanks for a year of dreams come true, a year of comfort and ease, warmth and too much food, happy family life and safety I don't even have to think about.

I think what if...

What if by accident of birth I was born in one of many other countries... what if....

What if one day in the future this will be us...

These are my brothers and sisters from other mothers. My children in other lives. My parents. My self.

And so I have given three Christmas gifts.

Not little 20-cents-in-a-collection box-to-let-myself-off-the-guilt-hook-gifts. Proper gifts from our family to other families around the world, that will make a substantial difference to other's lives.

One to feed a family for a month, who are suffering homelessness because of a hurricane. One to a political prisoner who could be, would be, me, who dared to question corrupt authority, and now pays for it with their own blood and confinement every day. And one to my children in another land - children for whom books and light and clean water, such basic essentials to us here, are luxuries out of their reach.

It would be easy enough to say we're hardly rolling in it ourselves. Or that charity giving isn't the best way to do it.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. This, as you know is my motto.

The more we give the richer we realise we are.

And so at this time of giving, please, please, however broke you feel, however busy you are, give a gift, to the value of what you would give your mother or sister, or neighbour, to your relations elsewhere whom you have never met, who need a Christmas present as a matter of life or death. 

We all know many charities and many ways of giving. Don't let not being able to choose stop you for a moment. Think of a son, a mother, a woman, a man that could be you in another lifetime, or another year. And give something right now to share the light and love and abundance that you enjoy as standard.

These are a few of my favourite charities (and obviously, it goes without saying, I benefit in no way from recommending them.)

International Red Cross - to support their work in the Philippines relief effort and in war torn countries around the world.

The Guardian Christmas Appeal this year is going to Africa to support books, water aid, renewable power and sustainable farming practices.

Amnesty International who support human rights around the world, acting as advocate for political prisoners. And whilst there you can sign a petition or two.

Goal - an Irish charity who we supported for our wedding, who work with the poorest of the poor around the world.

You can use your social media accounts to automatically support Irish charities by joining the 12 Days of Christmas appeal  which posts an appeal message on either Facebook or Twitter once a day until Christmas.

Thank you...  in the words of Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and everyone who needs us... We are the World.

Purging darkness

As many of you may know we have been so hopeful about the promise of a new second level school in our local area, and active in our personal involvement in the campaign to make it an Educate Together school. It has been a strong flame of hope for us. Regular readers will know just how big a deal school is for me, for us as a family. And so I feel sick, angry and shocked at the announcement today that the new school will be the only one of nine in the country, awarded to a Catholic patronage.

I don’t want to defend or attack any individual Catholics or to cause hurt. It is not about you or me. Catholicism is not my path. Nor my family’s nor that of so many families in the local area. And every school in this area, bar one private school is already Catholic. And so I feel frustrated that at the time when our children, the next generation of this new world, start moving into their adult consciousness, the only places on offer to them are all not of the consciousness we choose to impart to them. The place they learn day in day out about their feelings of love, arousal, sexuality, spirituality, their paradigm and sense of self and self-worth… will all be in a place which is so dissonant with our own values.

I feel angry, angry, angry. Because we were promised that these new schools would bring diversity, would reflect parents’ and children’s needs which were not already being served by existing schools.

I am angry because of reasons that I do not want to go into here, and I am a writer who could be sued for libel, not an impervious religious body that still holds vast power. But I do not feel that they have, through numerous past actions in the local area, only recently admitted, proven themselves to be a body to which I would trust my children’s bodies or souls.

And so we are left reeling, as are hundreds of parents in the local area, wondering what we do next, where we turn, what our options are: to move 40 miles to be close to the new Educate Together school which has been approved? To commute that distance every day? To home educate? To start a home-ed co-operative or private school, to move to the UK or further afield…. None of the options hold any desire for me… And nor do the schools on offer here. And there are SO many parents that I know personally who are in the same situation.

So here I am, in the dark time of my cycle, the moon darkening in the sky and I feel full of frustration, full of anger and darkness. I am taking part at the moment in a very powerful women's e-course, and we are purging shame and guilt and darkness there too. It runs deep. So deep. It is pervasive. And it gets rooted young.

So much of it is not individual, but collective, built up generation by generation, and now, those of us that are wanting to shift it, to get to somewhere fresh, somewhere creative and vibrant and life-affirming in our own psyches, in our collective culture, we are purging the darkness, speaking shame, shining light on it, sharing, and moving beyond.

But some days it really feels like I don’t have the energy to keep purging, to keep pushing and shaking and resisting the old ways. Trying to knock down old walls, and campaign for new ways. Trying to persuade and convince, and apologise and not offend the old-wayers. How much simpler it would be just to bow my head and accept, as so many have done for generations. To be grateful for what I have. To make the best of it. To stop being so demanding, so entitled.

Or to be happy to lay down my own life, my own career and soul-work to home-ed if it’s so important to me.

Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.

I am angry. But I know I am not alone in it. There's a lot of us. Angry. Frustrated. And finding our voices... watch out world!

PS So me being me I have gone into overdrive and in the past couple of hours have:

• Set up a petition - you can sign here 
• Contacted the regional newspapers with a press release.
• Written emails to the Minister for Education and our local Representatives
• Spread the word via social media so others can share their voices.

I don't know what can be achieved. But I know I won't go down silent or without a fight.

Harvest Moon

This weekend is harvest moon: the full moon closest to the autumn equinox.

The time of reaping and celebration of the year's harvest. Where communities would traditionally come together. Sharing the work, sharing the rewards. Feasting together. Companions, literally people breaking bread together. The bread which they had tilled the soil for, scattered the seed, joined together to cut the wheat in fine weather, to thresh and make bales.

This is the time for bringing the harvest home - physically, spiritually , stocking our larders to see us through the cold, dark months ahead. Though most of us are cut off from the literal harvesting of our food, unless we have a vegetable garden of our own. Our food is disconnected from the farmers. Food is always there, on the shelves. We forget the joy of the harvest. The physical exertion traded for stored calories. The reliance on every member of the community to make it happen. Food is just food, a commodity, easy come, easy go. We don't need each other any more to survive. We don't need to celebrate nature's bounty: it is always there. And so whilst we are rich on easy calories and  in money in comparison to those rural farming communities of bygone days, we are poor too if we do not gather together, to feast, to celebrate and give thanks.

It is fitting that this weekend is a weekend of community celebrations here - a tapas evening at a new local cafe, eating with friends; our multi-generational community will share a life affirming luncheon at Saturday Pizzas; drinking together to celebrate a friend's birthday and then a motherblessing, a group of women gathering to celebrate and nurture a pregnant friend about to give birth, with love, massage, mindful connection... and of course food!

My children and I gathered wheat and barley which had sprouted on the roadside. We pounded it into flour and used it to make a harvest loaf together, watching the miracle of yeast and grain and water become our daily bread. We feasted on our harvest loaf and gave thanks for the turning of the seasons.

Do take the time over the next couple of weeks to celebrate with your companions. Take time to break bread, to raise a toast to each other and the farmers who provided your food, to the sun and the earth. To bring harvest home to you and yours.

This post is being contributed to the Big Lunch which celebrates communities eating together every June in the UK. Do take some time to check out their great blog.


To find out about Dreaming Aloud's Big Lunch experience do check out this post . And this one about  why I decided to get involved with The Big Lunch.


Do take time to read my posts on Radical Homemaking. 


For more on the spiritual and astrological aspects of this harvest moon time see Hey Allie 

Know thy neighbour?

“The community you want starts at your front door”

Neighbour Day, Australia

We have just past our first anniversary of living in the Pink House. And along with boxes still to unpack we have many neighbours yet to meet.

You see, unlike my mama, I am not a knock-on-people's-doors-and-learn-their-life-story kinda girl. I get all wriggly in my tummy and think I might puke if I have to say more than hello.

So I annoy myself hugely by having a deep rooted "community" urge. If I have a moment on my hands I find myself organising sandsculpting events, or women's circles, or writing groups, or arts festivals. I really don't know why, but I have this strong, "let's get together and stop ignoring each other and make this a fun and doodle dandy place to live full of happy faces and fun stuff to do..."

I have always wanted to live in a “community”. You know the type, lots of long haired hippies, a communal garden, shared creative/ yoga space and bringing up the kids together.

A combination of lack of land, planning permission and cash in our group mean that instead we are living on a housing estate in a small Catholic village. We have the ties of the local school to bind us, but not the local sport or religious practice.

My dear friend Mary said to me the other day "My life is so much richer for knowing you Lucy cos you're always getting us caught up in your next mad project!"

So my latest mad project, which I urge you, dear reader to join me in, now we are friends, is "The Big Lunch". Brain child of one of my favourite impossible doers - the visionary behind the Eden Project in Cornwall (a complex of vast geodesic greenhouse bubbles which house a rainforest and others eco systems in a disused quarry in the south of England).

The Big Lunch is all about bringing communities together through eating together... On Sunday June 5th thousands of communities, hundreds of thousands of neighbours will be eating together in parks, on their streets, in gardens festooned with bunting, playing street cricket, making music... I feel that the best way to build family resilience, is to be deeply rooted in our geographic communities, which we will be relying on more and more in future years.

Community is at the heart of resilience. If your car breaks down or the power's out, or you need some milk, or to use a phone, your nearest neighbours are those you need to be able to call on. So many of us do not even know the name of the people who live two doors down. We drive miles to see friends. Of course there is little chance that everyone on our street are going to be our best friends. But there might be more like minded people, allies, companions, human beings, behind those closed doors than we realise. As oil prices rise and wages fall, we will be living closer to home. Soon gone will be the days of empty commuter estates.

Because of our hyper-mobile society, we now find ourselves living in newly built housing estates like ours, or apartment blocks, villages and towns surrounded by strangers. It feels instinctively unnatural, and leads to defensiveness. Which we experienced soon arrived our arrival here, when a neighbour popped by to yell at us about suing and insurance because his son had injured himself playing on a digger bucket which was being used by our contractors but left for a couple of hours on common land. What a wonderful introduction to the neighbourhood.


And so it was with trepidation that I put together an invitation to each of the 19 other houses on our estate. We delivered them by hand, my kiddies delighted to play postman, and we managed to avoid small talk with any of our neighbours we are so longing to meet!!!! and then we retreated to our little Pink House to wonder what the response would be, and what the gossip would be! So we shall wait and see... thankfully one neighbour, whose kids are friendly with ours, dropped by to say it was a lovely idea and that they were wanting to organise something similar but had never gotten round to it. Phew, so we won't be sitting by ourselves on our picnic rug come Big Lunch day... I wonder who else will join us...I'll let you know!


The Big Lunch is a UK based event, however there are Australian, American, Canadian and Irish versions of "Know Your Neighbour" type events. 

http://www.thebiglunch.com in the UK (June 5th)which is the brain child of the indomitable Tim Smitt, creator of the extraordinary and visionary Eden Project in Cornwall

http://www.neighbourday.org/ in Australia and New Zealand (late March)

Know your neighbor weekend in Ireland (late July)

http://www.european-neighbours-day.com/ on the last Tuesday of May, celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year. In 2010, over 10 million people in about 1200 towns hosted gatherings all over Europe and even further.Neighbours' Day has become a major event in more than 30  countries 

National Good Neighbor Day in the US- September 28th

(And if I can do a little advert too - JUNO magazine is out  June 1st and is has a number of really inspiring features on community...)

A Life Affirming Luncheon

Saturday Pizzas. These two words sum up why I love to live here. Locally produced, organic, well-cooked food, served up with lashings of community spirit, in a funky cafe, overlooking gorgeous gardens and the sea on the horizon. Only five minutes walk from the Pink House. Fifteen if the kids are walking and remarking on every feather and plant in the hedgerow. Good food, good friends, family friendly. Bliss.

Life lessons from an elder

Leonora - I shall call her that, as she is not one for being in the spotlight - is a constant wonder and inspiration. She is a woman of quiet creativity with a simple but beautiful home, a humble spirit, a childlike enthusiasm for the world. Though she is now in her mid eighties - she taught my father when he was in kindergarten (he is now in his late 60s!) - she is not old in any way. She digs her own garden, cares for her home, grows the best sweetcorn I have eaten, cooks wonderful dinner parties, the list goes on...

Visiting her immerses me in a different set of values. There is a different rhythm to her life and days which I drink like water and wish I could bottle. For sure it is partly from the fact that she is an old woman and I am young, partly that she lives alone and I have a house full of tumbling children. But she is like the spirit of an age which is almost gone. Her generation and their gifts are in very short supply, never to come again. This makes me feel sad. Our generation seem more flimsy, superficial, wasteful.

The grieving mother soul

For Una, and all who grieve,

I send you a prayer with every breath. I cannot begin to comprehend your pain, the scale of your loss.

The storm winds of the mother soul howled around this house last night, and every other house in the area, the tears of God raining down upon us as we battened down our hatches and sent continual prayers that you are finding peace and comfort somehow. We are counting and recounting our own blessings with every prayer. Wishing we could transfer them to you.

Words cannot begin to express the sense of deep, deep sadness that every mother and father in our community feels at this moment. We hold our own, dear children closely to us, as though we can immunize them and ourselves from suffering and pain through our tiny, repeated act of love, wishing, wishing that this would bring your children back to you.

We wake to a blue sky, the rays of sunshine promising hope. But the mood is dark and sombre. The usual school gate chatter is gone. Even the playground is eerily quiet. We are united in your pain: we are all one.

We want to talk but talking changes nothing. Nor does the news. It is like scratching an itch, it momentarily makes things feel better, and then worse. The facts are not what we want. We seek to find a way through the shock, the senselessness, the destructive possibilities of the human spirit. The knife edge of normality which we unknowingly walk along every day and which disaster can shatter in an instant. As I feed our chickens and empty our bins, I wish you the soothing tedium of mundanity.

The mother soul is grieving for one of its own. Know that we are united around you, though you cannot see us or may not know us. We hold the space for you, for you to be as you need, in this moment. We open our Madonna's cloaks, fall into their soft folds, let us hold you and croon you a lullaby to soothe you into sleep and the momentary forgetfulness that it will bring, let us wail together, let us wash you clean of your pain in our tears, let us feed you and hold you as you cry and scream and rage and then lie silent.

I pray that you might find life after death. Someday, somehow.

With love, deepest love, dear Una and all your family.

BOOKS, BOOKS BOOKS!

We had a book swap night last night here at the Pink House. A great way to recycle no longer wanted books, and pick up great new reads for free, and talk books with friends - what more can a girl want? The heady smell of cardamom, cinnamon and cloves from the mulled apple juice warmed our bodies as we shared stories of our lives and the books that made us who we are. It was really nourishing to spend time talking about the power of stories, words and ideas with good friends.

What eight books have been most influential or treasured in your life? Which books built you? Which author's complete works would you take with you to a desert island if you could only choose one? And what would be your "bible"?

Coming home to ourselves

(1500 word article, first published in JUNO)

I am an old-school Romantic. At university I fell in love twice: first with my husband and then the European Romantics and American Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, Schelling, Coleridge etc. Through their nearly 200 year old words I discovered a vision of the future so fresh, so relevant that it could have been written yesterday: a belief in the transformation of society, of self-reliance, on the importance of spirituality, of the wonder of the human experience and natural world. ‘Him the past instructs, him the future invites’ wrote Emerson in 1837 – “mankind must go backwards to achieve inner unity before he can progress further”. This I believe is key to any transformation. Not a top-down political manifesto, not a one size fits all global solution, there could never be one. The answers we will find will be different. It is a modern western myth to believe in a universal panacea. To find the solutions to how to live, we must first return to our roots: our human roots, our ecological roots and our ancestral roots. Solutions less deeply based will be merely rooted in reaction, denial or rejection. We have run away from home and lost the keys along the way. I invite you to come home…

We have been taught that in leaving home we find our independence. Maybe so, and maybe not. We have become a rootless, isolated society of individuals wandering from relationship to relationship, chasing high paying jobs across the globe in a society serviced by professionals. In returning home we recover the true meaning of eikos, the Greek word which forms the root of both economy and ecosphere in English. These strands have been separated for too long in our culture, alienating the economy from the environment by removing both from the domestic sphere. We begin to notice that once we focus on our microcosm (our individual homes) we become more aware of our macrocosm (the Earth as our home). Back and forth the awareness of one naturally infiltrates our awareness, sense of responsibility and deepening commitment and love for the other. People are beginning to recognise this through deep reflection. Gradually more and more are turning away from institutions, with their anonymity and lack of human scale, and returning home. So many of the movements we see emerging now are offshoots of the same desire: a desire to come home to ourselves, our roots, our families and communities, to imbue the basic act of living with meaning and depth. Supporting local producers, growing organic food, energy self-sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, home birth, home education, self-employment, self-building, all these and more are ways of coming home.

With this people are (re)discovering…

Interdependency, family, rootedness, community, simplicity, self-knowledge, involvement, exploring and creating, self-sufficiency, self-empowerment….

This is what I believe deep human fulfilment is based on. This is the well-spring from which we draw our joy and comfort. This should be the yardstick to judge any social change by, rather than material possessions or financial “security”. If we are rooted in ourselves, in our families, in the world and in the ever-changing cycles of nature then we are truly rich.

Homes are status symbols in our present culture. We pay them lip service as being the heart of family life, but this is not the reality for many. All the major events of our life: birth, marriage celebration, illness, death, food production, learning and work used to take place at home. Now they are looked after in institutional settings, saving us the bother of doing them ourselves; we hand ourselves over to the experts in professional surroundings. What was previously a place built with our own hands with local materials, according to local custom, with the help of the family and community is now constructed by contractors. We pay with money for what we used to do ourselves. When we commute for our shopping, our services, our work and schools, communities become shells, places where people sleep and pass through, but not where they live out the fullness of their lives. We no longer have communities, but networks. As Gatto observes in Dumbing us Down “Networks [rather than communities] do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is they cannot.”

Through institutions we have created taboos, great fears of birth, death, even learning, as these activities become hidden away, no longer a part of daily family life. They become great mysteries which we are no longer initiated in and so we hand them over to the experts. Institutions have taken over so many of the roles previously served in our homes. Modernity has given us hospitals, offices, schools, nursing homes and orphanages. They play the same role, but without the depth of human connection that we receive at home.

We cannot change society from the outside, we cannot force others to change. Our institutions and culture are the way they are because of what we believe about the world. We live what we believe. We believe we are vulnerable and need protection and so we have armies to save our bodies, churches to save our souls and insurance companies to save us from fire and theft. We believe we are what we have, so we accumulate more and more money, possessions, diplomas. We believe that we are separate so we have ghettos and classes and the chosen few in all areas of our lives. We believe that there is not enough, and so we will fight tooth and claw for what we deserve. We believe that education can be made compulsory. None of this will or can change until we, the people who create and support this system with our energy, change. There is no other way: anything else is superficial tinkering. When we give our energy (be it time, money, creativity, thought or in any other form) we give our support to its existence. We currently expend vast amounts of energy racing about serving and fighting the needs of others: commuting to jobs, children to schools, endlessly travelling, exhaustedly chasing our own tails in the rat race. To change anything seems impossible, just getting through the days is hard enough. We are at the beginning of an energy crisis in more ways than one.

Now, what if we were to conserve this energy and focus it on what really matters to us? What would this be? For most it would be their homes, families, friends, communities and local environments. If each of us were to look after our own patch, not out of fear as we currently do, but out of love, honour and gratitude. Not for us to worry about the rest of the world: not save the children, but our children; not condemn the hoodies but engage with the teens in our village; not refer to the problem of the elderly but our parents. We need to start not with economics nor policies, but real people on a human scale, working “as if people mattered”. As John Taylor Gatto says: “Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave or Marty – a community will call its [homeless] by their names. It makes a difference.” Then real progress might happen. This progress would deeply rooted in caring and compassion for real people, by real people. With the political and financial pressure and “the ills of bigness” removed, real reform for institutions might be possible. Less energy will be needed because we are not racing around all the time, we will be locally based and responsible for ourselves rather than the responsibility of the state. Earning less and spending less, our lives will not be dictated to such an extent by the vagaries of the global economy. Then we will have enough time to breathe, and to see perhaps a little more clearly where our futures lie and how to move forward. When we withdraw our energy, take back our power then we are free to choose how to use it creatively. By living Gandhi’s motto, “be the change you want to see in the world”, we can make our contribution and pave the way for others to follow. More recently Gregg Braden wrote that each individual who lives change, however small, “becomes a living bridge – both the pioneer and midwife - for every other person with the courage to choose the same path. Each time someone makes the same choice, it’s a little easier because another person did it first.” By living an example we shine a light for those who might fear breaking out of their old ways of living, but if we have no other effect than doing no harm to ourselves and those we are close to we have done well. The biggest step we can take is the smallest one that we think impossible.

Coming home might feel traumatic or mundane. Whichever it shows us the best and worst of ourselves and others. Coming home means no more running, nowhere to hide. It is a letting down of pretence and illusion. Not every community or home of origin is a haven or nurturing place. But then we are free to make communities of intention which will nurture and support us. Families, whether consciously formed composites or blood relations show us in miniature the struggles of human interaction and diversity. Home might seem a utopian concept, but it is the crucible of human interaction, a literal and metaphorical shelter from the storm, amongst people who are, for better or worse, our people. Families are a common bond between all cultures and faiths, the basic currency that opens out to embrace the world as we are, rather than manipulating us to drop our differences for the pretence of homogeneity which a nation state requires. If we do not start from the bottom up, from our beginnings, to build a strong foundation for a brighter eternal now, where then shall we start?