Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH
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and a ‘religious’ or spiritual dimension is, after all, one that has a long and troubled history, which is deconstructed critically, for example, by Timothy Fitzgerald.13 While I do not wish to enter into this academic debate here, I mention it because it provides a context to some of the dividing lines that Prentice herself points out, such as between ‘science and technology (outer focused) and religion and the humanities (inner focused)’.14 This split between outer and inner, with the latter risking to be portrayed as ‘airy-fairy’ or a waste of time, is reflected in some of the variations adopted in the naming of groups within Transition initiatives, with ‘Well-being’ or – indeed – Inner Transition being preferred to ‘Heart and Soul’, ‘perhaps feeling that the words “heart” and “soul” might be contentious’,15 because of their connection to the ‘dismal’ realm of spirituality and religion. The moving of Transition across this divide is clearly one that creates resistance and some difficulty: ‘there are hotly contested views, and strong feelings, around spirituality in particular. [...] From this point of view, allowing any spiritual presence within your movement could be seen as asking for trouble’.16
While acknowledging this challenge, Inner Transition equally weaves into the moving of Transition a dimension of experience that ought not to be censored out of prejudice, as long as its expression can happen tactfully: ‘For many people, spirituality can be explicit as well as implicit, and their spiritual life is central to their personal resilience. If we are to be inclusive, it is perhaps necessary both that no one in any sense ‘pushes’ his or her spiritual approach, but, equally, that this whole area of human experience is not unwelcome’.17
More generally, this inclusion is deemed one that can ultimately provide further momentum to the moving of Transition, as ‘the qualities that [Transition] calls forth – a move from materialism to values such as community, care, love and creativity; from arrogance and inequality to compassion – are the very stuff that spirituality was always meant to be about in the first place’.18 In other words, one could infer that Inner Transition gives a standing into the moving of Transition to the cultivation of embodied or discursive practices through which subjects are created, for whom it will be easier to resonate with the other concerns existing in the folds of Transition. Thus, to someone that has received some exposure to discursive and embodied traditions (such as shamanism or ecopsychology) that give a voice to the experience of connection with the other-than-human presences in an ecosystem, the practice of gardening or foraging can be a further validation of those attachments, providing them with greater coherence and resonance across the individual’s experience of his or her life.19
Another way of articulating the constitutive relatedness of Inner Transition to the moving of Transition as a whole is by focusing on the engagement it supports with discursive and material practices, ‘that are expected to generate ethical forms of conduct’.20 If we understand ethics not so much as the hiatus between what ought to be and what is, but rather as a process that is facilitated by particular relations in our lives,21 then we can begin to craft our understanding of Inner Transition along similar lines. This is perhaps easier to grasp by thinking back at instances where one might have been told by one’s parent to stay away from ‘bad company’. The parent’s concern for the connections through which his/her child experiences sociality reflects a folk understanding of moral behaviour as something that is furthered and facilitated by particular relations, beyond an individual’s atomistic acts of will: the life-world we inhabit defines us as much as we think we construct it through our actions. In recalling his studies on deviance, Becker equally observes how seemingly ‘radical’ choices and behaviours become acceptable after a step-wise process of building tighter attachments to a particular cultural milieu, so that a biological man does not simply wake up and decide to undergo a sex change, but that decision is one that matures after exposure to literatures, formal and informal mentors, the trappings of life lived ‘as a woman’, and so on.22
In much the same way, Inner Transition seems to rest on this understanding of ethical behaviour as a problem of facilitation, rather than compliance. Through what attachments can people gather the ability to follow and flow with the moving of Transition (not just intellectually, but through embodied resonance and felt connection)? Inner Transition, in revealing the relatedness to that moving of forms of corporeality and discourses that would otherwise risk being overlooked, enhances the possibility for individuals to surround themselves with ‘Transition things’, making the moving of Transition more tangible and inclusive.
‘Inner work’: implicit and explicit
The dynamism involved in the effort to weave ‘outer’ into ‘inner’ Transition and vice versa (so as not to turn incipient difference into an unbridgeable rift) is reflected in the frenzy of different experiments sparked by this ongoing tension.
‘Inner Transition-type’ activities in a Transition initiative have sometimes involved the direct cultivation of ‘inner practices’. This can entail, for instance, sessions or gatherings based on ‘The Work That Reconnects’. This is a set of practices that have been popularised by activist and writer Joanna Macy in a book with Molly Brown.23 In that book, they outline various activities, rituals and exercises to cultivate particular sensitivities and inclinations in a conscious manner and bring these to our relating in the world. In the authors’ own words, the Work That Reconnects aims to address the following aspirations:
• to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world
• to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing
• to provide people with concepts – from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions – which illumine this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives
• to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms
• to enable people to embrace the Great Turning[24] as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy
• to enable people to support each other in clarifying their intention, and affirming their commitment to the healing of the world.25
To give a better sense of what a space directed at the explicit cultivation of Work That Reconnects practices ‘feels’ like, a brief anecdote may help. When I arrived in Totnes, the Inner Transition group was meeting around significant seasonal transitions (the solstice and equinox). The one meeting I did attend was held to match the Autumn Equinox, and the passage from summer to autumn. On that occasion, participants sitting in a circle were encouraged to introduce themselves by focusing on their own connection to the changing seasons, and express gratitude for what the summer had brought to them. In my own experience as an academic practicing a moderately sedentary, indoors lifestyle, seasons tend to be marked by the beginning and end of teaching terms, by the adoption of daylight-saving time, and the general sleepiness that sets on as days get shorter and colder, getting in the way of sustained academic work. Other participants, however, offered a number of observations stemming from their own experiences of growing an allotment, describing in detail relationships with plants and animals. Upon hearing these accounts, I was confronted with a novel perspective on what the change of seasons could mean, which therefore offered an opportunity to conceive a different form of relating to the season’s passing. Subsequently, the circle split into pairs, taking turns listening to each other respond to a prompt about what one was harvesting in his/her life at the turn of seasons.
Both of these exercises are described by Joanna Macy. In the first case, the sharing circle is meant to help a ‘coming from gratitude’, establishing a ‘wholesome, generative ground for all that follows’,26 as well as to allow the surfacing of ‘our pain for the world, because knowing what we treasure triggers the knowing of how threatened it is’.27 The second type of exercise, centred on active listening, is described under the heading of ‘despair work’, and aims to ‘uncover our pain for the world, and honour it. We bring to awareness our deep inner responses to the suffering of our fellow beings and