Radical Sitting in Clissold Park

Here is a photo from our Radical Sitting on the 19th. It was really great! The night before the event the flat filled up—with no space left and Jeremy camping in the kitchen, transforming it into a kind of social grotto. The next morning a group of us gathered in Clissold Park. We held council, prayed together with word, sound, rhythm, song, tobacco offering and sage smoke. We honoured and celebrated all the other Radical Sittings going on around the world, feeling the power and bigness in that knowledge. Physical red tape symbolically & playfully demarcated our radical zone. [England is being increasingly strangled by a culture of restriction, red tape & paranoid regulation. A generation of children are growing up metaphorically wrapped in suffocating cotton wool, distanced from the opportunity to develop their own survival instincts & their own genuine creative strengths.] The weather was typically British (recalling years of experience of British picnics including soggy marmite sandwiches and holding onto everything to prevent it from blowing away!)—every climate fitted into our colourful session: brisk cold breeze, heavy rain downpours, hot sun, thick cloud, everything. A little ladybird joined us for the entire event—faithfully staying with us for several hours, reminding us of wildness in all its guises and sizes.

It was a public spot—people walked, cycled and drove by, welcome to join us. We met by a boarded-up house with a potent history: activists lived there for a while and made it beautiful and grew things and got the community involved. They pledged to leave if and when the building was needed for another use. But they were forcibly evicted anyway, and all the plants and vegetables and fruit bushes destroyed and the house boarded up for no one to use. There are still roses poignantly growing up by the fading door.

A beautiful feather tied to a central pole blew proudly in the playful changing breeze. A bowl of water, a red clay sculpture and a flame of fire represented the other elements. Laughter bellowed from the very outset, as well as the sincerity and insight to come. One guy showed up with an incredible painted face and a smart jacket—a creature of both worlds. The Radical Joy flag flapped and turned heads, looking more and more radical by the minute. Claudia and I wore the T-shirts over our jumpers making us look hilariously large and bumpy and we laughed. In our circle we shared about wildness—wilderness gone, wildness honoured and wildness explored—inside and out. The badgers, the salmon, the rapid “development”, the losses, the ways of farming, of relating to land… And just as importantly we looked for wildness in ourselves and in relation to our culture and found it to be intertwined with authenticity. Wildness not as a mere reactive rebellion to the status quo for the sake of it, but rather a breath of fresh authenticity within it—be that loud or quiet, motion-full or still.

We each had time alone. Then coming back together to share our stories. They were wonderful, some dramatic, some subtle. Both me and Alastair had felt pulled to climb the public fences around the lakes but had not had the guts on our individual walks due to observation and circumstance. So we decided to do so together. We climbed over the fence, (me taking a rather embarrassing and spectacular tumble, limbs in all directions!) and fished some litter out of the pond. A police man cycled by and stopped to approach us but then saw the Radical Joy flag and group of supporters and decided to let us be! I ripped down some genuine red tape the authorities had tied to the fence (as if the fence was not a statement enough to keep out!) and played with it with Alastair. When we returned to the group-hearth we had created we made the Radical Bird out of the reclaimed red tape!

There are no photos of the latter part as I was the one behind the camera and also the one doing the fence scaling. Still the others should give some kind of feel. [Please let me know if you would like me to send any of the photos in their original larger file size, letting me know specifically which ones, and I will be more than happy to do so.]

I had a look at the Radical website and love love love everyone’s photos—how rich, what spirit!! And how powerful it is to be reincorporating our blind spots in the form of wounded places, externally and internally, such that everyone can once again feel the warm hug of our vast belonging. And looking forward to connecting yet more..