On Where You Belong.
Last week, in my favourite Eureka project so far, I interviewed the brother-founders of allplants, a plant-based food delivery kitchen based in Seven Sisters. It was that Friday when the sun was so hot it seemed to take on substance, so we decided to hold the interviews in a dappled café, in the park near their offices.
To get to this park you have to walk past an actual tower of rubbish. The tower is a cone, 30 feet high and 60 feet around. It's literally in-credible, and can best be comprehended as a kind of meta-bin, the result of what happens when your bin at home gets tipped into a bigger bin on a truck, and then all of those bins need somewhere to go. So they convene as a Babel of waste, stinking and tottering over its builders, that by the way have to be continually douse it in water unless it - what? I didn’t ask. The point is, last Friday the founders walked me to the park - a vision of the world we want - by steering me past a vision of the world we face. It’s nauseating, bracing, and it makes you want to do more.
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Two days later, my partner and I found ourselves at Extinction Rebellion’s East London uprising. We were on our way back from the shops; in my backpack I had a whole leg of lamb, cold and heavy like a family secret. We took a road we don't normally take, and there, behind the kind of gate that gets padlocked by a developer and left for years, was a garden. A team had broken up the concrete of what developers call a "meanwhile space", covered the floor in wood chipping, and filled filled FILLED it with plants. We walked in amongst edible things, pretty things, alien ferns looming over our heads, and smells and butterflies, and smiles, and peace. Someone told us, they'd done it all in six weeks.
Imagine, what could happen to London if we gave it six weeks. It makes you want to do more.
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I always want to do more, or the most. And because I want to do more, I sometimes end up doing less, or nothing - for one meal means nothing compared to a banquet, and one takeaway coffee cup means nothing compared to the Pacific Plastic Gyre. It's a drop in the ocean.
But, as the last line of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas effortlessly tosses away,
"What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?"
As I dragged my guilty ass around these collectives of good people, waiting to be found out and cast out, I was greeted with something else. Not something as biblical as forgiveness, for that would be to start with the idea that I was there to be judged. More simply, it was acceptance. Without question or vetting. Both groups of people had two principles evident in the way they spoke to us, the way they acted to each other, their very structure:
You are welcome, as you are.
Your act has meaning.
Which is where we have to start, isn't it? When we're all responsible for a sliver of the Seven Sisters filthpeak? When we all live, constantly, in compromise? When I was little, my Mum knew not to shout me off the climbing frame but rather, to invite me to join her on the ground. So many of our debates are about correction, and if that's the attitude you cop, it will eventually come home to settle within you. What I saw this week was a paradigm shift toward invitation: whoever you are, come join us. It's really nice here.
You belong.
We belong in the company of those that welcome us. We belong, ultimately, in the company of ourselves.
We must, if we are to belong on this earth.
Hello (now in the PRESTIGIOUS number 2 slot),
I wanted to apologise for not sending you a letter last week, but it wouldn't make sense in the context of the above. Apart from being super busy, I came to feel when last Friday rolled around that I only had half a thought. As it turned out, a few days later it had formed into a whole one. Perhaps that means something for what we expect from ourselves.
A lot is happening. Two jobs weaving in parallel, which seems to be working quite well, then of course there's the Eureka website - if you've seen it and said nice things, thank you so much; if you haven't, here it is. I've got some small-but-big artistic news, too, but that'll have to wait. There's a big day ahead.
Inputs.
XR: There is trouble ahead, but there is a place for you, and true purpose to follow.
Louis Theroux: Surviving America's Most Hated Family: Louis' third visit to the Westboro Baptist Church. In the people the stay, the people that come, the people that have left, you see the same power: the pull to belong.
That's it. I hope you've wrestled the week to the ground, or least given it a few strokes to calm it. If you like what you read, please pass it on to someone you like to read it too. If you ARE that person,
I am,
James