Welcoming 2025 — shaping intentions around community and play

learnings to activate for 2025…

The goodbyes…

Goodbye lonely heros, hello collective wisdom…. It’s time for the hero to retire — their story has run out of paper … let go of the need to be centre stage. If we want to go fast we go alone, if we want to go far we go together. This level of complexity requires a collect approach to vision a world we know in our hearts is possible.

“Since the first sword emerged from the first forge, humans have been struggling to find the right social technology to balance the needs of the flesh, land and overpower tech. The only thing that can meeting this challenge is right story, which must never be authored by individuals, but crowdsourced over time by people in communicative relationship with the land.” Tyson Yunkaporta — Right Story, Wrong Story

“If we don’t reconnect with the land, with place as the source of wisdom and knowledge, we risk ‘wrong story” — Tyson Yunkaporta — Right Story, Wrong Story.

If your work is rooted in place and this breeze blows your chime bells, I can highly recommend the Power of Place learning journey from Really Regenerative — learn how to design and activate regenerative centres of energy through place-sourced patterns and processes. It’s a life-centric awakening.

Discover your place — connect with your community

Having spent the last few years learning and working on regenerative development and place-sourced design, I came to a realisation that I have not engaged with my own localised neighbourhood. Beyond the group that does regular beach clean ups, I have no idea who gathers to support life in this small sprawling ‘village’ by the sea that I call home. I have no connection to the local community or its groups. These are the energy hubs and capillaries of hope on the outer margins of the system so I set an intention to make more effort to connect in 2025.

Wrong story — Last week, as I sat working from home at my desk overlooking the street, I heard a cry and looked up to see someone lying on the pavement. I grabbed my coat (it was 4 degrees) and a front door key and raced outside. A man had fallen over and was unable to get up. He was (he said later) around 80 years old. Another women and myself helped him to his feet — his hand was bleeding and he was shaky. I gathered his shopping bag contents which was heavy with tins and potatoes. It transpired that he’d walked to the local supermarket which was half a mile away but felt dizzy on the return and lost his footing. He was living along and so we walked him home to be sure he made it safely. Going into his home to make him a cup of tea was heartbreaking. This was a vision into just how broken our system is! He should not have been living alone — even though this was a sheltered housing property. He was living in a chair. The place was unkept with food stored on the floor and nothing in the cupboards. This beautiful human being had no one and no community to support him. We got him settled and made him a cup of tea. I left with a lump in my throat. I was able to call the council and alert them that he had a fall and thankfully the warden who answered knew about his circumstances and said that they would ensure someone came and looked in on him. This is not how human’s should be living — separated in tiny isolated boxes with no connection to other people, no intergenerational communication and no communal spaces or gardens. We can’t expect councils to take on the role of human connection and care, we need to heal our communities and reconnect with our true nature.

Right Story — in an effort to further connect with the local community intiatives in my place, I discovered that the local Sompting Estate have a community farm, nature trail and orchard just over a mile from my house. So I went to see them. It was inspiring to hear about the work of this inclusive charity group Sustainable Sussex aimed at supporting those who find it difficult to enter the workplace or who suffer from social isolation or mental health issues. Here was a community space where you can help on a small farm that produces food for the local food banks, and learn a little animal husbandry looking after the sheep and a pony, where they offer wellbeing sessions, cooking sessions and more. There is even a small wildlife area — pond and fen land — where an Little Egrit casually wandered as we gazed in awe at the beautful wilderness. Meanwhile the Shetland pony who was on a walk with us lightly grazed. I left feeling a huge sense of hope and an intention to carve out some time to go back and help.

Serious about Play

Outside of the wonderful community spaces such as that being convened at Fen Farm Sompting, I am reminded how important it is for us to rethink how and what we teach our children. Moreover, how and what we ‘model’ to our children as adults really, really matters. The story of separation has cut right through ‘play’ and ‘learning’, and this division extends further into the division of ‘work’ from ‘recreation’. What is ‘work/life balance’ anyway ? It’s an ugly expression that speaks to idea of work as drudgery, a treadmill — as lifeless. In this stereotype, non work activity — is reframed as a holiday, an escape (from what exactly?). Yet our ‘holidays’ become ways to ‘consume’ other’s places and cultures as a tourist. (and that’s another story of separation). And then I am reminded that the whole concept of ‘holidays’ derives from a world of privilege.

The separation of ‘play’ story also cuts into a mind and body separation. Play has also been commodified. There are studies that have found that the online gaming taps into the part of our brain that forms addictions.

“Games now ruled humanity. Mobile games that consisted of little more than tapping on the screen when a box popped up were destroying people’s lives. Dragon quests with thirty million streaming subscribers.” ― Richard Powers, Playground

In the story of wholeness, ‘play’ is rooted in how we learn — it is the connective tissue of collective wisdom. It is core to life’s evolution — play is learning and it’s fun. But playing and playfulness are segregated off from the main business of learning. How can we bring play back into wholeness? How can we reignite the joy of learning in mainstream schools? Start playing in the classroom seems like a good first step, take the class out of the room seems like another good move … I’m not a teacher but I know there are teachers and educationalist out there trying to do exactly that. This is a shout out of gratitude to the pioneers in this such as Thought Box Education and Green School Bali as visionaries of action.

Play is embodied! Think dancing, sports, games — they all bring the body and mind back into relationship. When I worked as a watersports coach we mostly taught using games — every skill the students learnt was ‘disguised’ in a game. We called it ‘serious play’ or ‘serious fun’.

I am grateful to play tools such as Tom Mansfield’s ‘Cards for Life’ as they are really helpful means to bring lightness into depth and a kind of ‘play’ into the serious regenerative work of living systems actualisation and culture change.

Play is fun and so is reading and listening to stories. But we even tend to separate factual books from fiction when it comes to what’s considered good for learning — with fiction framed as the lesser valued option. Reading fiction is like a guilty pleasure — a frivoulous crime in these dark and urgent times. But…. but … but

I was that kid with a torch reading through the night underneath the bedclothes bleary eyed on the way to school desperate to get back to the story. And still NOW I find fiction to be one of my greatest sources of learning about the world, about culture about history. Fictional stories are my way of connecting to science, to knowledge, to understanding the past in a way that the factual text books or documentary simply don’t reach.

My top three most influential fiction reads from 2024 are:

Any Human Power — Manda Scott, this epic tale of modern times taps into so many threads of my current thinking and learning. I can’t recommend it enough.

Playground — Richard Powers because it is the story of the ocean, and a story of the deep entanglement of play and life — with brilliant characterisation and Powers brings in technology and AI to his novels in a way that opens up the postive possibility of tech.

“Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smart, teach it to play.” page 59

And finally Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner — because of its clever genre bending device of spy thriller as a philosophical treatise pondering the early years of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.

If you do find this post and read it… please do send me comments — I don’t write much and I am trying to ditch the need to be perfect…. hope you enjoyed…. and feel moved to invite more serious play into your life… Here are some beautful scenes of nature at play in my place.