Transition Whidbey

My friend Vicki Robin is a Whidbey Island neighbor who is quite an inspiration. Her book Your Money Or Your Life was one of my main inspirations a decade ago for some big changes in my own life that got me on the road to a more grounded lifestyle and a better sense of right livelihood. She is also the creator of the Conversation Cafe, a fun and innovative model of local community-building that gets people together across ideological divides. 

 

Lately Vicki is putting a lot of creative energy into Transition Whidbey, a local initiative to make Whidbey Island a model community for low energy and carbon footprint living. Accustomed to a lot of travel in her work, she has taken my own Circling Home commitment to heart and is cutting way back on her air travel this year. This is not an easy assignment when one's community of work is global in scope. Her efforts, in the face of these challenges, are in turn inspiring me and we are starting our own conversation about what we are learning, where we are benefitting from the effort, and where we are running into real obstacles and challenges.

In her latest Transition Whidbey bulletin, Vicki points out how quickly issues of energy transformation are moving to the front burner, raising the stakes on our need for personal transformation in response. Oil prices have risen from $80/barrel to $110/barrel in just a few short months since Transition Whidbey was formed. Gas prices are pushing $4.00/gallon. Food prices are also skyrocketing as a result of the falling dollar and as an unintended consequence of the shift to bio-fuel production on much of our agricultural land. The words "recession" and even "depression" are being spoken openly in reference to a teetering global economy.

Like me, Vicki is determined to look for the opportunities and the silver lining in these troubling trends. As she says in her post, "We are IN the transition, and together we can use the push of necessity and the pull of opportunity to stimulate our rising springtime energies to dream - and do."

Where are YOU finding cause for hope and opportunity? - not necessarily within these mega-trends, but within your own life, and within your own efforts to respond creatively with changes large and small? Where are you finding success in your effort to reign in excessive or unnecessary travel, and what vistas is that opening up for you? Where are you finding unexpected new opportunities for community and recreation (re-creation) closer to home. I'd love to begin harvesting your stories, and adding them to mine.