As a gardener, Winter Solstice holds much more meaning for me than the conventional new year marker of January 1.  Even here in Southern California's year-round growing season, we observe the slowing of plant growth into semi-dormancy as the Solstice approaches.  We witness the acceleration into new growth once the Solstice is past.  Animals know it too -- my chickens are resuming laying.  The Winter Solstice is the crossover point, the planet's annual marker of change.

Some years I join friends at a Winter Solstice fire at a local community garden.  As part of the evening we write down one thing we are releasing from the old year, and something we wish to bring alive in the new year.  Then we slip the paper with our intention into the fire pit together with some white sage leaves or perhaps some rosemary.  This beautiful ceremony always gets me thinking, at a rather early point in the season by conventional calendar terms, about my personal goals for the new year -- "Resolutions" if you will.

A multitude of seasonal reflections on compost, recipes, and cooking -- how these might change for a powerdown world.

In her visit to Los Angeles, Vandana Shiva reminded us how Gandhi had the symbolic actions -- sitting in protests -- but with that he also had the cotton -- the tangible actions.  Dr Shiva said that along with the protests, people need to grow food, to build connections within their communities, to make changes in their lives.

This weekend, in support of the folks at Occupy Wall Street and similar in other major financial centers (including Occupy LA here in Los Angeles), I put the full content of "Economic Resilience" online for free readership. This how-to document for building local community resilience has been freshly updated with new links and additional ideas.

Some other thoughts, specifically addressed to the #Occupy protesters and the themes that are recurring in signs and posters:

This Saturday, several of the Transition groups in the greater Los Angeles area will be hosting local sites for 350.org's latest international rally.  "Moving Planet" will focus attention on the need to move beyond fossil fuels.  Here's how we're doing it in my own local neighborhod, plus some resources offered to fellow organizers.

Here in my local neighborhood, we wanted to merge what we are doing locally with the Moving Planet theme.  We're focusing on solutions:  we're holding a bicycle ride between several of the community gardens which have been sprouting up in our neighborhood.  The ride ends up being approximately a 7 mile loop.  Since many of the gardens are in schools, including an elementary school, we mapped a route on bicycle-friendly streets, with only gentle hills so that full families might participate.

My name is Joanne and I am a knitter. (Yep, it's that serious)  For quite some time I have made excuses, telling myself that "knitting was one of those reskilling things" and it was a powerdown craft. But I got to thinking about it seriously this week.

Here, in the middle of urban Los Angeles, knitting is a pretty elitist hobby. It might be a "reskilling type of thing" good for necessary clothing-making somewhere out on a farm where there are plenty of goats and sheep. Or if I took to raising angora rabbits. Because when the serious hiccups in the economy come, when the darker transportation issues of peak oil set in, the boutique yarn stores I patronize today likely won't be around anymore.

In Sacred Economy, Charles Eisenstein poses the seemingly outrageous idea that money should be sacred. In this he means that a good bit of the mess we’re currently in is because we have lost this sense of the sacred and the special – the connected and interdependent nature of transactions between people.

Eisenstein advocates for a moneyless or “gift culture.” He asserts that, anthropologically, people didn’t have barter transactions as we think of them today. Rather, he says, the transactions were more like gift circles, where borrowing and lending and buying and selling and gifting were virtually indistinguishable.

A status report about Transition in Los Angeles

In early writings about the Transition movement, one of the guidelines was to "Let it go where it needs to go." Don't attempt to control the growth of your budding initiative or local group. Allow it to develop -- "organically" if you will -- however it needs to.  Given the unique dynamic between individuals on our initiating core teams, given the particular issues in our local communities, given the preexisting status of transition-oriented activity around us, what needs to happen next in one localle has been quite different from what needs to happen next in another.

I've already written about the early development of Transition activity here in the greater L.A. area. (part I, part II) At this point in time, our city hub is a little over 2.5 years old. Next month will mark 3 years since the initial public gathering when we first began using the word "Transition" for what we have been doing in the initiating group since 2005.

In these three years, Transition action in L.A. has grown from one active local group with a pretty little food garden, to a city hub (TLA) plus eight-going-on-eleven active local groups holding public meetings under the banner of the Transition movement.

Here in Los Angeles, we currently have between seven and twelve local Transition groups (depending upon at what stage of development you wish to begin counting them).  And we're eager for more.  The nature of our greater L.A. area is that eventually we will need to have in place a vast network of local groups, each neighborhood working on this process.

I'm frequently being asked for tips on how to get a new local group started.  As I sat down this week to write it out yet again, it seemed like the kind of info that might be of interest to other groups (both Transition and not-yet-Transition groups).  So, I decided to post it here.  If you're contemplating beginning a Transition group in your local neighborhood ...

It's a no-brainer to be attacking consumerism.  "Zero waste" is a concept that even massive city departments are embracing.  "Unshopping" is no longer unfamiliar.  People are finally beginning to get that the "Reduce, reuse, recycle" jingle has more than just the final element.  Hooray!

Meanwhile, within the Transition movement, we understand that we must change not only our outer, physical world, but our inner landscape as well.  That means the psychological and spiritual aspects of this great turning within society.  We are faced with changing our outlook, our world view.

I have been inventing, scheduling, and organizing public events for 20 years, 5 of those years in the topics of the Transition movement.  And consumerism is a huge issue -- Consuming events.  I'm not talking about how low-waste your events are.  (At this point in time, striving for low-waste should be second nature.  Striving for powerdown events whenever possible is necessary too.)  Now I'm shifting to the inner landscape:  Do your audiences "consume" your events?