| The Fairfield Farmhouse is something we need to grasp and hold tight to. This is a unique opportunity and is timely for today’s political and economic climate.We have the opportunity to build something, not just in the physical sense, but in the social sense. Our garden and farmhouse project has come through different troughs and highs of development, busts of energy excitement and production then low’s, personality clashes and widening differences. These are normal things in incipient projects. People find things out about themselves and others and things sometimes become to personal and cloud over issues that become locked and unresolvable.
One of the problems was the garden had no real sense of where it was going, Sure we wanted a garden the community could enjoy, we wanted to do up the building ourselves. Which is all very good but to sustain ourselves we need more than that. We need structure and context, a vision of what we are trying to achieve, not just next year, but the next 10, 15, 20 years. What you are reading is work towards this idea In this work here is no reason that we need to agree with or even like each other, but we need to agree with the basic principals of where we are collectively heading. These ideas do not need to be controversial, they just need to be wide enough to allow folk to develop and share their own ideas but also to add some purpose to the health of the whole project and community People are very reluctant to spread their time in different directions these days. We need to create projects that can justify our precious time, that are rooted in ideas that are relevant to ordinary people and affirm challenges without taking away the voices of ordinary people. How infract do we educate ourselves for the 21st century. How do we build post industrial institutions to gather the energy to do this. We have much of the process in place but much more has to be done to establish the human space that will allow interaction with these processes around more people and tangible ideas. No easy task in a hyper distracted society but a challenge in the collaboration of ideas, of developing process towards human goals and understanding. For this we need vision, commitment and dedication. High stakes, but the rewards could be fantastic, or if you like awesome. |
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