There was an email sent out at the beginning of the summer inviting people to help build the tree houses, the tree house gallery had a very open inviting face, the message was one of co-creation. A simple online agenda could be accessed and people were invited to fill in the workshop, performance or talk they wanted to hold in the space. When I received the email I imagined myself spending the entire summer in the boughs learning and laughing with people but it was only at the very end of the project that I actually made it down there. I went to a talk called the urgent need for revolution in our universities; it took place in one of the tree houses. The talk was, as is so often the case, a one-to-many set up, an expert sharing his viewpoint and knowledge and this lead later to a discussion. The person talking was an academic, using academic language and frames of reference; the audience was a mix of all kinds of people. The tone and frame were set, then, imperceptibly to most at a certain level with assumptions about problem solving as perhaps the most valuable way to approach meaning. The people who took part in the discussion were those who felt comfortable with the kind of language the academic uses and were comfortable or able to engage in the frames of reference. As is the case with most events like this, only a small handful of the people present actually said anything to the group.
The discussion covered academic institutions, society and environmental destruction and I asked a question about why we were framing the ways we were talking in terms of problems. A few people responded quickly to put me right, Ahh we don’t mean problems in the day to day sense, it’s an academic way of thinking, frame a problem and then think about how to solve it. This for me is at the heart of the matter, when people get together to describe a specific context, share ideas and think together about how it can be different and better than it is now, an openness to different ways of making meaning seems fundamentally important and framing everything in terms of problems that need to be solved is a big part of the kind of thinking that has created so much destruction of environment, nature and social relationships. Other people in the talk were keen to put me right about my misunderstanding of what can sometimes be an effective thinking tool. I was thinking of a quote I had heard attributed to Einstein ‘the same thinking that created the problem can’t be used to solve the problem’ it had come up many times during a recent Permaculture for Groups course I’d attended at Ragan’s Lane Farm. I persisted by asking, are there other ways we can think about this? and in an attempt to perform the possibility of this I said ‘why don’t we ask the tree?’
We were arranged on chairs on a platform a few meters up in the air surrounding the huge berth of an old tree, a beautiful space. After this suggestion , I did actually ask the tree and wondered what kinds of listening I could use to hear it’s contribution. The conversation moved and flowed differently and people who hadn’t spoken before reflected from their own points of view.