Our story
In the start of the Pandemic a rota watering local Memorial Garden in Battersea grew, as the roses dried out. Rather than denial and business as usual mode, as advised, I found friends who helped spruce up the space that looked sadly undignified, alcoholics and drug addicts peeing on the World War Two Monument.
Charlie
Captain Tom appreciated Community Care london that I was volunteering for and included some of us on his instagram in April.
"under the shelter of each other people survive.”
I was beginning to learn the power of community and meeting peopleI hadn't realised lived near me. Some were teachers from local school, busy, but still helped bring out a watering can, some nurses and volunteers, while others gave it their utmost. Soon I began to realise it is.. possible in spite of all to feel more rather than less inspired, and on Earth Day I knocked on a few doors and we all agreed that the shelter we need is our Earth. We had roses and these all mysteriously failed growing, watered or not. I spoke to local, Tim West, who is an OBE actor and he immediately reported: 'Have you noticed the birds are looking at us in a different way?!" I had said the same the previous day.
Tim, Donna, Will, Theo, Marie, Geraldine, Frank, Pru, Catriona, Helene..
Names not revealed as we are a collective community
"we support and shelter each other”
We are people who fell together
We are from Berlin, Paris, South East Iran, Scotland professional space and time travellers who met this lady, our guardian angel, who insists on us 'watering and caring for the 'soil as our soul' Andrei caught this night snap in the rain of her at work. His blur is awareness of unfocussed suburban lives.
Our family-run drawing workshops, ecological walkabouts, entymologist extravaganzas and we have an artist in residence from Edinburgh. A business company where the business is what time the sun shines where, and has a long tradition (back to Heliopolis and Mesopotamian civilisation and industry. It was recently discovered that those who built the pyramids were not slaves but valued artists. So where has society turned against loving artists and been led askew? Akhenaton passed the Sun business on to his son, who still rules our imaginations, Tut today. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding customer service to the bees and insects and longterm nature lovers: to guarantee that all of our clients are 100% satisfied.
The kindness of strangers
Rather than finding ourselves lost without jobs involving cars, planes and trains we find support. As we dig we connect, serendipitous, useful contacts who tells us: ask Covent Garden Market for lavenders, sage, thyme, herbs, allowing low maintenance Beth Chatto-esque not wasting water. These donated in huge quantity we celebrate the planting of aromatic herbs. The Vietnamese woman comes with her water, as there is no tap yet, then her husband also helps. Then a woman with tiny child, two- and a four-year-old is encouraged again; soon I'm gathering stories from locals. Val tells her grandfather used to open and close the gates to the garden, mornings and evenings. What is remarkable is that no plant disappears as we put in two hundred saplings. Community is focussed, the government's confusion expands irrelevant to lives. Forward-looking, indifferent (Yeats wrote in a renown poem: passionate intensity of those trying to control us contrasts our indifference and so I wonder if Yeats is prophetic? --As foreseen the development of society away from a point of control, the 'turning and turning' of 'the falcon' in the ever-'widening gyre' allows us to imagine that we can take to wing, feel like we are freer, growing away from previous narrow images of a controlled world. We have earned the right to fly away from tradition and explore all that we might find. Indifference to politics decried by policians over years, actually a sign of our own mature wish to resolve, to take matters into own capable hands. The 'slouching beast' is the collective inability to judge ourselves, so superior? Far from pure. The words of Baudelaire in Fleurs du Mal come to mind and TS Eliot's quoting from him in the Wasteland.
©Copyright. Photos by Andre Sarabandi and Michael Mapp All rights reserved