Agents of an Open Secret
An invitation to a Sunday Session with Deepa Patel
On one of my early calls with Deepa Patel, she was sitting with boxes piled up in the room behind her. “I’m in the middle of giving away all my books,” she explained.
Being, as I am, quite attached to my books, I asked her, “Why? What’s going on?”
“Didn’t you know, Dougald?” she said. “I’m dying.”
The words hung there and for a moment it was unclear in what key they had been spoken. Then she cracked a smile and started to tell me about A Year to Live, the programme she was taking part in, based on the book by Stephen Levine, where a group of you go through twelve months together, living as though this year was going to be your last.
It was during that year that Deepa and I were introduced by our mutual friend, Michael Wernstedt. Every few weeks, on a Wednesday morning, the three of us would get together over Zoom, and so the countdown became part of the beginning of our friendship. I have an email she sent the two of us in the first days of January 2022, suggesting a call the following week: “It will be a few days before my last day,” she writes. “I would love to see you both before that day.”
The day came – and for weeks and months afterwards, I heard nothing more from Deepa, so a part of me really felt that she was gone.
Here are two things I’ve noticed about the spaces of conversation that have meant the most to me in recent years. First, we go straight into what’s on our hearts and never get around to the smalltalk questions, the ones where you describe yourself in terms that might belong on a CV. And second, there’s a sense that ideas take shape in the space between us, new visions or new ways of naming things, that are the fruit of the shared space, rather than something that one of us brought.
A while after that “last day”, Deepa and I picked up the thread of our conversation – and a few weeks ago, as we prepared to invite you to listen on it, I realised that I had no idea how to introduce Deepa to you. When I told her this, she said, “I can send you over a bio.”1 And then, later in the same call, she said, “When I look at the world right now, what I’d really like to be is a kind of secret agent.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s how I’m going to introduce you.”
And we laughed, but it was one of those jokes that stuck.
“After all,” she told me later, “in my tradition, that’s how we understand ourselves, as agents of an open secret.”
Because among the many things Deepa has been and done – a music education producer for the BBC, a campaigner on HIV/AIDS for ActionAid, a Managing Director of Creative Partnerships, a Co-Director of Slow Down London – she’s also a guide and teacher in the Inayatiyya, a Sufi lineage.
As we head into the second half of this season of overheard conversations, the role of the sacred is one of the themes that will come to the fore, so I’m glad to have Deepa joining me to begin to open that up. We’ll talk about the traditions that have shaped our lives, the paradox of seeking to create sacred space in the virtual world, and why these things matter in the face of all the horror and urgent need that is there when we look at the world right now.
So join us for a conversation about being agents of an open secret, this Sunday at 8pm Swedish time. The call is open to anyone with a paid subscription to Writing Home and the Zoom details are below the paywall on this post. The recording of the first forty minutes will be available to everyone, while paid subscribers will also get the recording of the Q&A session.
And if you really want to join, but you’re not in a position to pay just now, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the Zoom link.
Finally, we’ve now confirmed the programme for the rest of the series, so here are the guests and the dates to put in your diary:
Zoom details for Sunday Sessions #5 with Deepa Patel
The call lasts an hour and starts at 8pm CEST which is 7pm BST, 2pm EDT or 11am PDT. Use the Zoom link below to join the call: