How to Smuggle Everything

(and not get caught)

Well, here we are, the day I’ve been working towards all autumn. In a few hours’ time, the Regrowing a Living Culture series will be underway.

I’ve spent the morning in the shoe shop, revisiting well-thumbed books, making notes, calling on other kinds of help for the journey ahead. Calling in the stories.

Here’s a note I made just now:

REGROWING A LIVING CULTURE

What is contained within these words? What griefs? What allegations? What glimpses of wonder, even now, even this late in the day?

Start with the wonder, or we won’t have the heart for the journey.

Coyote is here. William Morris is on board. As I was about to take this photograph, a magpie hopped up the steps to the shoe shop door. There’s something special brewing – and there’s still time to join us, just about.

If I’ve got my serious-bearded face on, well, I can promise you no shortage of laughter along the way. Especially if you join Anna, Billie and me for the afterparty that follows each session.

Here’s where you sign up, if you’re minded to join us:

There’ll be another post coming tomorrow with details of this Sunday’s Ivan Illich conversation and the recording from last time around.

And meanwhile, here’s a thing that came back to me on the edge of sleep last night. I shared this poem a couple of years ago, soon after writing it, but it reads in a different key, having finally written the long-threatened book.

If the description that follows is anywhere near true of At Work in the Ruins, then it could also mark the secret hope of an undertaking such as Regrowing a Living Culture.

Consider yourselves warned!

DH

Note to Self

This book, then – what will it be about?
‘Everything’ is never the right answer.

The books that matter are always really about everything,
only they get there sideways.

The trick is to write about everything
by writing about something.

Something is the hole in a pinhole camera.
The McGuffin. The cover story.

Something is the answer you give on the customs form.
Everything is the goods that you are smuggling.

‘How to smuggle everything and not get caught.’
That could be what this book will be about.

Västerås, 11 February 2020