Taking the Gamble on Life

So the day is here and a new series is about to get underway

Morning reflections from the final preparations for Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture – and a conversation with Sara Jolena Wolcott.

When I recorded the invitation, there were still mornings of waking up to snow. Five weeks later, the garden is full of blossom. It’s here, that moment I had in mind, the moment when everything takes the gamble on life.

I’m looking through the names of those who are joining us in the two groups that have gathered around this invitation. There’s a scattering of old friends and people I’ve got to know through earlier series, others whose work I’ve crossed paths with in different contexts over the past year or two, and many whose names are new to me.

In a conversation about improvisation, the musician Steve Lawson once told me: it’s good to leave a gap in your work, because otherwise, where’s the room for the audience? I’ve carried that with me, an awareness that what you show up with is only ever part of the story, and if you try to bring something finished and polished and complete, that won’t make for a hospitable encounter.

My job is to show up with some stories, some threads with which we can begin to weave. I remember a conversation with Vanessa Andreotti, six years ago now, when we met at the Climate Existence conference in Sigtuna, and she spoke about “bricks” and “threads”: two sensibilities, two ways of inhabiting the world. It’s not that one is all bad and the other all good, she said, but the institutions of the dominant culture have been built out of bricks and can barely recognise other ways of being.

What is this school, I wonder sometimes? A kitchen table and a story told around it, the guests who come and stay for a while, the gatherings we put on now and then in the shoe shop, and these online series with a hundred faces Zooming in from around the world, meeting over a few weeks to share threads and stories. There are angles from which all this looks like nothing, people who squint at what we’re doing and can’t quite make it out, questions that are hard to answer in a way that will satisfy the questioner. And yet I see the way that threads are handed around, passed like a cat’s cradle, or woven into other creations. I hear rumours of other invitations, catch glimpses of undertakings that had their beginnings in conversations in these series, or that found new strength and different ways of seeing from what was shared here.

In a few minutes, I’ll shut down the computer and head out to the Red House, the hundred-year-old barn at the bottom of our garden, where we’re setting up the teaching space from which to host this series that starts tonight and tomorrow. There are chairs to move around, equipment to set up. And then some final notes to put together for the opening session.

If you’re already signed up to join us, then I look forward to spending time together over these coming weeks – and if you’re not, but there’s something here that calls to you, then there are still some places left. Here’s where you find out more.

And on the cusp of this series, I recorded a transatlantic conversation with my old friend Sara Jolena Wolcott, stitching together some thoughts about what kind of teaching and learning make sense in times like these.

A good conversation is a piece of improvisation: you hear words coming out of your mouth that you’ve never spoken before, stories take on a new shape in the moment of this encounter, together you catch sight of things that neither of you were expecting. That’s how it felt, talking with Sara last week, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening in.

DH