The Alchemy of Regrowing

In just over three weeks’ time, we’ll have our first calls with participants in the new online series with a school called HOME. We’re calling this one Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture. Since 2020, Anna and I have been making these invitations, a couple of times a year, to gather with others who are drawn to the questions we’ve been carrying, to journey together for a little while and see what grows out of these encounters.

It’s always hard to tell people what to expect from these series, because it depends a good deal on what you bring and on the alchemy of what happens between us all. The people you will meet come from all walks of life, they are at different places on their own journeys, and the series is structured in such a way that you can sit back and listen, or lean in and play an active part. Some participants take away a reading list full of unexpected connections, or find that a project they were stuck with gets reframed and unlocked by stories told in our sessions. For others, it’s a sense of being less alone, meeting people who share some of the questions they have been asking, finding the courage to voice an idea they had been nourishing in secret, to reach out across continents or down the street and take the first small steps of putting a vision into practice.

Here’s how

Adam Wilson

of

The Peasantry School Newsletter

summed up his experience of taking part in one of our early series:

The true cost of admission: you might suddenly find yourself tangled in a weave of stories, people, ideas and actions so compelling that becoming untangled loses all appeal.

If you’ve had a glimpse of that tangle here on Substack, then it’s worth saying that many of those who are now part of the weave first came into my life through one of these online series, as was the case with Adam himself and with Michael Reynolds of the Roimata Food Commons. In other cases, the series allowed us to get to know each other better and start to weave our worlds a little closer together, as with

Rob Lewis

of

The Climate According to Life

, or

Elizabeth Oldfield

of

Fully Alive

.

Not everyone is a writer or an artist or someone with a public platform, and the space we hold is one where your public identity, your job title or qualifications are not the part of you that matters. But perhaps because of that, it does seem to be a space in which people are able to find their voice and make the experiences they are carrying into a gift. One of my favourite descriptions of this comes from

Caroline Ross

of

Uncivil Savant

, who took part in our first series:

It was like we were all sketching in charcoal every week, making things bolder, or darker, rubbing them out and redrawing them, until, by the last session, some image emerged from all our overlapping lines. Many of us went off and began to draw parts of our lives differently using the shapes we found together. Forms we could never have imagined on our own.

Like I say, so much of what happens depends on the alchemy, and it’s different every time. But what I can promise is that I’ll be bringing the stories and ways of seeing that have been taking shape for me in the two years since I wrote At Work in the Ruins – and if you’ve been getting something out of the writing and conversations I host at Writing Home, then there’s a good chance you’ll find it rewarding to be part of one of these groups.

We have two groups, this time around, starting in the third week of May – one that meets on a Thursday evening (Swedish time) and the other on a Friday morning. The full details are on the school website and bookings are open now.