The Shoe Shop

A film about the work we're doing here in Östervåla

There are days when I can see how the pieces fit together, and days when the work I’m part of loses all coherence. Maybe you have your own version of this experience?

I found myself thinking about this, the third time I watched the short film that Mattias Olsson has made about Anna, Alfie and me and the journey we’re on with this old shoe shop that we moved into three years ago.

For most of that time, Mattias has been visiting every few months with his camera. On Saturday, the resulting film was released, part of a series of twelve portraits called Something Beautiful for the World. Each film in the series takes as its focus some small, local undertaking, and the filmmakers seem to be following a hunch that actions which look insignificant by worldly standards might have the capacity to ripple outwards and surprise us all.

So in the course of a ten-minute film, you follow us arriving into this old pair of buildings, there’s a glimpse of

Caroline Ross

and Theresa Emmerich Kamper talking about old craft skills with a small gathering of our friends and neighbours – and then, by the closing minutes, we come to the thought that came to me from Tyson Yunkaporta and Sarah Thomas, that if we’re lucky, we stand somewhere in the early going of a thousand-year undertaking, because that’s how long it will take for there to be a world of old-growth forests once again.

Watching a film like this for the first time, when you’re the subject of it, there’s a disorientation that comes with seeing bits of your life taken apart and put together otherwise. You remember what you said just before and just after that clip that got used, you notice shots from different seasons or different years that have become part of the same sequence. This is just how the craft of filmmaking works.

So it was not until the third time around, when I was showing it to Alfie yesterday, that I began to feel how the film might work for someone watching from outside, and to sense how it hangs together as an act of storytelling. I’m still too close to see it for what it is, but it may be that Mattias has made a film in which the vastly different scales invoked in the work we’re doing come together with some coherence. If so, then that’s an achievement for which I’m hugely grateful.

The experience of the days when the pieces fit together and the days when they seem to fall apart – I don’t think this is a mistake, or a failure of perspective. Because it’s not like we’re dealing with a jigsaw here, or a Rubik’s Cube, with a solution that is identical each time. Rather, the phases of incoherence are part of a rhythm, out of which a new arrangement, a new pattern of connection and meaning can emerge, echoing how it was last time around, yet never exactly the same.

At least, that’s how it looks to me this morning, sitting on the sofa in the shoe shop, grateful to be a part of a puzzle that won’t be reduced to problems and solutions.

DH

Our new online series with a school called HOME got off to an amazing start at the end of last week. We’ll keep registrations open for a couple of days longer, in case anyone wants to slip in late and catch up on the first session through the recordings.

And this weekend, I’ll be hosting the seventh in the current season of Sunday Sessions, when I’m joined by M. R. O’Connor, the author of Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World, which is one of the most remarkable books around climate change that I’ve read in a long while. The live session is open to anyone with a paid subscription to this Substack.