To Listen Together for What is Calling Us

An invitation to dance with words across America

Let me start with a bow of gratitude to those of you who are nowhere near the places I’ll be travelling to this month, and who have nonetheless been reading and cheering me on and even getting in touch with offers of help. There are seasons when one project claims all of my working attention. The build-up to this American tour has been such a season. Yet, as a writer, I have long nurtured the conviction that words may be used in service to such an undertaking and still serve other ends, alongside it: open onto larger and longer views, bring gifts which exceed their immediate usefulness. On good days, I hope the words I send your way do some of this.

If the world is made of problems to be solved, then to admit you are out of solutions is to reach the end of the world. To those who get to play the grown-ups in our societies, anything is better than to make such an admission. So it falls to the rest of us, those who are willing to sound foolish, to say that the map is mistaken, the world is not a problem to be solved.

At Work in the Ruins, p. 118

“Dear Dougald,” the email began, “I’m very sorry to trouble you, but I don’t seem to have your secretary’s email address.”

It came from a man I had worked for, years earlier: a tall, gentle Australian who had settled in China and set up a language school. As I read it, a lightbulb went on, for I could see that this was my problem, too: I didn’t have my secretary’s email address!

I liked this joke a little too much, and told it on various occasions, until I heard it come out of my mouth at a gathering of friends and collaborators where Anna had done the work of organising that brought us around the table – at which point, the woman I love gave me a sharp look and said, “Well, that would be my address, wouldn’t it?”

Know, then, that my work is supported and sustained in many ways by the other half of this partnership, whose gifts exceed mine in both range and usefulness. (Not least, through our years together, she has been the one who brings in a steady income while my work goes through seasons of feast and famine.)

But the joke has been back on my mind, these past weeks, as I’ve juggled the soul work and the logistical conjuring that goes into producing an eleven-date tour of the upper right-hand corner of a continent I last visited fifteen years ago. The work of many hands has made this possible, but I am the one holding the spreadsheet that joins up all the threads and tells me where I’m meant to be and when.

Some year soon, perhaps I will find the email address of the person who ought to be holding those threads – but in the meantime, I’ve found an answer to how to be with all of this in Ivan Illich’s radical understanding of “obedience”.

It’s a story I’ve heard from several of his friends: how Ivan would arrive and declare himself “obedient” to you for the duration of his visit. He used the word in a sense that was other and older than its familiar meaning, to speak of a relationship of trust. To be obedient, as Illich meant it, is to place myself in your hands, unreservedly, ready to be surprised. At its root, “to obey” is “to give ear”, to be attentive to the call.

It’s this spirit that has come to me, in recent days, when speaking with those who will be my hosts and the convenors of the conversations that wait on the far side of the Atlantic. This is how I want to make the journey. The spreadsheet may give me a list of places to go, and a reminder of how to get there, but when I arrive, my role is to be obedient to those I’m going to, that we might listen together for what is calling us.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had to produce a CV for the Distinguished Visitors Program of a college that I’ll be visiting – and I felt some doubt as to whether the resulting document would fit their standards of distinction. Yet the sheer jumble of different worlds from which the invitations come tells its own story about the way my work is landing: they have come from schools of theology, environmental science and peasantry; centres for hospitality, social innovation and “a new economy”; the headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association of the United States and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

These last two have joined forces to host an event in Boston on Friday, September 20th, where I’ll be in conversation with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. His work has been a touchstone for my thinking in multiple ways. When I write about “those of us who are willing to sound foolish”, who can find the moves worth making when there are no moves left for “those who get to play the grown-ups”, there’s an echo of things I learned from his Trickster book. We’ve both drawn at some of the same wells: it made me smile, when I reached the end of The Gift and read at the start of the Acknowledgements:

The idea for this book took shape during a month spent at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I am grateful to Ivan Illich both for the example of his work and for the fertile atmosphere I found at CIDOC.

I never met Illich, but I made my own journey to Cuernavaca in 2007, to a gathering his friends held to mark the fifth anniversary of his death. It was there that I fell into the company of Sajay Samuel and Samar Farage, two of his pupils – and another of the delights of the trip ahead is that I will finally have the chance to visit them at Penn State, where Illich used to teach for part of the year, and where I will be giving a talk on Tuesday, September 17th under the title, ‘First, the World Must End: Ivan Illich and the Hope in the Ruins’.

The thread of Illichian friendship and influence is one of the calls that I’m following into this journey: in Toronto on Monday, September 16th, I’ll be in conversation with David Cayley, whose books include Ivan Illich: In Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future. Another thread has to do with gift and the hidden possibilities that may lie off the edges of our existing economic maps. In Burlington on Sunday, September 22nd, I’m greatly looking forward to joining

Adam Wilson

of The Peasantry School and Sam Bliss of Food Not Bombs. Reflecting the spirit in which both of them work, their invitation ends with these words:

The event has no ticket price. Participants will be invited to work together to sustain the event host, The Spiral House Collective. There is also no requirement to arrive hopeful.  Bring, instead, your heartbreak, humility, and perhaps even faithfulness – as kindling.  Let’s see if we can get a fire going together.

To travel from Europe to North America and to speak about gift and hospitality is to summon ghosts. As Gustavo Esteva once told me, the colonial history of the past five centuries began with “hospitality abuse”. There’s tragedy in how often the stories of early colonial encounters involve a failure to comprehend the logic of gift: how gestures intended to weave relationship were treated as though what had taken place was a transactional transfer of property.

With these unfinished histories in mind, I’m grateful that one of the first conversations on the tour will be with Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and the host of First Voices Radio, and Aja Schmeltz of the Good Work Institute. That event takes place a week today, on Thursday, September 12th in Kingston.

The tour opens in Great Barrington on Wednesday, September 11th with a conversation with the poet-philosopher Bayo Akomalafe and the theologian Catherine Keller, uncovering the apocalyptic currents that were running beneath the surface of modernity from its beginnings – and it will come to a close, two weeks later, at Haverford College on Tuesday, September 24th, where I’ll be joining the cognitive scientist Suparna Choudhury and the mythologist and artist Li Sumpter for a conversation about survival, imagination and cultural resilience.

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The phrase ‘The Gifts in the Ruins’ first presented itself as the natural title for the event with Lewis Hyde, but it took on a life of its own, as I noticed how it caught people’s imaginations. So it became the motto for the tour as a whole, a reflection of where I find myself as I set out to accompany this book into the world once more, three years after it was conceived, two years after it went to press and eighteen months on from its original publication. This is the direction in which my attention has been drawn: I want to bring into focus the examples, the clues, the small openings which reveal the gifts that only come into view when loss is faced and known, including all the losses that are bound up with the story of the climate crisis, but not only these.¹

So ‘The Gifts in the Ruins’ became, among other things, the title of the two-day retreat in Chicago on the weekend of September 14–15th, when Ashley Colby and I will gather with a group of you to go deeper into the questions that the book opened up. There are still some places available for that retreat, so please do share the invitation with anyone you know who might want to join us.

And the same theme echoes in the title of another event, in New York City on Monday, September 23rd, when I’ll be joined by M.R. O’Connor, author of Ignition, for a conversation that we’re calling ‘What Grows in the Ashes: The work of hospitality in a burning world’.

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I love the moment of speaking from the heart in a room full of people. There’s a deep joy in practising the craft that I learned from hanging out with comedians and improvisers and storytellers. Yet to take a book out on the road and to be alone on stage with it each night, reading from the same passages, would feel untrue to the way that I write and the worlds that this writing goes in search of – if you’ve read At Work in the Ruins, then you’ll know how many other voices run through it, besides my own. (Or, as

Lydia Catterall

put it to me during last year’s UK tour: “A third of the words in this book aren’t even yours!”)

So if I’m going to do a book tour, then this is the way to do it: to bring the written words that were anyway the fruit of many conversations out into the world as seeds for new conversations that will lead us places that cannot be foreseen.

Thank you to all of you who helped in one way or another to bring about this tour, including those who came with other invitations and connections that will have to wait for another time. Thanks for sharing my excitement at having the chance to dance with words in the company of this remarkable collection of souls, and for sharing these invitations in all the different directions that are called for.

I look forward to seeing many of you, somewhere along the road, and to sharing the fruits of this journey with you all, sooner or later.

DH

1. As I was writing this,

Martin Shaw

put out a note about the closure of Schumacher College which embodies this spirit, the wild and grief-inflected move of the imagination that is called for in times of loss.