Talks Walking 1: A Walk in the Woods with Lucy Neal

We met at 10am on Tuesday 26^th January 2016 at Chingford Station and prepared to walk together into the forest. I’d arranged with Lucy Neal, writer, theatre maker and creative catalyst to be my first companion on my ‘Talks Walking’ project in which I planned to interview pioneering arts practitioners engaged in ecological and social change. I asked her to choose a walk she wanted to do and my plan was that I would talk with her about her connections with soul, spirit and the sacred. I’d been inspired into ‘Talks Walking’ by reading Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot’ which gave me the idea of the form and by Jacob Needleman’s ‘An Unknown World: Notes onthe Meaning of the Earth’, which provided me with my subject. Lucy’s chosen walk was a circular one through Epping Forest.

The plan began to unravel and reform itself in unexpected ways as soon as I’d made it. I worried that walking in Epping Forest, London’s largest green-space, might not be conducive to my interviewing Lucy. My fears were that we might spend too much time trying to orient ourselves along the right paths to avoid getting lost and not be able to give sufficient attention to our subject matter. I phoned her the day before our planned walk and asked if she’d consider instead a more linear, urban route along London’s canals. We would in this way at least be assured not to get lost in the landscape and be able to concentrate on the intended themes of our conversation.  Lucy was disappointed, saying she had never been to Epping Forest before and really had a yen to go. She had the right Ordinance Survey map (number 174) and was confident we would find our way both into and out of the forest, have time for our ‘Talk Walking’ and she would still be in time to catch the 14.40 train to Liverpool Street for her meeting in Hoxton at 16.00.

I decided to be fluid, let go of my original plan and just ‘see what happened’. I did wonder how we would be able to catch up with one another’s lives and projects and still have enough time to talk about my chosen themes from Needleman’s book - spirit, soul and the sacred. That morning I’d read a particularly significant chapter in the book entitled ‘The Real Reconciliation’. I imagined that as soon as she turned up at Chingford Station, that I would read it to her and then our conversation would evolve with me asking insightful questions, like: “What is the connection between creativity, social activism and faith?” And, “What is consciousness?” Or, “What is the role of a human being on earth at this particular time in history?” Instead, we left the station immediately, swept along with the happiness of seeing one another and walked in the direction of the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, with me clutching my printout of a four hour, seven and a half mile circular walk of the forest via Connaught Waters, Loughton Camp, High Beech and back to the Hunting Lodge and Chingford Station.

Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, Epping Forest

We started off well enough according to plan, following the directions from my map, finding our way to Connaught Waters aided by asking some of the numerous dog walkers we met along the way. We then launched ourselves off  topic and off our planned route following our noses into the forest. I decided that Jacob Needleman and his questions might have to wait until another day. My quest to talk to artists about spirituality was perhaps destined to become more fantasy than reality.

Some time later, it started to drizzle. We sat down on a bench beneath a tree next to a portacabin café, not far from High Beech and had tea and flapjacks. Lucy started telling me of her recent work –leading ‘The Art of Writing Collaboratively’ for Arvon’s annual programme of residential courses, withCharlotte Du Cann. The invitation to do this came as a result of the publication of her book in 2015: ‘Playing for Time – Making Art as if the WorldMattered’ edited by Charlotte. This was their first experiment in sharing their collaborative writing practice with others. I listened to Lucy as she described some of the activities they had organised for and with the participants: being in dialogue with the earth; creating a fire walking ritual; publishing a newspaper (the first edition after a fictitious town’s major flooding); writing answers to the question, “What wants to happen through me”? and “What is my work in this world?” Even though Jacob Needleman’s book had not left my rucksack, Lucy started answering my unasked questions.

Later she spoke about Providence. How she leans into it and acts in relation to it, as it seems also to do with her. She spoke about the death of her mother and her finding herself going on pilgrimage to her mother’s grave, of her father’s interest in faith and theology. We spoke about a practice of art-making which is not just ‘creative change agent’ or ‘activist’, not just ‘space-maker’ or ‘documenter’, but which combines them all with an added deep connection to mystery. The word ‘God’ is not so much in Lucy’s vocabulary but ‘enthusiasm’ is. She appears to make the seemingly impossible happen. Lucy is often called an ‘optimist’ by other people – a word that appears to simple, too wide of the mark for what I believe she is. She agreed that this word did not sit comfortably with her. Instead she  talks about  it as simply, life happening through her. Her enthusiasm is perhaps a consequence of her life force. Watching Lucy is watching life in action. Full potential. The kind of energy that makes a tree a tree, a flower a flower, Lucy Neal, Lucy Neal. When she started to write Playing for Time she told me that she held some words close, almost like a mantra:

“If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable

I then will tell you why 

I think that I can cross it 

If I try”

There is something crucially important for Lucy about committing to and communicating her practice of ‘making art as if the world mattered’. She wants to encourage and create spaces for others to do this as well. ‘Taking our own permission,’ is one of the phrases I identify with her. However, she is a real permission giver for others as well as a permission taker for herself. She does not just tell stories, she creates a new language, a new structure and invites others to share in this. Lucy is appropriately named after the Latin for ‘light’ – she holds a torch, lighting the way for others to walk alongside, not just to follow her. She is a leader of a different sort – not one who is always in front but one who walks with you, pointing out the ladybird on the stone or the bluebell growing through the cracks on the pavement of a busy road.

We did not get to our destination. We failed at completing our seven and a half mile circular walk. It soon became obvious that we weren’t going to need the printout of the prescribed route, or the Ordinance Survey map, or even the GPS on my smartphone. We talked to people, the dog walkers, the people just out walking and taking the air, the perambulators, the forest guides. We became through our readiness to enquire, to not know, a part of a community – a temporary and fluid one but a community nonetheless. The forest gave us everything we needed. It held our enquiry, our searching, our desire to walk into the unknown, to take paths less travelled…

Finding ourselves back near the start of our walk at Butler’s Retreat, a café beside the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, we spoke of how not just her parents, but my mother, my father, and my brothers had also been a part of the day’s conversation. Earlier in the day she had named the notion that we have to bring our selves to collaboration. It can’t happen unless we do. The subject of my first ‘Talks Walking’ was intended to be Lucy. I had thought I might be the invisible, impartial interviewer. The walk had an energy and a direction of its own, as did the line of our enquiry. Our Talk Walking was a co-creation, not just with me but with the forest, the place itself. I had grown up in and around this forest, this area, been to school, attended church and become a teenager hanging around the streets near Chingford Station. It was twenty years, since my mother had died in 1996. Ten years before, I had been in this same café, about to embark on this same walk with my four brothers to scatter our mother’s ashes in Epping Forest. We had come out of the café – there, through the sun and drizzle was a double rainbow.

Four of the five Smith children (Scott taking the photo)

Lucy had chosen this walk. It had brought me back to my own mother. We spoke about both of our parents and why we might have incarnated though each of them. We knew we were privileged, drinking coffee in a café on the edge of a forest on a weekday afternoon. Neither of us had what could be referred to as sizeable incomes but we were privileged in so many ways and we knew it. What was the work that was being carried on through each of us – inherited possibly from our mother and fathers? How might each of us serve the Earth? How are we related to this living, interconnected universe, where we can speak of Systems and Gaia Theory but where it feels more difficult to talk about God?

At Butler's Retreat

I decided then and there to continue my ‘Talks Walking’ – to take this further, talk with other artists and to have Joseph Needleman and his book accompany me. Each of my companions would be given a copy of the book after the walk, but neither me nor Professor Needleman would prescribe where our conversation would wander. I would trust, as Lucy does in Providence. I would act in faith. I would lean into the unknown, the mystery, I would listen to what needs to come though me, through us.

Lucy got her train. The timing was perfect. We left Butler’s Retreat, and hurried back to Chingford Station, arriving two minutes before her train was due to leave. We then remembered that she was wearing my waterproof over-trousers which I’d lent her, to keep her red trousers from getting mud-splattered since she was going straight from the forest to a meeting with the Gulbenkian Foundation - her patent-leather smart shoes in her rucksack. With a minute to spare we both ran to her train, me outside on the platform, her inside the train, both of us struggling to get my trousers off her legs before the train left. We managed to do it and then both fell about laughing…me with my trousers, her pulling away on the train towards Liverpool Street. She texted me later saying “if we can do that we might be able to do anything…”

Earlier in the day I had asked her what she called herself given her role within the world of ‘transitional’ arts practice? She said, “Conductor”. “Lightening or Music” I had asked her, knowing she could be either?  Later in the same text, she said, “I think theatre-maker still stands, but in an expanded sense to include dramaturge and explorer of the story beat….I’m working on that….”

Lucy Neal is a theatre maker and writer. Her recent book is 'Playing For Time: Making Art As If The World Mattered' is published by Oberon Books

New Writing Course at Arvon 'Writing to Make Change Happen' by Lucy Neal & Charlotte Du Can

Fern Smith is an artist and Creative Director of Emergence