The Cloud of Unknowing - Reflections on the time of COVID-19

On 23^rd March, just 4 short weeks ago, the UK went into official lockdown as part of a nationwide response to controlling the spread of the Covid-19 virus. To mark this first month where life as we knew it changed beyond recognition, we were moved to write a very personal response through one of our semi-regular Emergence blogposts:

Machynlleth in lockdown

Fern: The new Emergence website launched on February 1^st  2020, a new vision for Emergence offering nature-based rites of passage, art projects and facilitation, all ready for early Spring and our fledgling ‘2020 Vision Festival’. Our offerings of ‘Space for Change’, ‘Summer Vision Fast’ and the ‘Bardsey Autumn Equinox Retreat’ were out in the world, ready and waiting to be filled. We spent time designing beautiful, eye-catching publicity, getting the word out, talking to potential participants and advising those already signed up on their next steps.

Five years ago, I had a kind of five-year plan, a dream of what I wanted to seed as an artist committed to ‘the art of living’. Since that time, I’ve been working steadily and emergently towards a sense of what I might want to be offering in 2020. For me, 2020 was to be the year for a new vision, for bold action and for ‘stepping into my work in the world’. My work as an artist, my work with Emergence. It was all meant finally to be falling into place…

We were looking forward with excitement and some trepidation to a busy and intense March, working with the Scottish and Welsh Governments as part of Margaret Wheatley’s team to offer ‘Warriors for the Human Spirit’, a residential retreat programme for self-appointed ‘change agents’ and leaders working in the public sector. One week was planned for Perth, Scotland and one week for Nant Gwrytheyrn in North Wales. Hot on the heels after finishing these, the final day of March was to be spent with those working in the Welsh environmental sector and Natural Resources Wales helping to develop a ‘community of practice’ to support ‘across the sector collaboration’.

Helen Williams, Simoon Fransen, Meg Wheatley with Phil & Fern in Perth, Scotland

On 1^st March, St David’s Day, we travelled to Perth in Scotland ready to meet the team and begin our contribution in support of Meg’s training programme. Phil spoke about the BBC Television documentary he wrote: ‘8 Days: To the Moon & Back’, looking at NASA’s Apollo program through the lens of ‘Warriorship for the Human Spirit’. I brought into the room two decades’ experience of theatre activities and shared the story of alchemical transformation in the Birth of Taliesin within the context of the Celtic tradition and the indigenous wisdom of Britain. We were looking at leadership on this retreat through a completely different lens. The invitation to our participants was to join with one another to help create ‘islands of sanity’ within uncertain and potentially overwhelming times.

Fern - centre left in the purple dress - teaches on the Warriors for the Human Spirit program in Perth

As our week together progressed, Covid-19 increasingly entered our awareness. One of the team was from the Netherlands, one of the earliest epicentres of the virus. She was concerned about her family, one of whom had developed Corona-like symptoms. Attendees on our retreat were increasingly having intense work and family conversations in between learning how to ‘let go of outcome’, and ‘take nothing personally’. Each individual was being encouraged to ‘take their seat’ as a warrior for the human spirit, doing ‘what they can, with what they have, where they are’. For some, this was within the Scottish health service, for some, education, conservation, others planning and policing. It was a bold vision to be working with this group on this material. It felt radical and timely.

By Friday morning, participants were readying to leave and return to a world entirely different from the one they left when they arrived in Perth just five days earlier. Within the next two weeks throughout the UK we saw food queues and panic buying, social distancing measures put in place, infection rates increasing, the death toll beginning to mount up, an NHS stretched to the limit, schools closed, calls for a universal living wage, and a complete lockdown in place.

The Warriors for the Human Spirit training didn’t even get off the starting block in Wales. Meg returned to the US and the program was postponed until some uncertain date in the now vague and distant future. Our workshop with the Natural Resources Wales folk did happen online along with pretty much every other conference, meeting and Pilates class. The word ‘Zoom’ suddenly began to take its place as one of the most frequently uttered since the superhero comics of the 1970’s.

April 1^st came and went with a gamut of surreal ‘Fools Day’ Covid-19 offerings, online videos and celebrations. Activity for half the population ramped up with a transfer to online working, living, shopping and socialising. Activity for the other half dropped away in a matter of days to a trickle and then an absence. Emergence’s grand vision for 2020 fell away in the process…

My own Craniosacral Therapy Practice at my clinic in Machynlleth, mid Wales halted a month ago. No social proximity meant no practice, let alone hands on contact with the client’s body which holds the power and potential to transform and heal of Craniosacral work. No television writing work for Phil. Nothing currently being commissioned. Suddenly there is no point in advertising nature-based rites of passage, although there is much talk on social media about this pandemic, being a kind of ‘global rite of passage’. The momentum of activity, making stuff happen, visions, potential – everything comes to a dead stop…

As I write this, we’re in an April heatwave with empty roads. Easter has come and gone. Good Friday - the dying, Easter Sunday - the Resurrection. Easter Monday and beyond, school holidays are all happening without happening...

View from Cader Idris on the last day before lockdown

Phil: A key practice at the heart of the Warriors for the Human Spirit training is to become intimately familiar with one’s own mind. To become an observer and chronicler of one’s own thoughts and patterns so that one might be able to loosen the mind’s grip on the ‘self’ and simply be, not reacting but present. The idea being that this might enable one to better serve others and the times we live in by being a calm ‘island of sanity’ for others…

When the coronavirus hit and the lockdowns began, both Fern and I responded in a very similar way. Our initial reaction was that we should do something, anything… We talked of offering Way of Council sessions online, we talked of online retreats, spaces to meet, supportive practices to bring people together… and then, individually and together, we pulled back from that energy and we… stopped…

This is not to denigrate or devalue the amazing work that so many are doing right now to support and help each other across the literal distances between us. This is simply to share what happened to us and how we are reacting.

Wile E Coyote realising he's made a huge mistake...

That forward momentum, that energy to ‘do’, to ‘help’, to continue, to make ‘normal’ at all costs, was so strong and compelling that, like Wile E Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, we very nearly ran straight off a cliff without realising that there is, in fact, no ground beneath our feet… But for some reason we pulled back at the last second and found ourselves standing on the edge of that cliff, our toes dangling into the cavernous space of the new reality, wondering what we should do…

Personally, I found myself collapsing inwards, falling into a very familiar pattern of dark and dangerous thoughts. My work had gone, my purpose had gone, my value as a human being had gone. I’m not a frontline worker in the NHS or the caring professions. I’m a storyteller, a maker of meaning. And, in this new reality, I find myself utterly reluctant to make any meaning at all. It feels too early… too raw… too disrespectful… to somehow leap to what this all means and where we might be going. Not yet, at least. If this truly is a rite of passage for mankind then, like all such rituals, it requires an enormous letting go of old ways and a stepping into a space of deep uncertainty without any clue where it all might lead. I can’t speak for anyone else but I know that is the space I’m currently living in.

So, after our grand plans ground to a halt and we screeched to a halt on the edge of the cliff, we found ourselves asking – what now? If we truly are in this liminal, threshold space, then how do we best live our days? How do we best serve? In short – what do we do?

The veg beds take shape...

Fern: The weather has been kind. We have a garden. We live surrounded by fields and hills on the outskirts of Machynlleth. The local community has been amazing. We now have a WhatsApp group in our local village. In our little community at home, we have spent time digging, pulling out the weeds, raking out the stones, preparing the ground. Like many lucky enough to have access to outdoor space, we have been planting and tending. We have dug a big vegetable bed, we have created a fruit bed, we have even made a rock garden with all the stones we have heaved out of the earth in the process of tilling the soil. There feels something good about this. Pulling out the weeds, hands in the earth, planting seeds, watering them; pulling out the weeds, hands in the earth, planting seeds, watering them…There is much birdlife in the garden. The primroses are in full bloom. The leaves of the foxgloves are getting fatter ready for anchoring the great pink wands of May.

Primroses in bloom

I am reading a 14^th Century Gnostic text called ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ written anonymously during the time of The Black Death and the Hundred Years War. I was drawn to the title and felt it prescient for the times. In it the author writes about what he calls the ‘Actives’ and the ‘Contemplatives’...

“Actives, Actives! Be as busy as you can…But don’t interfere with my contemplatives. You don’t know what is happening to them. Leave them to their ‘sitting’ and ‘resting’…”

The author seems to be implying that something important is going on beneath the surface with those who do not or who are not necessarily able to be outwardly active. If you can carry on your work and livelihood online, fine. If you are called to the front-line to serve, I thank you. If you are minding and looking after the needs of those in your care, this is important work. And if you are called to, or are able to do ‘nothing’, then this too is important work which needs doing on behalf of all of us during these times. Watch, witness, plan nothing, be with uncertainty, welcome the Cloud of Unknowing.

I have been meditating on what it means to have a productive day in these times. We are advised by many psychologists to put structures in place to support mental health and well-being. I also feel it is important to honour the broken shards of a life which had or held meaning. If we are in a rite of passage, this is the Severance not the Incorporation. If we are in a Descent Myth, we are in the dark.

I do not know what will happen with my ‘2020 Vision’. I anticipated that this would be a successful and productive year for Emergence of being in service at these transitional times. I imagined that ‘Space for Change’ would be sold-out with a small group of participants having a ‘transformative experience’; our ‘Summer Vision Fast’ would be likewise full to capacity; the ‘Autumn Equinox Retreat’ on Bardsey Island would be filling up nicely. None of this is happening. I am instead, simply with my ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. I tell myself: ‘Do what you can, with what you have, where you are’ even if this just means slowing down, contemplating and digging up the roots with your hands…

Spring lambs in mid-Wales

Phil: And so we go on, learning to become ever more comfortable with uncertainty. Trusting that, as each day unfolds, we will do what we can, we will be available to what is needed of us, and we will be present to each other. Before all this happened, I had mused to Fern about how a populous living ever more of its life online needs to learn how to be together again. After weeks, or potentially months, of forced social distancing, that need will be even more acute. And if, as seems likely, Covid-19 will be a part of all our lives going forwards and that repeated outbreaks will call for repeated lockdowns, then our ability to do what humans are defined by – being together – will become a rare and precious skill and ever more vital and necessary.

At this moment, we don’t know what we will be offering in the future. We don’t know what it will look like. And we don’t yet know who it will be for. It feels vitally important to us to wait and to listen for what is needed before offering what we think might serve. If this truly is a rite of passage, then we are being forced to pass through the ‘threshold’, in which every molecule of our beings is dismantled and put back together in a new, unfamiliar way. We will need to learn to do many things afresh. We will need to learn to do many things we’ve never done before and never imagined we would.

The uncertain road to the future...

Truly embracing the uncertainty of this time, for us, means letting go of everything we dreamed of doing and being, and opening ourselves to whatever might come next. It’s painful. It’s sad. And yet… isn’t it life? Isn’t this what life is? Change? Constant and unceasing change?

So. We’re still here. We’re still committed to our ‘2020 Vision’. And we’re still open to offering spaces for people to come together. We know that one day we will be together again. We look forward to seeing you there.

Keep safe. Be well. Stay connected.

Fern & Phil 

A new day dawns

Creating a Space for Change

Phil Ralph and Fern Smith, directors of Emergence, share a conversational blog about their experiences of change and how it led them to step into guiding others...

Phil & Fern contemplating a new life above the Mawddach estuary...

Phil: Life is change. We know this. Even when we wish it wasn’t so. Even when we desperately try and deny it and live our lives as if they will last forever. Life is change. And change isn’t easy to navigate because it involves loss. How could it not? For something to change, something new to come into the picture, something old – a job, a relationship, your hair (in my case…), something – has to end. Which of course is another way of saying that something has to die. As one door closes, another opens. And I’ve never been comfortable with all of this and for a long time I thought that this was some kind of failing on my part. “I’m not good with change” I would say to anyone who would listen (and even to those who wouldn’t). But after years and years of it, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m wrong. I’m uncomfortable with change, yes. AND I’m pretty good at it.

In 2017, Fern and I left our old home in Swansea and moved further north, initially to the beautiful surroundings of Dinefwr Park in Llandeilo, and then last year to the hills above Machynlleth in mid-Wales. We left behind our lives of working in the performing arts (although I still write scripts for film and television) in order to step into entirely new lives specifically focused on change – and, in particular, helping people to navigate it in their own lives.

Over the past decade our so we have both – individually and together – undergone a huge raft of learning and training around ancient and modern change processes. The list is almost endless: Vision Quests, birth processes, Way of Council, meditation retreats, training to be a Warrior for the Human Spirit, the Annwn Foundation, training and practising craniosacral therapy, nature-based practices, medicine walks… I could go on. All of this has been to one end: to offer what we’ve learned to others.

And, boy, do the times need it! You don’t need me to tell you what’s going on in the world. And what it’s doing to our relationships, our health – both mental and physical - and our futures… Navigating and managing change with openness, grace and decency has never been more vital or more challenging. 

So, when we moved to mid-Wales, the primary reason was a calling to come to this beautiful ancient land and offer ourselves and everything that we have learned (and are still learning) in service to others in these changing times. But, as so often happens, life got in the way and by February this year, we’d done precious little offering. Partly this was because I was immersed in landing a man on the Moon, and partly it was a desire to feel our way into the area and the community and to see how best we might begin to offer ourselves.

But early this year all that began to change. Fern and I facilitated a small hub in Machynlleth studying Theory U – of which more can be found here – and as part of doing so we undertook a discernment process based around 17 key questions. These questions offer a sequential journey through change from the present into the emerging future. One afternoon in February I sat in my office and answered the questions – and when I reviewed them afterwards, my answer to one of them pinged out sharply.

The question was: Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the future in which you could discover “the new” by doing something, what would that prototype look like?

And my answer was: Fern and I offer a short, affordable change retreat.

I told Fern. And that’s when Space for Change came into being…

Fern: I was plunged into becoming interested in change processes after the death of my mother in 1996. I was shocked to my core even though she had been ill with Multiple Sclerosis since my early teens. As part of my own untidy and chaotic bereavement process I read every possible book going on grief. I trained as a CRUSE Bereavement councillor, became what I can only describe as a ‘death bore’, this being pretty much the only subject I wanted to talk to anyone about. A few years later I made a show with musician, GP and end of life specialist, Patrick Fitzgerald – a song cycle requiem about my mother called This Imaginary Woman. 

I became convinced that sometimes a life begins with a death. The last words of ‘This Imaginary Woman’ were: “I will live” and this was the promise I charged myself to keep, in honour of the life of my mother Pearl Isobel, Stanley. I made a pact with myself to live deliberately, consciously, with gratitude and with awe at this transitory gift called life. Something changed in me then and the process of change has continued to play out in an unending cycle of many smaller and larger deaths and rebirths. My work has changed, friendships have shifted, my home and the landscape I see out of my window has changed beyond recognition many times since then. I knew that there was a healing process to be done and a growing up and a becoming more and more the person I was born to be. I was no longer the child of my mother. It was about time I became an adult. And what did I want to have learned before I died? 

This process of change led me away from my first great love – theatre. After I made This Imaginary Woman I had a clear sense that I didn’t need to make theatre any more. Any involvement in theatre after this would just be going through the motions and I respected my company and the spirit of theatre too much to offer myself as a performer for much longer without this driving passion and integrity of belief being present. From my childhood on, theatre was my life, gave me meaning, a voice, a family, a community. Who was I if ‘business as usual’ was no longer an option – even if that business was creating vibrant, daring, emotionally and physically draining theatre which meant everything to me? So, the rest of my life began with the loss of my passion to create theatre, the loss of this voice, this meaning, this family and this community.

In the next years, I consciously pursued a kind of intuitively directed action-research in my own life on processes of not just change but transformation from the inside out – at a cellular level and at the level of soul and spirit. My training as a craniosacral therapist supported personal research and an opportunity to practice daily my own and others healing – healing in terms of ‘becoming whole’. I became Clore Fellow for Wales on the Clore Leadership programme in 2010 at the age of 46. During this time, I read a book on Leadership which mentioned Vision Quest. This set me on a path of undergoing a 4 day and night Vision Fast in Wales and then training as a Wilderness Guide at the School of Lost Borders in 2017. Between my mother’s death and now, change has been my constant companion and the only constant in my life. I have met and worked with many teachers and guides who have created and opened up transformative spaces for me which have given me a chance to let go of a rigid sense of self and if not let go of, then at least to be able to dialogue with that voice which tells me what I can and can’t and what I should or shouldn’t do. My horizons and sense of my own and other’s potential has been expanded and exploded. I have witnessed countless individuals and groups going through profound shifts. Increasingly I came to the realisation that I wanted to be one of those people to hold a Space for Change for others… 

Phil: My own personal experiences of change have mirrored and complimented Fern’s over these past fifteen years or so. As I now understand to be a common shared experience, it began for me with breakdowns. I say ‘breakdowns’ plural because there was more than one. There was more than two, actually. In fact, if I’m going to be pedantic about it, then I suspect that I’ve lost count of how many there have been at this point.

My first breakdown was a physical one, that presaged the mental and emotional ones to come. I’d left London, where I’d lived since training at RADA in my late teens, and moved to Wales to be with Fern. In so doing I’d begun a process of moving away from my own first great love – acting. As Fern describes her own shift away from theatre, I too went through a painful and complex ‘conscious uncoupling’ (thanks, Gwyneth…) from acting as a way of life. The reasons why are many and would take too long to list here but, fundamentally, I realised that the urge to perform came from two needs: the first a ‘selfish’ one of needing to work through my own personal demons and foibles; the second from a place of ‘service’, a passionate knowing that performance and story has a healing and cathartic role to play in the lives of those who witness it. So, in slowly, painfully, moving away from this first need, I began to move ever closer towards the second.

A physical breakdown whilst touring my one-man play, ‘Hitting Funny’, for Volcano was the start. It shouldn't have been a surprise since the play was an exploration of a man having a nervous breakdown in real time in front of the audience but it never occurred to me it was actually my own until it was too late. I had huge energy crashes, coupled with an inability to function or relate to others. My GP recommended anti-depressants. I declined. Then, later, emotional, mental and further physical breakdowns came thick and fast. I came to understand that these were all indicative of my body and my soul trying to tell me something. The message was a simple one but it took me many years of denial to truly begin to hear it: I had to change. I had to change the way I lived, the things I valued, the impact I had on myself and others. I had to change or I would not survive…

Gaia House

And so, I did. I do. I am. Like Fern, these breakdowns led me to places and to experiences I could never have begun to imagine and still find hard to grasp sometimes. I found myself going on silent meditation retreats at Gaia House in Devon. I am not a Buddhist. But Buddhist practice has become a central part of who I am and how I live my life. The ability to work with my mind, to be fully present to myself and what’s going on within me – all of this is now my daily practice.

Margaret Wheatley

In 2015, after many years of Fern trying to bring her to my attention, I met and began to work with my teacher, Margaret Wheatley – see here for my initial experience with Meg. Since then I have committed to more learning and training with her to become a Warrior for the Human Spirit. In the same year, I undertook a Vision Quest with Pip Bondy as well as many of her Way of Council retreats.

Slowly but surely, the combination of all of this work and training and changing has begun to make sense. It has begun to lead me, without my consciously fully understanding or expecting it to, towards my next life. Perhaps towards my destiny as a human being in this lifetime. Towards the second of my two needs that led me to act in the first place – the need to ‘serve’, to use my gifts and talents and abilities as a storyteller and a ‘holder of space’ in order to serve others, to help them to find their own still quiet voice within.

All of these experiences, these breakdowns, these breakthroughs, lead me to want to offer myself, alongside Fern, as someone who can hold a Space for Change for others. And so, early this year, we made our plans and presented our offer… 

Betty and Jaffa survey the land

Fern: We decided to run a pilot ‘Space for Change’ to create and test a format with a group of invited friends and colleagues. We wanted to make it as accessible as possible and set the rates as cheaply as we dared to just cover cost and create for ourselves the experience of holding a group through a deep personal process. In a very short amount of time we had our group of participants. They turned out to be a mixture of some we had known and worked with over many years of making theatre in Wales, some we had met through the work of Emergence and some we knew a little if at all. As it turned out, every single one was an artist – mainly with performance and community organising backgrounds and most with an interest in socially engaged arts practice. Though most had experience in this area and some had experience in counselling, psychotherapy and facilitation, none had worked consciously with the nature based practices based on the model of the Four Shields which we intended to use throughout our process.

Our plan was to move through the process of the Four Shields as taught by Steven Foster and  Meredith Little from the School of Lost Borders. This map or model is beautiful, powerful and simple though not simplistic. The Shields are connected with the seasons, the elements and the four directions. They also mark the passage from childhood to adolescence, adulthood to eldership, death to birth. Each connects with a state of being, knowing or doing – physical/sensory, psychological/emotional, logical/rational and intuitive/creative. 

Any process which calls on the Four Shields is dynamic not static, inviting us to move and flow through each in turn, not getting stuck, blocked or favouring any one aspect in opposition to the others. The idea is to be able to access and hold each of the four in a dynamic state of balance and ‘become five’. To be at the ‘centre of the circle’ of our own life, calling on and having developed a ‘full set’ of Shields and to ultimately come into balance and be ‘fully human’. A lovely neat model and very tricky in practice. Something to practice every day in every moment rather than to reach some kind of static state of fixed or rigid ‘enlightenment’. 

It was our intention to create a process which might be powerful in and of itself and to give people an introduction to working with the Four Shields. We began with an orientation and introduction before diving into the Four Shields and spending one day working with each direction in preparation for inviting our participants to go on a dawn until dusk solo ‘Medicine Walk’ with no food. In the height of Summer this can be quite an ordeal – lasting from 5 in the morning until 9 at night. 

Our beautiful group room awaits the retreatants...

One of the most powerful and beautiful parts of this process is the concept of ‘creating an intention’. Each participant is invited to shape or craft their own ‘intention’: What is being marked, let go of, celebrated or manifested? The intention that each participant creates with the help of the guides is specific to their life trajectory, interests, passions and challenges. This strong intention becomes the guiding principle which helps give clarity and focus to a process which otherwise can feel uncertain and unclear. It gives a rudder, a compass, a sense of specificity. The Medicine Walk at the heart of the process then becomes a walk where everything and anything ‘speaks back’ to the initiate. The whole of nature becomes a window or mirror which reflects back to us the wisdom each of us is seeking. The Medicine Walk therefore becomes a microcosm of the person’s life, with patterns, gifts, challenges and meaning laid out in front of us if we can but take notice and see.

Glaslyn from the summit cairn of Moel Fadian

And so we had our intention, our framework, the theory to hold us through our week of work together. Of course in practice there is something profoundly messy, complex, dynamic, improvisational and emergent holding seven people through a potentially life-changing process. As a very wise teacher recently told me: 

"You cannot guide anyone else through a change process without going through it yourself." 

Once we embark on the process, we are leaving behind certainties, old tried and trusted ways of how we think things should be or how we used to do things and we open to the uncertainty of a creative process which is different every single time. I love this work though it is probably the thing which terrifies me the most. It is true improvisation, surrendering to ‘what is’, letting go of preconceived outcomes and trusting in the emergent process. And this is what happened with Space for Change in all it’s mucky and magical unpredictability. Over to Phil for some final words...

Phil: And so, after these long journeys, these deep learnings, these doubts, insecurities, breakdowns and breakthroughs, Fern and I stepped into the roles of guides together for the first time in mid August this year. It’s inappropriate to share what happened as the confidentiality of such processes must be sacrosanct. But what I can say, from the perspective of myself, is that it felt like coming home. Coming home to myself, to work I know in my bones and marrow. Coming home to a role and a process that I feel my whole life has been preparing me for. It was deeply challenging, deeply beautiful and deeply rewarding. And deeply exhausting too, in that bone deep, satisfying way that good work always is. 

Here are a few words from our first Space for Change participants to give you a flavour of their experiences:

“A space for change has opened a new way of perceiving nature for me and by nature… I mean everything, my own life, the landscape, food, animals, interconnection, history... It was thrilling, exquisitely beautiful and profoundly vital.” L.R

“A powerful encounter with what is alive in you. An exploration of life, death and the space in between. We spend so much of our lives running away from things. Space for Change is one of those rare and powerful opportunities to face your reality as it is; I celebrated what is truly alive, honoured some things that had died and shone a little more light on all I am and can be.” D.H

“Fern and Phil are two of the most compassionate, generous and wise soul facilitators I have come across.” T. G

“I thought the way Fern and Phil organised things and took such good care of us all was exemplary! It was a really special and significant week.” K.L

The night after everyone had left the house, Fern and I went to a party at a neighbour’s house and sat there, exhausted, bemused and overwhelmed. There was no way on earth we could begin to talk about what had just happened – the scale of it in our lives, the importance of it as an experience, the incredible blessing of finding our way to doing this work together, the openness and beauty of our participants… it was all too much. 

Now, months later, we are clear in one thing: this is our work. And so, we’re preparing to make an offer to host a second Space for Change retreat in 2020. More details will be coming soon once we’ve finalised venues. In addition, we will be offering our first Vision Fast. 


The times they are a-changing. As they always are. As they always have been. Navigating the choppy waters of change is the art of living. And it’s the art that we now practice with joy, delight, a fair amount of surprise, and a huge amount of love. Come and join us soon.

More details of our planned Space for Change retreat and Vision Fast for 2020 will be available soon. Sign up for our mailing list at www.emergence-uk.org 

It’s about time too – by Phil Ralph

I have teached. I am officially a person who has teached.

(I’ll cut to the chase for those of you who are pressed for time and say that this will be a blog where I reflect on my recent experiences teaching at Schumacher College and I really hope that you might be intrigued enough by my musings to consider joining myself and Fern for our ‘Practising the Art of Living’ course at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth, mid Wales, from Monday 24^th to Saturday 29^th September 2018. Full details and how to book can be found by clicking this link.)

This blog is therefore a sort of sequel, or next instalment if you will, from my last blog of 25^th January where I looked forward to my first experiences teaching with not a little amount of fear and trepidation. Well, I sit here today as a person who has teached. (I know the correct word is taught but I quite like the sound of teached…) And let me tell you, it was quite an experience…

To briefly precis the last blog (although if you have LOTS of time, you can read it yourself here) I have come to realise that my fear of teaching – of standing up in front of people in a role that offers myself, my thoughts, my experiences and my being in service to them and their lives – was actually a fear of some kind of lack in myself. And, after developing a spiritual practise, having a loving, supportive partner and a teacher who doesn’t allow me to get away with any nonsense, I realise that there is no lack in myself. There isn’t even really a self to have a lack of. All there is, I now realise, is an organic lifeform present on this planet for a short space of time between birth and death with a profound and genuine desire to serve. And, if I really want to follow that desire, then it’s about time I offer whatever I have to others.

And so I did. I have teached. Taught. Whatever.

At the invitation of my dear friend and extraordinary writer, Manda Scott (if you haven’t read her stunning quadrilogy of novels about the warrior queen Boudica then you’ve really missed a treat), I went to Schumacher College at the start of this month to offer two days of teaching on Changing the Frame – The Science and Art of Communicating for Transition. To quote from the course website –

“This course provides an opportunity for a deep dive, in the company of internationally recognised scientists, writers and artists in various media, into the science underlying the process by which we make sense of the world and how we can use this knowledge to become more effective communicators in the service of liberation.”

Manda Scott

Manda had invited me to be part of the course faculty late last year and I had not hesitated to say yes since I love Manda and am always swept along by her enthusiasm, passion and creativity. And then, as the date for the beginning of the course grew nearer, I began to be assailed by doubts and fears. Especially when I read the full description of what the course was about and most especially when I read who else would be teaching on the course… A veritable cornucopia of incredibly learned, erudite and experienced people such as amongst others A.L Kennedy, George Marshall, Prof Chris Rapley CBE, Kate Raworth…

 And me…

I know comparison is unhealthy and we must never do it. But we all secretly grapple with it, don’t we? And I certainly grappled. I grappled bloody hard. So, I arrived at Schumacher already scared. I was scared because of all the above and, most especially, I was scared because… well, because it was Schumacher…

Schumacher College is the place where I met my teacher, Margaret Wheatley. It’s a place where I can absolutely assure you that my life changed beyond all recognition. And I can say with absolute confidence that my experience has been replicated by thousands of students who have passed through the Old Postern at Dartington in the past quarter century or so. This is a place that changes lives. And here I am – teaching there…

The Old Postern - Schumacher College

The old questions were rife in my mind: Who do I think I am? And why am I doing this now?

But this time was different because I knew the answers to those questions.

No-one special. And it’s about time…

I stepped into the Play Room (what a fantastic name for a teaching space!) at Schumacher on Tuesday 3^rd April with an open heart and the desire to be of service. I was met there by a group of people from all walks of life and all four corners of the globe. And all ages too. And I shared my life and my experiences with story.

Story has been my life’s work. I have been an actor, writer and storyteller since I was six years old and I have been a professional creative artist for 26 years. It is endlessly fascinating to me how much we as human beings are story making animals. We imbibe story with our mother’s milk. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves every waking moment and our dreams tell us stories while we are asleep. And, right now, as Charles Eisenstein and many, many other people say: We need a new story. Or an ancient story. Or a different story. And we need to learn how to tell this new/ancient/different story as well as we possibly can and as fast as we possibly can because things on this planet are not going well.

I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of my experiences at Schumacher in too much detail because I’ve already rambled on for long enough here. But suffice it to say it was a truly wonderful experience. My fear – totally natural and to be expected – galvanised me into offering myself and my experiences as fully as it was possible for me to do. Myself and the students – alongside Manda and the brilliant, compassionate and kind Jonathan Dawson – talked story and we played in the Play Room.

For myself I learned the deep joy of sharing and, yes, teaching. I learned of how enlivening and invigorating it is to open oneself to others with no hope of anything more than enrichment for all. I also learned of how heady and seductive it is to sit in that chair. To look out at a room and see people staring back at me, hanging on my every word. I learned how easy it must be to go from being a nervous, insecure, fearful person sitting in that seat to being a person who believes they deserve to sit in that seat because they are a natural genius and everything that drops from their mouth is gold dust. I learned how seductive it must be to imagine oneself a guru. And I gave thanks for these revelations, laughed at myself for noticing them and then went back to offering what I have in service to others.

And after I left Schumacher? I learnt to expect shame and embarrassment. They turn up regular as clockwork after every single one of my One Eyed Man offerings and here they were again after my first experience of teaching. Back come the old questions: Who do I think I am? Why did I say that thing? Or this thing? Why did I reveal so much of myself? Why did I go so far? Why didn’t I say that other thing that I should have said but didn’t realise until two days after I’d left? I learnt that these voices always show up and to expect and welcome them. And not to take them seriously. There is always something to learn from every experience, no matter what. But that learning never, ever comes from kicking the shit out of myself for my perceived failings. Failure is only valuable when it is seen as an opportunity to learn. A creative life should be rife with failure or it simply is not a creative life.

I got home, awash with joy and shame, exhilaration and failure, and shared it all – as I do everything else – with Fern. We talked about it all. And we talked about how we can apply what I learned to our course ‘Practising the Art of Living’ at CAT in September.

Fundamentally what we realise is that we are conducting an endless series of experiments in the art of living. We take our inspiration from Prof. Tim Jackson’s quote: “The art of living well within the ecological limits of a finite planet.” What does it mean to live well? And to practise it as an art?

It means to be open to everything and to learn from everything and to say yes more than we say no. And it means to teach through the same principles – openness, experiment, failure, joy. These are what we practise and this is how we live.

Since the beginning of January when I last blogged, Fern and I have set aside an hour a week to sit together and discuss our practise in preparation for our course. We tape our conversation as a record and to focus our minds. We learn a huge amount by stepping into this space of the unknown together every week. We've just posted the first of our short vlogs about this process.

We’d really love to invite you to join us – both at CAT and at other events and teachings that we will be sharing in future.

The world is in a parlous state. We think it’s time to figure out how to live…

And about time too…

Links! 

Fern is co-facilitating on a Vision Quest with David Wendl-Berry from 18^th to 27^th May 2018

She is also running Woman Time with Jenny Archard from 9^th to 14^th July 2018

Phil is assisting on Margaret Wheatley’s Warriors for the Human Spirit programme from 28^th April to 4^th May 2018. The programme is full for this year but for more details and to express an interest for next year’s programme visit – www.margaretwheatley.com

And we are both teaching on Practising the Art of Living at CAT from 24^th-29^th September 2018.

It’s about time… by Phil Ralph

This year, in September, my partner Fern and I will be teaching a week-long residential course at the Centre for Alternative Technology. Entitled ‘Practicing the Art of Living’, the course will lead up to 12 participants through a cycle of change and transformation, exploring how they might live, work and create differently in this rapidly changing time.

Simply the mere act of writing that paragraph has given me the shivers… of anticipation, of delight, of shock and, above all, of fear. My mind and my ego are now bouncing around inside my head like two competing pinballs, utterly terrified at the prospect of what I am proposing to do. Rising above the cacophony of these two clacking balls is a repeating refrain. A single question, repeated over and over and over and over again –

Who do I think I am?

I never expected to be doing this. To be clear, I never even imagined I would be doing this. I have spent my life assuring myself and anyone who will listen to me that “I’m not a teacher, could never be a teacher, don’t know enough to teach anyone, am superstitious about the whole notion of teaching and what kind of an egotist would I need to be to presume that I had any knowledge that would be valuable enough to others for me to teach it?”

And yet here I am. The course runs from Monday 24th to Saturday 29th September at CAT near Machynlleth in mid-Wales. Bookings are now open.

So, the questions I find myself asking are: why now? And what has changed?

And the answers are: It’s about time. And – everything.

Fern and I have now been together as partners for twenty years. In that time, my life has changed beyond all recognition. When we met in 1998, I was living in London and I was an actor. Today, we are living in the wilds of Wales (well, Llandeilo…) and I am a writer, performer, producer, facilitator and – yes – teacher. How the hell did that happen?

The full answer to that question would undoubtedly exhaust your generous attention span (thank you for reading this, by the way…) so let me give you a brief, two-word precis:

Breakdown. Breakthrough.

There you go. That’s 20 years of change in a nutshell. Simples…

Yeah, you guessed it -  it wasn’t really that easy. I mean, it was that pattern but… it didn’t happen just the once. Nor twice. Nor three times. It happened again. And again. And again. And again. And that was just in the last two minutes.

My (extremely belaboured) point is that change is not easy, it is not painless, and it isn’t simply a one-time thing. It is a seemingly endless process of challenge, loss, grief, depression, disassociation, denial, bargaining and ultimately acceptance that goes on throughout life, day in, day out. It’s a process of reimagining who and what I can be in this lifetime – and then doing it again, and again, and…

Wherever you look in the world, you can find aphorisms and sayings that encourage us to accept that life IS change. And that’s easy to accept when it’s just words. But living it – truly going through the process of having your dreams and expectations churned and chopped and discarded and rejected time and time again – is so much harder to do. In fact, it’s a lifetime’s practice… it’s an art…

One of the key things that enabled me to follow the path of change I have been living through in the past 20 years – apart from sharing my life with the most joyously questing human being it has ever been my privilege to know – has been a gradually burgeoning spiritual practice.

(****** SPIRITUALITY KLAXON ******** HE’S JUST MENTIONED THE ‘S’ WORD!!! EVERYBODY HEAD FOR THE EXITS!!!! WOOP!!! WOOP!!!!)

As you can tell, I’m something of a recovering cynic – as well as being a recovering actor and addict – and my take on spirituality from the cradle was pretty much encapsulated with a sneery shrug and some combination of the words – what, load, a, of, and knackers. But I discovered to my eternal gratitude that cynicism and a closed mind will only get you so far in life and in my case, it got me just as far as a nervous breakdown, physical illness and severe depression. Opening myself up to the notion that there might be “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” has brought me endless riches – as well as endless challenges and opportunities to learn and grow.

One of the first things I did that began to open my mind was go on a silent meditation retreat at Gaia House in Devon. When I say I went “on a silent meditation retreat” what that actually looked like in practice was booking a place to go on a retreat FOR THREE YEARS RUNNING AND BOTTLING OUT EVERY SINGLE TIME BECAUSE I WAS ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED before finally managing to pluck up the courage to spend a week in silence with other human beings, sitting on a cushion and letting my mind shout at me day and night. And once I finally got there, how was it? Well… 

When you see images of people meditating, they always look so blissful and calm, don’t they? And that is part of it, sure. For maybe one minute every five hours, if you’re lucky… The rest of the time the images should arguably look like the people are in a war zone, assailed from every side by thought after thought after thought… 

But, eventually, after time had slowed to a crawl and my senses had become refined and retuned and I began to watch my thoughts as one might watch the clouds passing across the sky – eventually, by the end of the week I had discovered something truly revolutionary. Ready?

I am not my mind.

God, what a relief, eh? From that point on there was no stopping me. Change and transformation here I come!!! Toot toot!!!

No, not really… At every stage of change, when I could possibly have resisted, you can be damn sure I resisted. I fought and kicked and screamed against letting go of any of the assumptions and desires I had in place for what I thought my life should be. I insisted that I would change no more. But life, as it so often does, had other plans. And, like it or lump it, change I would and change I must.

Now, some seven years after my first retreat, the list of things I do and have done that I could never possibly have imagined seems endless: I have a daily practice of sitting meditation; I have sat in more circles of total strangers undergoing profound spiritual and psychological distress than I could ever have imagined; I have undertaken a vision quest where I went alone into the wilds of north wales with nothing but minimal shelter and water to sustain me;  I have assisted others who have undertaken the same process; I have facilitated transformative gatherings, workshops, and walks; I have co-produced and directed with Fern a documentary series about the unique and wonderful spiritual activist, Satish Kumar; and I have trained as a Warrior for the Human Spirit with my teacher, Margaret Wheatley, and this year I will be stepping up to assist her in training others.

So, as you can see, when I say that everything has changed, I’m not even vaguely exaggerating.

So, why now? Why is it ‘about time’?

I’m 46 years old as I write this at the end of January 2018. I will be 47 in about eight weeks. On a personal level, I’m running out of time. Now, I know that the voice in your head that insists that you won’t ever die has balked at what I just wrote, but the absolute, ineluctable truth of it is I have less time ahead of me than there is behind me. Someday soon – terrifyingly soon – I will die. And I am absolutely certain that I want to be of service while I’m still here and offer some of the hard-won wisdom I have learnt to others.

I could spend the rest of my life asking the question ‘who do I think I am?’ I suspect we all could. Who do I think I am to teach, to guide, to speak, to stand up, to lead, to be generous, to think I have something to offer, to imagine I am talented, valuable, can be of service….? And the only answer to that I can offer is simple –

Who do I think I am? No-one. Just a human being. Alive for now, able and willing to serve for now. Curious, passionate, questing, failing, falling, laughing, crying. A human being. 

Time to get past that question then… That’s the personal level. So, why is it ‘about time’ on the global level?

I don’t really need to tell you, do I? You’re alive too. You know what’s going on, even if you do everything you can to protect yourself from it. None of us know what the future holds – for our species or the planet – but based on where we are right now, today, it doesn’t look good. At all. In fact, it looks really, really bad. And I could bed deep into my old friend, cynicism, and say that I’m alright and screw everyone else and the sky isn’t falling and why do I need to change and grow and share and love… I could do that. But I refer you to the paragraph above where I talked about the fact that I’m running out of time. We all are. Fast. Time to put up or shut up.

So, inspired and nurtured as I have been for the last 20 years by the love and awesome curiosity of my partner Fern, I’ve decided that it’s about time… It’s about time I offer whatever talents and learning I have in the service of others. It’s about time I set aside my fragile ego and my fear of failure and share my life’s learnings for the betterment of all. It’s about time that I accepted that being a teacher doesn’t mean I have to know everything or be everything. Quite the reverse. As I look around the world right now, the scariest, most dangerous people I see are the ones who claim they do know everything… And the most profound and valuable teachers are their opposites. The ones who have walked the path ahead of us and with deep humility and a sense of their own unimportance, share what they know in the hope it will be of service.

What I now know to be true to my very bones is that change is life and life is change. Nothing about that sentence is simple or easy (or grammatically correct…) but it is profoundly and undeniably true. I embrace life and change in all its complexity, beauty and harshness. For however long I have left, I commit to serving life. 

 

It’s about time...

Fern and I hope you will join us at CAT in September.

I will also be teaching a couple of days on 'Changing the Frame: the Science and Art of Communicating for Transition' at Schumacher College in April. The course runs from Monday 19th March to Friday 6th April. Full details available here.