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

Making Pilgrimage by Lucy Neal

I lived in a house called the Hopgarden for a couple of years as a child. It had a huge garden and I loved it. We only lived there a couple of years before moving on and on the day of the move, I went to school as normal, but realised as I left the house, it would be for the last time ever, as my parents spent the day transporting family life to our new home - actually quite near by.

Leaving the house, I raced back in again and in an improvised fashion marked my farewell to the house by walking steadily down each step of a long, curving staircase, counting as I went, cherishing life lived in the house, sad to go, knowing by instinct honouring, celebrating, paying attention to change was more than important, it was crucial. I think the number (not really the point of the excercise) was 68.

I feel I have been marking my life with such ritualised stepping ever since and walking has been an essential means to this. I spent a week walking Offa’s Dyke to kneel at my mother’s grave after she died: it was the first time I absorbed fully into my whole heart and soul, that she had gone. I walk around Tooting Bec Common every day to watch chestnut trees explode into bobbing white candles; I have had the grandest of privileges of participating in not one, but two of Emergence’s Land Journies: one in a graceful ellipsis around Machynlleth, north to Cader Idris and one along the open-hearted paths of the Gower Way. Both, marked enormous changes in my life: a growing awareness of a role I might have to play in the historic shifts our societies must make by the minute, by the day in service to life on Earth for the next millenias - cherishing, honouring, celebrating the life that dwells in the thin, rich, layer of our biospere.

Sometimes change is happening to us and we are not fully aware of it, but we pick up a few signals here and there that seed themselves for future provisioning in our lives. When I first met Satish Kumar in May 2003, I was co-director of the London International Festival of Theatre. A visionary colleague, Julia Rowntree, had invited Satish’s lifelong friend and co-activist Vandana Shiva to speak at the Natural History Museum on the subject of Biodiversity, cultural diversity and celebration: intimate links and matters of survival. Vandana’s lecture, staged with her audience seated beneath the famous Museum Diplodocus was part of a LIFT Festival series I was responsible for presenting called: Imagining A Cultural Commons. It was a stupendous evening: Peter Sellers made a noble introduction to Vandana who then spoke - without notes - for an hour or so. She pointed to the botanic plants painted on the tiles on the ceiling and made the connection between bio-diversity, cultural diversity and art’s role in survival on the planet. She ended by saying ‘..we don’t want to go the way of him’ pointing to the dinosaur. I listened to every word  but was possibly too embroiled with the intense, busy and immensely rewarding activity of running a wonderful festival, to listen with my whole heart and body. That took a few more years, and co-incided with my second meeting with Satish when I spent a residential week at Schumacher College. Standing one night with my back against the grand chestnut tree, something cracked within me: the vastness of space, my immeasurable smallness of lifespan, my sadness at the unwellness of the Earth and lack of certainty about how future generations and species could thrive, all collided in me.

From then on, my stepping has been more careful about how to live with the universe and let it act upon me and one day, I’d like to go on a pilgramage to mark such stepping. Where would I go? what would I go on pilrimage for? What would be risked? what changed? to what end? Having just finished a long, big project, writing Playing for Time - Making Art As If The World Mattered,  I am not 100% sure at this moment. I need to wait around on street corners, looking, observing, kind of hanging about for a while, picking up the signals, looking backwards and forwards.

"As we step into a new geological age of a four billion year process on Earth, called the 'anthropocene', it is hard to imagine as humans we are accountable for reimagining our world on behalf of ourselves, subsequent generations and all species. We need celebratory social spaces to look backwards and forwards in time, where our collective knowledge, intuition and a sense of wonder at what is possible can come together."

Satish’s pilgrimage from India has been a huge inspiration, not simply the miles of walking, and the engagement with intention and action along the way, but the knowledge gained about how the universe provides for us, if we trust it. We can travel openly, trusting in what uncertainty brings: we can let the universe act on and through us.  We can create the social, celebratory spaces. The conversation between Satish and Jane Davidson will provide a very grand one of these and I shall listen to every word, with heart and soul.

In the meantime, I take smaller walks, building into a grown up, intentional pilgrimage - or maybe not! maybe the daily, smaller walks are indeed a pilgrimage of their own. Each step, each day. Today I went for a walk near my father’s home in Wales. Campion in the sun; bluebells, dandelions and hawthorn peeping: the joy, the energy, the spring in the universe. I noticed numbers printed on the sheep’s backs - animals stamped as man’s possessions.  A lamb jumped about: 68 printed in red on its back, jogging my thoughts about what it is to belong to an abundantly rich world of all living things and journey through it.

Emergence is crowdfunding to make a landmark documentary series of 6 programmes with Satish Kumar. To find out more, contribute or pre-order your copy of the limited edition DVD box set click on this link.

Playing for Time - Making Art As If The World Mattered

Is published by Oberon Books

http://oberonbooks.com/playing-for-time

Promotion code: ONPFT2015 valid until June 30

The Comfort of Community by Philip Ralph

Fern and I have two small dogs. They are called Jaffa and Betty.

We’ve been away for the past five days at various events and workshops and had to find somewhere for the dogs to live since, annoyingly, the world isn’t terribly dog friendly and we can’t take them with us wherever we go. All of our usual dog minding options were full or unavailable and we were beginning to panic when we remembered Canine Comforts near Rhossilli on the Gower near Swansea.

You see, the problem with our dogs is ... (do bear with me, this isn’t all going to be about the dogs, I promise. You might even begin to discern that I’m using them as something of a metaphor later on cause I fancy myself as a bit of a writer) ... that they are a feisty couple of so-and-sos. Both of them are some form of Jack Russell terrier cross and they can be a real handful. Jaffa in particular – and I’m sure she won’t mind me saying this – can find it very trying meeting new dogs. She always has to get right in their face or up their bum, the fur on her back standing to attention, indicating clearly that if the new dog doesn’t back down pronto then things could get a bit growly and bitey. Canine Comforts, unlike most dog kennels, houses dogs together in one big pack – they sleep together at night and run about together during the day. So, it was with a due sense of trepidation that I delivered the two dogs there last Wednesday night...

How did they get on? That’s where the metaphor bit comes in and also the dramatic suspense. Now, don’t just skip to the end to find out if they survived or managed not to rip their pack mates limb from tiny limb. There’s method in my madness. Read on to find out more...

While the dogs were enjoying Canine Comforts, I headed to London to meet up with Fern at the launch of our friend Lucy Neal’s new book, Playing for Time. 

Lucy, former director of the LIFT Festival, co-creator of Case For Optimism and stalwart of Transition Tooting, has been a lynchpin for us here at Emergence over the last five years. She spoke at the second Emergence conference in Swansea; was at the heart of the planning and delivery of the first Land Journey and Summit at CAT nearMachynlleth in 2012; and facilitated and walked the Gower Way as part of the Walk That Reconnects last September. She’s been working on Playing for Time for the past two years. I won’t say too much about it here since Fern is going to blog all about it next week but, suffice it to say, if you’ve found your way to this blog and are even a tiny bit interested in the arts and sustainability, then you need to read this book.

The launch event was held on Thursday night at the beautiful Free Word centre in Clerkenwell. The many collaborators and artists who had co-created the book alongside Lucy had been there all day together, celebrating and marking their achievement, before a larger launch event in the evening to which I was invited.

Here’s the thing though – I was really terrified about going...

I’m 44 years old. I look like an all-in wrestler. People scare me.

To be more specific, large groups of people gathered together at social events scare me...

And small groups, to be honest...

In fact, ANY group of people, no matter what size, gathered together socially gives me the almighty collywobbles. The jitters. The heebie jeebies. You get the idea...

This is a bit of a bind since I’m really committed to the idea of community and recognise it to be crucial to the whole movement surrounding the changes we need to make to create a liveable planet for future generations. It’s the separation we feel from each other, the suspicion we feel about each other, the doubt and fear, that leads us to attack each other and to jealously guard – and waste – valuable resources. We literally need each other to survive.

But, as I said in my last blog, I don’t like change. I like staying firmly in my comfort zone and what that means to me usually revolves around being on the other side of a closed door from most of the people in the world (and eating a pastry based food item whilst watching a DVD boxset...).  But, recognising that my need to stay in my comfort zone has lead me to a much smaller, sadder life in the past, I know that I have to bite the bullet, put down the pasty, and get out there and be with people. And, of course, whenever I do, I discover that people are, by and large, bloody lovely. And indeed so they proved to be at the launch of Lucy’s book.

In fact, I’d go further and say that it was a room chock full of some of the bloody loveliest people one could ever hope to meet. Passionate people. Engaged people. Committed, dedicated, creative, funny, enlightened and inspirational people. Everywhere I looked. 

And therein lay another problem for me...

“What the hell” – I couldn’t stop myself from asking in a slightly Sex & The City type way – “am I doing here?” Because I may do some work with Emergence and I may feel passionate about these issues but I’ve never walked the walk and talked the talk like the people around me that night. These people aren’t waiting for a politician to tell them it’s okay to go and make connected, relational, valuable, useful art that connects and inspires their communities. They’re just doing it. And as the evening went on, my feelings of inadequacy faded away to be replaced by something much more useful. I realised that these people around me – the ones I was so afraid of – were my community. I stopped feeling inadequate and felt inspired instead. If they can do it, then so can I. I came away feeling fired up and engaged and ready to tackle change head on. And I drew that strength from being with people who don’t whinge and moan about the world and do nothing. They act. They do. They make. They create. I want to be in their gang. I want to be part of their community. And, slowly but surely, I think I am.

If that weren’t enough, Fern and I then traveled to Cambridge where we were part of a wonderful weekend called Way of Council and Community, lead by the force of nature that is Pip Bondy. 

Pip has made teaching and sharing Council her life’s work and it shows. Small of stature but huge of heart, her strength, compassion and wisdom are remarkable. Like Lucy’s book, I recommend her and her work to those of you with questing souls and fearless hearts. 

Way of Council is a ceremonial form of deep communication and listening that derives from tribal cultures stretching back thousands of years. It is intuitive, open, heartfelt, passionate, and – you guessed it – utterly terrifying. Pip teaches the practice of sitting together in circle with our fellow humans and really truly speaking and listening from the heart to what serves in that moment. It might sound a bit woolly, yoghurt-weavy and new-agey but, believe me, it’s anything but. It’s primal. It’s grounded. It’s pant-wettingly scary. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run and, try as I might to be funny and frivolous so everyone in the circle would think I was a great guy, the reality of the experience is that I had to tell the truth. And the truth hurts.

The content of the weekend – what we all shared with each other – is confidential, quite rightly. But I can tell you this: I went into a room in Cambridgeshire and met strangers. I was scared, terrified even, and way way WAY out of my comfort zone. And I walked out of that same room two and a half days later – you guessed it  – part of a community. We had spoken from the heart and listened from the heart, we had laughed and we had cried and we had come to know each other not as strangers but as fellow travellers. We had broken down the barriers between us and come to recognise that we are all scared, all lost, all searching, all grieving, all joyful, playful, delighted and thrilled to be human animals in this time and place.

(Okay, park your materialist, First World cynicism and go with it. Believe me, no-one is more surprised than me to be on this journey but I am so very glad that I am. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, my friends...)

After the weekend was over, dazed and not a little confused, Fern and I travelled home and went to collect the dogs. And what did we find? (METAPHOR KLAXON!!!) Our two dogs – and yes, even fiery Jaffa – had, after initial fear and doubt, fallen into deep and warm community with their fellow species mates. They had played together, they had slept together, they had eaten, chased, barked, scrapped and cuddled together. They had broken out of their comfort zones and were a community.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere...

Coda

In recent years I have become fascinated by the etymological derivation of words. The true meanings behind the words we use in everyday life carry great hidden messages for us if we only care to look a bit deeper. Most recently I have been thinking a lot about the words community and comfort. 

As I said above, comfort for me is a solitary experience and I wonder if it may be the same for many people in our solipsistic, materialist culture. But once we push through our comfort zones and fears around other people we are, more often than not, rewarded with a real sense of belonging and warmth. And that’s not surprising since the etymological derivation of ‘Community’ boils down to ‘Together we are one’.

But here’s the kicker and the real life lesson for me from the last few days. The comfort zone I am so scared to leave... the solipsistic, solitary experience of closing my door and sprawling on the sofa with a pasty... the desire to remove myself from the company of others because I feel inadequate or lost or threatened by their company... I think I may have got it all wrong...

Because you see, the etymological derivation of ‘Comfort’ boils down to a really fascinating notion –

'Together we are strong'.

Like my dogs, I’m going to remember that the next time I face meeting strangers. I think it may well make me see things in a new light. I think it might offer me real comfort to continue doing things that scare me in this particularly scary time in human history. I think it might make me feel less alone. And I hope it does for you too.