All The Women I've Ever Met: Women Making - 1st of 7 Sundays in Spring... by Fern Smith

Photo: Phil Ralph

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don’t dig for answers that can’t be given yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then someday you will gradually without noticing, live into the answer. Rilke -  'A Year With Rilke' (reading for February 18th).


It is Sunday February 18th - the first Sunday in Lent... Chris and I are preparing her house in readiness for this, the first ‘7 Sundays in Spring’ gathering. We’ve had a slow start to the morning. Chris is feeling low and under the weather from a virus that has struck her down these past two weeks. Most of Swansea seem to be similarly afflicted and many have had, are recovering from or are still suffering with it. I’m wondering how she will be and cope, as she has generously agreed to her house being the venue for our first gathering, ‘Women Making’. I made soup the night before and brought with me a loaf of home-made spelt bread, there is also the cold roast-veg leftovers from yesterday and a plate of home-made malt loaf. We will be okay for food even if no one else brings any.

We set out the chairs in Chris’ large front room which overlooks Swansea Bay, all sea and sky. George, the parakeet is curious and engaged, watching and chirping encouragement from his open-door cage in the big bay-window. A little table, a central unlit candle, whicker basket of nightlights, Carolyn Hillyer's divination pack ‘Weavers' Oracle’ all laid out in preparation, with my palm sized ‘talking stone’ from Iona ready at the side. I’ve chosen a low stool to sit on, placed notes, books and other things I might need to open this, the first of our seven circles which will take place over this and the next six consecutive Sundays. I’m ready…

Photo: Fern Smith

Donna arrives - always the earliest, at 10:15. The invitation was to arrive at 10:30 for an 11 o’clock start. Looks like we are now officially open for business. I give Donna the job of making tea and coffee for the arrivals, though in my nerves I often keep taking over until I’m distracted by another task or conversation, leaving Donna to take over again. This is my way when I’m on edge. All hyped up, I try to do everything. I delegate but still try to do everything, know that I can’t and if I’m aware enough - step back and relinquish control. This thing will happen in its own way or not at all.

I’ve had at least three messages this morning from those that wanted to, but aren’t now able to make it. My heart sinks a little as I imagine only three or four of us being present. We were 17 and now will be 13 including Jo‘s baby Phoebe. Plenty. Those that come are the right ones, I know this and still always feel a little stung when I get last minute cancellations, trying hard not to take them as personal rejections.

Each of the women bring, as well as food, (home-made cakes, bread, savouries), a whole world of connections stories and memories that for me are associated with each of them. Each woman also brings something to make. This project which I’m envisaging as an ‘every-day art project’ or a ‘residency in my own life’ is an invitation to ‘All the Women I’ve Ever Met.’ I’ve sent out the call on email. The idea is that only women I know already or have met before have been invited. This is not my usual ‘call out’ on Facebook or over the Internet “come one, come all.” Each invitation is specific. It might be to a close intimate friend, who I’ve known for years, someone I’ve just met, someone I’ve met through the arts community, activist network, professional arts sector or even family. The same invite has gone to all. The email invitation was originally much longer - explaining the back story and reasoning behind the project in more detail than anyone could have taken in, in a fast-read email. Again, this is my way. Over-think, over-prepare, over-write. I finally manage to fillet the email invite down to the bare essentials. “Come join me… For a particular activity in a specific place on a precise date. A Sunday in Springtime - during Lent (from the old english word Lenten - Springtime)." A call to women only. The project has many birthings inspirations and beginnings. It was going to be a 7 day vigil for the lost, forgotten and dying called ‘Living Without Hope’ originally intended for Theatr Ardudwy in North Wales. The fact that the theatre has had to close for infrastructure and safety reasons that couldn’t be resolved in time,  left a space in my Arts Council funded Creative Wales enquiry - a vacuum needing to be filled.

“Who do you think you are?” This has been my question throughout the year. (Live the questions says Rilke. Love the questions as if they were rooms yet to enter.) I’ve been asking this beautiful, uncomfortable, powerful question perhaps/probably my whole life. It’s got in the way of many things. And it’s been the cause an instigator of many others that I wouldn’t otherwise have had the courage to do.

For this my 53rd revolution of the sun, I decided to pose it as a central question in my life and in Rilke’s words to “live the question now “, in the hope of perhaps finding a way to somehow  “live into the answer”.

So, all the women I’ve ever met received an invitation. This was a poetic translation of ‘all the women I’m now connected with through email or via Facebook’. Perhaps 300 perhaps 500 invites went out in the end. Hard to gauge, But, once I’d had the idea, I seemed to spend the better part of one week hitting ‘send’ on my computer. Once I knew it was going to be impossible to do my Harlech Vigil the idea came fast on the heels of frustration and disappointment (with a tiny hint of relief.) The idea for seven circles of women gathering throughout Lent and finishing with an all-night vigil to end on Easter Sunday, seemed to literally come from the universe, fully formed, and wholly hatched. I’ve been working with a particular set of ‘divination cards’ for a few years on and off. Since the New Year I’d begun a new meditation cycle and choose one card at the end of each morning's sitting as a teaching or provocation for the day. The deck is concerned with and connects with ‘the Sidhe’ and is named after them – decorated, highly coloured, naïve-style art-cards - 54 in total containing powerful images in support of transition and transformation.

It was early January. I was tussling with my question – “what was I going to do for my fourth Creative Wales arts residency now I couldn’t spend my week in Harlech?” I’d completed three of my intended four residences. This final one didn’t have to be about culmination but I still felt there was some kind of a completion that I wanted to honour. I wanted whatever happened to also to be based on the number ‘7’ since all the others had been. I also felt it should be ‘emergent’, organically flowing from the residences that had gone before and not to be a separate, isolated, ‘tick-box’ exercise for myself and those who might be joining me. I knew what I didn’t want to do, but didn’t yet know what I needed or did want to do. I’d already thought the timing would be in March preferably - around Saint David’s Day, around International Women’s Day - the start of Spring proper.

The North Wales vigil I’d planned, I’d reckoned should take place during the week in which International Women’s Day fell. This was about creating a space for women to be, to connect, to grieve, to speak, to stand up for what they/we believed in. So there were already a number of elements constellating, even after I’d received my apologetic “no’ from the board of Theatre Ardudwy, the gatekeepers of the due-to-close theatre in Harlech… Women. Spring. Vigil. Gathering.

The most extraordinary thing heappend that I still can’t quite understand. I sat after my meditation with my Sidhe cards in early January and chose a card ‘blind.’ I received the ‘Grail Person’. And again, on the next four consecutive mornings, I received the same card. The Grail Person. This brought with it a whole load of associated meanings since the Grail is a symbol I’ve been inspired by and enquiring into for at least three years now. The only problem was, what did it mean to get this same card five days running chosen from of a pack of 54 possible different options? Also the card is arguably the most significant in this particular deck. I sought advice from my mentor and teacher Ian. “Sit with the card” he said “bring the image into your body. What message does it have for you? What’s it telling you?” And so, I did. Almost immediately came the answer - 7 Sundays in Spring. Seven women, seven Sundays, seven places, seven activities, (archetypal - walking, making, dancing). I had the bones. In the next week or so, the bones fleshed out in an organic, emergent way. It took pretty much seven days from the original idea to the details and logistics to be sorted and for the invites to go out. I didn’t have much time to lose. The timescale of Lent came from and was part of the ‘original impulse’ during that enquiring meditation. It wasn’t a ‘message’ in a traditional sense. No silent words in my head. Just a lightning bolt, knowing - this could be so. It represented a kind of challenge or invitation to me. Did I want to receive it? Did I want to make it happen? Could it happen within the allotted time? The first Sunday in Lent was only six weeks away. I need to act fast.

Photo: Fern Smith

And so, the invitations went out. Perhaps you have received one. if not... there is still time...

"7 Sundays in Spring: yes, this is about sisterhood. Yes, this is about #Me Too. Yes, this is about identifying as women witnessing the beauty and the sorrow of this time. It’s also about honouring the fragile nature of life at a time when things and people appear to be falling apart on a daily basis."

I drafted my invitation, read it to a close friend. “It’s an invitation to all the women I’ve ever met” I said to him. “That’s a great title” he said. “What is?” I said. “All the women I’ve ever met” he said. And so, it was duly named.

It felt important that these were not ‘public events’, in the traditional sense. They could have been and almost were. I’ve run plenty of events where I’m putting the word out as widely as possible. But this one - to feel like ritual, ceremony - needed to be different. This wasn’t a public art event. It was about re-connecting, re-gathering. The gatherings would potentially be smaller, more informal and more intimate and without the artist/audience separation I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with.

The first few days I got a flurry of responses back - the first within a minute of sending. It read “count me in!” The invitation process itself felt like an online celebratory ritual. Of course there were many bounce-back‘s from now defunct emails and non-respondents but often, even if women couldn’t come, they loved the idea, loved the timing, loved the sentiment. Some who knew they couldn’t come offered messages of support, poems, stories to share at the gatherings. It became clear that there would be many who would be willing and able to come to one or more of the gatherings and there would also be many women who would be holding space for us even though they weren’t able to attend in person.

It is 11 o’clock on Sunday, the 18th of February 2018, time to sit in circle.

Artwork and photo: Rose Davies

I light the candle and we share some moments of silence. This stilling is as much for me as for everyone else. I have a propensity to become quite overwhelmed by nerves so this is a useful reminder to me that I am here, now, in this circle, with these people - these women. I begin by sending the basket of unlit candles round, inviting each woman in turn to remember someone - a maker, a guide who is significant and special to them and to say their name silently or aloud whilst lighting a candle from the central flame in their honour before placing it on the bronze, circular tray provided by Chris. “For my mum, Marina Abramovic” I say. Then to clarify, “for my mum and Marina Abramovic!” . Since reading her autobiography ‘Without Walls’ last Christmas, Marina has been a close companion. She is an outrider - praised, undermined, deified, vilified in turns. The room becomes populated with other women - artists including Kathe Kollwitz, a sister-in-law who died recently and many other mothers. The day is dedicated to them - who in many ways, have made each of our presence’s in this room somehow possible. We are 11 in total so far - still awaiting Jo coming the distance from Lampeter but delayed by stopping to feed her baby.

Photo: Chris Bird-Jones

I feel enormous gratitude for the presence of those who have come, and thank them for answering the call. There is a significance that these particular women are here. I speak about the context from which the day arose - my Creative Wales and my central question, “who do you think you are?” I've come to the conclusion that I am the result of all the conversations and experiences I’ve ever had, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met. I try to be lean and not extemporise too much - framing the context without taking up too much precious time and space.

I read aloud some words sent to me by one woman who received my invitation, Judith who I met in my 50th year whilst spending a week alone at the summer solstice on Bardsey Island in North Wales - known as the island of 20,000 saints. Judith and I were both lone pilgrims, spending our time there walking and contemplating. After some days, we eventually spoke and found we shared a whole lot of common interests and ideas. Judith‘s words speak of Wales, for belonging, longing, ‘Hiraeth’, connection to people, connection to place. She articulated that it was time for our small boats to come together to become a flotilla - in these transitional, scary times. Her words touch us deeply and open a seam in each of our hearts that we soften into as the day unfolds. We take turns sharing what brings each of us here and also to name what each of us has brought with us - whether it be knitting, or a tender heart, or both. The process of each of us speaking and listening from the heart comes from many traditions. Many circles here and all over the world have opened and unfolded in the same way, now and in times gone by. We pass the talking stone. Each speaks. All listen.

A number of the women, especially those aged 60 and over, talk of the women’s groups they were part of in their younger years. During the 1970s and into the 1980s at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Spare Rib and Greenham Common, many were members of women’s groups that met on a regular basis. It became quite normal to be part of this type of support network. Many in our circle, named just how much they missed these gatherings as they had got older. There are tears, apologies for the tears, invitations for more tears. This is a place to lean into our vulnerability. Each of us brings something unique. It turns out that our day isn’t just about ‘Women Making’. I am surprised but heartened by the depth and authenticity of the sharing, the hunger and eagerness to reveal, to be honest and vulnerable, to speak and to be witnessed - to speak of pain and grief and to share the burden of it. There is a phrase my partner Phil and I have come across recently. We’re not sure from where it originally derived, but it was requoted by Brene Brown the American researcher on Shame and Vulnerability. “Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a great battle”. So simple. So true. So every-day. Everyone is hurting. You can’t be in the world as it is now and not be hurting. Where are the places we can share this without guilt, shame and feeling that expressing these emotions is just an indulgence? So, apologies often follow reveals and tears. It seems just the way it is.

After the round of speaking, each chooses a card from the ‘Weavers Oracle’. Our circle becomes bigger, bringing the female ancestral line - the 'Grandmothers' - into the room by means of Carolyn Hillyer’s extraordinary images which she’d dreamed and painted over a 30-year period: ‘Grandmother Turtle’, ‘Old Woman Walks Good,’ ‘Bone Hill Hag,’ ‘Stone Mother of Time,’ ‘Buzzard Dreamer of the Longest Flight.’

Photo: Leonie Ramondt

Leonie brings in the future generations, naming the work of Joanna Macy, the great veteran of ‘The Work That Re-connects’, systems theory and environmental activism. Women from the past, women from the present - all are called. As we close our opening circle, leaving the candles burning and make for the kitchen preparing to eat, Jo and baby-girl Phoebe arrive, accompanied by Chris who’d going out to collect them since Jo's satnav had failed to guide them to the house. We are now 13 in total and have the women of the future generations present amongst us.

Artwork and photo: Rose Davies

The more formal sharing in the circle now unfolds into an informal, easy familiarity. Some in the circle – like me - know all the women. Some in the circle know none. But the combination of sitting in ceremony and then sharing food is the gentle pathway into an afternoon of making - making conversation, drawing, or ‘scribbling’ as Rose calls it. Throughout the day Rose scribbles - as easy and natural as breathing. Later in the day she gives me some tips. “Never use a pencil to draw with. Never draw on white paper. Tear up strips of brown paper, newspaper, anything to stick them in your book to draw on - and draw with thick pastels. Draw the space around the thing and not the thing itself.” For a self-conscious, fair weather drawer such as myself, this advice is gold. “People go to art school and study for years to know which pencils to use. Fancy giving children pencils and white paper to draw with! The tyranny of the white paper - no wonder so many people think they can’t draw…”

Leslie sits at the dining table making beautiful palm-sized papier-machè dogs - each with its own individual character. I offer to buy one later. She thinks I am joking.

Photo: Leonie Ramondt

Donna is training in Indian Head Massage, and one by one, takes a number of our group upstairs. They descend half an hour later looking as soft as newborns. I remain close to the kitchen table for most of the time and manage to complete making a batch of ‘raw’ chocolates from a chocolate kit I’d been given some time ago but never got around to making. I never get onto making my Rock Cakes which I’d brought the ingredients for. There wasn’t really any need as we already have plenty of cake. As well as being a formidable scribbler, Rose makes cakes. She doesn’t like eating them she says it just calms her down to make them.

Deb is still recovering from a virus and has to leave. She is exhausted. As well as battling her virus, she seems to be battling in her job at Swansea Council. A growing part of her job seems to be now about protecting the landscape from those who seem to be only considering economic interests . In these times of imposed council austerity, local authorities are under more pressure to make money from so-called ‘natural resources.’ Even though Wales champions the 'Well-being of Future Generations Act', Deb often finds herself feeling not just under or unvalued but is also at risk of being seen as someone who is blocking progress. The same old story. I mention to her the work of environmental lawyer Polly Higgins and her naming of those who stand up for the planet and future generations as ‘Conscientious Protectors’ - joining  the respectable lineage of those who object or protect, on the grounds of common sense, ethics and for the safe-guarding of life on earth. Deb leaves. At least  knowing she is respected and valued for the work she does on behalf of us all.

A burst of creative writing heralds our last hour or so together. Gilly, an expert teacher and dramaturgue offers us invitations and prompts: “The three things you most love about your life. The three things you would most like to change. Your dream and what gets in the way of fulfilling it?”

We share our reflections one by one. What mainly arises in terms of what we love, time after time is nature and community in one form or another. And for many, the thing we would most like to change? Something along the lines of self-acceptance, knowing “I am enough.” Knowing “I belong.”

The writing flows into the final sharing circle, revealing deeper layers of tenderness, and yearning. I think of the mention of Hiraeth from Judith’s writing... “A deep longing for home for belonging.” It’s one of those untranslatable Welsh words of which there are many. Longing for a knowing and feeling of acceptance, being at home in one’s own community, one’s own self, one’s own life.

The final sharing brings more tears - often coming as most surprise to those that weep them. Tears of yearning. I remember some lines by Thomas Berry: “the world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” How do we create the spaces where we really know this to be true?

The words of Rilke accompany our closing. “Live the questions now, then some day you will gradually, live into the answer”. I feel I now understand more what these 7 Sundays are about. They are not about looking for answers or even expecting them, but about living the questions together. We blow out the candles. It’s past 4.30pm our finishing time. Time for goodbyes, for putting the house back to rights, packing away, washing up. The house slowly empties as we go out our separate ways, leaving Chris - Buzzard Dreamer of the Longest Flight with her parakeet George in peace.

Fern Smith

18th February 2018

Fern Smith is an artist and 2017 Creative Wales recipient from the Arts Council of Wales.
Upcoming courses/activities she is leading include:

Practising the Art of Living (co-guiding)
 https://courses.cat.org.uk/sustainable-living/practising-the-art-of-living-detail

Woman Time (co-guiding)
 http://www.woodlandjourneys.org.uk/wild-camps--quests.html

Vision Quest (assisting guiding May 18 - 27)
 http://earth-encounters.org.uk/events-prices.html


 

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. 

Talks Walking 2, Chris Bird-Jones: 'The Light, the Worm, and the Bone' By Fern Smith

On the morning of 22^nd February 2016 I pick up Chris Bird-Jones from her house high on one of the hills above the city of Swansea and we head west to Rhossilli at the tip of the Gower Peninsular. It is a full moon day and the weather looks promising. This is a place known well to both of us – the jewel in the crown of the oldest AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in the UK. It always feels like a special occasion going to Rhossilli - a place for high days and holidays - it has been one of my favoured Christmas day walks for many years. It’s a place of breathtaking beauty and spectacular coastal scenery, presided over by the majestic Worm’s Head, a long, dragon-shaped rocky outcrop. Facing the dragon stands the high ridge of Rhossilli Down, well-used by paragliders. Nestled between the two, is one of the longest unbroken stretches of golden sand in Wales.

Rhossilli Beach

Chris is the second artist I’ve asked to walk with me as part of my new ‘Talks Walking’ project. The idea is to discuss an invited individual artist’s work and their relationship to ‘spirit, soul and the sacred’. My first walk (A Walk in the Woods) had been with theatre maker Lucy Neal. The project was inspired by a book I’d read recently by Jacob Needleman that literally shook my world. In ‘An Unknown World’, Needleman asks the ultimate and ever so slightly daunting question, “what is the purpose of life on earth?” So no pressure then…

The drive to Rhossilli is taken up with sharing all our news, projects and challenges since we’d spoken last. There is lots to catch up on and the day could easily have continued in this way with us both sharing the day to day challenges and opportunities our daily lives present. This day is different. I have an agenda and want to put the focus on Chris, her work, what motivates and what keeps her doing what she does. Chris Bird-Jones was the ‘Creative Ambassador’ for Wales in 2015 - a highly prestigious and sought after award bestowed on a particularly prominent or questing artist in recognition of their work. It involves working closely with a venue in Wales as well as one overseas that the artist has developed a significant connection with. Chris is a glass artist, or more specifically one who works with light as her principal ‘material’. Chris had pioneered techniques and new ways of working with glass whilst a student at The RoyalCollege of Art. Moving away from more pictoral stained-glass windows, Chris instead worked with stacking glass, working more architecturally, experimenting with reflection and refraction. Twenty years ago, these ideas were so outside the mainstream of glass working that her ideas were not fully appreciated for what they were. However now, these methods and ideas have informed a whole generation of new artists who are working more experimentally with glass and the effect of light upon it.

 

Illuminated lens detail Hawaii 2015

Part of the deal with this particular project is that the invited artists get to choose the walk themselves. When I picked Chris up this morning, she immediately informed me, “I want to go to the sea!” We drive the forty minutes or so out of Swansea to Rhossilli and park in the National Trust car park. She has chosen an RSPB circular walk of around six miles which takes in the high cliffs, hidden bays, farm and heathland of this westernmost tip of Gower. Her school nickname was ‘Chris Birdy’. This feels appropriate given her attunement to things at the edge of consciousness, so often the case with a bird in flight at the furthermost reaches of our vision. Or similarly, a bird camouflaged by its stillness in the hedge or cliff top. Attending to the moment and to detail typify her work. Chris sees things. She notices and is continuously enchanted, “how can you ever feel tired of smelling a flower?”

She is someone who is often on the move. Currently she is living between North and South Wales, and appears as at home in Morocco as Hawaii, both of which she has visited this year. She speaks of how lucky she is to feel at home in so many different places. It is nature, she says, which helps her do this. She is able to dwell on this earth anywhere there are forests, rivers, sky, sea. Her attention to detail is striking and she is constantly drawing my attention to things I’ve barely noticed, like the way the water in the rock pools looks like snow - so strong is the reflection from the low wintery sun. She has the ability to connect with joy and the sense of adventure of a child exploring the world for the first time, as well as a desire to bend the rules, to climb over the fence marked ‘private’ – insatiable curiosity it could be called.

 

Illuminated lens detail Hawaii 2015.

Chris was 60 in January and has surprised herself that she is troubled by this. Since the beginning of 2016 there have been some notable high profile deaths of significant artists such as David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Lemmy. Added to this was the death of a dear school friend of Chris’s only a few days before. She speaks of the finiteness of time and how it is concentrating her mind. About the tension she feels between her art making, re-establishing an active connection with a Corbyn-revivified Labour Party and a desire to ‘just live’. By just living, it feels like it is the ‘art of living’ she wants to dedicate herself to – a simplifying, a re-aligning to what is important in life. And to walking. She speaks of walking as if it is an art-form, a meditation, an end in itself…

We speak about the fact that early on in her creative career, she left being solely an artist in order to teach. Partly desire and partly a pragmatic decision as she had her daughter to look after. Chris returned to her home of Llangollen and became head of department at NEWI (North East Wales Institute, now Glyndwr University), established residencies for Cywaith Cymru for a year and later taught the Masters course in glass at Swansea College of Art (now University of Wales Trinity St David), one of the nations most established centres for stained glass. She has always been an enabler and someone who found great satisfaction facilitating learning in others.

Since leaving teaching four years ago Chris has been re-connecting with and re-establishing her practice as an artist. Motivated by a need to bring more playfulness into life, she began to make everyday objects which ‘hold’ light – containers, buckets and bowls - significant, archetypal, timeless objects. The bowls were initially developed from an idea twenty-five years ago when she had her first major international exhibition in Hawaii. One of the pieces was inspired by an Hawaiian tradition whereby each new born child is blessed with a bowl of light within his or her belly. A bowl which can collect dirt, stones and rubble but can be daily washed clean in the sea. Chris says it is the magic and alchemy of light which draws her. Not the facts or science of light but something about the otherworldly transcendent nature of sunrise, sunset and the golden hour which enraptures the film-maker. A connection established when a child by means of a fascination with fairies.

Bowl of Light Hawaii 2015

The buckets and the bowls also reference traditional creation stories in which the universe is formed out of the ingredients of a great cauldron, as in the tale of the Welsh goddess Ceridwen who inadvertently created Taliesin, the bard of bards. Even more magically, a mirrored bucket or bowl also allows the holder to collect whatever is needed – to fill one’s bucket with the sky, sheep, birds, flowers. A bucket which is never full and however poor the owner be, can be filled with riches. Chris’ buckets appear to send an anti-materialist message of the highest order, though her work remains always playful and never pompous. 

 

Bucket portal 2016

Chris spoke of her connection to the mysterious. Admitting to feeling that she was on the edge of making a choice to go through a kind of threshold. But that if she did, there would be no turning back. She connects to the mystery continuously and intuitively in the making of her work but has difficulty putting it into words. Working with light seems to her a good metaphor for the mystery – holding something that cannot be held. A paradox. “The light is inseparable from the shadow. It is impossible to see if we do not have the light as well as the dark. The world would be unimaginable”. We sit on a bench in a field cordoned off from the general public and I read her the opening paragraph of Jacob Needleman’s book ‘The Unknown World, Notes on the Meaning of the Earth’…

“A month ago, on the night of my seventy-fifth birthday, I dreamed of Elias Barkhordian. I was once again sitting on the low stone wall surrounding our neighbour’s lawn, where Elias and I would always go to talk about the universe. As it had been then, over sixty years ago so it was in the dream, late afternoon in October, the sun low in the sky; in the distance the shouts of the neighbourhood children at their street games. And as it also was then, I had been walking away from the noise, pretending I was walking aimlessly but knowing I would be meeting Elias. And as for Elias, who soon appeared from across Seventh Street where the rich people lived, he was also pretending to be just walking, and when we met we pretended to be a little surprised – that was our ritual, played out for several years until Elias died just before his fourteenth birthday.”

The light of that day when Chris and I sat there overlooking Rhossilli beach was phenomenal. It had been overcast and rainy for days, months even. This day - where we spent at least six hours on a four-hour walk since we stopped countless times to look at things in detail - we met no-one. It was an empty landscape except for the grazing sheep, horses and ever-present birds. The light of the sky was magical. Grey, blue, pink, silver ever-changing as we walked that afternoon, the winter sun appearing and disappearing tentatively behind clouds in the enormous sky. The full moon preparing to reveal itself as the sun set over Worm’s Head. The light was our constant. The ever-changing light. Chris spoke of a new project, one nestled closely to her heart, still yet to be born. One which she hoped would mix the playfulness, the shadow, the light and which would entrance. Chris is a serious player. Enchanted. She sees things differently.

 

Chris Bird-Jones Toronto 2015

She picked up a bone. The single vertebrae of a sheep or a rabbit. “Look at it this way” she said, “it’s a smiling face with wings. Look at it this way – the smile is even wider…”

Chris Bird-Jones, artist and Creative Wales Ambassador 2015, lives in Swansea. You can contact her via her website chris-bird-jones.co.uk or on twitter @chrisbirdjones. Also see bird-jonesandheald.co.uk, ttps://lightexpedition.wordpress.com and https://www.facebook.com/Alldaith-Goleuni-Light-Expedition-by-Chris-Bird-Jones-1104935502865257 

Fern Smith is an artist and Creative Director of Emergence