So many of my working hours in the first half of 2018 went into the new Dark Mountain website. It was a strange experience to have it “go live” while I was offline and away from work of all kinds last month. But also appropriate, a reminder that there are others who will take this project forwards.
I got back to my desk two weeks ago – and it’s taken most of that time to steady myself, to find the balance between the things that came into focus while I was away and the things that were still waiting here on my return. But I think I’m getting there.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t found it already, let me share the site with you. It’s by no means finished – if there’s one thing I learned over the past year, it’s that no website is ever “finished”. But already, I think, it fulfils two of the ambitions with which we set out: to create an online home for our work that approaches the beauty of the books we publish, and to go back and tell the stories of the work we’ve done over what will soon be a decade as a project. I hope you agree.
Oh yes – and to celebrate me finally getting round to trumpeting the news of its launch, today we’ve published Childish Things, my essay on the ways that art gets tangled up with the sacred (originally written for last year’s SANCTUM issue).