In the spring of 2020, we took this school called HOME online for the first time with a series called Homeward Bound. Over eight weeks, I retraced the lines of thought that I’ve been following over the past twenty years and how these led to the work that Anna and I are doing together.
The teaching sessions were followed each week by an afterparty in which members of the group had the chance to get to know each other better and this has led to an ongoing community which meets regularly.
Meanwhile, we plan to offer further online series in the near future. For more information, sign up for the HOME newsletter.
The original invitation
What could it mean to be Homeward Bound?
In this strange spring of 2020, when many around the world remain homebound by lockdowns, here’s an invitation to a journey we can make together. It begins not with a leap into the future, but by retracing our steps.
The chances are that you were born into a culture addicted to the upward sweeping projections of growth, development and progress: history as an exponential curve, building towards the take-off of the rocket ships. Half a century after the moon landings, the billionaires of Silicon Valley are still set on claiming our destiny among the stars.
Well, perhaps you have your doubts about this direction of travel. I know I did already as a teenager – though it took years to name those doubts in a way that made sense to anyone, and longer still to start piecing together another map of where we find ourselves, what other paths might be worth taking.
In Homeward Bound, I want to retrace that journey: to revisit the encounters that helped me find my bearings, back before the Dark Mountain manifesto or the other writings and projects for which I have been responsible, and to retell the stories I learned along the way.
It touches on so much, this question of where we are bound: from how we face what we know and what we have grounds to fear about a changing climate, to the ways our lives are shaped by schooling systems, and the activities that sometimes go under the name of art. And it takes us to the encounter with mortality: our common destination, our true north, whose force has pulled the human world so far off its envisaged course in these past months.
So join me over eight evenings this spring, and let’s use this time of collective disorientation to enquire together into where we thought we were going.
— Dougald Hine