DOUGALD HINE

Tag: a school called HOME

  • Homeward Bound: An Invitation

    Homeward Bound: An Invitation

    Well, here’s an invitation I’m excited to share – the first online offering from a school called HOME, an eight-part series I’ll be teaching, starting next Thursday evening. If you’ve found something that spoke to you in my writing or the projects I’ve created over the years, then here’s a chance to go a bit deeper into where all of that came from. 

    I’ll be retracing the encounters that helped me find my bearings in my twenties and the thinking that underpinned the work I’ve done since – but this is also about the broader questions of how we get oriented and find a direction of travel, when the upward sweeping curves of progress, growth and development stop making sense. What could it mean to be ‘homeward bound’, starting from where we find ourselves, in this strange spring of 2020?

    The price for the series is 1000 SEK (roughly £80, €90 or $100), but there are discounts available for those whose current circumstances put that out of reach, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if that’s you.

    I’m excited to see what we can do, bringing this work to a new platform – a way of meeting each other that may not match how it would be to sit around a table together, but might just open the hospitality of our little school to those who would never find their way across its threshold here in Sweden.

  • When the House Is Built, the Scaffolding Can Be Taken Down

    I started my first blog in an internet cafe in Xinjiang. It was early 2004, I was teaching in a language school set up by a man named David, who was younger than I was, smoked a pipe and talked like he’d walked straight out of a 1930s movie version of England. (In fact, he came from one of the English port dynasties, grew up in Australia and went on to settle in China.) I was the first teacher he’d hired who wasn’t already a friend.

    Everything about the experience was intense, and early on I began sending out emails to a list of friends back home, telling stories as a way to stay sane. Then I found a site where you could keep an online journal, so I told my friends I’d spare their inboxes and post my stories there, in case they wanted to go on reading. After a couple of months, I found that I was getting comments from people I’d never met. It’s hard to explain how strange and exciting that felt in 2004.

    That memory came back to me as we were preparing the invitation to Homeward Bound, our first online offering from a school called HOME. This is an eight-part series which I’ll be teaching, starting on Thursday evening next week.

    Besides the obvious transfer of a significant proportion of all human interaction to Zoom, several recent experiences convinced me that it was time to make this invitation, one which Anna and I have been mulling for a while.

    First, in February I embarked on a six-month course led by my old friend Charlie Davies, entitled Clarity for Teachers. It made me realise what a charged word ‘teacher’ is, the power and the possibilities for confusion involved in claiming it.

    If someone asks what you do and you say you’re a teacher, they will assume you mean in a school. It’s hard work, being responsible for classrooms full of children and teenagers. I’ve seen people broken by it, and I’ve seen people come alive in it. If you don’t belong to the professional body of qualified classroom teachers, then to call yourself a teacher could verge on the shady, like passing yourself off as a surgeon or a lawyer.

    Among the group of us on Charlie’s course, there’s at least one with a classroom career behind him, but the others include the head of a national church, the head of a Buddhist monastery, a former naval officer and a ritual designer. It’s quite the crew.

    During the first part of the course, we worked with a set of forty-two cards, each carrying a line from A Teacher’s Advice on How to Be Clear. This is Charlie’s reworking of a thousand-year-old Buddhist text, Advice from Atisha’s Heart, rendered in fiercely commonsense, modern-day English.

    Because I absorb and process experience by writing – not much has changed since I was teaching in classrooms in Xinjiang – I began writing a more-or-less daily commentary as I worked my way through the forty-two lines. Since I started this in early March, it became my companion through the strange weeks in which the world slid sideways and so much else changed: one exercise I’d sit down to, usually at the start of a working day, that still seemed to make sense.

    There’s so much I could say about where this led me. Not least, it means I accidentally wrote a book in two months, though it remains to be seen whether anyone will want to publish it! For tonight, I want to pick out a passage from one of the later commentaries, where I’m reflecting on the difference between what I do and what my friends who teach in universities do:

    I work with words and thoughts, it’s a big part of what I bring to any stage on which I get asked to speak, and yet my favourite piece of feedback after a talk was the time my friend Ansuman told me, ‘What you said was great, but what mattered was the way you were.’ There is a song beneath the words, and if that song is not there or does not come through clearly, then it doesn’t matter how clever the words are, it’s all just noise.

    Having spent two months in the company of this gang of irregular teachers, and writing about these lines of A Teacher’s Advice, this has brought me to a place of claiming my role as a teacher – and getting clear about the kind of teaching that has been increasingly central to my work.

    In the way that sometimes happens when you reach a place of clarity and commitment, a series of messages then arrived in quick succession. First, when I shared that passage about Ansuman’s beautiful piece of feedback, I received an equally beautiful response from the artist and teacher Toni Spencer:

    I remember vividly your day at Dartington last year. And the talk the night before. I can be pretty reactive when talked at for too long. Especially by a man, especially a white educated man, especially with big words and academic and literary references in there. But none of that reactivity happened. We were all there in it together. I kind of didn’t notice. And you facilitated something so simple (which gave plenty of space for everyone’s voices too) and with a quiet magic. It made me smile how I couldn’t quite see how but didn’t care!

    Then it came time to deliver a guest lecture at the centre at Uppsala where I have been a frequent visitor in recent years, except that this time I was to give the lecture over Zoom. Now, because I live in a small city in Sweden and work with people around the world, I was an experienced Zoomer before most people had heard of it, but still I was unprepared for how rich and lively and intimate the experience of teaching to twenty students over this platform turned out to be. The course leaders let the session run half an hour over because the questions and discussion were flowing so beautifully.

    Afterwards, I was shaking my head. ‘That felt better than when I go there and teach in person,’ I said to Anna. Apart from anything else, this seems a pretty damning verdict on the physical and social construction of the spaces in which we usually gather for academic teaching, because in years of editorial meetings and family calls over Zoom or Skype or Hangouts, none of them ever felt better than it would have been to be together in person. ‘Maybe it’s time I made an invitation to that online course we’ve talked about.’

    Two nights later, in the kitchen, I brought up the subject again.

    ‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘are you going to do it?’

    So here we are.

    I’ve been reading Mark Boyle’s book, The Way Home, about his year of living ‘without technology’. When I say reading, I mean listening to it read by an Irishman with a lovely voice, on my headphones, using the Audible app, on the smartphone that is one of the great love-hate relationships of my life.

    I remember crossing paths with Mark a couple of times, around the time he became The Moneyless Man. I can see him bounding onstage at a new media awards ceremony where members of the Freeconomy Community had organised to vote themselves ‘the people’s choice’; there’s a photograph of him at the first Dark Mountain festival, delivering a speech to crowd on a mound outside the venue, in solidarity with those who objected to paying money for a ticket. It’s quite a messianic image.

    I’ll admit, back then his zeal set me on my guard. I’ll buy that money is the root of many of our evils, but not all of them. But there’s much in his writing and his example these days that I admire, and it seems a good book to spend time with, as we embark on the proposition of offering something of the heart’s work of this small school of ours through the unsettling miracles of instant global communications systems.

    In a conversation with William Wardlaw Rogers, not long ago, the pair of us landed on the thought that the technologies in which many of our lives are swathed just now might be used as scaffolding. It’s a humbler role than the one afforded them in the grand narratives of technological progress. Much of the best of what I’ve seen these technologies do over the years has been a kind of compensation for the damaged social and cultural landscape of our heavily-monetised societies. The danger is that such compensation numbs us to the accelerating damage that surrounds us. But sometimes, perhaps, we can turn them against their own logic. We can use them to build a house worth living in, a place worth calling home. And when the house is built, the scaffolding can be taken down.

    Meanwhile, perhaps the way to hold the contradiction is the one recommended by Ivan Illich: ‘Only the gratuitous commitment of friends can enable me to practice the asceticism required for modern near-paradoxes, such as renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba.’

    I can’t imagine how my six months in Xinjiang would have been, if I hadn’t had that online journal as a window to lean out of and throw words to friends and strangers, although part of the answer is that my Mandarin would have come a lot further. I can’t imagine how my life from that point onwards would have gone, without the friendships and connections that began in online spaces, and the ways that we used those tools to dream up projects and make them happen.

    This time last year, I spent a day in Doncaster with Warren Draper, first at Bentley Urban Farm, and then at the shop from which he and Rachel Horne have run Doncopolitan magazine. There aren’t many people whose work is as close to my heart as the work that Rachel and Warren have done over the years, and I’ve had glimpses of how much of a struggle it has been, how wearing it can be, the ground-level making of culture in and with and by communities that have borne the hard end of forty years of neoliberalism and deindustrialisation and the rest, where what funding there is rarely trickles down to the local culture-makers. But though I’ve only spent small handfuls of time with them over the years, every time I’ve come away inspired.

    As I walked back to the station with Warren that afternoon, I felt a touch of sadness. I said something like this: ‘I’ve seen you put the last ten years into building the magazine and the shop and the farm, in a place you can call home, and the work matters to so many people here. I’ve put ten years into building Dark Mountain and the rest of it, and it matters to a lot of people, but they are scattered across the world.’

    Someday soon, all being well, this school called HOME will have a place to call home, and Anna and I will enter a time when there is more possibility for rooting in our lives than there has been.

    All will not be well, of course – except in the mysterious sense of those old words that Julian of Norwich heard in her vision: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ These days, I am surprised at how directly I feel old words speaking to my heart.

    Yet even with all the things that will not be well, in any ordinary sense, we will go on making a home that offers what shelter and hospitality it can, as long as we are able.

    My hope for those of you who are able to join me, a week from now, in the strange in-between space of these online encounters, is that it’s possible to offer you something of that hospitality, in the words we share with each other and the song that runs beneath them.

    For details of future Homeward Bound series and other courses and events, visit the website for a school called HOME. 

    If you’d like to learn more about Charlie Davies’s work around clarity and teaching, visit his How To Be Clear website. 

    You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • Homeward Bound

    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

  • After We Stop Pretending

    After We Stop Pretending

    The setting could so easily seduce you. Painted wooden houses line three sides of a square of grass: the red house, the white house and the low wooden barn between them where the bunk rooms are. On the fourth side, the slope falls away, past the village library, past the station house and the railway tracks to the lake. A strip of an island a hundred yards offshore, then miles of water stretching to a wooded horizon.

    The first clue that something is wrong should be the colour of the grass: dead-yellow already in the first days of June. No rain for weeks. The radio says we had the hottest May in over 250 years, but seeing as the oldest continuous temperature records anywhere began in Stockholm in the 1750s, you can probably stick a few zeros on that figure.

    Now look again at the island – the one in the photograph on the homepage for this school called HOME – and see how it changes when I tell you that the scatter of low buildings by the jetty is the oldest preserved oil refinery in the world, the soil still poisoned from spills before our grandparents were born. This is where we meet, in a landscape whose beauty is haunted by a history of extraction. Whatever else there may be to say, this is the background against which our voices rise and fall.

    A train pulls into the platform. Among the passengers who disembark, there are a number wearing rucksacks, looking around to find their bearings. They take in the lake and the island and the hostel on the hill. Together, they begin the short climb that leads to where we are standing, and, with their arrival, something shifts: this school, which has so far been a story Anna and I are telling, becomes something larger, messier and more substantial. For the next few days, in these borrowed buildings, it will be a place where our ideas and fears and longings get tangled up with those of the people who have taken up our invitation, an invitation to ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of re-growing a living culture.’

    * * *

    One member of the group that week stands out in my memory. Fran is not the loudest presence; a large, gentle man in his early forties, he can be humble almost to a fault, yet there is a steadiness that marks him out. Here’s what I think it is: out of the whole group, he is the only one who hasn’t come alone. I mean, he made the journey solo, sleeping on overnight coaches, but he was able to do this thanks to the support of dozens of people who chipped in to crowdfund his way to Sweden – and so he arrives with a small village at his back, a community to which he already had to explain what was calling him here, and by which he is held. Sometimes in the sessions, I can see their faces leaning in over his shoulder.

    A few months later, I’m planning a trip to England when I get a message from Fran: would I like to come and visit his hometown and give a talk? So that’s how the two of us end up sitting on this low stage in an arts space in Stroud, along with our hosts, Emily and Ali; the four of us watching as the seats fill up and the queue stretches out the door, hoping we don’t end up having to turn people away. Looking out at this crowd, I’m guessing a good few of Fran’s villagers are in the house tonight.

    Well, it seems the folks without seats are happy to stand at the bar, and the whole room listens intently over the next two hours as we talk about what it might mean to take seriously the question with which the invitation to our school began: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’ I talk about things I’ve learned over the past decade with Dark Mountain: about how despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs, nor an end state; about how much of what makes human existence endurable lies beyond the reach of the state and the market, unmarked on the maps we’ve inherited from recent generations; about the role that art has played as a refuge for those aspects of reality that retreat from the gaze of those who would measure and price everything, that slip away like deer into the forest; about the hunch that, whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.

    Fran and I talk about what it means to make room for this within the ordinary fabric of our lives, among the everyday pressures; creating pockets, spaces to which it is safe to bring more of ourselves than it would be wise to bring to many of the workplaces, educational institutions or families we have known.

    Then right at the end of the night, just as Emily and Ali are drawing things to a close, they invite a friend up to the stage, a woman I haven’t met yet.

    ‘A few of us are organising a rebellion,’ she says. Not words I was expecting to hear, but as she goes on, I realise that I’m listening to something new – or new to me, at least. This is the voice of an activism that comes from the far side of despair, that has room for grief, that calls for courage rather than hope, that frames the stakes of climate change as starkly as anything we’ve published in Dark Mountain: this is not about saving the planet by changing your lightbulbs, it’s not about how we can sustain the way of living of the Western middle classes or fulfil the promises of development or transition to eco-socialism; it’s about how many species will be driven out of existence in the decades ahead, and whether our own is to be among them.

    Two weeks later, Extinction Rebellion delivers its demands to parliament, and as November goes on, their actions bring parts of London to a halt: blocking the five main bridges across the Thames, then holding up rush hour traffic at key junctions around the city, morning after morning. Even the organisers seem taken aback at the scale of the response. The other week, my mum called to say she’d heard a BBC radio documentary about Gail Bradbrook, and wasn’t that the woman I’d told her about from Stroud?

    From the occasional Facebook messages we exchange, I get the sense that Gail and those around her are riding a storm now, so I’m glad we got that chance to meet briefly in the relative calm of the weeks beforehand. And it seems fitting that the thread of serendipity which brought us together should run back to the gentle presence of Fran and the weave of generosity that brought him to Sweden in the endless days of early June.

    * * *

    ‘What do you do, after you stop pretending?’

    I wrote those words one night in the spring of 2010, as we were preparing for the first Dark Mountain festival. They became the frame for the Saturday programme on the main stage, and when Paul and I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian ahead of the event, it ran under the headline: ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending’. Among the crowd who gathered in Llangollen that weekend, there were those who came expecting us to offer a vision of what the environmental movement should do instead, and they were disappointed. I remember one guy from Manchester who was outright furious, railing to anyone who would listen, writing to us afterwards to demand that we refund his ticket.

    Maybe there are people whose ideas are born crystal clear and arrive in the world just as envisaged in the imagination, but my experience has always been that projects stumble into being: any new undertaking has to wrestle its way clumsily through the muddle of what you thought it would be, past the temptations of what others want it to be, until – if you’re lucky – it starts to reveal what it’s capable of being. In the case of Dark Mountain, it was only some years in that I saw clearly that this project wasn’t the place from which to ‘do’ anything. Whatever else, it has been a place where people come when they no longer know what to do; a place where you can bring your despair and put it into words, without being judged, without feeling alone, and without a rush to action or to answers.

    There’s a subtlety here that’s not well served by the pugnacious rhetoric of some of what got written in the early days. Activist writing often has the tone of telling everyone else what to do, and that certainly carried over into the ways I used to word things. The subtlety is this: to insist that the space you are holding is not one from which plans can be made or action taken is not to claim that no one should be taking action or making plans.

    There’s a video on YouTube, an hour and eight minutes in the quiet, slightly shambly company of Roger Hallam. It was filmed in a university lecture theatre last May, soon after the meeting at which Roger, Gail and a few others came up with the idea for Extinction Rebellion. If you sit down to watch it, make sure you have time to get to the end: I had to stop halfway and wait till the next morning, and this was a mistake.

    The first 40 minutes are where he presents the climate science, attempting to add up how much warming is already inevitable and where this would take us. There is something mesmerising about the parade of numbers – 1.2° that has happened already; 0.5° within a decade from the loss of the Arctic sea ice; another 0.5° from CO2 already emitted but not yet fed through into warming; the water vapour effect, doubling the impact of warming from other sources to give another 1° – and this is just the start, he adds. Somewhere around the 3° mark, we’ll lose the Amazon – assuming Bolsonaro hasn’t got there first – and this will bring another 1.5° of warming. Having got this far, Earth will tip further into a hot state, outside the conditions under which humans are capable of living.

    I’ve been reading, thinking, writing and speaking about this stuff for long enough to know that a certain caution is called for. As one climate scientist put it to me, the bits we know for sure are scary enough, without stating worst-case scenarios as facts. Still, watching the first half of Roger’s talk was enough to give me a sleepless night. Maybe we need those nights every so often, to be brought back to the existential core of our situation, to have the layers of reasoning with which we insulate ourselves peeled off.

    ‘Why we are heading for extinction,’ begins the title of the talk, ‘and what to do about it.’ The remaining half hour is the bit about doing. What is striking is that Roger makes no attempt to row back on the bleakness of what he has already told us. There is no bargain on offer here – ‘If everyone does X, then all this scary stuff will go away’ – only the observation, backed up by research on social movements, that those whose willingness to act endures the longest are not the activists who are motivated by outcome, who need to be given hope and to believe in their chances of success, but the ones who are motivated by doing the right thing. It’s the first time I can remember seeing a call to action which explicitly invites people to go into despair. In the closing minutes of his talk, Roger speaks about ‘the dark night of the soul’, the need to move through the darkness rather than avoid it. This is a call to rebellion that is framed in the language and draws on the traditions of mysticism.

    I don’t say that this is without precedent; indeed, part of Roger’s argument is that the rational, secular logic of mainstream Western activism, with its dependence on promises of progress, is the anomaly, while the stance for which he speaks has more in common with what has sustained grassroots movements in other times and places, and continues to do so. But this is the first activism around climate change in the West that I’ve encountered that has roots this deep, that draws on spiritual traditions without slipping into New Age wishful thinking or fantasies about a collective evolution of consciousness. It’s the closest I’ve seen to an activism that can answer that question I didn’t know how to answer back in 2010: what do we do, after we stop pretending?

    * * *

    In late July, we hired a car and drove north. This was the middle of the wildfire season, the Swedish authorities were dropping bombs on burning forests and borrowing firefighting planes from Italy. Our county got off lightly, but there were nights when you could smell the smoke on the air. We’d be following a backroad between villages and a convoy of fire engines would come speeding past. Coming home one evening, on the radio, two young hipster comedians from Södermalm were sniggering about how stupid the countryside people are and why don’t they just move to Stockholm rather than live out in the sticks and wait for their houses to burn down – and I thought: what the fuck, does it not occur to them that the rest of the country might be listening?

    We stayed on a farm and the farmer told us that she had a problem: in this heat, the lambs didn’t notice the shock from the electric fencing, so they were getting out and running everywhere. But her farm was lucky, she said, they had about three-quarters of the fodder they would normally have at this point in the year. In other parts of the country, farmers were trying to send their animals to slaughter because they couldn’t feed them, except the slaughterhouses couldn’t handle the number of animals the farmers wanted to send them.

    At almost any moment in human history, this would be the highest-order crisis a human society could face: to have to slaughter your herds before summer is out because of a lack of fodder. For half a dozen generations now, we’ve lived in a world that is bound together by supply chains whose effect is to distribute the impact of any local crisis across the whole system, so that a failed harvest in the American wheat belt is more likely to cause bread riots on the streets of Cairo than on the streets of Chicago. This works until it doesn’t, until the frequency of local crises strains the global system to breaking point. In the meantime, while the system holds, it means that those whose ways of living place most strain upon the system will be the last to notice.

    * * *

    ‘What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’

    This was Vinay Gupta, on a Saturday afternoon in Llangollen in 2010, in the soulless converted sports hall of a venue where we held that first festival. It was one of those lines that everyone seemed to remember. There was talk of putting it on a t-shirt.

    I realise now that I have taken consolation in such thoughts.

    When Marks & Spencer put up those posters that said ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B’, I asked: no Plan B for who? For posh supermarkets and department stores, or for liveable human existence? Or do we no longer make the distinction?

    When I wrote about Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, it was to point out the thread of irony running through it: you’ve got this kid and his father pushing a shopping trolley down a road. In one scene, the father finds what might be the last can of Coke in the world and presents it to his son like it’s a sacrament. Isn’t there something that gets missed here, among the biblical cadences and the apocalyptic horror: the traces of a satire on our inability to imagine a liveable existence beyond the bubble of supermarkets and superhighways?

    Before Dark Mountain came on the horizon, I’d read my way through the writings of Ivan Illich, from the revolutionary moment of the early seventies, when he wanted to show that ‘two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age’, to the late eighties, by which time he had seen environmentalism co-opted into the oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’. And still he was able to glimpse in the fiction of Doris Lessing, or the everyday realities of his friends in the barrios of Mexico City, ‘what kinds of interrelationship are possible in the rubble’, among the ‘people who feed on the waste of development, the spontaneous architects of a post-modern future.’

    In talks, I would tell the story of the Natufians. Late in the last Ice Age, in the territory marked on our maps as Israel and Palestine, they lived in year-round villages. They were among the first people anywhere to settle and they lived like this for 1,500 years, fifty generations, long enough for any memory of their ancestors’ wanderings to pass into the dreamtime of gods and culture heroes. Then came the Younger Dryas, the 1,200-year cold snap that turned Europe back to tundra and broke the pattern of the seasons which watered the wooded valleys in which they had made their homes. They knew nothing of the processes by which this climate change had come upon them; it was not a consequence of their actions, only a shift in the weather. Within a short time, they abandoned their settled way of life and became wandering gatherers and hunters, returning to the old villages only to rebury the bones of their dead in the ruins of the houses.

    Then I would recall a passage in After the Ice, Stephen Mithen’s history of the prehistoric world, where I first learned about the Natufians. He sends a time-traveller to walk unobserved through the lives of the people he is writing about: coming upon a band of late Natufian nomads, he follows them to a gathering in one of the ruined villages. The interment of bones is accompanied by storytelling, feasting and celebration; the connection between past and present is reaffirmed. In Mithen’s reconstruction, these days of festival offer a respite from the hardships of the present. Yet afterwards, as the people go back out onto the land, they do so gladly: ‘They are all grateful for the return to their transient lifestyle within the arid landscapes of the Mediterranean hills, the Jordan valley and beyond. It is, after all, the only lifestyle they have known and it is the one that they love.’

    These stories were never meant as lullabies. We are living through a tragedy whose measure exceeds our comprehension and most of us are implicated in this tragedy. We were born into this situation and there is no simple way to free ourselves from it. The grand summits, the uplifting rhetoric of leaders, the protests at the summit gates: none of this will make it go away. The changes we make to our lifestyles, the meat we don’t eat, the flights we don’t take: none of this will be enough. We will not make this way of living sustainable, nor anything like this way of living – and yet, I’ve always felt able to add, this need not be the end of the story. There will almost certainly be creatures like us around for a good while to come, and though they will live with the consequences of the way we lived – though their lives may be hard, as a result, in ways we do not like to think about – they will not simply live in our shadow: the way of life of those who come after us will be, just like our own, the only lifestyle they have known and the one that they love.

    I stop now, as I’m writing this, to take a swig of coffee, and I try to think about the lives of the people who grew the beans, the landscape in which they were grown. I try to think about the lives of the people who assembled the computer at which I type these words, the people who mined the minerals that went into its making, the places they were taken from the ground. The conditions in which the people who grow our coffee live are not simply a default, back to which you and I might tumble should the project of civilisation (or ‘development’, as it’s known nowadays) collapse. Our lives are more entangled than that, joined by global supply chains which stretch back into the unfinished history of colonialism and its plantations, where the lives of people and plants were subject to a brutal simplification.

    Still, I have taken consolation in such thoughts, in the awareness that there are vastly more ways in which humans have made life work than the lifestyle which happens to prevail around here, just now. This way of living could unravel without that being the end of the story, the end of any story worth telling. I still hold this to be true, but lately I find there are more nights when I wonder whether anything will survive the unravelling.

    * * *

    Mid-October. Still tired from the two-day journey back from England, my first morning home, and I’ve agreed to record an interview for the Culture show on Swedish national radio. The presenter and I sit on a bench in the park across from the railway station. He starts off asking me about the fires this summer. He’s hoping I’ll say that something has shifted as a result, but all I can think of is the stream of comments, overheard at the hairdressers or the supermarket, or around my in-laws’ dinner table, through the rainless weeks of July and August. ‘Isn’t the weather amazing?’ people would say to each other, and ‘Don’t the farmers complain a lot!’ and ‘The government should really buy more of those planes so we don’t have to keep borrowing the ones from Italy.’

    After the interview, I start to wonder, though. Perhaps something has begun to shift, below the surface: a change in the conversation about climate change in certain places, a darkening realism, a movement in the boundaries of what it is possible to talk about. I’ve had some strange encounters lately with people on the inside of institutions who have lost all faith in the usual stories about how we’re going to manage this mess we’re in.

    That speech last September by Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was unusually stark: ‘I’ve asked you here to sound the alarm,’ he begins. ‘If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.’ Of course, in the next breath, he is insisting that there are great opportunities ahead for green economic growth, because anything else is still unthinkable. In quiet corners, though, I’ve heard the unease of people whose job it is to put together the numbers and show how all this can be done: the need to leave the assumption of growth unquestioned is pushing them into claims that are clearly absurd. Their question is how to voice the unthinkable in a way that will have a chance of getting heard.

    Here’s what I think I’m picking up, as we head into 2019: the official narratives about climate change are under strain from so many directions, there may just be a major rupture coming. Another straw in the wind is Jem Bendell’s academic paper, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, released in August and downloaded over 100,000 times by the end of the year. From foreign correspondents to solarpunk hackers, I keep hearing how it’s reframed the discussions going on in all these different worlds. To many Dark Mountain readers, the message of the paper won’t come as a great surprise: ‘near-term social collapse’ due to climate change is inevitable, while catastrophe is probable and extinction possible. But when this suggestion is made by a professor of sustainability leadership with twenty years’ experience working with academia, NGOs and the UN, it has a different kind of impact, at once a symptom of the shift that is underway and a contribution to that shift.

    Something similar applies to Extinction Rebellion. In its framing of the situation in which we find ourselves, in the energy which has gathered around it and the speed with which all this happened, it may well be among the first movements of a new phase in the story of our collision with the realities of climate change. If this reading of the signs is anywhere near right, then there will be other movements along soon, other kinds of rupture and other kinds of work to be done.

    There’s an old video from Undercurrents, the activist film network, shot in 1998 at the Birmingham G7 summit. Thousands of Reclaim The Streets protesters gather outside New Street station. On an unseen signal, the crowd spills out into the road, whistling and whooping, swarming around buses and cars, outnumbering the yellow lines of police. In the chaos of the minutes that follow, a stretch of urban freeway is occupied; part of the concrete collar of ring road thrown around the city centre by modernist urban planners in the 1950s, it’s an appropriate site for a movement that has grown out of protests against the road-building plans of the current government.

    A couple of tripods have gone up, the sound systems won’t be far behind – but right now, there’s aggro up at the front, where a few vehicles are still caught inside the reclaimed zone. A man just drove his car into a small group of protesters – not at any speed, just trying to nudge them out of the way, just threatening them with half a tonne of metal – and now he’s out of the car and arguing with the police, as more protesters put themselves in front of his car, holding a banner, and now the police are letting him get back in, and now he is putting his foot down and driving straight ahead, as everyone manages to leap aside, except for one young man who is still on the bonnet of the car as it accelerates beyond the last police lines and out onto an empty dual carriageway.

    I’ve never managed to track down that video, though people have assured me it exists, but I was the guy on the car, and it was only luck that meant I walked away that day with nothing worse than bruises and shock. And while it was a drama at the time, I’d hardly thought of this in years, until I saw the livestreams of the swarming protests where lines of Extinction Rebellion activists were stopping traffic at major roundabouts in London, the queues of impatient motorists, the sound of car horns. 

    I learned two things the day I went for a ride on a Birmingham bonnet. The first was that I am not the person you want on the frontline, when tempers are fraying and the adrenalin is rushing. There must have been ten of us in front of that car when the driver put his foot down, and the other nine all managed to throw themselves clear. I love the ones who can keep cool and make good calls in the heat of the moment, but that’s not me, and my reflexes aren’t going to come to anyone’s rescue.

    Compared to the days of Reclaim The Streets, Extinction Rebellion seems strikingly sober, yet there’s still a headiness to any movement as it gathers momentum. Watching from afar, as friends use their bodies to stop vehicles, I realise that I believe in the work that they are doing and I know that there are other kinds of work that will be needed, away from the frontlines. Among that other work, there’s still a need for the space Dark Mountain holds, not least as a place to retreat and re-ground, but it’s no longer my time to hold that space: I’ve known for a while, and it’s been official since October, that I’m moving on from this project. So that brings back the old question: what do you do?

    The second thing I learned that day in Birmingham was more unsettling. As the car drove off, I went chest down on the bonnet, looking into the windscreen – and then I rolled over, and he swerved to throw me off and I landed, half-running, tumbling to the ground. But in the moment before I rolled over, I remember seeing the driver’s face and knowing that he had no more clue what to do next than I had, that we were caught in a shared helplessness.

    It’s the end of the year and Anna and I take a couple of weeks offline to rest and reflect. Walking beside the lake in the small town where she grew up, we talk about this sense that something is shifting, and what this means for the work that seems worth doing now, how to frame what is at stake. ‘It’s about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living,’ I say.

    There’s a thing called the Overton window, the boundary of what is ‘thinkable’ to governments and decision-makers: what you can talk about and still get taken seriously, inside the rooms where the decisions get made. I have an image of the window as a windscreen, an expression of helplessness on the face behind the glass.

    Unthinkable things are going to happen, that much seems clear. 

    ‘You should stop going round saying we’re all going to die,’ someone who spent time in those rooms told me, years ago, in an early online argument about Dark Mountain. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever gone round saying that,’ I wrote back, ‘except in the non-apocalyptic sense that, sooner or later, we are all going to die.’

    There are things you can’t see clearly through that window, possibilities that go unmarked on the maps according to which the decisions are taken. We can come alive in the face of the knowledge that we are all going to die. And in the meantime, before we die, we can try to live out some of those possibilities: the ways of being human together that are hidden from view when the world is seen through the lenses of the market and the state; the ways of feeding ourselves that get overlooked because they don’t work as commodities. We can try to negotiate the surrender of our way of living, without pretending there’s any promise that this would make it all OK, without pretending we even know what OK would look like. We can have some beauty before the story is over, without pretending we can be sure how long we’ve got.

    * * *

    It was Anna who came up with the name – before we thought of it as a school, when we were just talking about creating a hospitable place to bring these conversations together. ‘It’s not a centre,’ she said. ‘We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else starts from there.’ It doesn’t come into being on those weeks when we advertise a public course, when people we’ve yet to meet make long journeys to be here. Those are just the times when we’re able to open up the work that’s already going on: the conversations we bring together around the kitchen table, the people who come and stay, the thinking that gets done in their company. This part of the story is clearer now than when we made that first invitation to the course last June. We’re clearer, too, about the urgency: the need for quiet spaces where bridges can be built between troubled insiders, an awakening grassroots and what one of our collaborators, Vanessa Andreotti, has taught us to think of as the ‘knowledge-carriers at the edges’; spaces of negotiation, away from the frontlines. Clearer about the role of the network we have built, our ability to bring people together and the consequences this can have. So this is our answer, just now, the place where we might have something to contribute, the work we’re going to do.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 15.

  • The View From the Kitchen Table

    When it got to the end of the year, we took two weeks offline, to rest and be with family and take long walks, and to talk over the beginnings of this thing we call a school. Often, when you make time to reflect like this, there’ll be a moment, a particular memory that surfaces, a story with something to tell you. This time around, it wasn’t anything from the week in June when we held our first course, but a conversation a month or so earlier. And if I’m going to tell you where we’ve got to, what we’ve come to see about the work that lies ahead, then — like Janus, the old god of the threshold — I need to start off looking back as well as forward.

     *   *   *

    The first Saturday in May, seven in the evening and the door to the back garden is still open. A month earlier we had snow on the ground; this weekend will turn out to be the prelude to a strange hot summer, a season of droughts and wildfires. For now, though, we are here, seven of us around the table, serving each other from a huge dish of spaghetti. There’s red wine and a lit candle. Some of us only met this afternoon, but we are in the company of friends.

    It’s Karim who turns the conversation to our plans for HOME. He’s caught an echo of his own project, the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences: a pocket-sized community of scholarship and conviviality, born in the shadow of a failed revolution, dedicated to ‘reassembling the social’ on a human scale. Anna used to live in Egypt, running a children’s literature project, and it doesn’t take long to find mutual connections, but Karim is here in Sweden as the guest of another of the friends around the table. This is Isak, deputy director of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala, a student-led centre inside the otherwise conventional structures of Sweden’s oldest university. He’s also organising Climate Existence, the conference where Karim and I are to hold a session in a few days’ time. Besides Alfie — who’s nearly three and up past his bedtime — the final members of the company are Shelagh and Peter, old friends from London; they both have long histories working on the boundaries of arts, education and policymaking, and they are two of the kindest and most generous people I met in the years when I moved in those borderlands.

    ‘So I want to hear about this school you’re starting!’ Karim says. ‘What is it going to be like?’

    ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I hope it will be like this, only a little bigger. An extension of the conversations that come together around this table.’

    It’s this answer that hooks me back, at the end of the year — after the intensity of that first course; after the fairground mirror weirdness of reading about ourselves in a glossy magazine; after the decision to slow down, to go deeper into why we’re doing this, to wait for a while — and its simplicity brings the sense of direction we’ve been waiting for.

    *   *   *

    Anna was ahead of me, as usual. It’s there in the name — and the name was her idea, something she said years ago, when we started to talk about creating a hospitable place for bringing together these conversations: ‘It’s not a centre. We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else is going to start from there.’

    If HOME is a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table, then it doesn’t just exist on those weeks when we hold a public course: it happens the rest of the time, as well, in all the work that goes on in between, all the people who pass through this household, all the living and learning together. This is obvious, but it’s not the way we’ve been telling the story — and the way we tell stories has consequences.

    For a start, if I look at things this way, it gives a different picture of the work we did in 2018. Those five days in June become part of a patchwork of activity that wasn’t all building up to or coming down from the course itself.

    Among the other pieces in the patchwork, there are shared meals, like that evening in early May — and guests like Shelagh and Peter who come to stay for a while, to take a step back from the busy-ness of their work, to talk and think together, to make connections which go forward into what they do next.

    There’s the theatre-maker Luca Rutherford who came in August, funded by the Arts Council, to spend a week with us working on the script for her show about escaping from political paralysis.

    There’s Vanessa Andreotti, Professor of Race, Inequalities and Global Change at UBC, who I met at Climate Existence in May, whose ideas became a touchstone for the June course — and who came to stay with us in December and do some writing together.

    Here’s what I see now: this network of kitchen table conversations and collaborations is the heart of what we are up to at HOME. And recognising this, we get to go about it more deliberately.

    *   *   *

    So what does this mean for those weeks when we open up and make a public invitation to this school? Here’s where we’ve got to: the invitation we can make isn’t to a one-off course, it isn’t to a retreat that we are leading, and — despite what you may have read — we’re not in the business of offering group therapy.

    What we can offer is a chance to come and spend time around the ongoing work of the school; to hear from and talk with some of the artists, thinkers and doers who are part of this network; and to take part in the everyday home-making, the practice of hospitality and conviviality, without which the wild ideas we sometimes throw around would have no hope of coming to life.

    What worked best last June were the parts of the week that had this quality: the space that Anna and I can hold when we work together, the fellowship of the friends who were there to help us. Meanwhile, the places where things didn’t work, or where it got needlessly difficult, were the ones where we came adrift from this way of being.

    I think of the pressure it puts on a group of people who have only just met, to tell them: ‘By coming here, you’ve made this school a reality.’ I think of the pressure it puts on a friend and fellow teacher who finds himself playing the role of a workshop leader, trying to summon an experience intense enough to live up to the powerful language with which we’ve called this group together. I think of some wise words from Anthony McCann, years ago: the greater the emotional intensity of a situation, the wider the gap will tend to be between the experiences that the people present are having.

    So my hunch is that an invitation which doesn’t place the weight of being the school on those who turn up will give us all more breathing space, the chance to make some fresh mistakes, to take ourselves more lightly and take care of each other.

    *   *   *

    We could have scheduled six courses in 2019 and filled them — given the amount of interest in that first course, given the number of those who came who tell us they are keen to come back, and given the flow of enquiries we are getting.

    Instead, right now, we’re not sure whether there will be any public courses at HOME this year. It depends on practical considerations — which I’ll come to — but it’s also a question of the order in which to do things.

    If we’re going to make a public invitation to spend time around the ongoing work of the school, then we need to ground that work: to make more time and space for it, to share more of what’s going on, to tell the story of what we are doing here and why.

    In that spirit, here’s an outline of what we see ahead of us in 2019 — assuming we are spared that long…

    1. Focusing on the heart of what we do and doing it more deliberately. This means convening conversations and collaborations around the kitchen table where I’m sitting as I write this: bringing together particular combinations of people for a few days, gathered around a theme, often with the intention of publishing something together afterwards. It will include strengthening our immediate network of close collaborators, as well as making new connections — and developing a rhythm for this way of working, leisurely and fruitful. And some of this work will need to be fundable, without us going off-track in pursuit of funding.
    2. Framing the conversations we intend to bring together and the themes we are working on. Since the autumn, we’ve arrived at a new clarity and urgency about a kind of work that is called for around climate change. In the next few posts, I’ll set out what we’re seeing, the implications as we understand them, and the role that a kitchen-table operation like this might play. (This is also a chance to be clear about the difference between the work I’ve done over the past decade as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and the work that Anna and I are setting out on here.)
    3. Publishing and co-publishing to share the work we’re doing. Ideas arrive in conversation: glimmers of possibility, new ways of seeing a familiar landscape. Where it’s useful, we want to get these written up and out there swiftly — on our school blog and through other routes. I won’t always be the one doing the writing, but writing is a thing I do, and just now most of what I write is an expression of the themes around which this next phase of HOME is taking shape. This includes writing together with others around our network — I’m currently working on texts with Vanessa Andreotti, David Abram and Duncan McLaren — as well as finding new places to publish. And publishing won’t always mean writing: in November, I had a go at making a HOME video, talking about Extinction Rebellion, and there will be more of these.
    4. Experimenting with ways to connect over distance. One reason we were hesitant about running six courses this year is the distances from which people want to come to connect with this work — and the implications this has for who gets to be involved, as well as the resulting carbon footprint. There’s a conviviality that requires being around the table together, breathing the same air, sharing the season and the hour of the day. But we need ways of connecting up the many tables around which people gather, without hopping on and off planes as if there’s no tomorrow. So we’ve been kicking around some ideas with friends: slow travel networks, corresponding societies, a monthly online Assembly that would offer another way of connecting with this school. Watch out for news about these experiments as 2019 goes on.
    5. Going on tour. Between now and April, we’ll be at home in Västerås, moving on into some of the above — and then we’re taking this on the road for three months, or rather on the rails. Anna, Alfie and I will be making the trip to the UK, with some stops along the way. It will be the longest visit I’ve made since I left England in 2012 — and along with a couple of gatherings to mark the end of my ten years at Dark Mountain, we’re planning various events at which we open out the work we’re doing at HOME. So far, it looks like we’ll be coming to Brussels, The Hague, London, Glasgow, South Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall — and we’ll put together a detailed announcement soon — but if you’re interested in doing something with us, please get in touch. (Also, while we don’t have any public courses at HOME scheduled right now, I will be teaching one final Dark Mountain course at Schumacher College in early May, together with Charlotte Du Cann.)
    6. Finding a place to call HOME. Yesterday we sold our house, the place that has been home to us for the past three years in Västerås. We’d known all along that it was home for the time being, not home for good — and the first decision we took in 2019 was to put it on the market. Where we’ll end up next, we don’t know yet, although our assumption is that it will be on this side of Sweden. We’re looking for a place that we can call HOME, that’s got a little bit of land and enough space to host smaller and larger gatherings.

    How soon we find the right place and how long it takes to make it ready will determine when we’re in a position to host further public courses — though, as you’ve gathered, we’ve plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.

    *   *   *

    For that first course, we hired a hostel in a village that’s 45 minutes from here by train — and this turned out to be the hardest part of what we’d taken on, to recreate something of our home in a set of borrowed buildings. Those buildings looked idyllic in photographs, but it was a while since anyone had shown them any love. (When my fellow teacher Andrew arrived on the Sunday, his first task was to help me do a deep clean of the hostel fridge.)

    If you’ve read the GARAGE article, you might guess that there are parts of it we’d quarrel with — but life’s too short and there’s enough vanity in the world already, right?

    There was one bit that properly pissed me off, though — and that’s when their reporter writes about Anna being ‘relegated’ to the kitchen and how we ‘glamorized… a gendered division of labour’. He did three months of interviews for that piece — before, during and after the course — and he knew that Anna was a full partner in the school, but he never spoke to her. Unless you count the one time he directed a question to her over email — he wanted to know how the two of us met and what her first impression of me had been.

    Now, let me fess up: when it comes to gender, there was stuff we did that week that deserved calling out. In fact, Anna and I talked about this with the group on the final morning. Partly, it came down to having a course that was fronted by two guys — and partly, having a set of buildings where the kitchen was shut off, behind a door and up a set of stairs from the room where the eating took place.

    On the other hand, if the GARAGE guy had actually talked to Anna, he might have learned that her CV includes professional kitchen experience, cooking for everyone from anorexic women to kindergarten classes to weddings — so if she takes the lead in the kitchen when there are thirty people to feed, it’s because she has the skills and the experience for the task. (He might also have learned that she was about to take on the role of gender equality strategist for Sweden’s fifth largest city — and that she’d had a hellish year in the job she was just leaving, which is why she’d opted for a backstage role that week.)

    This seems worth saying, because I’ll often be the more visible half of this partnership — for the time being, because Anna is holding down a full-time job, while I work day-to-day on developing HOME — and probably beyond that, since I’m the one who has spent twenty years talking into microphones and in front of audiences, writing essays and manifestoes, and generally wrangling words in public.

    As a straight-ish white dude, I’m not wholly oblivious to the structural reasons why people-who-resemble-me are disproportionately represented among the public wranglers of words. I’m still on a path of wising up to my personal blind-spots and the habits acquired from growing up in a world that’s structured this way — and when it comes to me and Anna, you can bet that this shit trips me up, more often that I want to tell you, in the everyday undertaking of making a life together.

    But anyone who spends time around us is going to see Anna’s strength and single-mindedness, the deep mutuality of this partnership, and the way we come together to shoulder the work that needs to be done.

    *   *   *

    What got me about the layout of that hostel last June is that it was so totally the antithesis of the way of being together that I’ve learned from living with Anna — and to wrap up these kitchen table reflections, I want to tell you one last story about that.

    Two weeks before we met, Anna had bought a flat. Forty square metres on the south side of Stockholm — one room, a bathroom and a kitchen — it wasn’t a whole lot of space, especially when I gave up my rented room in London and moved in with her. It was the first place she’d ever owned and her first move was to knock through the kitchen wall, so that the space where the food was made opened onto the space where we ate and lived and slept. That also meant that you could get twelve people round the table for dinner, no small thing in a flat that size.

    Four years on, we’d moved to Västerås with Anna’s new job, I was commuting back to Stockholm three days a week to work at the national theatre — and we bought our first house, a suburban row-house built in 1957. The old guy we bought it from had lived there since it was built and to say it needed work would be an understatement.

    Well, I don’t look at a physical space and see how it could be remade — that’s not how my mind works — but Anna has the gift of seeing such things. Once again, her first decision was about the kitchen: when the house was built, they’d stuck it in a room at the front, shut off from the living quarters, but with a view out over the street, presumably so the housewife could see her husband coming home from work and get his coffee on. That became Alfie’s bedroom and the kitchen moved to the back of the house, opening straight onto the living room and sharing the view out over our neighbours’ gardens, where the sunlight streams in over the treetops for a few hours, even in the darkest days of winter.

    I don’t mean to go all House & Garden on you — believe me, I don’t take this middle class idyll of home ownership for granted. It’s not what I grew up with and not something I just assumed would happen in my life. I’m wearing this privilege, sharing these renovation stories, because the only reason Anna or I have for living in anything larger than a cell is to have a place that we can share, a place where we can welcome people. (Though if we did live in cells, hers would definitely be more stylish than mine.)

    Before I met Anna, I held hospitality and conviviality high among the things worth living for — but in making a life with her, I’ve learned vastly more about how to embody this, how to ground it in practical decisions and in how you use the privileges life throws your way.

    When we got back from the estate agents last night, I could feel the house gently slipping away from being our home, readying itself to welcome the excited young couple with whom we’d just been signing papers. On the last day of April, we’ll hand over the keys, then leave to catch the night train south.

    Whatever is coming after that, whichever kitchen this table lands in next, the experience of these past seven years allows me to trust in our ability to make a home together that’s capable of being HOME.

    Meanwhile, the January work is done, the new and the old are joined, the threshold of the year is safely crossed — and that will do for tonight.

    To find out about our current activities, visit the HOME website. You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

    Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.

    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.