Family friends on how it's impossible to mess up your children in some way...

"we just ask them if they want driving lessons or therapy sessions. if they choose therapy, that's when we know we've really messed up."

Am sweltering in a white fluffy hood. It is too hot for this game...

The pressed heat contracts our thinking into slow-crawling spirals. Our movements are thick like mud and our words flounder listlessly, sometimes even drop, exhausted before they reach the other ears in the room. The air is waiting, tense, ready to break; like burnt umber. There are the first dim and distant growls, like waves of heat heaving over dry sand - now two beaded drops perspire from the sagging sky behind the window. And we taste the first wafts of concrete steam peeling off the pavements.

And now it is here.

Lone bullets of water smack the pavement with improbable abandon; the people look at them like they are a dance. They think welcome.

And the rhythm accelerates - now we are walking through war. ammunition pelts the ground around us,  cannons fire against the clouds from within and artillery streaks through the sky, ripping it into shreds and rolling it up again into loose-knit thundery balls. The sound splits the seams of the heat; the people jump, exhale, and catch one anothers eyes, calmly. A blast of cool air escapes before the humid skins of transparency holding in the air are drawn taut again, sealing us in.

Black feet on a slippy pavement. And now under cover, the silver sliding off the station roof onto the hot coal like a liquid glass curtain, the people sit and watch, and wait for the next crisis, the bigger one.

Please mind the gap.

I know…

How would you like to go to a city that you love, and have a whole load of resources at your disposal to work with a bunch of extraordinary young people on the very edge of society, utterly failed by the system for the summer… You’d get to be their friends, and devise any creative means you can to draw out anything that really matters to them, but you can write a research paper since you’re there, that might actually affect something (maybe). In fact, why don’t we even pay you for the privilege, and throw in a house, and an incredible (slightly batty) research community into the mix? And while we’re at it, we’ll even fly you off for free to meet some mental professors around the country to give you some more ideas, and clear lots of space in both the institutions you’re working in for you to basically do whatever you like (within reason) to inspire these young people about the extraordinariness of their lives and their own stories.

But we would tentatively suggest that you try out this new idea which links in with some ideas a number of others are chewing on… which involves building a kind of learning treasure map (or ‘archaeology’ of learning) by starting with an object which fascinates the individual, and helping them to spin out stories and maps of themes and questions into which to learn… because it’s actually quite good. And it might actually even work.

While you’re there you can even meet a squillion other incredible individuals carrying ideas of massive potential for change (of course they can be found in these marginal places. where else?), make some new friends, learn some more about Bristol and even have some proper space for solitude. And here, by the way are some new threads to follow about exclusion, ‘delinquency,’ learning, silence, prayer, creativity and the workplace …

Um, no thanks. Actually I’m a bit busy right now.

I am wondering where the line is between creative receptivity and madness.

Opening yourself up to be moved by jets cannoning up from the inside feels like becoming spiritually alive but if I am losing control then who is to say I’m not just slipping away

maybe this kind of madness is partly about letting go of the lines around yourself, and the lines between yourself and the other. It’s terrifying. Here are more people, there are more people; their landscapes, wells, deserts, their rivers become my rivers and I am pulled apart by the chasms which rip through their floors

where is my own skin?

Tumbling, falling, landing in the middle of new conversations

Arriving, leaving, walking in the desertplace, sore feet and sometimes wanting to stop

Hovering on the boundary between loneliness and solitude, the latter bringing close to a communing deeper than unbroken sociability

The sense of so much more, hovering, imminent, the lack of words to express it

Eyes and eyes and forgotten stories, finding them out and being churned up inside out

Is it madness to make space for more?

More colour, more dimensions, more pictures, more people, more voices, more clues: if there is much more there will be no more me.

It feels like that.

'Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.' --- Mark Twain

I used to be afraid that if you kept on learning all your life, eventually your head would be so full with bubbling volcanoes of ideas that eventually you'd dissolve and be paralyzed by the possibilities.

Maybe this is possible.

But maybe also, if you set your mind to learning wisdom, rather than knowledge, you end up becoming emptier rather than fuller.

Because, it seems like the ways of wisdom are a lot to do with LETTING GO. In a million different messy, uncomfortable ways; each with big cost to the ego and to our precious walls.
Like, learning which are the really important questions for now, and letting fly to the wind those which are not. Learning to discern times and seasons and stick to one moment at a time. Learning to attend to the still small voice and let go of the head noise; learning to see the individual faces in amongst the masses; learning to see the blade of grass in the busyness of the street; learning to love and not to own, to seek truth and not contain it...
learning to see the ugliest and worst and most depicable things in everything (including ourselves) and the most beautiful, lovely, incredible Truth in all things too (including ourselves). And letting go the boundaries that we normally guard that divide these things apart.

And IF loving Truth has to do with the love of beauty, simplicity, coherence, the Other, as these ideas suggest, then we need empty hands, not full ones to be wise.