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onceuponatime
http://20six.co.uk/nimoi
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percontatio
How is it possible to make peace with the particular? ie. possible to fully live and inhabit the path//life/person you are walking/becoming with those you are near, doing what you are doing, in the place you are in, despite having even a shallow comprehension of the millions of possibilities and others and other ways of being there are..?
Answers on a postcard, or ex-christmas card, jam jar label etc.
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rebel clowning
'The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army or CIRCA is a UK-based left-wing anti-authoritarian activist group that uses the ancient traditions of clowning combined with the modern art of non violent direct action to challenge corporate globalisation, war and other things they see as injustices.' (Wikipedia)
'CIRCA aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin of all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion - adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth. The rebel clowns that make up CIRCA embody life's contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.' ** 'We are clandestine because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone. Because without real names, faces or noses, we show that our words, dreams, and desires are more important than our biographies. Because we reject the society of surveillance that watches, controls, spies upon, records and checks our every move. Because by hiding our identity we recover the power of our acts. Because with greasepaint we give resistance a funny face and become visible once again. We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is irresistible...' more...
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If something of the dynamics of a lifetime of journeying can be summed up in the movement of breathing, then the inward breath might be called welcome (hospitality, making space for otherness, encounter and change); and the outward breath go (pilgrimage, sojourning, travel and change). But if it is true as I have written that our culture tends naturally towards openness, embracing the new and movement, then we will probably find pilgrimage easier than hospitality. It will be easier to follow our restless spirits’ longings into adventure than to invite others into our own spaces, to identify with the places we are in, to commit, belong and to deepen. Only, the one without the other does not allow deep change – it will remain shallow and superficial, or become static and immobile. For this reason, some way needs to be found for us to practise our adventurous pilgrimages with sacrificial hospitality. One possibility is thinking in terms of seasons, of knowing that going involves coming back… others might include carrying in your backpack the values of openness to the ‘other’, taking unnecessary time to notice, being prepared to be interrupted. Another one is a new experiment I am hoping to try, others are warmly invited…
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Experiment #5 - pilgrimage of kin
Hospitality in ancient (and more recent!) times centred around the family home, a space into which friends and strangers could be invited. For such a space to function hospitably, individuals would have to be committed to a group of Others they had not chosen, despite having (usually) only their lineage in common. It was not a matter of personal selection and whim but of a choice and commitment, of perhaps a more transformative kind than I think we give credit for any longer. In this era of fragmentation and dispersal, we still find ourselves connected to strangers in this incredible, mysterious way (family). We arrive alone, but into a network of unchosen others, to whom we often remain joined in some way throughout our lifetimes. But where previously, this bundle of oddballs would have normally bound us tightly to the place we were born, now the generalized scattering allows us the choice of moving far away, of discovering new terrains and peoples, of expanding our horizons and worldviews… and of losing connection with the ones we were originally gifted with: of becoming indifferent to our hosts. But it seems to me that this whole set-up is also ideally suited to a kind of pilgrimage with a pretty fiery edge; just like the Hebrew nomads practised by seasons - a pilgrimage back to our families. It’s a simple idea… people have often spoken of learning through making a pilgrimage - learning from anyone and anything you encounter and embodying your own personal and spiritual journey.
This experiment is based on that principle, but the destinations will be less appealing to our wanderlusting souls and more stretching; they are familiar, (although often unknown), perhaps mundane, ordinary, unexotic houses in quite unromantic towns and cities. They will be wherever our families are.
But part of the challenge will also be to discover stories of our own origin, forgotten treasure buried in folds of time, and there is much life here. Also there are opportunities to rekindle warmth within communities we have inherited without even having had to ask; to make friends, to find discover the lost, forgotten, often lonely we can otherwise spend so long trying to find. So… in shorter words:
For anyone wanting to partake the challenge is this: – To visit; stay with; spend time with less well known relations, especially of older generations. To collect stories. To meet at the end and swap what we’ve learnt and experienced over a bonfire and marshmallows. Let me know if you are up for it.
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creative anarchy
...could be a way of thinking about an alternative response to injustice, beyond deconstructing the stuff of society into spirals of clever wordplay. A picture for what might happen if our generation does not stop at unlocking power structures, opening eyes to recognize the Other enmeshed in them
but brings forth something new. That is, not another System, reproducing the same instrumental coordinates under a different name, with a different narrative, a new project; we have always being doing this.
But nor either an absolute rejection, a melancholic resignation, a bitter critique, each to his or her own. This seems to us to be radical, but tolerance, critique is not the new message; everyone is already saying it. (And its actually no less ego-centred than Colonialism - individual choice and consumerism are just more invisible ways of enslaving the powerless to our own advantage.) In modernity openness was taboo, but now the flow travels the other way, it expands... we are reluctant to build anything, we are wary of any kind of closure. Carefulness, poetic openness, receptivity are vital; they are the only means to rediscover Life, to encounter meaning, the rhythm of creativity - but the real challenge for Now is to channel this into commitment, into action, into an authentic Response, many responses. Without the poetry the narrative is oppressive, without the narrative, poetry is futile, hopeless - it loses sight of the bigger picture. Anarchy implies an overthrowing, but creative anarchy is about disrupting the power cables, not a violent reactionism. Its foundation is not a particular project but shalom (peace), and recognition of the other; its action is not a victorious overthrowing or an ultimate rejection but an act of becoming, a desire for each to become him-or herself in collaboration, a collective artwork creeping in from the sidelines. It learns, it journeys, it is transformed, it transforms.
And unlike communism this thing is not instituted from the top, it surges up from the becomers themselves, as they begin to live it - it is a spiralling fractal recreating itself, where each becomer adds a new dimension.
If Existentialism says, find out who you are and do it on purpose Creative anarchy would be find out who we are and become it.
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memory
Are we children of our history? 
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
Passage from Night, Elie Wiesel
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#11 spend a day taking notes from the teachers that surround us without going near a schoo
Our class was of two, our classroom expansive, and our lessons most enlightening.
Notable teachers included Fleep the sad-but-alive tree who taught us about sorrow, the crop semi-circles on Churchill pitch which taught us conspiracy theories about burning eels falling through holes in the ozone layer, and Spiz/Hyacinth the schizophrenic old lady/dj tree who was mostly just confusing. We also received messages from Russia via chocolate wrappers.
as it turned out, our classroom crossed boundaries between several different planetary zones. This was quite accidentally discovered, as (scandalously) it turns out there are a number of doorways to other worlds located around Churchill and the astronomy department; mostly between significant pairs of trees. In one of these other worlds people had tragically been turned into wire sculptures and magnetically aligned. We narrowly escaped this fate by guiding each other through the wires with our eyes closed. in another our brains turned to pulp and started spouting inspired but wonky poetry.
Our lessons also raised a number of unanswered questions: - can spiders jump? Can they fly? Do they swing like batman? How do they make webs stretch from tree to tree? - Why don’t beavers live in trees? - If you cross over accidentally into other worlds, how do you get back to the right one? And how do you know when you are there?
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