The czech professor of theoretical physics has a large cardboard mobile of the solar system hanging from his ceiling and an assortment of dice, colourful toys and other curios are scattered about the shelves alongside the books. Leaning back in his chair, rendering his czech mustard socks germanly visible, he inhales the theories, equations and leatherbound periodicals stacked on the bookcases, and breathes out stories; a colourful swirling chaotic mesh of them, interspersed with small gift-boxes of intense clarity. He switches between his three pairs of glasses according to the topic (it seems): a conversation of snowflakes whirling in impossible snowstorms. In the same breath, and the same mesmerizing swirl of poetry and prose the professor spins tales of the everyday lives of well-known philosophers, the landscapes of his eastern-bloc childhood and resistance youth; of the personal histories of atoms and systems, the routes of travelling puppetters, and the world expands, wrenches apart, sifts through the cracks in the floor. seventeen hours of conversation later my head is biscuit crumbed... days afterwards Ideas are still losing their capitalized status, but there are also other seed packets to open. I think I have a new mentor. *** On a related but mostly unrelated note: Today, one of my students showed me a zoomed in picture of the sun. My first and only profound thought was: SPACE IS REALLY REALLY BIG and my stomach fell away inside of me. It's quite true: it is.

27.7.06 20:25 Permalink / comment

ships n shamrocks Belfast… is a beautiful city. amongst a mesh of rest and people and festival between the two weddings, it happened that i landed up in the seat next to a guy about to begin a phd in education looking at children on the margins of the system in the same three ‘port-cities’ I have been thinking a lot about lately: Bristol, Belfast, Glasgow. conversations and thoughts ensued… Bristol, Belfast, Glasgow... inklings of a bigger picture, always beyond reach, and deliciously. There are also a lot more clues in Bangor (the irish version), nearby town and knotted root of british monasticism. So many clues… and we wade through them as they shift about into maze-shapes like iron filings around magnetic song-lines*… Belfast… you have paint on your walls and doorposts like passover blood and carved hate-line streets and yet something like light runs like a river through you. your histories and your stories are built on layers of memory in the land of peace-war-peace-war-rest-peace-war; your bricks make shapes that spell family and enemy, hospitality and travel, trade and dreams of adventure in the nations; your high walls and your spaces are moulded by thoughts of protection, recovery... hmm. Incidentally. I also learnt from another table-neighbour of the marine biologist variety that lobsters are ‘immortal’ – until they are eaten, that is. *songlines are an incredible concept in aboriginal mythology; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime to discover more, recommended

12.8.06 16:29 Permalink / comment

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.

19.7.06 10:12 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

recognize any themes here?   '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

17.7.06 17:14 Permalink / comment

tumbleweed 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.

8.7.06 19:55 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

barefoot in bath   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.

4.7.06 20:08 Permalink / comment

expansion and contraction Is ‘creativity without limits’ a paradox? I have used the image of a springboard, to dive from, talking about the book of days and the need for constraints as well as free space to be creatively active. Thinking now also about the picture of a window, whose square edges box out much of a landscape, but which serves to frame and focus a piece of world into an image, to be reflected on,  appreciated, responded to... 'Art' consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.’ - G.K Chesterton So... maybe receptivity (thinking here about openness to the ‘other,’ to God; contemplative ways of being which decentre and change us) needs the bigness of the landscape, which drowns the individual and almost prohibits a response. But creativity, an act of meaning-making needs language, boundaries, narratives to work with, to mediate; material to give form to a response beyond words. ??? At the moment, I am thinking that oppression, over-rationalistic or project-minded thinking could be examples of 'creativity' which is not preceded by 'receptivity', meaning that a particular 'narrative'  becomes the basis of action, rather than a source beyond us which decentres and respects the others 'otherness.' Interested to hear anyone else's thoughts, this is a fledgling idea. Could this look like... Mobility = receptivity + creativity where receptivity =  love of the other + willingness to be changed and creativity = constraints + a healthy disregard for the impossible ???

16.7.06 17:31 Permalink / comment

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