Turn turn turn…
And then the day came that things began to really turn around….
I’m feeling this one in my body. The sense that things are on the turn. And it is a feeling fed by the potential for a greater turning. All the kids went out on strike again yesterday. Turn turn turn… There is an energy for environmental activism surfacing across the planet with a strength and intention to shake up 2020 and beyond. Joanna Macy calls it the Great Turning: capital G, capital T.
Maybe it’s just a feeling, but it’s a feeling to live by; the best way to meet a felt sense of metamorphosis is to keep turning towards it.
I have been spending the first months of the year in community with artists engaged with research on societal transformations from the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. The process is intense: a group activity of stretching ourselves to process systems change research, and find words, language, colours, movements, music, recipes — and also jokes—to convey the possibilities we sense. There are also quiet moments of making and process outside group time, reflecting with the land and in our own spaces.
Today, I’m in quiet mode. Writing in a field of wildflowers in Hampshire, a wild space out behind the rented bungalow I live in with my daughter. Two dappled horses walk with each other through yellow dandelions. Slanting sunlight illuminates a host of dandelion clocks: their fuzzy heads blaze in the light like ethereal candles. The day is sun-kissed and sun-touched, and the air holds burgeoning infinite space for so many variations of birdsong. It is a sweet moment outside to consider the quieter aspects of collective creative work and our attempt to engage usefully in systems change research.
The question I’m sitting with today is around what creative communication can be. I wonder—for instance—about the manifold ways the land communicates. I wonder about the body’s capacity for readiness and responsiveness: diverse sensory capacities work together towards expanding detailed understandings of place. Through walking, the body can orient and integrate new details that have never been encountered before. Whether it’s discovering the wild land on the outskirts of a town or turning up for a meeting in a new city, we find our way into the unknown one step at a time. There are many dimensions to how we find our way with the unknown that we can’t see. And yet, embodied presence can meet the new with simplicity: we just do it.
Neuroscientists talk about the primacy of expectation — that we actively balance the energy in our sensing bodies by seeking to make our sensed experience of the world match with our expectations about the world — but there are many creative nuances in bodily openness that are not simply about closing the prediction gap. The non-alignment between what we are capable of perceiving and expecting and what we meet in the world is of great creative importance: a vitalised gap for learning, relationship, and imagining otherwise. We play with this gap in any walk down a new trail, movement into a conversation, or dance. It is a vital space where art and creative process do their work: a space to be wrong, to have our expectations surprised, to tend a curiosity that is not invested in controlling experience but in meeting experience and others as they are and perhaps to act and live in shifted ways.
Can art interact with transformation and systems change research in ways that allow it to be as wide and varied as a field?
Art and uncertainty
Lived experience is more like an experimental music score than a neat message: each day brings unexpected processes and new learnings, often in jolting, unpredictable steps, punctuated with surprising news and events, sudden disappearances and appearances. Working with the STEPS Centre attunes me to noticing the plural uncertainties on a macro scale — daily encounters with research on social and ecological justice is full of unanticipated troubling knowledge. (It may be the right kind of trouble — as Donna Haraway names it — but opening to environmental and social justice research can be heavy, urgent, and full of grief.) Uncertainty feels pervasive in all sorts of micro-personal ways, too: the challenges of sharing childcare with an old friend, communicating needs to my Landlord in a way that leads to action, finding ways to stand up for colleagues in systems that erase their work.
I struggle with reductive approaches to communication that consider art’s role as to clarify research messages and “communicate” systems change with some feeling. I take a moment to ask the dandelions — how best to work with this sense of a turning? What kind of actions and stories and ways of being have the integrity to be with life as it is? I listen for whispers on the breezes about what worries me about this way of approaching creative practice and alternative futures.
The sun sets and there’s an old Flaming Lips song playing in my mind: a memory of the band singing that the sun never goes down, it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.
Do you realise that happiness makes you cry.
Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die.
By the light of the moon things loose their edges even more. Perhaps our past and futures are just as alive as this one day in June? Perhaps art and story and song speak across time in ways that we can never really capture or make clear? Perhaps we are part composed of land and what we love, by our friendships and our creative cultures, that shape our creative responses as we are turned around by life — through the passion of the day, and the grief of the night — always thinking with us as we navigate uncertainty?
The creative invites living encounters — beyond conveying pre-written clear messages, or even telling stories about alternative possibilities. By which I mean, the value of art and story live in the whole dramatic wave — the value can not be extracted or reduced as a simple lesson or idea, the creative encounter is alive and contains multitudes, it’s a worlding full of distinct creatures and relations, patterns and textures, and all the details of experience that emerge through feeling, sensing, and improvising “in the wild”.
The weird transformations of living communications
Transformation is a perennial subject for creative practice — stories, art, music, performance, creative experiments, consider the major and minor turns in collective meaning-making and collective history-making. The fairy tales offer a way of thinking about transformation archetypally. The oldest juiciest tales drop us off at the confounding Crossroads. “The Crossroads” itself is a character, living in myth as a kind of reckoning point where creatures refine intention and their powers of follow through. Many cultures revere the moment at the Crossroads of life as a moment of great power and great danger. The potent threshold space is understood as under the guardianship of More-Than-Human beings, the wild goddess Hecate or the Trickster spirits. Particular sites around the planet are known to be Crossroad places that hold a particular potency: in London, the poet and troubadour John Crow sings of the Crossbones graveyard as a liminal zone of weird possibility in the heart of the city.
One thing we have in common is that we are all destined to face moments of reckoning and asked to choose one path over another. Being human in times of ecosystemic collapse feels like an urgent invitation to get intimate with the Crossroads — to get close in with uncertainty and struggle. Karl Marx clearly articulates how our creative liberty is by no means limitless. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) people make their own history “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
One thing I’ve learned from Carla Strang and Martin Shaw in Devon is that the myths and old stories feed a collective hardiness to meet the spooky solitude of life-defining choice. Stories like The Lindworm pivot around cross road choices, turning points, limits and transgressions. Myth folk, like Martin Shaw, speak of the Crossroads as the crucible for character, bringing inner life to meet the surging life of the wild. Martin plays the drums before the telling of a Story, summoning the many beings who come to listen, sharing a rhythm, and drumming up the energy to give whole-hearted attention and live the Story. The old stories teem with transformations and strange crossings; stories that push beyond comfort as a raison d’être, remember passions, desires and a care for relations, stories that remind us that we have eyes to see the experience of others, and hearts to feel. The Crossroads is understood as an archetypal and necessary passage for transmutation, aided by the quickening action of the threshold guardians. Just about all the stories counsel meeting the Crossroads with the greatest humility and caution (yet just about everyone has trouble remembering that when it comes to it.)
These mythic tellings open up an invitation to those who gather to listen: an invitation to enter in and not shy away from the Crossroads. It’s at the Crossroads that we may find the energy for massive social protest, the determination to speak what’s necessary, and the fire to imagine something better and create. Martin Shaw’s storytelling urges listeners to grow courage to participate in the process and with the conditions of our lives: if the sun is to rise again on a new day of fresh running rivers, the fierce commitment to a life-giving Story must be cooked up somewhere.
Omnes in triuio sumus / We are all at the crossroads
So reads an epigram to one of the Renaissance emblem’s in Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber. The emblem shows Hermes, the messenger of the gods in the ancient Greek pantheon, rising up from rough stone at the intersection of three roads.
In Andrea Alciato’s emblem book illustration, Hermes is depicted as a horned wild God using the caduceus as a divining rod to sense out the middle path. The caduceus acts as a connecting rod to the unseen, allowing Hermes to receive fresh directions from the cosmos. The strange image is a powerful depiction of divining an onward path: entangling the forces of nature, animal instincts and cosmic guidance. The emblem’s epigram is clear:
Omnes in triuio sumus, atque hoc tramite uitae, Fallimur ostendat ni deus ipse uiam.
We are all at the crossroads, and in this path of life we go wrong unless the god himself shows us the way.
If we could not catch it in the image, it is spelled out: creatively navigating uncertainty requires an intimate receptivity to something greater than the self. It is wisdom that has roots in Platonic thought and reflects a kind of alchemical sensibility on creative receptivity.
Ecological communication: beyond controlling the message
There is a great wave of research growing about radical societal transformations that clearly identify the roots of systemic breakdown, ecological disaster and pollution in Western European colonisation, racial capitalism and attempts to control nature. Extractive societies, heavily invested in creating consumers, pretend that buying a comfortable, good life is a question of money, not of creative responsibility. Painfully, “developed” societies linger at the crossroads of choice and choicelessness. Inaction is explained away by strange refrains: “Do not deny our liberty not to listen to what’s necessary. Do not deny our freedom not to change.” Inertia creeps. We burn daylight together. The earth speaks back — in fires, in floods, in uprisings — yet all the developed, professional, modern cultures can do is wrestle on the gates of the uncanny, unable to conceive of how to take a different path, delaying to make it across the threshold into something else. Extractive society is firmly stuck in an allegiance to control over creatively meeting the unknown.
You can describe creativity many ways — a lifeline, or a web, or the Great Sea — whatever you like. But you can’t control it. Creativity is bigger than us. The Indigenous cultures know this best: the land animates Imagination, the land is dreaming us. A simple and meaningful task for collective creative practice is to tend receptivity and tend conditions for folk to notice what is already at work in their lives, relationships and places. The sense that some more vital ways to navigate the Crossroads live across our relations. Spaces for receptivity are radical in themselves, particularly in a culture that emphasises anxiety, fear and control. There are inspiring examples, from the Zapatistas to the clowning of protestors at the COP21: ways of feeding creative playful receptive forms of activism, in service of different kind of commons and collectivities.
So how do we continue in non-extractive relational creative processes?
Listening to dreams is one technique I find helpful in tending creative process among the artists in the Systems Change group. There is something wild, unforced, and non-coercive about sharing dreams. Learning at Schumacher taught me that stories live in bodies like animals live in the woods. Each one of them is interesting, unique and worthy of attention.
Dreamwork is an old technique with rooted histories across many cultures. It is a practice of receiving, of listening to what is not expected but is still there. Sharing dreams opens up latent spaces that flow with intimacy, generosity and welcome, always communicating more than is explicitly intended or known. These engagements in dream process are soaked in living waters and embodied myths. And despite it all, recognitions and discoveries emerge from the unruly unimportant dream space that can change the course of a lifetime.
To some, dreamwork has no place in activism. It is too quiet. Too dreamy. Some policy-minded folk ask that art prove its utility more explicitly. But dreams and art will not craft a nice clear controlled public message—the work of dreaming resists all that.
Shared dreamwork is quiet work, small work, tender work — and it renews. When we tend streams of story and experience, vital symbols and pattern, when we notice gut feelings and grow good relationship with other beings, we find glimpses, phrases and traces of the forces of nature that shape our histories.
Slow change, deep change, seachange
In everyday lived experience, our points of change are often not so clear. Our lives can rarely be boiled down to one choice, one moment, one crack of lightning, and then we transform into a swan, a frog, a Prince. Mostly our lived experience moves in the ebb and flow of continuous seachange. Maturation emerges invisibly out of ever-deepening involvement in the creative work of good relations, which is as much about transforming and assimilating abrupt dead ends, mistakes and the myriad struggles of continuing to exist in cultures trained to take and not give back.
Sometimes, it’s only when we look back, we see the Crossroad moment so clearly: a story, clear as anything. We can notice and speak it, we can share it with others and pass on some learning. If we made it through a particularly gruelling phase of life, we might want to narrativise, “I have lived to tell the tale, I met the test, I’ve got the badge, the trial lies behind me now…” Yes, if ever those words escape our mouths, we’ll hear the Trickster laughing softly on the wind. For we meet the Crossroads again and again, and each morning when we wake a fresh turmoil of living processes await us.
Despite the fact that the stories of our lives are always shifting in the stream of time, finding new forms and fresh readings. We are sometimes delivered a distinct story in the night, a glowing symbol, or we find a story in a song or in books of myths or through a friend, that offers a touchstone to guide process.
Wherever they call, we must go…
Creative energy keeps us turning and always gives away more than it knows: this is something that we really can rely on. Each person — engaged in the unique ecologies of their lives, and in complex worlds of making and doing, relating with particular communities in distinct places, and balancing specific needs, limits and invitations — is a creator engaged with living alchemical processes.
Ecological thinkers, like Nora Bateson and Erin Manning, work to articulate the radical epistemological and ontological shifts held in ecological understandings of communication as relational entanglements of beings, sensing, temporalities, contexts and diverse dimensions of meanings. Though art may be useful to activist endeavours through “messaging” complex issues around Systems Change, the richer invitation is one that opens up relational communicative processes, entangles lives and weaves connections. As creative practitioners we can tend the conditions for a particular encounter with the forces of nature, but what happens always exceeds intentional design.
Who knows where it takes us?
My focus through the Hidden Paths exhibition has been to open up and invite deep relational encounters: in the live programme, curated by Idil Bozkurt, we are planning a water ceremony on the seafront, a Warm Data lab at ONCA and a Circling session in the gardens. Quiet time outside, moments of rest and listening to each other, to dreams, to trees, deepens an awareness of communication as alive, ecological, nuanced, fractal, indirect, embodied, ever working itself out.
Creative practice and collaboration take hard work. What form, what shape, can hold meaning in the world? Can we sense it together? Perhaps the real test of a collective creative attempt to go deep together is whether there is enough strong relations, trust, patience, passion and good will to hold faith with the rigours of the creative process. Sometimes in groups one person forces their vision or way of doing things. A silent killing takes place, and control - untempered by generous receptivity - cuts off the forces of nature. What is lost when this happens? When collective creative potential is overruled by domination, what is lost through refusals of generosity or radical action? Perhaps modernity would find the guts to operate differently if it could see the hidden costs in replicating the same old story of control.
Like Hermes’ caduceus, the creative process guides the way: keeps us walking, feeling out what’s missing and revealing hidden paths to what’s needed. Art and dreaming, entangling with others in creative processes, provides some necessary sustenance through the shocks and changes, and brings up awareness into the collective. It all comes out in the wash.
Walking through the fields, I happened upon an artist’s installation: a sculpture made of white painted wooden slats with poetry printed on the wood. The words invited anyone who read them to:
commit and recommit, like fistfulls of fat blossoms falling over each other…
Relational sensing, dreaming together, symbol and story — however you name it — is evergreen; as reliable as the Spring. Creativity is tasked with calling it all into awareness. Meeting these painted wooden boards, that stand alone and unremarkable on open common land, art is encountered as fundamentally useful. Re-directing attention to the Spring rising, and the task of learning to abide with what’s here, to notice what’s really happening, rather than getting hung up on what should have happened. Art speaks through the small, raw and dependable, speaks through the effort it takes to cut and paint the wooden boards, to choose which words are right, it is a language of lived and living experience.
And it’s only art if it’s alive and kicking. Like activism, art can not simply be put to use. The creative process has its own logics and plans for us, if we are courageous enough to listen and hold with the processes. Art and activism demand that we abide with tensions and tend rich difficult relational collective encounters, but it also equips us with a strange power to take the next necessary step, to sense through care and curious friendship what’s really needed. This does much more than explicitly explain alternatives, it worlds something new into being, and it brings necessary qualities into the real lives and worlds of beings. It is this art, in its spooky, uncontrollable, radical, untameable form — as defender of the oppressed, articulator of the invisible, progenitor of life — that can be a real friend to the endeavour they call Systems Change, or eco-social transformation, and also to the folk living through these times.
A way of living and growing relations, and patiently, inventively, generously finding the next step together, growing muscle in the struggle, supporting the deepest intention: to live the Turning that we sense on the wind.
May we keep encouraging each other to turn towards the hidden paths and make a path by walking.
If you are interested to participate in our dreaming with watersheds project you can reach out at hello@languageofthedre.am [updated]
We have a website languageofthedream.com
Dream tending listens to the living streams of spontaneous creativity inside each person. Our collective dream tending across art and activism emerged from asking questions about care and relational health.
How can we tend understanding between people, lands and more-than-human beings? How can we become better at acting on what needs attention and the needs of beings? How can we support creative practice within a collective?
We then incorporated a desire to make a shared ritual in creative relationship to the watershed that we live on with Meeting Oceania.
For more on the origins of this work, please visit
With thanks to all those I’ve journeyed with in 2019: the artists and collaborators who entered so deeply into a process of reimagining systems change at Brighton University, and the generous researchers at the STEPS Centre for sharing their work on Transformations and Uncertainty in our sessions over the last months. It is a real honour to facilitate and create with this group of people.
Thanks also to Charlotte Pulver and the hundreds of people who participated in London’s water pilgrimage along the Thames through the Easter week. On Easter Sunday, when Greta Thunberg arrived at Marble Arch to give her speech to the climate activists in the city, we were reeling with sorrow at the news that the brilliant lawyer and activist Polly Higgins passed away.
My thanks to the pioneering artist Jill Purce and her transformative work with sound, chanting and ceremony. Jill’s work reveals the deep turning that creative practice can bring about— and she has lodged The Byrds’ song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” always in mind. And to the great Carla Stang and Martin Shaw whose course at Schumacher College inspired a deep commitment to learn of Myth and Alchemy.
Originally published in Redness of Red
Written after WEDDING THE WILD with Dr Carla Stang and Dr Martin Shaw
Renaissance emblem images added later from: Emblemata Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, Arthur Henkel & Albrecht Schöne. Barbara C. Bowen’s Mercury at the Crossroads in Renaissance Emblems, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 48 (1985) The University of Chicago Press
