In the dark green corner is the deep soul of ecopsychology; a new take on ancient wisdoms that we have somehow forgotten in the long years of concrete and coal, consumerism and communication. The problem is, as Kris Tomkins put it, “everywhere, you’re plugged into a machine”. Whether we’re walking in the crowded city or running in the wilderness, we all have our smartphones out and our headphones on, and we all expect a good, hot shower at the end of the day. The ‘dark greens’ understand that we have got to this ‘ordinary’ place only by using up far more than we should have done, and that it is a long way back for a world in which there has been 323 consecutive months of above average global temperatures.

Psychologically, the ‘deep green problem’ is a chicken and egg: our disconnection from the world was what led us to nearly destroy it – and our continued disconnection is what prevents us from seeing what is right in front of our faces. The only way to fumble out of the darkness is to shine new light on old wisdoms – to rediscover and reconnect and to unearth new stories and old. This has everything to do with happiness; our growing dysfunction and distress have emerged less from some internalised psychodynamics, than from our inability to dig deep enough into the soul of our earth to feel whole as human beings.

In the bright green corner are the optimistic, new merchants of the enlightenment. And merchants they are; selling technological solutions to a crisis that technology has caused. They’re selling happiness too; optimism, wishful thinking and transcendence for dollar bills. These guys don’t spend too much time in the shadows. A bit of personal development and a big dollop of positivity, and the human spirit will soar into the future. Onwards and upwards, like the wind towers that scatter our land. Nuclear waste? No problem, by the time they stuff gets really dangerous, someone will have come up with a technological solution. Cities? No problem, they’re where people want to live and where the creative and entrepeneural energy will come from that will save us. Depression? No worries, just join us in meditation and a bit of shadow work and you will be ready to transcend and evolve.

The bright greens believe in the boundless creativity of human ingenuity. So, of course, did the men who built the dark satanic mills, but this time, this time its different. This time, we are in for the long haul. Humans are evolving and the ‘bright greens’ are guiding you towards the light. Soaring spirit, not earthy, grimy soul, is what will carry us to this enlightened future. All you have to do is believe, and you don’t even have to get your hands dirty!

You can probably tell what side I have mostly been on! I would rather doubt than believe, and I prefer grounded uncertainty to optimistic cocksureness. However, it is sometimes a close call and the psychologist in me doesn’t really want to take sides, for I know that, first, we need to start from where we are now, and that, second, giving up on progress will lead to as much despair and suffering as our historical disconnection has done. And I want to believe in Stuart Brand’s technological long-now visions and Ken Wilber’s bright integral future for humanity, I really do. I just have a sense that we are going to have to do a lot more digging around and dirty work before we get there.

I suppose that my intuition tells me that the shadows cast are much darker than we think. And after all, we are not being led into the future by big and subtle thinkers like Brand and Wilber, but by politicians, many of whom are, in Bill Plotkin’s words, “psychological adolescents with no deep understanding of themselves or the natural environment that makes their lives possible”. 

It will be a shame (nay a disaster) if the two green protagonists batter each other to a standstill. The stakes are too high for our world and for our own human wellbeing. I guess the lesson is that we can’t step away from the psychological and ecological challenge of our age, which is to constantly bring things together, even as they fall apart! Each disintegration, provides another opportunity for integration, in this uniquely human, creative cycle – outside in the soulful world and inside in our spirited imagination.

If you’d like to talk about these ideas and how they affect you, your workplace and community – why not contact me for a 21Soul coaching conversation or sign up to the 21Soul e-learning programme currently being trialled! 

So my 21Soul initiative (which shares a number of the same assumptions and reference points that Burkeman’s book does) is launched today. it is imperfect, unfinished and incomplete. It is not about how to be rich, successful or happy, nor about setting goals and chasing your dreams with determination. There’s no flashy new website (for the moment), and no conference or retreat centre in West Wales (I wish!). What I am offering are two small things:

Firstly: my presence as a coach/conversation partner working on the ground, at the root or at the coal face (whichever analogy you prefer) of your deep exploration of ‘soul’ – on a personal and connected level. Over many years, as a therapist and coach, I have worked with people whose deep unhappiness and anxiety stems from a clear awareness of the eroded quality of the relationships that human beings have with each other and with the planet. These are rational and appropriate responses to genocide, ecocide and disconnection; but we still (most of us) choose to live in the world, and sometimes we haven’t developed the resources to deal with these deep feelings.

So the coaching/conversational aspect of this work is aimed at helping people live and work authentically, deeply, ecologically and creatively in the context of our challenging times. It is for those who carry great sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, creativity and anger at the state of things. I will work with you face-to-face, by phone or via. Skype – and meet you where you need to meet (within practical and financial constraints of course!).

If you’d like to try it out, I’m offering an initial free phone conversation and you can find out more about this HERE.

Secondly, I will be teaching a new integration of psychology and life practice. This is what 21Soul is in essence: a bringing together of practices and paradigms in a way that melds these into a whole; telling a story that has uncertainty and openness at its heart. rather than the ‘either/or’ mentalities of our culture. A kind of unpsychology for our times.

So the teaching and learning element of this project is about bringing people together to learn and share their experiences and practices within a framework  drawn, with pared down simplicity, from a wide range of wisdoms. There will be online and physical courses, hopefully a conference, and you can book me to talk or lead a workshop about these ideas for your organisation, business or community.

Again there’s a free opportunity for individuals to engage with the teaching materials, so I’d invite you to get in touch with me if you’re interested. I look forward to hearing from you. 

So what is the 21st Century Soul? Well here’s a short meditation on the subject that may – or may not – answer that question – this project has uncertainty at its heart, after all! You will also find some of the other ideas and concepts discussed on other blog posts on this site below:

Soul is the deepest part of us. It is always manifest; felt most when we are fully living. It is in the subtle, nuanced connections we have with our universe, so when we walk out, wide-eyed into the world, our soul is constantly being re-made. 

The twenty-first century soul is the best way we will live our lives. It is inside us and all around us. It is in our relationships, politics, art and science. It is in the physical world and our biology. It is imagination and it is psychology. 

And soul is to be found in facing the shadows, yet endeavouring not to project them into the world. Thinking bad, sometimes, but not being bad. Making soul is about getting a balance between, on the one hand: duty, temperance and belonging; on the other: freedom, expression and abandonment. The joy of a soul being made is present when we are curious, playful, mischievous and courageous. It is in our love and learning, and in our solidarity and activism. 

The twenty-first century soul is secular and mortal – as the religious soul was eternal and spiritual. So, our soul’s emergence depends on the integrity and courage we bring to the unfolding of our self over a whole lifetime. 

And this uncertain century provides the backdrop for our soul’s emergence. The twentieth-century soul is seen in the ways we respond to its challenges, in the ways in which we face ourselves and each other and in how we deal with the consequences of our individual and collective actions. 

Soul, is not a thing, but a deep manifestation of life. Mostly we find it hard to pin it down – soul is not often that tangible – but we know when it is being lived in ourselves and others. 

And most importantly, soul is shared with the world. The big misconception of the twentieth-century was of the individual ‘self’ – to be ‘helped’ and ‘developed’. The twenty-first century soul is a mutual, empathetic, collective entity – nebulous, beautiful and ultimately liberating. 

The first is the fundamental soul self, that contains all our deepest, most authentic talents, virtues and destinies. “In each of us, there is a little voice that knows exactly which way to go”, says Alice Walker, and she is right. This is soul: the Ruth-ness of this Ruth, the Freya of this Freya, the essence of this Steve. It is called different things in different traditions – soul, inheritance, core self, true self, strengths and virtues, calling, daemon. Soul, however, is not a singular self, for it is connected – through metaphor and poetic image, by evolution and archetype – beneath the surface of our lives and waking awareness, to all other souls.

The second is the social self of learned behaviour, cultural belonging, relationships and the habits of interpersonal interaction. It is in how we are seen by others, how we respond to others, how we learn to love. It is embedded in the psychological theories of development, attachment and object relations and in the assumptions we make about parenting and the determinism of nurture. It is in the narcissism we bring to world (“look at me, people!”) and in our habits of avoidance. It is in our families and our connections and, yes, in the love we hold for others and in the limits of the true love we hold for ourselves. This is the self that in the contemporary world dominates consciousness and human motivation and behaviour. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, the social, relational self is the one marriage we recognise.

Third, and least acknowledged by modern humanity (but inherent to the ‘self’ of indigenous peoples) is the ecological self. This realm of being emerges from the material world on which we evolved – we animals. It is a place in which exists the phenomena of night and day, dark and night, body and mind, hill and forest, sea and land, big sky and deep waters. This ‘self’ is not a self at all in some ways. It is a constellation of ever-changing experiences of life on a shape-shifting earth. It is the sense of presence and connection that dissolves the boundaries between the human world and our environment, and puts our small human concerns in some sort of perspective. In a way, the ecological self is a self of everythingness – though more gritty and grounded than transcendent (though spirit, as an experience of immersion in something infinitely bigger than ourselves, is one way in which this self can be approximately described).

Each human culture has had its own dynamic balance between these three selves and, while some might see human development as an onward and upward civilising process, something is inevitably lost if a culture becomes blind to any of these dimensions. Our own civilisation – and the psychology that has developed to explain its mind – is fixated with the social self to the extent that the other two – the soul self and ecology of mind – hardly get a look in.  This might explain why we got into the mess we are in, and why we still find it so hard to create the solutions that may, even at this late stage, be possible.

We have a one-track mindset, so to speak, that is obsessed with the social aspects of  human being and finds it almost impossible to locate and access these other two dimensions in meaningful or sustainable ways. As a result, most people believe that they are unhappy because they cannot get their life ‘right’ in the narrow realm of the social self. My sense is that it is more because we live our lives too narrowly; attenuating the richness of soul, connection and ecology into a yearning for self development, recognition and relationship; wishing for something – perfect love – that can never be fully realised.

The clever crows on the cliff tops imitate the hawks in the way they hold their position and speed in the eddying winds. The buzzards and kites, in their turn, find and hold their mark and stand stark still above the saturated winter fields. And the peregrines seem to control and harness the wind itself, accelerating into a breathless other dimension.

Beneath the gaze of these three predators, their prey scurries and busies itself: clouds of pigeons and starlings, flurries of winter finches, rabbits, mice and weasels. Foxes and badgers skirt the fields and muddy roads in search of their prey. Robins and wrens peck and hop around the margins of our habitation. And the small things – the insects, mini-beasts and small crawling things of Edward Wilson’s passion – lattice the ground unseen by the more un-subtle humans amongst us.

It is winter, and it seems wilder here that ever, and the west wind is relentless, driving the rain into the squat stone barns and houses. In spring, the colours will emerge, breathtaking and beautiful, and the sky – like the creatures who fly in it – will seems to breath out and expand.

What can we make of such a place? We are human, and this is an impressive thing. Yet, the wildness around us tells us that we are sometimes nothing more than animals with big brains and engines. Much more impressive, however, is the human who understands that he is animal; the realisation of this, and the communication of this contemplation, is the truly creative part of being a human animal.

And this is the well from which all truly creative acts spring. It is why the more self-conscious and ambitious a human project is, the more sterile and limited it eventually becomes. Human grandiosity takes us far from our grounded nature, and focuses our attention on the driven desperation of doing. As Andrew Taggart writes: “How did we go from a conception of human beings as, at their best, contemplative animals to one in which they are creatures who act for the sake of getting things done?”

Being intimate with wildness makes such grandiosity impossible, and back in touch with the cycles of being. And, paradoxically, sitting with the experience of the wind and rain and the hawks and swirling starlings, makes it more likely that when something is done, it is creative and worthwhile.

My Poetry from the wild writing workshop is a writing retreat with a difference running from the 1st – 3rd March 2013. It draws on the depth and beauty of the Pembrokeshire landscape – coast, hills and hidden valleys. I’m running this course with Indigo Brown Creative Holidays and there are limited residential places available. All early bookings receive a free book or poetry box gift!

If you haven’t come across psycho-bubble, it’s a small blog with pared back words and big, poetic ideas.

You can explore it any way you like: hit RANDOM to get a selection of writings OR hit ARCHIVE to explore over 200 short pieces of writing from August 2011 OR just scroll back from the present into the past!

Let me know what you think….

Where are we going?

Art and poetry at St Davids Cathedral Cloisters Gallery over Christmas and New Year.

An exhibition for peace and new ways forward for the human relationship with earth and spirit.

Download an invitation to the Preview evening on the 14th December – 6.30 till 8.30 p.m.

I hope to see you there!

Poetry from the wild writing workshop

A writing retreat with a difference.

It draws on the depth and beauty of the Pembrokeshire landscape – coast, hills and hidden valleys

I’m running this course with Indigo Brown Creative Holidays and there are limited residential places available.

So - Book early! – early bookings receive a free book or poetry box gift!

YOU’RE INVITED

Where are we going? – This exhibition of spiritual art by Kim Major-George and my eco-poetry is showing at St Davids Cathedral, Pembrokeshire from 15th December till 5th January. A preview evening with readings, wine and nibbles is being held on the 14th December at 6.30 p.m. All welcome – click HERE for an invitation.

TO BOOK EARLY

Poetry from the wild workshop - Drawing on the depth and beauty of the Pembrokeshire landscape – coast, hills and hidden valleys – this is a writing retreat with a difference. I’m running this course in conjunction with Indigo Brown Creative Holidays and there will be limited residential places available. Book early! - early booking receive a free book or poetry box gift!

AND PRE-ORDER

Trails – art and poetry portfolio edition

Trails is a collaboration between myself and conceptual artist, Elaine Johnson. This four-part portfolio/chapbook weaves words and images in ways intended to surprise, challenge and delight. This edition is open for pre-order now - all orders include three of Elaine’s limited edition prints and there is an e-book version too.

]]> http://www.lifescape.me.uk/blog/?feed=rss2&p=651 0 http://www.lifescape.me.uk/blog/?p=600 http://www.lifescape.me.uk/blog/?p=600#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 21:35:44 +0000 steve thorp http://www.lifescape.me.uk/blog/?p=600  

We came up with no real answers, but I think we (and others too ) might be beginning to ask some of the right questions – and tell the right stories. I’ve copied it here because it seems to fit well with Lifescape – but please check out Jeppe’s blog – it’s full of interesting conversations and viewpoints. 

(Note – In the interview JDG is Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard, ST is Steve Thorp. The interview is as it appears on Jeppe’s blog, with the addition of various links by me to points of reference and interest. Any thoughts or comments would, as always, be welcome!)

JDG: In our earlier conversation you mentioned that finding the Dark Mountain Project tied in with other conversations and collaborations you were pursuing at the time. And I got the sense that you were also going through an important time in transforming your counselling practice. Can you tell me a little more about that time and what you were seeking?

ST: I’d been searching for some kind of place I could feel I’m going with my work. I mean, the move to Pembrokeshire was in the pipeline and I knew that my work as a therapist was going to change because I’d spent the last 5 to 10 years in Banbury building my practice and networks. I was looking for something which was much more integrative and much more contextualised around the kinds of lives we are living.

There’s two things in psychology which I have had a real problem with. One is the determinism in a lot of the field which says “we are like this because we were like that”. Often, it’s childhood traumas that people are talking about, but actually they extend it to everybody, it’s not just the odd child who’s had a really bad or traumatic childhood. And then the other one is this idea how we can all be happy – or should be. That actually this place that we live in, the kind of world that we live in, is  somewhere we somehow all can just be happy and that we all should be.

When I went to Uncivilisation it gave me the beginnings of a platform to scream from. Which is where the blogs came from. I mean the first blog had been around for a while – my ‘Lifescape’ blog which is my ‘professional’ one. I had done a lot of the writing around that, but the other one – ‘psycho-bubble’ – sprang directly from Dark Mountain. I wanted it to explore some new ways of expression. It was nice because as a writer it gave me this way of writing that wasn’t academic, and I didn’t have to argue with anybody. So it didn’t have to have polemic in it. I could just say something and see what happened to it. So that’s the starting point.

I think Dark Mountain can be a place – an open space – where I can be uncertain. There’s not many places you can go with yourself as a psychologist and as a poet and an activist. There’s not many places in the world. You can go to psychologists and they don’t really get you as a poet, and if you go to poets they don’t really get you as a psychologist.

JDG: When I studied climate change I went through this experience where the activist in me became disillusioned and I had to learnt to sit with brokenness and helplessness. And talking to people involved in Dark Mountain I’m finding that this seems to happen a lot. It seems like despair is something that you almost have to go through and then at some point you move on. You write about this as well saying despair is a valid response but that we need to move beyond it. How do you see this from psychological perspective?

ST: To me it’s a necessary response. But I don’t see despair as a path to anywhere and I don’t think we have to work through it. There’s a traditional, psychological way of thinking about it: we’re born as children – blank slates – then we’re treated like crap by our parents, and – I’m aware that I’m being a bit stereotypical – but then we internalise it and it becomes our unconscious pain, and we spend the rest of our adult life trying to get over it. If we’re lucky we can “get through” our pain and we end up becoming, you know, whatever we become. It’s an incredibly selfish project. It’s selfish because it makes such big assumptions about our relationships in the early years. I mean, our parents were just young people. If they fucked it up because they were crap at parenting it was because they just took a chance and improvised, you know. They weren’t, most of them, abusive, they were just a bit unsure sometimes like we all were, wanting to do the right thing, even when it was the wrong thing.

So, you know, I don’t think we have to work through any of that, we just have to recognise, in a sense, that  despair is just something that is there and therefore it’s a necessary counterbalance to joy. I write about joy and I write about despair, those are the two things I write about. At the same time, there’s so much talk of “happiness” and, you know, I don’t believe that it exists in the way that people talk about it. You know, it’s transient and can’t – shouldn’t – really be sustained.

So despair is necessary but if we stay with it then that’s a problem. So what we do is one of two things. One is we hide in it and work towards this thing called happiness or we wallow in it.

And the other space is the space of joy. So when I’ve been in Pembrokeshire recently, you know, one of the things that happens on almost any evening is that as I drive back home there’s this welling up in me of this kind of feeling of “wow”. What I’m responding to are birds like hawks and buzzards and red kites, and the black sheep and white sheep on the hill and the shadows and the breezes – and, you know, to me that’s incredibly poetic. And it’s material – I’m responding to the material world, you know.  I’m noticing it rather than not noticing it – to me that’s the difference. If you get lost in despair then obviously that’s one thing but if you feel it, notice it a bit like a landscape, it allows you to move on.

JDG: You write about three different but related aspects of collapse: economic, ecological and psychological. Financial and environmental problems are often discussed in the media but the psychological dimension of the current crisis is rarely discussed. How do you see the psychological collapse?

ST: The one that nobody talks about is the psychological one, which is why people do kind of understand that we’re fucked, but they don’t really feel they can do anything about it. So we’re aware of it and concerned about it but we don’t quite grasp what it is that we need to do. I mean my parents brought us up in the days when there was the strong possibility of nuclear war, so there was a sense in which they really didn’t know what to do with it, so they just got on with their lives and felt really scared all the time. And I think there’s a sense of that right now.

The problem and the challenge psychologically is actually being awake, you know – it’s actually being awake, seeing things as they are and not shying away from this because we don’t like the implications of it. And probably the reason that people shy away from the things we don’t like is because we’re not going to look at the things we don’t like in ourselves! So we look in the mirror and we don’t actually like what we see and then that leads on, I think… to something about the soul-making stuff.

So what is it that we are doing in our life? Are we actually meeting with anything that’s in our calling? Are we meeting anything that we should be doing? Not from somebody else’s point of view, but from our own point of view. And actually, if we’re not, then it’s no wonder we turn away from other things because, actually, we turn away from ourselves. So that kind of spirals back to the bigger crisis, and of course they’re all linked because you could say the psychological crisis causes all the others or you could say it is the other way around – that actually the economic factors cause the lot. Or you could say the same of the ecological crisis, that it holds the fulcrum of these three. So I’m kind of exploring these – the relationship between those three things.

JDG: That is related to a recurring theme in my conversations about Dark Mountain about the breakdown of meaning or of some of the modern concepts through which we have learned to understand our lives. It seems like our ‘mental infrastructure’ or the concepts that we use to describe the world with are becoming antiquated. Meanings become hollowed out or they’re not actually describing the reality that’s going on around us. So part of our task, and maybe that’s where Dark Mountain is really innovating, is trying to build new concepts and new ideas around how we can best adapt and live in a time of collapse. You mentioned soul-making, that is quite a powerful idea. In a way, soul-making seems like a vital task for anyone going through psychological collapse?

ST: Well, it specifically comes from James Hillman’s work, and a lot of people in the green and radical movements will know James Hillman. He was a disciple of Jung and many of those people have taken Jung’s ideas and literalised them in some new-age spirituality. What Hillman did was to bring soul back to the human kind of experience, but not to say it’s either this thing or the other.

The other part of the soul-making comes from his idea of a metaphor of the acorn. It’s a poetic theory, it’s not meant to read as science or theology. It says, it’s funny how, as we go though our lives, we look back on our lives and often they make sense when we look back on them rather than when we look forward from past experience. So what he’s saying is that it’s not things in our past that determine us. Often, as children we know who we’re going to be and we sort of express this in childish ways. It’s not till we’re thirty or forty or fifty that we actually look back at the childhood and say “oh yeah!”, you know, “oh yeah, I knew that”; or “that’s what I was doing in my family, that’s how I was playing out my role”. So that would be what he might call ‘calling’ or he calls it ‘daimon’ as well – it’s the seed and the source, you know. And the kernel of the seed is the essence of the person.

And he’s not saying that environment doesn’t have an effect on that, and he’s not saying that genetics does not affect it, he’s just says that, you know, when we are actually in our bodies and our minds, then that’s soul manifesting in the world. So soul-making is what we then do with that. So you know, we’ve got all this material which is already there and we’ve got the contexts in which it emerges throughout our life. So soul-making is going to be different for you today than if you got off the bus at somewhere else and gone to another place. Or if I had missed my appointment, you know, your soul-making and mine would take a different track. It’s important, but also it isn’t, because it isn’t the only thing that goes on. And the soul would, in a sense, be the kind of energy that takes us through our life. In relation to vocation and calling, for example, it doesn’t tell us you’re going to be a train driver, it says train driving contains something of your self.

JDG: You also write about ‘wildness’ which is something that often comes up in relation to Dark Mountain. What do you think wildness could mean within the psychology of collapse?

ST: To me what that parenting assumption – attachment theory – does is, it’s another way of civilising people, it’s another way of saying: “what’s the problem?”. And the problem is always parents. So, what’s the task? Getting through the problems my parents gave me. It narrows it down to self healing and seeking out some kind of civilised normality.

I don’t think the task is about parents, the task to me is about the world. It’s about, you know, the broadening of our psychology to realise that actually – let’s go back to the Hillman thing – if we’re already there to start with in some way or other, not naively, you know, but essentially, then the task is a very different one from one that says we can be made right. And to me these assumptions (that’s one of them, there are a number of others) that somehow we’re made by our parents is actually really detrimental. It could stop our wildness, and it makes us blame our parents which is a bad thing anyway for our relationships with people as we get older.

And the other big assumption which is accepted by a lot of people is this – the new age psychologies are full of it, you know, which is basically Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with spiritual knobs on. Basically if you think happy you are happy. Yeah? Or worse, if we want something we just ask the Universe for it and we can have it. And also that somehow there’s something we can do to train our brain to make us happy.  And you know, if that’s true it’s really worrying. If it’s true – let’s imagine we could do an experiment, and we took a hundred people and made them happy, and actually the context in which we made them happy is economic collapse. That’s a really bad thing to do, frankly! You know, I think we need to be preparing people psychologically for something different. Not disaster – I’m not sure I think that we’re on the edge of that necessarily – but something that is more realistic or existential, you know, much more! If we could face our day-to-day trials in ways that are grounded and realistic, then we’d probably be better off on that path. So that’s a critique which is emerging. The stuff I am writing around the psychology of uncivilisation is a critique that’s been emerging for some time and it isn’t really anywhere near finished yet.

Wildness is a type of relationship we have with our self and our environment. What it helps me to do is to keep me grounded individually within a world which knows I am an animal. Which gives me a relationship with an animal which is different than that relationship would be if I thought I was superior to it. It’s about saying, you know, these other species are just part of me, not in a kind of spiritual way, but just in a “I am an animal” way – and I’ve evolved to be me and you’ve evolved to be you.

JDG: Another concept that has come up in various conversations is ‘synchronicity’. I have been thinking about how to formulate this in terms of my own experience in being involved in Dark Mountain. It is difficult to pin down but often has seemed like a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about pops up in other people’s writings, in conversations or creative projects. Have you had experiences like this and how do you see that from a psychologist’s perspective?

ST: I’ve made two or three really good connections, I mean, not many more than that really, I mean, yourself and there’s an artist called Robyn Woolston, I don’t know if you’ve come across her, in Liverpool.  When we were going to Dark Mountain last time, I took a car because I live a long way off and had a convoluted journey, so I offered a lift to somebody if they were coming from the same direction. Robyn and I connected on Twitter and we met at the train station at Petersfield. And since that time, you know, a lot of conversation has been going backwards and forwards. There’s some really interesting stuff she’s doing, completely different from mine. I love the way she constructs her spaces, which is, you know, that is her art! I’m really getting interested in what she does with what she calls her practice; and her generosity of spirit is just so amazing she’s just got amazing openness – she just reaches out to people. So really, in that sense it’s been brilliant.

And another person I met – before Dark Mountain actually – was a guy called Patrick Andrews – an ex-corporate lawyer – and this has also had that kind of ‘meant to be’ feeling. With Patrick and me, its been like one long conversation. We went to the Uncivilisation Festival together last summer and each time we meet seems like a continuation of the last conversation! And although we come from very different places we keep coming across things we have in common – books that have inspired us and ideas.

The other thing that’s extremely good about Dark Mountain is that it’s something I feel I can be involved in but not forever. I can let go of it, whilst in the past I’ve been involved with stuff where I have always had this position. I’ve been involved in something, you know, even quite actively and feel “oh god, I’ve got a responsibility, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that”, you know. And for this I feel as if well, you know, I’ve had a year and, you know, I’ve made connections and been involved in it, it’s sparked me off. I will always acknowledge it.

JDG: So what would you say is the main thing you’ve taken away from your involvement in Dark Mountain?

ST: That last bit about connections and generous people and the ability to be an activist without feeling obligation. I mean, there’s always responsibility if you decide you want to change something or touch someone with what you write or create or speak of, but organisations have a way of drawing me (or rather I have a way of being drawn into them!). Then, in time I find I don’t really want to belong to them anymore because psychologically they’re just like all the other organisations.

Dark Mountain feels different. People don’t judge your motivations for being there. Some of the debates at the Festival and online have been a bit strange sometimes, and frustrating to listen to, but there seems to be an acceptance that that’s OK. I guess that’s what ‘wildness’ is – or ‘uncivilisation’.

Even in the seemingly most sophisticated forums there’s still a tendency for people to have to win an argument – spirit versus science (in Resurgence magazine for example) or right versus left versus centre politically. But most people don’t live their lives like that. We get on with things – with or without our gods –  and we know what we like and don’t like, but often if we accept our basic connections with each other and the places we live, we live and let live. I’m not saying that anything goes, but I might be saying that anything goes that doesn’t hurt or oppress anyone or degrade or destroy our environment. And yet that’s such a big ask in the current climate.

And anyway we might not have a choice about all these civilised arguments, which is possibly the point of Dark Mountain anyway. Like most of us, I like a lot of things about ‘civilisation’, but somewhere down the line I know I – we – are going to have to adapt.