The other day I had the great pleasure of making a journey into deep Argyll, over Loch Fyne by ferry (whilst it was still dark) then up to the Isle of Seil, to meet with poet, novelist and artist Kenneth Steven. The pretext of this visit was to record a podcast, but the truth is, it was about time we met! Two blokes, both about the same age, both living in Argyll, both writing poetry inspired by the spirituality of wild places – oh and we have connection to Iona and the Iona community too. How was it that we did not already know each other?
Kenneth and his wife Kristina were the perfect hosts- despite an earlier failed attempt to record over the internet which I messed up by getting the time wrong! They live in a beautiful place and I very much enjoyed our chat. We hope you do too!
You can listen on Spotify, Apple or Youtube – Here is the spotify link;
If you don’t already know Kenneth’s work, here is the blurb from his website.
Kenneth Steven is first and always a poet. To survive as a literary author he’s had to become many other things as a writer – he translated the Norwegian novel The Half Brother, he’s a children’s picture book and story writer, he’s an essayist and a feature writer – but it’s poetry and the love of poetry that lies at the heart of it all. His volume of selected poems Iona appeared from Paraclete Press in the States a couple of years ago. His numerous collections have sold many thousands of copies, and he has a strong name as a poet thanks to the poetry-related features he’s written and presented over long years: his programme A Requiem for St Kilda having won a Sony Gold for Radio 4.
His poetry has been inspired primarily by place. He grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands with a profound awareness of that world: his mother’s people were Gaelic speakers from Wester and Easter Ross. It’s the wildscape of Highland Scotland that pours through his pen.
It’s that same wildscape he seeks to capture as a painter. He and his wife Kristina live on the Scottish west coast, and it’s the ever-changing colours of sea and sky he loves so much: the myriad blues and the incredible beauty of the light.
Kenneth runs his own podcast, available to those who support his work through patreon- we very much encourage any of you who are able to reach out. We need out poets more than ever!
I am just back from Ireland and the funeral of my father, Seamus Goan, aged 86. I am still rather dumbfounded that the Catholic priest who led his short funeral (not a mass) at the funeral home refused permission to allow anyone else to contribute to the service in the form of reading a eulogy or even a poem. I contemplated ignoring him and speaking anyway but this seemed like an agressive act that was not the way to send anyone off. I decided in the end that I would tell the story my way, via this blog. I am very tired after yesterday’s ten hour journey, but as ever, I process best by writing so here I am once more looking at a white screen, fingers poised.
Where to begin? How do you tell the story of a life – particularly when I only know most of it through snatched stories and second-hand memories?
Behind the wheel of an Austin A30, around 1965
The first death of my father happened before I was old enough to form memories. His marriage to my mother was always problematic and at some point he disappeared, leaving a well of bitterness for my mother to swim in. She raised two children on benefits, struggling with her own mental health, and I grew up with a constant diet of stories about my father that could not have been less flattering. Some of the grim and uncomfortable facts of this early part of his life were without dispute, but I aways knew that my mother was not a reliable witness. My late sister was older than me, and had memories of him that she always cherished – we always knew there was more to this story. It would take almost 40 years for me to start looking for the rest.
Me in yellow (with the bowl cut) back row, around 1975
The next part of this story leaps forward to the early 1990’s. We had been invited to a friends house in Blackburn, Lancashire and I was sitting in her book-lined living room whilst she finished cooking. Idly, I picked up the telephone directory and flicked to the G section to see if there were any Goans listed – something that I had often done before, with no previous success – it is an unusual name, after all. This time however, there they were- four or five telephone numbers, with addresses, each a different Goan household.
(Incidentally, the name Goan has nothing to do with Goa. Our best guess is that it is a derivitive of Gowan, or McGowan, meaning Smith or son of Smith. Somewhere way back in my ancestry, they were working with metal. But back to the story….)
Seeing these names in the Blackburn telephone directory triggered a distant memory. As a child, we used to recieve gifts from an uncle and aunt in a place called… Blackburn.
I did nothing with this information for a while, as I was not sure what to do with the knowledge. I spoke to my sister, who was tantalised and immobilised in equal measure. I said nothing to my mother. Eventually the pressure was too great, and I wrote to Mr J Goan, asking if he might be who I thought he was. Mr John Goan wrote back, and he was indeed my Uncle. I remember the nervous drive over – little Emily was sick en route, forcing a detour to buy new clothes. I remember kindness, but awkward conversations, a sense of profoundly disconnected lives and the impossibility of questions or answers. I remember meat sandwiches, which I ate despite being a vegetarian. I remember not knowing what to do next, so asking my Uncle and Aunt not to let my father know I had been in touch – a request that they graciously honoured, as it turned out, for many years.
The years passed because of my own uncertaintly, but also I did not think I could take the next step alone, because even if I could keep a secret from my mother, I could not from my sister, and it was hard to draw her out into the adventure. We had both lived with the absence, but for her it had been invested with the possibility that one day our father would return and ‘rescue’ her from the difficulties of our childhood. When this never happened, meeting him as an adult was the end to her childhood escape fantasy.
The story then moves forward another ten years or so, during which (largely unknown to me) Michaela had stayed in touch with my Aunt Betty in Blackburn, quietly keeping the channel open for future connection. By then we had moved to Scotland and life was different. It seemed important to keep pushing outwards, to let the expansion continue. I can’t remember exactly what made me finally take the plunge, except that I hit the age of 40, and it seemed like now or never, with sister or not. I had no real expectations or hopes, just the feeling that there was an integrity in reconnection, even if this might lead to unknown difficulties.
I sent a letter to an address in Strabane, Ireland and three days later, my father called on the telephone. His accent was so thick I struggled to understand, but it was clear he was very glad to be speaking. More than this, he told me that my brother Stephen and his wife Kate were also living in Scotland, only about an hour from us.
In the end it was Steve and Kate (and their son Jamie) whom we met first. We greeted them from the ferry, little Emily standing back in suspicion, the two boys instantly playing together, the rest of us starting to map things we shared and would always be different.
My parent’s wedding, Sutton-in-Ashfield, 1965. (My mother had to leave her job at Boots chemist shop as married women were not allowed to work there.)
My first meeting with my father was part of a trip to Ireland, during which we spent a couple of days in their tiny flat. We drove together to the Giant’s Causway, and spoke at tangents.
It was obvious from the start that I was my father’s son. We looked alike. Our temperaments were similar- a certain shy reticence. Introversion. In other ways we were very different. My life had been about seeking respectability and safety. His had been an excercise in staying one step ahead of what he had left behind, at least at first. He used different names- even to the end of his life. He spent time in prison. My mother’s bitter condemnations (of both of us) rang out loud.
On that trip to the Giant’s Causeway, the conversation was sparse, and consisted of my asking lots of neutral questions, followed by short answers and long slightly uncomfortable silences. When we arrived at our destination, I took the kids off to scramble over the hexagonal stones whilst Michaela walked along the upper shoreline with my father and his partner Peggy. In that journey, he spoke much more freely to Michaela – it seemed easier for him to talk to women. She was unable to understand most of what he was saying, but there is only a limited number of times you can ask for repetition. At the end of one long monologue, my father said “So can you pass that on to Chris for me please.” He had been unburdening himself and making some kind of explanation, and she had heard very little of it. I never managed to find out exactly what he had to say in that conversation.
Inevitably, over the next 18 years or so, I began to piece together the story of his life, mostly not from him, but from conversations with Steve and other relatives. Here is what I know – it is not the whole truth and some might be not true at all, but it is the story I can tell.
Seamus Goan was born in Sion Mills, just outside Strabane, County Tyrone, in the province known as Northern Ireland, to Margaret and John, who worked at the flax mill that gave the town its name. He was one of five children who survived to adulthood – Michael, Molly, Gay, John and Seamus.
Flax Mills meant short lives for workers, who often contracted ‘brown lung disease’, and my grandmother died in 1947 when my father was eight years old, so he was brought up mostly by his older sisters Gay and Molly. My Grandfather died twelve years later, and somehow it seems that my father barely attended school and back then was unable to read or write.
As a young adult, he followed the exodus of Irish men and boys – and his brothers – over the Irish sea to England in order to find work – remember all those ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ signs that were placed outside ‘respectable’ guest houses? He found work on the construction of the new motorway system, and whilst working on the M1 being forced up through Nottinghamshire, he met my mother and they married.
My sister Katharine was born in 1966, then I came along in 1967. By then the wedding was already over. My mother raised me with stories of much of the bad that happened around that time. Gambling addiction and the stolen items to fund the betting from neighbours. The house empty of food or warmth and the bailifs at the door for unpaid bills. The fear and shame of this time never left her, unlike my father, who left and never came back – except that is not quite true, he knocked on the door some time in the mid 1980’s, but was given no welcome, so left before my sister or I knew who he was. I later found out that he sometimes drove his car to our street in order to catch glimpses of us, but we never met again as
He lived a life away from mine which I can only wonder at.
I know that at some point a few years after he left my life, he met Peggy and fell in love again. She was from a Protestant family, born out in the sticks outside Strabane so they made a mixed couple – something difficult to do in Ireland back when the troubles were still raging in the wild west border country of County Tyrone. (Strabane lost the greatest percentage of citizens to the violence of anywhere in the country) so they made a life for themselves in Cambridge.
Seamus was still working on various contruction projects – for a long time he was running gangs installing cables for cable TV. It seems he was always held back by illiteracy, leaving a job whenever this might be found out, mostly managing to cover it up and stay one step ahead of the shame. Later Seamus and Peggy ran a pub, working long hours.
During all of this they had two children- Stephen, then Sarah. Sarah was born with profound learning difficulties and it was her care than dominated family life for the next decades. From being an absent father, Seamus became as hands-on as it is possible to imagine.
If I am going to tell this story here, do I tell everything? There are dark sides to this story, which I was tempted to gloss over, but this does not feel honest, to the story we made together. My father was always ‘on the run’ in some way. He used the names of his brothers rather than his for many interactions with officialdom right up to the end of his life, for example. He went to prison for failing to pay maintenance. He never stopped the betting on horses and was most at home in a bar. At some point his new family was disrupted because he was jailed for faling to pay maintenance (not directly to us, but rather to offset the state benefits which my mother, sister and I existed on.) Money was always tight, always an issue. Steve and I have this in common, despte our different beginnings.
A man is never just one thing – we are many. We are capable of both good and bad. We are all redeemable. We can all grow and change. Steve told me that for most of his adult life, he had never passed his driving test (remember the interchangable name thing mentioned above) but then, as an older adult, he took it and passed it. Quite what they made of him turning up for the test I don’t know.
It seems he changed jobs frequently to avoid being shamed as illiterate, but around the time that we met, the same shame drove him to learn to read. He developed a taste for novels about cowboys.
By the time I met my father, he had moved back to Strabane, a place which had always been home to him – full of a network of family and friends that anchored his whole life. He was a regular attender at Mass and became that man who could always be relied upon to drive someone to hospital or go round to unblock a gutter, or deliver newspapers to those who were less mobile.
Meanwhile, he stayed in touch with friends and family in England too, often turning up wiht little or no warning in Scotland or England, having driven long distances seemingly on a whim, but always to see Sarah who was then living in supported accommodation in Cambridge.
My sister Katharine died.
May half sister Sarah died.
My mother died.
Peggy developed dementia, with Seamus as her carer. It was difficult at times, but he remained faithful. Once, after a difficult exchange, he created some panic as he left the house and booked himself in a hotel without telling anyone. Margaret, a family friend, found him and gave he a dressing down.
Then he developed dementia himself – revealed in irrational anger towards his landlord and some quite dramatic acts of confusion.
He left Peggy at one point and got on the ferry to come to England, but then disappeared. We had to report him missing, leading to police searches of all known addresses (including ours. There was a very funny moment when they opened our hoover cupboard and we imagined him standing there…) Eventully his numberplate was picked up by the cameras on the motorway system near Manchester, and Steve went over to bring him back. After this, his licence was revoked, but this did not stop the old pirate from buying another car – leading to Steve and I going over to Ireland to make some interventions…
First Peggy was persuaded to move into a nursing home in Strabane. Seamus was lonely, so eventually he followed. Steve, Kate, Michaela and I cleared out their home. They had very little and most things went ot charity shops. I constantly found myself comparing this process to that of clearing my mothers house, who had accumulated so very much. It felt unbearably sad at times, but perhaps this was another gift from my father- to learn that life is not measured by weight of posessions.
fixing a mower with my father, around 2013
I said none of this at the funeral, partly because of the religious ego that silenced any non-priestly voice, but also because it would have all been too much. I would have said something like this;
When I was a child, I was jealous of people who had ‘normal’ families. Mine was a mess.
When I got older, I realised that there was no such thing as a normal family.
Families form and fracture, like mine did, even before I could form memories of it.
It was perhaps harder for Seamus, losing his parents so young. It set him on a road that led to me.
It was hard too for Stephen and Sarah, learning to make their family work.
We know this – Despite the scars, fractures can mend.
I believe that this happens if we choose a path of love. It will always take us home.
I want to read a poem that was read at both my mother’s and my sister’s funerals that talks about love as a deliberate decision, and the consequences that it might have.
It is also a prayer for my father.
Cupped
Practice the wound of love Let it devastate Let it scrape your soul For blessed are the gentled Blessed are the meek Blessed are those whose fullness Is now found empty
Practice the wound of love Rest now in that broken place Where grief is never silent And ragged roots of love Tap the trampled earth Blessed are you as you reach for love Because it reaches out for you
Practice the wound of love Let it devastate For nothing ever came from nothing (Apart from love) At the end of everything We are just cups Who are cupped. We are held.
I heard someone say recently that the journey is often something we treasure more than the destination. This seems more true of advent than most things – not because I do not wish your Christmas to be full of beauty love (I most certainly do) but because this journey is about finding light, despite the darkness. Finding hope despite all evidence to the contrary. An invitation to faith not as destination but as process.
It is all there in the Christmas story. A nation longing for a different kind of Messiah than the one born in a stable. An on-going occupation. A despotic king. A clueless pair of parents who have only the slenderest hold on what they have brought in to being. Homelessness. Refugees fleeing violence. Rich men who promise solutions but merely reveal the vast inequality gap.
This year, let’s try to remember that we are not the first generation of Advent travellers to fear the way things are going. The journey is not over though, even if the destination remains so very far away. Let’s keep walking.
Thanks to all of you who have walked with me. May we make more miles together yet.
This year’s poem was written on the shortest day of the year, that time when our ancestors marked the turning point towards light. I stand in their shadows.
Comes a time
.
Comes a time when dark seems darkest
When things can fall no further
Comes a time when the day is shortest
When everything that might break has already been broken
When I reach out into the darkness
For I need you more than ever
.
Comes a time when we can again conspire
Towards the rediscovery of kindness
Comes a time when we hold each other close
When we can stitch our common thread into
Hoods that hold the warmth from its retreating
When we hang lights
.
Comes a time when the daylights must be brighter
Turning dusk to reluctant amber
When the embers of this fire seem to linger longer
Once again we are gathering contributions for a collaborative creative advent journey. Days one (Cameron Preece) and two (Margaret Somerville) are now live over on the Proost blog.
It would be lovely to share this with you, so any contibutitions of creative material that engages with the advent season in ways we can encourage and challenge each other with would be most welcome.
Music, video, poetry, art, dance – anything that we can share digitally with each other.
According to our home secretary (herself the daughter of immigrants) this is the problem we are facing, and she has the solutions to the problem.
The solution, it seems is to bring in the most draconian policies against refugees ever attempted.
Why are we doing this?
Is this really a necessary corrective to an unfair, out-of-control, chaotic situation that is dividing our country? Is this about taking back control of our borders and keeping our streets safe from marauding gangs of rapists and pick-pockets?
Or is this just performative cruelty, intended to assuage the far right scapegoating of a tiny minorty? The desperate move of a deeply unpopular government lead by a prime minster seeminly devoid of an ideas that might bring hope of compassion to a country beaten down by cost of living rises, decades of austerity and rampany inequality.
It is almost as if the people who arrive here seeking asylum are not people at all… as if their pain is not our pain, as if it belongs elsewhere. We can justify this lack of compassion only by asserting our own victimhood, and it is this that Reform and Tommy two-names are exploiting as a political blunderbus, aimed downwards at those most vulnerable.
Labour appear to have decided that the answer is to get a blunderbus of their own.
What we are not seeing in this ‘debate’ is any real attempt to address the so-called refugee crisis on the basis of facts. The ecomonic/demographic analysis of the impact of refugees in this country is always secondary to political perspective and the fear and hatred whipped up by those able to use it as a political weapon. Lets push back on this if we can. What can we say about the numbers?
Is the UK facing a particular problem not seen elsewhere?
Well, in terms of numbers of assylum seekers per head of popuation, the UK is in 17th place in Europe so this is clearly a global problem, not a UK problem. If the ratio of brown faces to white faces is the concern here (and I think it might be that simplistic for many) then despite our colonial history which makes our connection to – and responsibiity for – many of the most troubled places in the world, still there are 17 nations within Europe that take more people than we do.
Are there too many people here already?
Is Britain full? Are we being overwhelmed? Numbers can be so difficult to get our heads round, but here are the stats for this year’s immigration to this country from the UK government’s own figures.
The vast majority of immigration into this country is people who come here to work or study.
Is the system broken and out of control?
Here are the numbers of people who are currently in the asylum system, waiting to be processed. As in the Channel 4 documentary clip above points out, people in this system have years of waiting, followed often by seemlingly arbitary and draconian decisions which then go back to court, and meanwhile people live half-lives of waiting in poor accomodation, excluded from participation in economic or community life.
We perhaps have to conclude that this system is indeed broken, but that this has been the result of political choices driven by ideology of the sort that Labour are now embracing.
Are migrants a drain on our economy?
This is certainly the message we see pounded out repeatedly on our media outlets – the cost of hotels, the fact that the NHS cannot cope etc etc.
Leave aside the fact that asylum seekers are not allowed to work, or that the benefits they recieve are miniscule (£49.18 per person per week if they live in self-catered accommodation, or £9.95 per person per week if meals are provided. This money is loaded onto a pre-paid debit card and is intended to cover basic needs like food, clothing, and toiletries.)
Leave aside also how the NHS, and many of our other institutions are dependent on immigrant workers to sustain their activities, or the fact that our aging population desperately needs the creativity, vitality, youth and enterprise brought by incomers.
And consider this report which offers wholy different approach to that which our Labour government are pursuing;
Welcoming Growth – the case for a fair and humane asylum system is a new policy report, supported by PCS, which has launched today (17). The report reveals that every refugee accepted into the UK would contribute over £260,000 to the UK economy if the proposed changes within the report were adopted. This includes a net benefit to the public purse of £53,000 each.
The four key policy changes within the report include:
Asylum claims to be processed within six months
Legal assistance at all stages of the application process
English language support from day of arrival
Employment support from day of arrival.
Speaking ahead of the launch in parliament, PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said: “Today we are witnessing the government neglect its own plans for growth by taking a harder line against some of the most vulnerable people who come to this country, fleeing war, persecution and violence. To threaten refugees with the removal of their only belongings to pay for their cases is frankly a line I would expect from Reform.
“Our report shows that through embracing a humane and fair approach to asylum we could assimilate refugees into our communities whilst ensuring they can contribute and support themselves. This report provides positive solutions, not divisive decisions which continue to fan the flames of hate.”
Other key findings within the report include:
Overall economy – The four changes to the asylum system would mean a contribution to the UK economy from every refugee of £265,788 over 12.5 years from arrival.
Accommodation – The changes to the system would result in a net saving in accommodation costs of £42,000 per asylum seeker over a 12.5-year period from arrival. This equates to a 34% saving in the total cost of accommodation for asylum seekers over the period (from £144,000 to £79,000). This is because by expediting the application process to six months, people can be self-sufficient sooner – meaning housing costs would be paid by the individual, rather than the state, a year earlier.
Public Purse – The four interventions in the model would benefit the UK exchequer by £53,000 per refugee over 12.5 years from arrival. This includes a net contribution of £7,000 for every refugee to the public purse just by expediting the asylum application system to six months and providing legal assistance throughout the process. This financial benefit takes into account all the associated costs of supporting asylum seekers from arrival, as well as the expense of creating and implementing the four proposed changes to the asylum system.
Employment – Every £1 invested in English classes and employment support from day one results in £9 in increased salary–over the 12.5 years from arrival. This equates to a 76% increase in total employment income, reflecting the cumulative effects of faster processing, language training, and employment support. This, in turn, means significant benefit to the economy and public purse.
The London School of Economics (LSE) report, commissioned by PCS and Together With Refugees
If then, these draconian, punishing proposals by appear NOT to be based on actual research, or on factual understandings of the challenges brought by the arrival of refugees on our shores, why are they being proposed at all? I was so heartened to read these words from Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah, the bishop of Edmonton.
“We are scapegoating asylum seekers for the failures and political divisions caused by successive governments in the last 15 years – the failures of successive governments to address wealth inequality, funding for education, the cost of living and primary healthcare and infrastructure.
“Every day I meet homeless people who have fallen through the cracks in our system. And yet in singling out asylum seekers we are laying the burden of society’s problems on less than 1% of the UK population – when the number of millionaires and billionaires is on the rise.
Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah: ‘We can’t isolate one section of people and label them as a problem that can be easily addressed.’ Photograph: supplied
“There are politicians who are trying to hold on to compassion in public life. But at the same time there is a pressure to have a singular problem on which all things can be blamed.
“But we are a connected society. Our environmental crisis is deeply connected to the conflicts which lead to people to our borders. We can’t isolate one section of people and label them as a problem that can be easily addressed. If one part of the body hurts, it hurts the entire body.”
I live in a ‘wild’ place – mountains, broken tree-lined shores, deep lochs, forests. I am surrounded by iconic British animals- red squirrels, sea eagles, pine martens, deer. Tourists come here and wonder. Locals are proud. All of us are nature-blind, because this place is anything but wild.
There is this strange thing that happens when we look at the Scottish landscape (or perhaps at any landscape) in that we do not know what we are seeing. Partly this is because we have lost our folk memories of what we are NOT seeing.
Despite every metric pointing to a continual precipitous decline in our ecosystems- a loss of diversity measurable in almost every way, and in different biomes – most of us are not able to grasp just how bad things are here in Scotland. There has been an average 15% decline in abundance of 407 terrestrial and freshwater species since 1994. There has been a 49% decline in average abundance of Scottish seabirds. 11% of species found in Scotland are threatened with extinction from Great Britain. Meanwhile, we thrill to nature propoganda shots of the sea eagles of the noble stag as if all is well.
This film tells a story that we need to hear.
How has it come to this, and what can we do about it?
As mentioned in the video, wealth is at the heart of the problem. Land ownership in Scotland has a particular flavour and pattern that arises from a history that we can not be proud of. This from here.
No other European country has such a narrow base of proprietorship as Scotland. Half of all privately owned rural land is held by 421 people or entities. The roots of such disparities lie in the past. The 18th- and 19th-century Highland clearances emptied the glens and readied them for private takeover. On the continent, and eventually in England, the great estates were broken up by inheritance and land taxes. By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.
There are already fears that Scotland’s new proposed Land Reform Bill has been gutted, ending up with something far less than that recommended by the Scottish Land Commission in their report from 2019. It is hard to escape the power of wealthy elites.
The video above mentions the possible use of a land tax, of the kind proposed by Common Weal.
Land prices in Scotland have risen at a rate outstripping many other ‘investment assets’ with stocked commercial forest land in Scotland, for instance, increasing in value from £8,500 per hectare in 2018 to £21,000 per hectare in 202210 (had such land increased in price only by general inflation, it would be worth just £9,500 per hectare in 2022). The selling price of such land has also consistently been over 120% of the asking price on the market which is indicative of demand for purchases being substantially higher than supply. Similar patterns have been observed in other types of land in Scotland in recent years so it is not a stretch to say that communities are simply being ‘priced out’ of land, even where legislation has made some steps towards making it theoretically easier for them to purchase such land assuming they somehow had the capital to do so. The high profile failure of a local community to be able to enact a community buyout of the Tayvallich Estate in Argyll – which had an asking price of £10.5 million, equivalent to around £7,800 per hectare – is indicative of Scotland’s broader failure to enact land reform and will only be one of many such failures until reform is embedded. A local land tax can, should, and must be a part of this reform, not just by raising revenue which would directly benefit communities who cannot otherwise access the land around them but also by acting as a break or even reversal on the price of land sales (which would have to factor in the tax burden of the asset) and, if done right, would bring prices back down into the range at which communities would have a better chance of owning the land around and under their own feet.
For most of us, far from the seats of power in Edinburgh or London, there remains the important, ordinary urgency of learning how to read a landscape.
The photograph above is taken just above my house- one of the many many vast plantations of commercial forest in my home county of Argyll. They are better understand as green-brown deserts.
Here in Scotland, our challenge is mostly NOT preservation, it is the urgent need of restoration and recovery of our ecosystems. Think about that- in contrast to other European countries, we have ALREADY lost much of what should be here. In order to see any recovery, the task required is a mult-generational re-seeding and re-populating of our mountains and valleys.
We have to be able to SEE this and imagine an alternative.
I am just back from York, where I was attending an Iona Community event. I have started the two year discernment process towards becoming a full member of the community, and this event had two parts- firstly time spent with other new members examining one of the four ‘rules’ that form the basis for membership-
Working for justice and peace, wholeness and reconciliation in our localities, society and the whole creation.
(By the way, if you are interested in the work of the Iona Community, let’s have a chat.)
After this came a day with around 80-90 of the existing full members as we heard from Paul Parker, Recording Clark of the Quakers in Britain. The Quakers don’t have a ‘leader’ – rather Paul’s role is to seek to create good processes for the 450 worshipping groups of friends. He spoke powerfully about quiet diplomacy and the Quaker colective process of testing concern together to develop collective courage. He contrasted the ‘prophet’ role (calling out injustice) from the ‘reconciler’ (seeking to listen and love) role- how they sometimes need to be employed in different ways and in different circumstances. In other words- the two hands of non-violence, in which one is the hand held aloft to say STOP, and the other is open to say ‘I love you, can we talk?’
This discussion inevitably makes me think about the divided and splintered shape of our society just now. How do we engage – as either prophets or reconcilers? Where are the spaces in which either of these things are possible?
And even if we find these places, how will I find the courage?
Meanwhile, there is another fear project going on at full tilt. Fear as a political instrument to create division through hatred and scapegoating of the outsider.
As you might expect, I have been trying to explore some of this through poetry. Here is what I am working on…
Be not afraid
I know you are afraid love - Who can blame you? This broken world Wobbles so hard it might Shake us all off. And all those purple-faced men Looking for someone else to blame - If they run out of brown people They might wave their flags at us.
We should beware my love For there are those for whom your fear spells opportunity. They nurture it in toxic tubes, so To spore the very air they feed us, and None of us are immune because Even those of us with those lumps in our throats Must still breathe.
So, forgive my riding high on this highest horse Because I need to tell you this; If we always fear of what you do not know It will rob our future of hope It will tuck us up in defended spaces Seeking only safety Watching the world through narrow arrow slits Flexing that persistent itch in our trigger fingers But if we always fear the stranger How will we ever make new friends?
I know you better my beloved - Your heart beats beauty on your sleeve. I know you would mend the broken if you could With that clever glue called kindness. I know you would never eat alone When someone close was starving. I know you were never made for hatred When the core of you is love; When the heart of you is love; When at the bones of you is love; When in the mess of you; Is love.
One of the delightful things about our Proost project is that it enables us to walk the edges and find others that are doing the same. We try to gather some of this edge walking via our two podcasts- one that has a more general focus (and includes trying to do Proost ‘buisiness’ out in the open), the other one gathering poets and poetry- as this seems to have always been a strong and important strand of what we are about.
Today I was delighted to listen and share this conversation;
Where does poetry go? What is it for? How might it be used in the service of justice, peace and reconciliation? How does this relate to spirituality?
In this episode, our Talitha talks to the poet, musician and activist Samara Pitt about her practice, her songs and her love of words. In particular, she describes a process of turning poetry into song – an almost magical process…
Samara describes herself like this;
Samara is a 7th generation coloniser-inheritor living on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri Woirurrung people in the hills outside of Naarm/Melbourne.
She has lived and worked in several different intentional communities, most recently at Gembrook Retreat where the community invites people on to the land to encounter God in creation and to equip each other to live a soulful life.
She loves singing, singing with others, and putting music to words that help us listen more deeply to Country and to soul. Drawing on the liturgical tradition of sung refrains as a congregational response to the reading of a psalm, she has just started to compose short songs based on the repetition of short phrases, designed to help us dwell with the emotion and beauty of words and harmonies. They are also a grateful tribute and offering to the writers.
You can find more of Samara’s work – and support it – here.
Here is Samara’s account of her poetry choices for this episode.
Shaun Tan is one of my favourite writers and illustrators working in these lands now called Australia. His books are haunting and beautiful. and help me to look at the ordinary through the lens of wonder and imagination. This is taken from his book Tales from the Inner City which explores the mythic presence of the more-than-human world in the midst of our cities.
The lyrics come from Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s book ‘Thin Places’, a mix of nature writing and Troubles memoir about growing up in in the midst of violence in Derry and the role of nature in helping her find peace and healing.
Gout Gout is an up and coming Australian sprinter who gave the most poetic statement I’ve ever heard from an athlete in a press conference, when he was asked if he still feels normal. I found another slam poetry style quote from him about how he ‘steps light but presence heavy’, and then added my own line imagining the cycle of preparing for, running and coming down after races.
I found these lines in a book by Chris Anderson called ‘Light when it comes’. Based on the spiritual practice of ‘examen’, these words suggest that we turn to face darkness rather than flee from it.
For years now, we have been trying to get a project over the line. It has often seemed like it was never going to happen, but now we are finally on the cusp of making it reality.
When we moved to our house, we were not looking for lots of land. Our brief was simple – a smaller house, with room for a pottery studio in which we could work and run workshops, and a small vegetable patch to grow as much food as we could. The aim was for a simple lifestyle, as environmentally sustainable and low impact as possible. Things did not quite work out in the way we planned…
Firstly, we ended up buying a house that came with a large area of overgrown woodland. When we moved, it was impossible to explore most of it, choked as it was by invasive rhodedendron and buddleia. I felt the responsibiity to care for this land keenly – to take out the invasive species and let the old oak trees breathe. I have since spent a long time and lots of hard work trying to do just that – and slowly it has started to transform the woodland back to what it always should have been- a pocket of beautiful oak rainforest, perched above the Clyde estuary…
The other thing that did not go to plan was that we had an unfortunate brush with officialdom. When we moved to our new house, we asked a series of questions of Argyll and Bute planning department about what permissions we needed to obtain to work from home and run pottery workshops for members of the public. We were told (by e-mail) that we required none. Accordingly, we built workshops and pretty soon a third of our income was made up of people paying for pottery workshops.
Unfortunately, following a complaint from a neighbour about us running a business from home, the planning department conducted an investigation, and decided that although our activities were not in breach of planning, the building we had erected as our workshop was not deemed to pass building regulations for recieving members of the public. We appealed, on the basis that we had previously been informed by e-mail that building regulations were not required, but to no avail. Conspiracy theorists might well enjoy the fact that our beloved council deleted all documents and e-mails relating to our enquiries, meaning that the ombudsman was not able to rule in our favour. Such is life. We adapted and moved on…
My mum died. Here she is, sitting in a garden, her favourite place in the world. She never got to see our new garden, here in the Clyde, being too ill to travel north. When it came to a share of the small amount of inheritance from the sale of her house that was coming to us, I wanted to make something that might form a lasting memorial.
Could we use it to build a new workshop? Something that enhanced the woodland, built from sustainable materials and using low impact construction methods?
Even better, could we make a space in the woodland that might become a haven for people – for artists and makers to spent time creating and recharging their passion?
Fortunately, we have a friend who runs a company who have the skills to make something like this happen. Without Stuart and his company Fynewood, we would have given up long ago as we have tried to navigate the labyrinth of planning. Along with Ronan (who handles design and planning) we came up with something…
We now have planning consent to put up two small buildings – one a micro-lodge with shower and amenities, the other a workshop with disabled access loo. We intend to make the whole site fully accessible to people in wheelchairs by putting in a graded pathway and decking.
We will then use the premises in a number of different ways;
A place for people to make artist retreats. People will be able to book both the accommodation and the workshop for either four, seven or eleven nights.
We intend to make some slots available at low/no cost to artists who would otherwise not be able to participate.
Our own workshops. Pottery, retreat days, poetry and writing days.
Guest workshops. Working with our network of artists and creatives, to host a wide range of arts, crafts and writing.
Bookings by other artists to run their own events.
As you can imagine, the costs of making this happen is a real challenge – particularly as these costs have been rising constantly, making everything much more expensive than when we started this process. Conditions imposed by the planning department have raised these costs further – we are still negotiating some of these conditions.
Despite this, we are pressing forward, determined and very grateful for the support of Fynewood.
If you are an artist, and you have ever taken, or would like to take, an artists retreat, then we would love to hear from you.
If you have undertaken workshops, would like to start or attend more, we would love to hear from you.
If you have run workshops yourself, we would love to hear from you.
Crowdfunding
The next way you might be able to help is to support this project more directly – specifically with the accessibility side of the project. Feel no pressure, but if this project connects with things that you find important and you have some spare cash to put towards it, then we would be most grateful.
Back in 2020, we were amazed when our crowdfunded ‘shop shed’ was so well supported. We decided to reach out once more to our wonderful supporters.
We have set up a new crowd funding portal, with a set of rewards as before – both physical things, but also the opportunity to book in advance as a way of investing in the future.
Hasan Baglar’s ‘Danlock’ has been crowned the grand prize winner of this year’s Cewe Photo Award (Image credit: Hasan Baglar)
I have been thinking a lot about prayer recently. I am starting a 2 year discernment process towards a decision of becoming a full member of the Iona Community. I will be committing myself to doing my best to keep the ‘rule’ of the community- which includes the following;
Daily prayer, worship with others and regular engagement with the Bible and other material which nourishes us.
Prayer is something I have never been ‘good’ at, even in the days when I tried hard to be good at it. In more recent times, I have moved to a point where I mostly do not pray – at least not in the way I used to understand what it was and what it was for.
I grew up with an understanding of prayer as a means to persuade God to aid our cause. The degree to which God was willing to accede to our entreaties and lists of requests was always something of a problem. It was very tempting to over-claim – or to build castles of consequence on shaky coincidences. Those times, for instance, when God miraculously granted us a free parking space, or a friend to talk to just when we needed them.
My wife Michaela was prayed for by good people for years because of her experience of chronic illness which left her ill and unable to participate in many things others took for granted. Some even suggested her lack of healing was due to unconfessed sin, or lack of faith.
Then her illness got better, overnight. It confounded medical people and confused us…
…particularly as my theological journey has taken me to a place where I no longer believe in an interventionist God. My current way of trying to resolve all of these contraditictions is through process theology – or sometimes open relational theology.
But this is all very ‘head first’ stuff.
For any theology to be real, it has to sing in our souls. The complexity of open relational ways to try to describe the way that a divine being might interact with our broken humanity is beyond more of us, particularly during the inevitable struggles and challenges of our lives.
What part has prayer to play in these struggles?
How might I/we concieve of a spiritual practice of prayer that is meaningful, relational, dynamic and useful?
I saw this quote from a new book the other day;
On the strength of this quote alone, and in the shadow of my own struggles with prayer, I ordered the book.
But these are not new questions for me, so I have some other provisional answers about what I think of as prayer now. They have broadened out to include this list (which is not in any kind of order)
Breathing
Seeking connection in forest
Singing
Caring and hoping for friends
Dancing
Looking for resonance in art
Hoping
listening to bird song
Deep talk around a fireside
Making art
Seeking goodness
Listening to people who are hurting
Pilgrimage
You may well think that this list is a good list, but not a prayerful one…
Above all, my current thinking is that I need to pray with a pen in my hand (or more commonly a keyboard under my fingers.) For me, my poetry is above all, prayer.
So I finish with this poem, which I wrote this morning;
this fragile tent 