I took a walk today- up the hill behind our house. It was hot, and the south-facing slope I toiled up was baking. Spring life was bursting out- in fact, you could actually hear the bracken pop and squelch as it was growing and unfolding.

The walk took me up into the Argyll forest, but it is not what it was. Not even remotely.

Of course, the giant elk and hairy rhinos are long gone, along with the bears and wolves and lynx. The western Atlantic seaboard was once covered in the great arboreal rain forest; mighty oaks, beech, birch- all of which supported a vast hierarchy of teeming life.

The thing about ecosystems like these, is that they only exist because of a harmony and balance, not just from competition, but also from inter-dependency. Our understanding of just how complex and deep this dependency went is only in its infancy, but we can get some clues from this;

The forest I walked up into was not like this any more. In many respects, it has become a barren desert. A graveyard of giants, like the bones of dinosaurs long gone- except in this instance, we have no meteorite to blame for their demise. The finger points at us.

The forest is now made up almost entirely of fast-growing cash crop spruces, planted in serried ranks, acting as a barrier to wilderness. The life they support is sparse, and totally out of kilter. Deer do well in the cover of needles, with nothing to control their numbers but the front end of our cars. Other animals are remarkable when we see them more because of their rarity.

Insect life is another new barometer, and we see a reduction in both numbers and variety.

This is not the rain forest, it is hollow cultivated imitation of it.

We live in a changing world. This is not a new thing, but the pace of change is no longer geological as it once was, rather we see huge change within human life-spans. It should not have been this warm today. What might have once been seen as a freak weather event has become the new normal. Lovely as it is to sit in the dappled sunshine, there are costs to other wild things;

Extinction Rebellion reminds us that there is hope. It is not too late. There is something yet worth fighting to preserve. Consider their three demands;

Tell the truth

In my context, I think this means seeing the forest for what it is, both in it’s remnant and it’s hollow imitation. I feel this like a kind of reverence.

Act now

Preserve what we have- but this is not enough. We need a massive programme of rewilding and restoration of natural resources. We need to allow the land to recover, and re-introduce apex predators, and large mammals. This will have costs and impacts which we may not fully understand until they happen. Agriculture has to fundamentally change, as will forestry. We have to support farmers and foresters financially and practically to become heroes not villains.

Beyond politics

ER want to establish people’s assemblies, because they believe that change is only possible if we establish a mass movement. We have to literally change our consiousness and our ways of life. We have to break the chains of materialism and commercial distraction.

This is my own small, on-line rebellion. I aim to make more.

Mindfulness. We see/hear it everywhere. It is touted as a spiritual/therapeutic hit for all; Lily-the-pink for the post modern age. It has much to recommend it; a simple moment of stillness that we can carry with us into our crazy lives.

Whilst appreciating the potential of mindfulness as a tool, something about it has always made me uncomfortable.

Is mindfulness just being used as a way to make the madness bearable, whilst changing nothing?

Perhaps it was the sense that a core tenet of an ancient faith was being appropriated.

Perhaps it was some of the people who I saw promoting it; expensive mindfulness retreats, shiny books, lots of mindfulness product.

Perhaps too it was a feeling I had that mindfulness should be a bi-product, not a short cut.

Then I read an article that summed up all of these feelings for me, entitled How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry.

The technical, neutral definition of mindfulness and its relativist lack of a moral foundation has opened up secular mindfulness to a host of dubious uses, now called out by its critics as McMindfulness. McMindfulness occurs when mindfulness is used, with intention or unwittingly, for self-serving and ego-enhancing purposes that run counter to both Buddhist and Abrahamic prophetic teachings to let go of ego-attachment and enact skillful compassion for everyone.

Instead of letting go of the ego, McMindfulness promotes self-aggrandizement; its therapeutic function is to comfort, numb, adjust and accommodate the self within a neoliberal, corporatized, militarized, individualistic society based on private gain.

…

McMindfulness aims to reduce the stress of the private individual and does not admit to any interest in the social causes of stress. In corporations, “[m]indfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on institutional goals.” Mindfulness, they argued, needs to reclaim an ethical framework that goes beyond privatized adjustment to a society based on market capitalism that contributes to stress and other sources of unhappiness.
McMindfulness practices psychologize and medicalize social problems. Rather than a way to attain awakening toward universal love, it becomes a means of self-regulation and personal control over emotions. McMindfulness is blind to the present moral, political and cultural context of neoliberalism. As a result, it does not grasp that an individualistic therapized and commodified society is itself a major generator of social suffering and distress. Instead, the best it can then do, ironically, is to offer to sell us back an individualistic, commodified “cure” – mindfulness – to reduce that distress.

The other reason I am thinking about this is that every year, I lead a ‘Wilderness retreat’ over the May bank holiday weekend. An ever-expanding small band of friends hire some boats to drop us off on a small deserted Hebridean island for a few days. It is all about immersion in wilderness, the formation of temporary community, and engagement with Christian spirituality, albeit of a non-confrontational kind.

To extend the analogy used above, how is this not just a McWildernessretreat? Are we not just doing the same thing- consuming some space, taking lots of photographs to show what a adventurous people we are then returning to the same tramlines that we had only so recently vacated?

How is our own smug spirituality any different from those practitioners of McMindfulness who are after all doing their best to survive the wilderness of their own lives?

I suppose my answer to this is complicated. We get out of something what we give to it, so it is perfectly possible to engage with any experience in an eqo-first kind of way. But there are some things about our retreat that are different. Things that have me looking forward to it again more than I can say;

1. The Wilderness is real. It is challenging, humbling, uncomfortable and awe-inspiring.
2. The friendships are real. The conversations are real. The tears are real. The uncouth and poorly-judged jokes are real. The silent companionship is real.
3. Faith is real- or at least we make faith a deliberate part of our encounter. This is of course highly individual, but even on the level of ‘suspension of disbelief’ it is a vital component of our gatherings.
4. The hope for MORE is real. Not more stuff, more achievement, but just better. We are a group of people who want to be a force for good, even whilst the great wilderness forces us to acknowledge our own silliness and inadequacy.

You may feel (with some justification) that this does not get us off the hook – we too are creatures of our own culture – but nevertheless, I head out to the wild places with my friends in great anticipation, anxious to encounter the Great Stillness not as a cure-all, but as a discomfort, a disatisfaction.

How else can things change?

I officiated at a funeral yesterday- something I have never done before. I found myself having to learn the language and rhythm of collective expressions of grief. A friend of mine who does all this for a living (or used to) helped me to appreciate how the way we shape the service can act as an essential grounding rod for our emotional response to death.

So yesterday, we celebrated the life of Bob, who left behind a wife of almost 70 years, two daughters, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

His eldest daughter, my dear friend Pauline, told me a story about his last days.

She was alone with her father in the hospital room. Bob was very unwell, slipping in and out of consciousness, but when he was awake, she noticed that he was distracted by something in front of him. It was so real to him that he assumed Pauline must see it too.

It was a door.

Bob said that he knew he had to go through this door, and that he could take nothing with him.

Of course, we don’t know what this means. Perhaps his mind and body were preparing him for death; his subconsciousness was somehow allowing him to confront the inevitability that is facing all of us.

Or perhaps he was indeed being called onward for the next part of his journey.

I wrote this for the service yesterday;

…all we know is that a door opened in the corner of the hospital room
Seen only by him
He watched for a while, wondering what lay beyond
Wanting to stay but
Knowing he must go
Held for a while by tender threads, until even they
Were broken
At the door, he lingered, then
Stepped through, drawn towards the light
 
Blessed are we who mourn
Blessed are you, whose hearts are breaking
Because without great love, there can be no mourning
Without the shelter of our shared companionship
We could never feel the searing pain of loss.
Without this wrench of separation
We could never hope to meet again
It always takes darkness
For us to see the light
 
So, may your coming days be gentle, your companions ever kind
May memory bring great joy as well as pain
May grace find you like a feather, blown in on the breeze
May it lift you high into clear blue sky
Where only blackbirds go
 
And in those moments when grief overwhelms you, remember;
You are never alone.

We (Seatree) are participating in another exhibition!

This is at the wonderful TIG gallery, over in Tighnabruach, overlooking the Kyles of Bute- long reputed to be one of the most beautiful places in Scotland (therefore the world.) What better way could there be to celebrate the arrival of spring? The blurb is below. Come and see!

We would like to invite you to the exhibition launch which is featuring some of our work. We are looking forward to seeing what the other artists have been working on too and hope to see you there!
Michaela and Chris

‘Spring on the Secret Coast’
Friday 19 April – Monday 6 May

Mixed exhibition featuring paintings, photography and ceramics by a variety of local artists, all capturing Spring as it bursts onto Argyll’s Secret Coast. 
Featuring work by Mary Taylor, Peter Walsh, Michaela & Chris Goan, Pauline Beautyman and Kyleside Art Club.

Exhibition Opening
Friday 19 April, 2-4pm 
Join us for a celebratory glass of fizz as we open the exhibition and celebrate the arrival of Spring!

I am starting to get busy outside, and I love it. Every year I long for spring and when it comes, it never disappoints. The smell of the earth. The feeling of energy returning to the whole world around me, from the birds to the flush of shy green on the trees.

The poly tunnels have been cleaned out, and all the beds laced with well rotted compost. I have also created a couple of out door beds, including one for a new experiment, growing tea.

There is a back story to this. A year or so ago, we had a visit from a lovely bloke called Tim, who runs a magnificent gardening project over in Edinburgh. Tim looked at our typical west of Scotland landscape, dotted with rhododendron bushes and said ‘you have ideal conditions for growing tea’. We expressed surprise, but Tim told us that tea is a camellia (Camellia Sinesis to be precise) and loves acid soils and high rainfall. It just so happened that one of our other friends, Ali, was present and she and I started to dream about a local community connection project, involving tea. What better way of symbolising connection is there, after all?

Since then, the organisation that we were both part of through which this idea could develop (South Cowal Development Company) has been busy with other things, but the idea has not gone away. I bought some cheap plants on ebay, and tried to nurture them in the poly tunnel last year, but they are not very happy, so I decided it was time to get them outside;

I am determined to make as much use of our land as possible, and I read something recently about tapping birch trees for their sap;

The next task was to turn the sap into syrup. Cue a LOT of boiling!

The fist lot made a tiny bit of very think syrup because I over boiled it. The next one I boiled less, and the result was sweet, runny syrup, which is like a smoky- tangy version of maple syrup. I am going to make some flapjack with it!

It is easy and fun to collect sap- and there are lots of things you can do with it- check this out.

Today I finally did it. It felt like cutting an umbilical cord – albeit a chord that carried toxicity along with nurture…

…I cancelled my registration as a social worker.

No big deal I suppose- after all, I have not worked in that capacity for over two years now,since leaving my last job as Service Manager for a mental health service.

But then again, it has been a defining factor in my life. I became a social worker straight from university full of a missionary zeal; I was going to be one of the good guys. In a world full of injustice and brokenness, I was going to make a difference, one person at a time because emerging as I was from my own experience of poverty and deprivation as a child of the Welfare State, I could imagine no higher calling.

There were moments of deep beauty. People whose lives touched mine- professional detachment be damned.. There were even successes in the justice-making and people-mending business. But overall, my career also knew enervating disappointment. There was never enough of me. Never enough resources, never enough energy. Despite the manifest failure of the system, I often internalised this as personal failure, like many of us do, leading to a depression and a sense of impotence. Also, the loss of any kind of ethical missionality that began to overtake the whole profession ate at my soul. Perhaps in the face of so much bad publicity, we no longer believed in what we were doing. We became ‘professionals’ but lost our radical edge entirely.

In hindsight, I made other mistakes. I accepted promotions, thinking I could make a difference higher up. I had some very relevant skills to take on management tasks, but lacked other crucial ones entirely. Perhaps above all, my skin was too thin.

Even though I made a positive choice to STOP and to use my life for something else, I kept paying my registration fee, until today that is. I told myself that I might need to work to earn money (which of course is still true) but the greater truth was that this was it a connection to the old me that I was not quite prepared to let go.

So what now? What am I, now I am no longer a social worker?

There are other labels I can apply. Some of them (writer, poet, artist) feel self-aggrandising and not really me. Others (craft worker, picture framer, carpenter) are too specific and task centred. Anyway, after being a social worker t is not enough merely to ‘do’.

Neither is it enough to just be a ‘former social worker’.

Social work was about reaching for something better, for others as well as ourselves. It was about being part of the resistance. Remember how we used to talk about being both ‘in and against the state’? The fact that the reality was often reduced to mundane administration and form filling never killed this hope in me, and it remains still.

Since I stopped working as a social worker, the lack of urgency has dogged me at times. After all, social work is mostly driven by a series of life-and-death crises and after that finding motivation is not always easy.

But I am not done yet. I am 52 years young, fit and mostly intact with half a life time of experience working on the ragged edges of the welfare state, doing a job that became almost synonymous with tabloid hatred, even though ‘normal’ people had no idea just what it entailed and how much it cost. There are missions left in me.

My life of late has become rather inward looking. I write after all. I spend a lot of time at my desk, or working with my lovely wife, or digging veg . I like it. I am happy, but I am not totally fulfilled. Social work stole that from me, for a while at least.

Now I am no longer a social worker, I have no excuse any more.

This is our local shop. We only have one. It is a post office too; one of those increasingly rare places that increasingly plug the holes left by banks retreating from our high streets and government agencies expecting everyone to go on line. Our village is six miles or so from the nearest supermarket, so the shop is also a life-line for groceries. (They even sell food for our chickens!)

But the shop been for sale for years now with no takers so there has been a real chance that we could lose it. This would be a disaster for all sorts of reasons. Villages like ours used to have a whole range of shops, pubs and churches which as well as meeting physical and spiritual need, also allowed us to mix, interact and build community. Most of these things are long gone, and Innellan is no different, except here, we decided to fight back.

Under the auspices of our local Community Development Company, we started to look at the possibilities of taking the shop into community ownership. There are numerous inspiring examples of other places who have done this- check out the stories on the Plunket Foundation website for example.

Momentum gathered and a community enterprise company was formed to start the huge amount of work required to submit funding bids, raise money and most importantly to engage local interest in making this happen. We are now at an exciting stage of the process- we have been awarded a substantial grant towards the cost of the property by the Scottish Land Fund, but we still need to raise about £60K for stock and other costs. We are hoping to do this through a community shares offer, and we are getting there, but still need some more dosh!

Can you help?

Do you know anyone who would be interested in investing in a small community business? If so, can you point them towards the South Cowal web site, here?

If you support this project, you are participating in a radical act of resistance.

Honestly.

I am excited by the possibility of a community buy out of the shop not because I will still have a small shop to get my pint of milk from, but rather because the shop offers a means by which our small sleepy community starts to renew itself, in the following ways;

• It will continue to offer employment opportunities to local people
• It will allow local people to have a direct connection and investment in a key local resource
• The shop will become a hub for information and engagement
• Phase 2 of the development will be to convert the upper flat into a bunkhouse. (There is very little in the way of affordable accommodation in our lovely area.)
• We hope to sell fresh local produce, and even to go plastic free wherever possible
• The post office. Essential for small businesses like ours!

There are of course dissenting voices. This is a village, and like all villages, allegiance to an idea is shaped by relationship. Misinformation is also easily spread and some feel ‘it will never happen’. But it IS happening. We are almost there.

Perhaps you can help us get over the line?