Ownership, that ship has sailed
How do we let go of the idea that this is mine and that is yours and that over there is theirs?
This planet can hold and feed and thrill and nurture and disappoint and hurt all of us sometimes.
Since we started the this is my land and that is your land thing, and left behind the vibe that this planet holds all of us in livingness, I feel things have diminished in so many ways.
So, here, in this space, we are playing with sharing and caring. You are welcome to get involved.
Creative Living
If I see something that is missing in my life, I look for ways to fill that need. If I can learn how to create or access the thing or feeling that is missing, maybe I can meet that need?
And if I can’t, maybe I can find someone who can help me meet that need.
Isn’t that how we created all the things we needed for the first several hundred thousand years as a new, young species?
Imagine if we encouraged our youngsters to share what they were drawn towards and find others who could help them satisfy their desire to develop those skills.
The Thisness of This
This website is where I share some of my stories and I am happy for you to share your stories here too.
The space here does not involve money, I pay a small amount for the domain and the hosting, but can cover that with my own income for now.
So, if you have anything you feel like sharing, you can share it here, for free, and you can add your name, or tag, or whatever, or be nameless.
It’s up to you how you use this space here.
So give me a shout if you need more info before you jump in.
What’s important to you?
As a bit of an intro, I’ll share how I got here from there, as simply as I can.
As a kid I liked the odd, new, least acknowledged, quirky stuff. That was always more engaging than the stuff considered important by many.
I left school at sixteen and worked in a hairdressing salon in Manchester in 1972.
1973 I moved to London and worked in a salon just off Oxford street. Went to nightclubs, gigs, galleries and cinemas and hung out with people who were odd, new, and beautiful, in both traditional and primal ways.
The people who employed me wanted me to be really good at cutting hair. I wanted to be good at cutting hair, and they encouraged me to work out what I felt really good looked like.
So I did.
I liked having that encouragement and the freedom of expression.
While pushing that freedom as far as a I could, I found my thing and set up my own team in my own space in Saville Row in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1976 and filled it with people I liked working alongside.
That team became a community, it included all those involved in creating a good place to work, and we worked with people we liked and understood.
Those people included those who made the tools we needed, the drivers that delivered them, the photographers and graphic designers who developed our comms and the people who trusted us and paid us to cut their hair.
I have more or less always worked with people I like and respect and learn from. I’m not sure why I would ever not do that. I still do that now.
By the late nineties, I had pretty much peaked in terms of my own hair cutting skills and felt the need to move on.
I completed a degree in environmental science, specialising in soil science, and spent a year, on and off, working with farmers in Bangladesh and bringing their soils home to measure in a lab in Newcastle Uni.
I liked meeting the farmers and their families and also bumped into some nomadic indigenous people who didn’t see themselves as belonging to any bordered country and had developed their own principles based around a pantheist understanding of self and nature.
Spending just a little time with them taught me much more than I ever learned in uni. I think uni made me less intelligent, less imaginative, and limited my story telling skills.
And maybe I had to learn that?
I love learning, but maybe formal education and learning are not that closely connected?
By the early noughties I got involved with a few charities, mainly ones that offered support to people struggling to get their lives to a point where they dared to do what they really wanted to do.
Around that time I also bumped into someone who helped me recognise that we gain the confidence to trust ourselves when we feel safe enough with someone to share our desires and hopes.
That person spent a couple of years helping me develop the skills needed to support the cautious dreamers enabling them to see their dreams become a reality.
I went on to do that (what gets called facilitation) work as an independent in my own spaces and occasionally as an employee now and again.
The common thread in all my work is that I meet loads of interesting people and each one of them has stories that I want to hear.
And that is how I got here, retired, living in an old house in Clerkenwell, and still doing what I love to do.
I am currently experimenting with story telling via dance, theatre, music, writing, nonviolence and de-escalation.
Get in touch if you want to use this shared space to tell your stories.