Bit of an hiatus here while we set up the new blog at www.authenticblogging.com
Once we do (Graeme and I that is), there will be loads of stuff available to help set you (or keep you) on an authentic blogging path.
Stay tuned.
Libby
I really want to support the film Freedom Writers (see previous post) and am waiting to get a copy.
Interestingly, StoryMakers Studio found my blog entry and contacted me with an invitation to an event in support of the film. It’s in Hollywood at the Chinese Theatre and I won’t be popping over for it (funnily enough) but here’s their info for anyone wanting to follow up on this powerful film and what’s happening around it.
“a live conversation with a whole bunch of people who made the movie, including writer/director Richard LaGravenese, several cast members, at least one of the original Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell…
“For those of your members who can’t get to Hollywood to attend the live event, we’re considering videotaping the evening and making it available for viewing later….Anyone who would want to watch program on a tape delayed basis can sign up by going to:
http://storymakersstudio.com/freedom/viewpage
Since a big part of this evening is all about raising awareness for Erin and the Freedom Writers Foundation, we’d really appreciate your support.
Let’s make something wonderful happen.
Gordon Meyer
StoryMakers Studio”
Important independent films like Freedom Writers (eg. early Micheal Moore, Super Size Me, What the Bleep) are doing much better now a days thanks, in part, to the promotional power of the internet to spread political messages virally.
To find out more, just go to http://www.storymakersstudio.com/freedom
More power to them. And as the man says… let’s (keep) making wonderful things happen. Why not tell your own stories and get them out there.
“The moon and sun are eternal travellers.
Even the years wander on.
A lifetime adrift in a boat,
or in old age leading a tired horse into the years,
every day is a journey,
and the journey itself is home.”
For me? More blogging inspiration, in the here and now.
“i have been full of steam
for months
for years”
“to shut yourself up
would be the hugest crime
of them all”
“let’s celebrate now
all this flesh on our bones”
Currently looking into the viability of teaching blogging to academic staff and students, at Sussex University initially. It’s certainly the way things are and need to be going. Heck, Universities created the internet for these reasons in the first place, but long-lead-time dead-tree journals seem to have taken over the publishing side of things and there is not a lot of deep content out there.
Specific (participant) outcomes expected:
- Your own free weblog site for individual or group publishing.
- Instantly and easily publish your own or a group’s academic /
creative work (in progress or completed) online, without having to wait
for it to be updated by webmasters.
- Share thoughts and work with an extended learning community for
feedback and discussion.
- Collect thoughts, notes, longer pieces / items and reflect on your
own learning with private or public posts.
- Support the development of student and staff voice and collegiality
- Develop greater confidence in expressing yourself
- Be heard!
- Enhance your public profile for media and public speaking.
So far the response has been great. Will see what doors starts to open…
Increasingly my teaching practice is focussing on blogging for a wide range of learners and contexts, including:
Here is a general, introductory message about the tailored courses available.
Come and join the global conversation. Blogging is a profound, effective new way to express yourself, connect, learn and be heard. It’s a process and an outcome, supporting personal, academic, business or organisational growth.
Many and diverse people, all around the world, are successfully blogging online about their:
- learning
- lives
- diverse interests and hobbies
- businesses
- electorates
- public roles, and
- creative pursuits.
Blogs (or web logs) can include words, images, sound and links as well as comments back from your new-found audience.
This is your chance to find out what blogging is all about and get your very own (or a group) blog working for you. Suitable for anyone that can use a basic word processing package that has used the internet before. You do NOT need to be an experienced writer, as you will be developing this skill in your own style. Within three sessions you can have your own free blog site up on the internet.
By the end of the course, you will have found your voice and be confidently blogging. Join in and watch yourself and/or your business grow. Plus, learn how to have people find your blog when you are ready.
……………………………………..
About your Teacher
Libby Davy has over 15 year’s experience working professionally and teaching communications – for individuals and organisations. She contributes to several blogs and was a pioneer blogger at www.barkingowl.com/learning and other spaces.
Currently studying a Masters in Person-Centred Education at the University of Sussex, Libby is interested in how blogs support life-long learning through their open, reflective and communal nature. Libby is a co-founder of one of the internet’s most exciting new online communities www.scouta.com, where she hosts groups on Education and Brighton.
After gaining a degree in communications and media Libby eventually went on to teach writing, editing and publishing at a university and community level. She is a published and awarded short-story writer, and has had her work broadcast on national radio. For many years, Libby worked in strategic communications, marketing, organizational development and business coaching.
Libby is a fun, friendly, Australian mother with a passion for education and human potential.
Contact 01273 540 023 or 07968 687 107 to book a place or arrange a tailored workshop series.
The key is curiosity, and it is curiosity, not answers that we model. As we seek to know more about a child, we demonstrate the acts of observing, listening, questioning and wondering. When we are curious about a child’s words and our responses to those words, the child feels respected. The child is respected. “What are the ideas that I have that are so interesting to the teacher? I must be somebody with good ideas.
Vivian Paley
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Kahlil Gibran
Are you a curious person? If so, does this help you learn more? Do you think it is a blessing or a burden? How can you harness it to educate yourself, in the fullest sense of the word. What is learning?
These questions and more are examined in the learning biography I’ve just submitted to Sussex University’s Institute of Innovation in Education towards an MA in Person-Centred Education.
The language is somewhat academic, but there are lots of poetic moments. That’s integration for you!
It was a transformative process of deep learning, and testimony to the benefits of person-centred education, despite the university’s inevitable challenges in embracing the whole person.
Here’s the first page and the full .pdf
Towards Integrated Learner Curiosity
We need to create a culture that leaves room for the constant “contamination” of a hundred subjective and objective experiences, in an atmosphere of reciprocal help and socialisation. Implicit in this thesis is a decisive response to a child’s need to feel whole.
Feeling whole is a biological and cultural necessity for the child (and also for the adult). It is a vital state of well-being (Malaguzzi in Reggio Children 1996, p 34).
Synopsis
This learning biography uses narrative to explore personal knowledge being formed about the cause, nature and function of curiosity and its relationship to learning, within a cycle of inquiry into spirituality.
Looking closely at pedagogues Paulo Freire and within the Reggio Children project, along with psychologists and philosophers such as Carl Rodgers and John Macmurray, it begins to articulate a vision of integrated learner curiosity and a personal expression of an ancient way of looking at knowledge.
It also critiques a university’s early beginnings in practicing emerging theories of person-centred education and challenges academia to embrace the potential of the Reggio “hundred languages” in understanding adult learning.
…………………..
Having lived a life rich with curiosity and learning, I am now curious about curiosity. From my earliest memories, I engaged deeply with the world around me. I have been highly motivated to learn through being curious. I have felt great joy and great sadness through this trait and state, and have come to embrace it – and consciously, carefully harness this Promethean flame.
More…
Learning Biography
Dear mum got me to check out the new film Freedom Writers. Powerful stuff. Check it out yourself (trailer). We all have a voice.
The production notes within “About the Film” tell me a hell of alot about authentic education, biography, community, student voice, about the noble calling to teach, to listen, to find a way in, to make it real.
[Update: see new post here.]
“Why should we write? We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own… We should write because, above all, we are writers whether we call ourselves writers or not.” Julia Cameron in The Writer’s Life: Insights from The Right to Write.
Just to let people know that the wonderful Clare has put up a site with some of her paintings on it. She rocks!
In preparing to write my learning biography for the MA in Person-Centred Education, momentum is gaining to bring together key threads in the reflective process that’s been bubbling away over the last 6 months since I first discovered the course.
One of the key themes is books. I have learnt a great deal from books. I have spent hours and days and years of my life immersed in them. I have lain down in sunny fields, surrounded by daisies, reading until my stomach growled for attention. I have curled up in a waterproof, padded, canvas bag in torrential rain and hail stoms, reading to that last gripping chapter.
I have worn batteries and parents out with clandestine, late-night sessions under the doona.
In retrospect now, I think of the warmth of the womb as an incubation chamber towards human becoming, like cinema viewing (I like all the lights out). I see the desire to combine the natural world with the inner or intellectual world. The integration of a dual self.
I have had books handed down by my mother and my grandmother, recommended by friends. I initiated a chapter of the Puffin Club (Penguin Books) at my school, age 10 - with a letter from Muddlepup and the secret code book as treasured artifacts to prove it.
I wrote my first book, “The Mad Mad Mad Professor” at age 7 (is this still in Mum’s collection?) and have been writing ever since. Some examples of work published or broadcast are available here.
As a little woman growing up, I was in love with three books by Louisa May Alcott, (romantic that I am, problematic as they are).
Little Women grew in to Good Wives then on to Jo’s Boys.
The character I most identified with was Jo:
“The protagonist of the novel. Jo is a tomboy and the second-oldest sister. She is very outspoken and has a passion for writing. Her bold nature often gets her into trouble. She is especially close to her younger sister Beth (make that “Gra”), who helps her become a gentler person. Jo cuts off her long hair - “her one beauty,” as Amy calls it - and sells it to a wig shop to get money for her mother to visit their father, a wounded Civil War chaplain. She refuses the proposal of marriage from family friend Theodore Laurence (”Laurie”), despite many letters sent to Alcott to have them married, and later marries Professor Fritz Bhaer.” (From Wikipedia entry.)
I have highlighted the most resonant aspects.
One of the reasons we were so drawn to The Dharma School for Bea (6) was that her teacher Caroline Woods made a priority of outdoor experiences. A regular weekly visit to Ecoplay at Stanmer Park (part of Stanmer Organics) gave the children, teachers (and sometimes parents and grandparents!) a much needed chance to connect with nature. I have also seen lessons going on with chalk on pavement as soon as the sun came out (and just before it went back in again too). The size of the classroom becomes no barrier. Enormous dinosaurs can be drawn to scale and measured by child-lengths, arms stretched from finger-tip, to finger-tip.
For me, this is one of the most important things people can have. Spiritually, emotionally, physically, intellectually. The whole blooming person.
So I was delighted today when Gra sent me this item from Boing Boing.
No child left inside: reclaim outdoor play
“Richard Louv’s stirring article, “No Child Left Inside,” documents a burgeoning movement to reclaim the idea of outdoor play for kids, who are increasingly under house arrest…”
There is much food for thought and growth in this and linked items.
I feel a research project coming on… goes very deep.
Not just about connection with nature, but about space and freedom. About trust and connection with the local community. Our aspirations for the South Fremantle Early Learning Centre project was very much in line with these thoughts. Children being seen, and heard all around their neighbourhood. Being known and nourished, nurtured by the world. Not locked away in the prisons of school and loungeroom.
Would also like to refind the ex-Dharma Kindy teacher I met at The Ram’s Inn in Firle who runs a (primarily) outdoor nursery school. I believe the Annan Farm Froebel Kindergarten (literally: Children’s Garden) near Uckfield is similarly inspired.
Certainly the Steiner tradition has a great respect and connection with nature too, as does our own dear Dharma School. The grounds are full of mystery and adventure, with numerous places to play and hide.
But what of our home lives? What of the weather and our own dispositions.
As an Australian new to the UK, I have a few perspectives I will note.
Outdoor links to curriculum are still largely untapped in Australia, despite the better weather. So outside time is seem as time to let off steam generally, for free play (great! should be more of it!). But what of the potential to spend longer in nature, while continuing lessons. Would it be too distracting? What are the issues? With a burgeoning curriculum designed to cram students with ever more stuff, pressure to stay inside concentrating is great than ever before.
So perhaps part of the answer, in the school context at least, is to make curriculum links. It’s still a bit like changing the wheels on the broken bike while it is still in motion, rather than building a better bike (or helping it build itself to destroy the metaphor completely). But I guess you know what I mean.
Maybe it’s worth just working on the questions for now and not jumping to solutions.
So let’s consider this…
What fundamental (educational) needs can be met for a child (human) in having time outdoors, in nature?
How would be define ‘outdoors’ and ‘nature’?
What examples can we find to support this?
What can we do to support this happening - as Parents? As Educators?
What would a policy or statement of intent, a vision for outdoor education look like?
How likely is this to inspire parents and students in choices around education and home life?
One thing clear to me as a parent, the more time I spend outside, the more time my (single) child does. I lead by example in this way. And yet on an average day in England, the weather can be so intimidating and snuggly inside pursuits so compelling as to make the choice of activity inevitable. And yet children seem so immune to the elements when they are running around playing together.
And as the old saying goes “there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothing.”
See the Pott Row School’s way of handling this. “School Gives Children Rain Suits.”
Right now I am thinking of a few different environments, across three countries and a wide age-group.
Beaconsfield Primary (Western Australia) - Ange Drum’s pre-school class. A great example of a government school making the most of the great outdoors.
Reggio Emilia (near Bologna, Northern Italy) - the infant-toddler centres & preschools - making the most of some fairly average weather to look at ‘education’ in a very whole way.
The Dharma School (Brighton, England) - a primary school developing captivating gardens for children 3-11 to explore, within a Buddhist context of respect and connection with all living things.
Varndean College (Brighton, England) - a secondary school adjoining my garden, I have limited knowledge of, but would be interested to talk to re: current and potential experiences around these questions.
Lewes New School (Lewes, England) - a small, independent primary school near Brighton. They are located in a Victorian school house but have far more modern ideas about education. There is currently much talk at the school as parents and children discuss what to do with the outside spaces.
Lance Holt School (Fremantle, Western Australia) - a Summerhill-inspired school I attended in the 1970s. The inside space was extremely limited in this inner-urban school. Ironically in many respects, this meant we had a much richer experience of life outside the classroom than many other children. Our mini-bus took us on daily excursions (whoever wanted to go, from whatever age group). Local parks gave us great space to roam. Today, the students are custodians of Bathers Beach, just a short walk away.
So an additional question could be… How can students, teachers and parents share their aspirations for outdoor experiences /education - and work together towards making any changes they might wish to?
In addition to having a strong research interest in the schools question, it is clear to me that school’s are only part of the question when it comes to human education, human becoming.
What of the home situation?
What are people’s thoughts and experiences in this regard?
We are about to invest in a campervan - and head for the hills! I also need to find things I like doing outside, even when it is cold. Building fires is a great love. Bring it on!
Never let me hear myself saying again “You can’t go out there, you’ll freeze to death.”
I just love this photo. Had to use it again in this context. Reminds me about outdoor playing needing to be free, and not managed by adults too much. “Now take your silly photo and let us get back to it!”
And this one again too. Bubba Bea in Margaret River.
“I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch.”
- Lily Tomlin or Albert Einstein?
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.
Afterward you can remove all traces of reality”.
- Pablo Picasso
After having my daughter Bea, I finally sat down to write. Memories, stories, fantasies came forth. It was great. Better out than in.
I had written extensively and professionally before, but to a brief. For an audience, not for myself.
I had fantasies about going the whole way, but other, less isolating pursuits spoke louder. But I have kept writing, and will never stop. No idea where it’s all going, but I laugh as I recall a Leunig cartoon… something about a man going to see a Physician.. “Doctor, doctor… I’ve got this thing inside me. It’s hurting me. Please, please. Take it out.” Doctor asks “what is it?” of course. “A book Doctor, a book. I think it’s a book.”
Have you ever had this feeling? I sure have. Blogging certainly releases the pressure, and there are other pieces of life-saving surgery pending (41,000 words for the MA over the next two years… phew. Hope there’s not too much blood loss. Must plan to allow some post-operative recovery time.)
Some further quotes found just now that help relate these thoughts.
“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn’t, I would die.” - Isaac Asimov
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” - Cyril Connolly
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart … Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” - Carl Jung
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Until I work out how to update my old fashioned writing website, I will just add some other stories that never got collected, via this blog. They are several years old now, from what feels like a distance land, with all that has taken place and transformed in this short/long life so far.
First of all, there are several stories up on the original “Here” writing website, which (if anyone is actually out there? But thanks Cyril, I’m with you) is the best place to start.
Then, there was…
The Surrealist’s Ball - just for fun.
Food & Art - deeper ruminations
First Day of School - sweet, vivid memories (with an edge)
Italian Hotel - power, breastfeeding & gender - a short story
My New Friend & Bees - free child voice (inspired by the questioning nature of children and their fascination with guts)
The Oracle - a short but zapping mystery revealed
Days of Milk - fantasies of being a kindergarten teacher
Lick Hum Dresser - sensuous, Australian, languid short story
Has been good to look back, reread, remember what I have been doing with my words over those years. All part of the learning journey. While some have been published or broadcast, most are yet to be read. Not sure what to do with them really… two many interests for one lifetime…
Reading back over the Quantum entries, my passion for dear old John Macmurray, and interest in The Gifford Lectures, became blindingly obvious.
The prestigious Gifford Lecture series, held annually at the ancient Scottish universities since 1888, have carried the words of great thinkers on the broad topic of natural religion. Some of the speakers have, through other strands of synchronous enquiry, already been referenced in this blog (eg. Heisenberg, Bohr, Macmurray).
“Although the will expressed the hope that the presentations would spread sound views “among the whole population of Scotland” the stature of the presenters and the quality of the addresses and books that came from them have reached far beyond Scotland.
“The prestige of the Gifford series derives in part from the world-renowned lecturers and from the diversity of intellectual disciplines they represent. As would be expected in a series on natural religion, numerous lecturers have been theologians and ethicists, such as Jurgen Moltmann and Reinhold Niebuhr, and philosophers, including, Etienne Gilson and Henri Bergson.
“What might not be expected in the series are historians (Arnold Toynbee, Herbert Butterfield), scientists (Werner Karl Heisenberg, Niels Bohr), writers (Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt), and even one British Prime Minister (Arthur Balfour). Former speakers such as Karl Barth and Carl Sagan bring very different perspectives on the nature of nature and the meaning and value of natural theology.
“In recent years the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh have been delivered by Mohammed Arkoun, Professor Emeritus of Islamic Thought at the Sorbonne (”Inaugurating a Critique of Islamic Reason”) and Michael Ignatieff, Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University (”The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in a Time of Terror”).
“These names represent but a small sample of the disciplines, topics and people to be found in the Gifford series.”
There is a new book out called:
The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science &
Religion
As one reviewer says…
“…a stimulating volume that would be a welcome gift to anyone interested in the development of modern thought.”
“Although his coverage is necessarily selective, Witham includes an impressive range of material for a single volume: lecture summaries, biographical sketches of selected presenters, observations of Scottish history and local color, and a wealth of background information on intellectual movements that have shaped the lectures over the decades.
Witham follows disciplines and ideologies rather than strict chronology, allowing the story to flow more naturally. The text is deeply researched and factually rich, even dense at times. But fans of the Gifford Lectures will appreciate Witham’s thoroughness, as well as his interest in the personalities of the presenters beyond the lectures themselves. For all their intellectual accomplishment, these thinkers were also
human beings whose “efforts to conceive, produce, and finally deliver the lectures reveal a remarkable drama of mortal hopes, fears, victories, defeats, vanities and frailties.”
Always good to get the human element!
I’ve been trying to read the Dalai Lama’s most excellent book The Universe in a Single Atom - The Convergence of Science and Spirituality for two years now. It keeps slipping through my fingers.
Before it last disappeared, I managed to at least get a sense of his handling of a topic very dear to my heart. The unification, if you like, of head and heart. The rational and the spiritual.
It always delighted me, when I finally got to watch What The Bleep Do We Know, that you could not tell the difference between the quantum physicists and the mystics. When the interview subjects names and titles were revealed at the end, I laughed and laughed.
This seems to parallel the experience of Fritjof Capra, well known author of The Tao of Physics, who brings the two sides together within his own practice - as both physicist and mystic. See the wikipedia entry on Capra and Nobel Laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg’s conversations in 1972 for another glimpse down the rabbit hole.
So, back to the Dalai Lama’s universe. In a word, emptiness.
Once I find it again, I might reflect some more.
Perhaps I’m reading it right now in a parallel universe!
Another book with, not by, the Dalai Lama I shall have to get my hands on is The New Physics & Cosmology - Dialogues with the Dalai Lama.
“What happens when the Dalai Lama meets with leading physicists and a historian? This book is the carefully edited record of the fascinating discussions at a Mind and Life conference in which five leading physicists and a historian (David Finkelstein, George Greenstein, Piet Hut, Arthur Zajonc, Anton Zeilinger, and Tu Weiming) discussed with the Dalai Lama current thought in theoretical quantum physics, in the context of Buddhist philosophy.
“A contribution to the science-religion interface, and a useful explanation of our basic understanding of quantum reality, couched at a level that intelligent readers without a deep involvement in science can grasp.”
From Tao of Physics
by Fritjof Capra
“Physicists are coming to see that all their theories of natural phenomena (”laws”) are creations of the human mind; properties of our conceptual map of reality rather than reality itself, and that scientific theories and models are approximations of the true nature of things.
“All theories and laws are mutable, destined to be replaced by more accurate laws when the theories are improved. Step by step, as theories improve and increase in accuracy, we will ‘bootstrap’ toward (but maybe never reach) the ideal answers. The hypothesis, in that it does not rest on or within a framework, is considered unscientific (it leads beyond science).
(The world-view of the Eastern mystics shares with bootstrap not only an emphasis on the mutual interrelationship and self-consistency of all phenomena, but also the denial of fundamental constituents of matter).”
No wonder I find Buddhism so close to my own sense of ‘what is’.
Reading the very lovely Michael Newman from that profound source infed this morning. He makes a strong case for a renewed emphasis on critical theory.
Michael is primarily directing his words to a group of Adult Education academics in this context, just last year. Through these ‘meta-meta-professionals’ he is in turn addressing a much wider audience.
By looking back on the work of people like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (I will be following up on Dialectic of Enlightenment), Michael is nostalgic for:
“a state of mind and a stance of constant and continual critique. Nothing was to be taken for granted. No utterance was to remain unexamined. It promoted the kind of positive scepticism which could enable us to withstand the doomsayers, the mean-spirited, the manipulators, the malign and the propagandists who might otherwise force us to think in the way they wanted us to. Critical theory helped us combat a Gramscian kind of hegemony. It helped us resist being hoodwinked. It helped us see through the people, ourselves included. It enabled us to make up our own minds.”
These words are more important now than ever before. Individuals, communities and ecosystems face a perilous future, while governments and corporations continue to manipulate the agenda in support of their own short-term vision of greed.
The last decade of my life, primarily as an activist, was spent working as an antidote to their propaganda. The reasons why I thought I could and should attempt this go way back, and other entries touch on themes of an emerging social and environmental consciousness, and emancipation, planted in the womb and nurtured in the family, schooling (eg. Lance Holt) and the wider context.
Having a critical faculty, a ‘positive scepticism’ (I like that) was encouraged from a young age.
Looking specifically at Critical Theory in a formal context, I was 17 when I embarked on a course called Structure, Thought & Reality at Murdoch University.
Searching for information on this foundational course at a university cut from similar cloth to Sussex, I am not surprised to find the course description”
“In this unit you will be asked to think differently about reality. Rather than taking reality to be natural or objective, we will treat it as social or subjective. When we think of reality in this way, we start to understand “truth” and “knowledge” in a very different light.
After considering reasons to treat reality as social or subjective, we apply this view of reality to topics including: human sexuality, childhood, death, virtual reality, God and the war on terror.”
It was a grand and often frustrating adventure for such a young, freedom loving person. While my mind was finding ways, in the longer term, to be free, it was hard to still be institutionalised after so many years of formal education.
At 19, I was looking for a less abstract path and a financial way to freedom (read: employment) and began studies in Media and Communication theory and practice. This then led to a highly engaging strategic framework that would make use of practical communications (writing, journalism, stakeholder relations, film making etc) along the way, if not a cohesive philosophical one, called Public Relations. Not ‘PR’, sweety. Not by a long shot.
The development of my early career in strategic stakeholder relations as I prefer to refer to is, will need to be elaborated on. But let’s move on to a vital juncture.
I remember a key moment during the beginning of my course in Critical Film Analysis, where we were asked to stop just consuming the tasty film we were viewing, to STOP ‘willingly suspending our disbelief’ in the darkened womb of the cinema - and to start engaging critically.
My world was shattered. I could not see a way to continue my deep love of immersion into the screen, the ‘text’, any text, the moment, while also fulfilling a critical function. I could not yet conceive of both processes running in parallel, indeed in conversation within me.
Yet within days, this turning point in learning just happened. From then on, the immersion, the deep engagement with ephemera could happen at the same time as the internal (eternal?) conversation. I was no longer one of the other. They were voices, in a way, I could turn up or down.
….
So I had a very good idea of how to ‘manipulate’ the masses and indeed individuals from a young age. I worked and saw deep inside the ‘belly of the beast’, and indeed my own beast. And I did not like what I saw.
At 26 I decided to have an early ‘mid-life crisis’, out of which a more integrated and authentic self emerged.
A future entry will reference the importance of Thomas Moore, Matthew Fox and Michael Leunig.
L