Posts tagged with "question"

What do I see and what does it mean to me?

A simple question but how often do we give ourselves the time to properly look and ask?

I can see stunning colours and contrasts; beeches and birch trees standing out against the deep green of the Scots Pine; bright oranges and yellows, deep russets, luminous and translucent greens, grey, browns and blacks. I can see the trees and the ground all covered with a rich carpet of mosses and trees covered in lichens.

I can see a deer fence along the line of an ancient moss covered dyke. I can see and hear the River Tilt thundering down the gorge with rivulets jumping up above the waterfall. I can see two grey Atholl ponies, I can see the rain drops falling off the trees. I can see up through the black branches of the middle aged beech tree I’m sitting under and I can see glimpses of the white sky beyond. I can see thriving life and I can see decay. The mountain looms behind my back but I’m not looking that way.

What does it mean to me? Not so easy to answer. I ‘m thinking about how the woodland I am sitting in appears to be a harmonious community; each tree has found its roots and found its space among its neighbours to grow towards the light yet acting together to form the mutual shelter they need.  The rich colours of the different species seemingly so complementary. Then I think about the Scots Pine and birch being Scottish Natives but they look so spectacular against the backdrop of the non Scottish native beech trees. I’m that English beech, naturalised but not native.

I’m very fond of beech trees. We had two magnificent beech trees in the garden where I grew up. Standing between them as a child I could touch both trunks, one was a copper beech and one a green. I thought of them as my wishing trees. The contrast of colours through the seasons was stunning. That makes me think about family and belonging and how if nature can adapt to change then why can’t we? That leads to talking about work life balance or the lack of it. And so the cycle goes on.

A good place to start

Its only 6 weeks since we all became friends in Knoydart but it feels like so much longer. Such a close bond formed in a long weekend. Then we have all been rushing around madly in our real lives and now here we are back together again. We all headed to Glen Tilt from across Scotland meeting up as we got nearer. Getting more and more excited until we were all on the train together at Perth and then into the mini-bus at Pitlochry. The autumn colours dominating the landscape more and more as we neared our destination. Even the driver was so keen to share the beauty with us he managed to drive into a ditch whilst pointing out a waterfall.

I’m quite anxious as well as excited though. This time together is so out of the norm of rushing around, deadlines, targets, outputs, relationships, responsibilities. It is such a privilege to have been given permission to slow down and reflect but it’s a big mental shift.

 A simple question when we all meet- how have you all been since Knoydart? I feel overwhelmed

So, it’s out with the big pad of paper and the coloured pens. People want to know what we are hoping to achieve, are we going to make a difference? How then? It so lucky to have freedom and licence to explore and express our passions. All those conversations, you longed for. Strong themes of commonality emerge for the problems of social and environmental injustice but can such a “self-indulgent” process as this go any way to improving anything? Trauma keeps coming up, trauma that needs to be acknowledged before progress can be made. There is a feeling of real change in the group, some more dramatic than others, often subtle but it’s mostly about self. It’s a good place to start.

Participant or Researcher??

Who am I?!

Typical philosopher – but this question is a bit more interesting. How much am I a participant and how much a researcher? From the start it has been an interesting tension – bringing myself as an outdoor educator with a passion for places, but also standing with one foot outside trying to capture the process as an ‘independent’ researcher.

I have had solo time before, and it has always been special – and the ‘main event’ of the weekend was no less deep. Wandering up in the hills, brain in neutral, a cave found me before the wind and rain started in earnest. The cave sheltered me for the day – I slept and sat and watched and ground garnets out of the rocks.

The relationships between the group have deepened so quickly, and we have reached a level of openness that reminds me of other really important times in my life. As a researcher I have had to tread carefully around this deep process and bring my time in the cave along with my endless jottings in the research diary…

Where did the project idea come from?

fruits to seeds...

WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Two questions I get asked all the time about the project that I’ll try to answer, at least in part…

BUT the answer to the second question really lies in the process of the project over the coming months. “It’s all about” how the process of this project affects the people taking part, how it changes the way they look at the world (theirs and others), how it changes the way they act and behave and also how they influence others’ to change. Of course we can talk about sustainable behaviour change but that must be the least inspiring combination of unimaginative words known in our language. I think it is more about the art of living, the creation and finding of meaning, rediscovering ourselves and what it means to be a human being alive in  2008 facing the pressures that we all face, yet finding that underneath our skins lies a unifying thread of humanity. Lofty ideals? Perhaps. But without lifting ourselves up to some noble aspirations, taking full responsibility and truthfully facing ourselves and where we come from as a species how can we genuinely hope to create a powerful vision of the next century for future generations of any species?

 So where did the idea for this project come from?

Well, like all ideas it is an amalgamation of thoughts, approaches, experiences, needs, creative process and partnerships. From my own perspective I can trace the birth of the idea back to about eighteen months ago when I was working up campaign and communication ideas for sustainable lifestyles for WWF and co-incidentally went on a WWF personal effectiveness course. There I was given an article called “For An Ecology of the Heart” that I will try to find for this blog. It was from Resurgence magazine, a magazine that I had (perhaps surprisingly) never heard of before, let alone read.

As soon as I read the words in “For An Ecology of the Heart” I was thrown into a storm of ideas and excitement – here, at last, was someone eloquently saying some of the things that I had been thinking and fumbling with for a while but had not yet found the means to express. I wondered if WWF could combine some form of these ideas with personal development approaches, communicate the concepts far wider and INSPIRE people to “sustainability” through a reconnection with nature and what it means to be human. For this communications project to work it would be far better to take real, interesting people on a journey spread over some time and for them to communicate it themselves. I believe there is nothing more powerful or affecting than personal experience. This led me on a personal quest to discover more about an inspiring and relatively unknown approach that combined art, nature, spirituality and psychology that I discovered mainly came under the name of eco psychology. Six months later I took part in the incredible eco therapy course run by Dave Key and Mary-Jayne Rust, upon which much of this project’s design and process is based (read Dave Key’s blog on here).

The intention is that we communicate as widely as possible about this project and research the process. The range of people taking part and the amount of time they will be thinking and creating should lead to some fascinating blogs (and potentially lifechanging experiences). For some of the blog readers the ideas and experience will resonate, for others it will leave them cold, but what this project won’t do is just leave people not knowing that this approach exists.  And just maybe…it could even create genuine, lasting change.