A mish-mashed hodge-podge of doing.
I end up doing all sorts of things, some of which happen and many of which don’t.
Events, retreats and residencies For example, I occasionally host Reading Weekends at the old house in Spain where my wife runs an organic beef farm. For a few years I held one person retreats called ‘Parenthesis’. I have also offered artists and writers residencies in Arenas de San Pedro.
Pauses I occasionally hold online workshops focused on pause and pausing. I spent a day with a group of friends and colleagues in Oxford exploring the idea of ‘temporal intelligence’. With my friend Johnnie Moore, I ran a series of exploratory workshops under the title ‘Into Rehearsal’ exploring what it might mean to rehearse in the context of everyday life and work (for a change, we did this in Cambridge).
Olives and AI For years I have been promising to organise an event built around the olive harvest in Spain and it has yet to come off. But we have recently acquired another olive grove, with close to a hundred trees that are now mostly clear of the jungle of thorns that had grown up in the decades it has been abandoned, so maybe this will be the year. By way of contrast to the ancient olives I am also working on a project about AI with Michael Dila and we may run a retreat on this in Spain in the summer of 2024.
Conversation I am also wondering about whether to form an on-line conversation group to connect to the publication of Do Conversation and inspired by the title of William Blake’s work ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ I am curious about what it would look like to create a space for cross generational dialogue...
There’s plenty more where these came from.
If any of these interest you, let me know. When enough people write in about something, I might just organise it…