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. In 2024, having 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, we finally did so as a project for Yellow. By way of contrast to the ancient olives I am also working on a project about AI with the Oxford Praxis Forum based on the work of philosopher of technology Tom Chatfield.
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…