Do you have a creative practice?
Not something you are paid to do for someone else.
Not a thing that you judge yourself on - ‘am I good enough’?
Not that.
But an experimental practice that is yours alone.
A practice that allows you to express yourself in an emergent way.
A playful way.
To play with your feelings.
Exploring the feeling Intelligence
We started Into the Dark last week, beginning the journey with endings - contemplating grief, tending to loss and letting go.
It’s a mysterious emerging adventure, a crew of curious humans, coming together intentionally to explore this darker time of the year, the darker parts of ourselves and this darker moment of being alive on Spaceship Earth.
One of the invitations we like to encourage over the 5 weeks and beyond is to practice some weirder moves.
Re-entangling with the great mystery of being a human-being on a more-than-human planet, paying attention to the parts capitalist modernity hides from us, exploring our relationships with a vaster web of life - felt, seen and unseen, human and more-than-human.
This often begins by simply sitting outside in a spot, in a park, garden or beside a tree with a blackbird on a busy road in London (as one of our crew is currently doing) and just noticing, sensing and feeling with our full animal intelligence.
Taking our most alive questions out into these liminal places, offering something back to these stranger spaces, noticing what we see, hear, smell and feel.
And then returning home to some form of creative practice as a way to begin to move into a deeper relationship with the living Earth.
To begin to capture some of that feeling data in whatever way feels interesting to you.
That might be through writing, sketching, painting, crafting, movement, music, cooking - any form of making.
It doesn’t matter what it is - I think, it’s all in the reflection and participation.
In the messy process.
I often like making food with my hands - bread, jams, pickles especially - I’ve come to see these as a relational dance between me and gifts from the Earth - fruits, flour, foraged gifts - there’s seasonality, connection, a pattern which feels grounding.
And there’s the alchemy of co-creation. Of making something with.
I can time-stretch seasons
Spreading summer fruit on winter toast, spring pickles on Autumn plates, hedgerow tincture on a tired end of year tongue, fermenting earthy flour into nutrient dense baked joy.
I also love messing with music.
As a kid I used to create compilation cassettes, recording 7 “ singles, songs from albums, tracks from the radio onto a cassette tape - I’d decorate the cover and give them away to friends.
I started drumming in my teens and then discovered raves and got into DJ-ing and electronic music, that interest has ebbed and flowed through life but never gone away.
I’ve never really stopped listening, dancing, collecting. For over 30 years now.
Earth Sessions
In the last few years I’ve been recording DJ mixes at particular moments in the Earth cycle and putting them out on the podcast - Earth Sessions (you can find them all here or on Apple Podcasts)
They are a way for me to mark the season, the moment in the cycle and how it makes me feel and how it makes me want to move. Through a channel of electronic and dance music.
This is a new one. A live mix to honour this darker time of the year, and the darker times unfolding.
Recorded in my kitchen on a Friday night, after a long walk in the woods.
I wanted to start slow and ambient, to acknowledge the slower liminal space of winter and gradually pick up the pace.
This was a mix of vinyl and digital - spanning 30 years of releases.
From ambient electronica, early rave inspired house, breakbeat, melodic techno, tech house and some progressive bits.
Respect to all the artists and producers for these sonic offerings.
I hope the mix moves you in some way.
Movement, dancing and connection is a way through these unravelling darker times
We must stay together.
Thoughts start with feelings
Brian Eno, artist, musician and activist says that all thinking starts with feeling.
We feel before we have thoughts.
The feeling informs the thinking.
If you agree that as a modern species we are stuck in dominant ways of thinking that are exhausted, divisive , limiting and keeping us locked in the same destructive patterns, logics and ways of being, then perhaps we need to learn to feel in new ways.
If we need ways of thinking that have qualities of care, interdependence, imagination and regeneration then we need to feel those things first.
What does the Earth want from you?
I’m fascinated with feelings that emerge when we practice connecting with the living intelligence of the Earth, this entangled mysterious complex weirder wisdom - intelligence that you can’t access scrolling online or from Netflix, LinkedIn, or in the news or at work or in the shops.
You can’t think it, you can only feel it.
And to feel it you have to pay attention, you have to listen deeply, you have to move into relationship again, you have to not know.
With your heart, body, with land, with community.
You have to spend time outside, (inside maybe?) In the non-human scape.
So when you spend time re-connecting with this intelligence, creating a regular practice, you start to feel differently, and then if you do something with those feelings, express them creatively in some way, capture them, soon you might find you begin to think in other ways.
Weirder ways.
More beautiful ways, I’d suggest.
So I wonder what it might be like to go back to those creative practices of our younger selves ?
Those parts of ourselves that we’ve suppressed in order to get on, on the highway of progress.
To begin again.
What might emerge from these times, if instead of numbing ourselves with the algorithmic distractions, stuck in the exhausted, expiring and limited thinking of these unravelling times, we began to re-entangle more with this true, deeper mysterious feeling intelligence, and to experiment more from there.
At the very least we could create waves of beautiful human expressions, pulses of joy, curiosity, grief, weirdness, mystery and imaginative possibilities.
Words from rivers, wind infused artworks, songs of wintering, dances of trees, baking with Ancestral Intelligence.
And these creative experiments might at the very least provide our future ancestors with clues as to how we were actually feeling during the great unravelling.
And who knows what could happen if we began to really feel this life differently, to feel this world with love, and then to begin to think with care, interdependence and connection in great and growing numbers.
Becoming-with.
Cultivating a feeling revolution.
What might be possible ?
I leave you with owls and wind.
Dan
