Flirting with Modernity(4)

Greetings from St Giles House in Dorset, where The Realisation Festival begins later today. I’ve been enjoying the peace here for the last few days. There was one particularly blissful moment under the setting sun in the outdoor hot tub that will stay with me. I was savouring some rare solitude, the sound and sensation of optimally heated sloshing water in the tub, and then, when still, the company of the silence with backing vocals from the gurgling stream nearby. I was glad to be held captive by the surrounding foliage and fields as if imbibing nature’s welcome. At that moment I noticed, for the first time in months, that I am alive, and, because of everything, unbelievably blessed to be so.

This afternoon there will be 150 people travelling in, setting up tents, banging down pegs, asking logistical questions, and introducing themselves to each other. There will be small talk, smiles and laughter to allay the ambient social anxiety as people shift from the world outside to their temporary shared arena. A little later there will be dinner, and a Cèilidh (dance), but before that we assemble people to contend with frequently asked questions and say a few words about what’s ahead. Like every year since 2021, I will give a short 5-10 minute speech offering my account of what the festival is about, but every year it comes out a little different, and this year I’m looking for a new way to say the same thing.

Realisation is a festival about getting real, becoming real and making real. It’s a festival for the soul, about unlearning and reimagining, and that it’s a form of experiential education distantly inspired by Bildung. All of this remains true, but I need a new way to enliven it.

I feel torn these days between curation and creation. In public fora of various kinds, including Substack, part of me wants to offer conceptual and operational scaffolding to allow people to locate and orient themselves, but part of me wants to entirely surrender to the moment and say what feels most alive in heart and mind regardless of any audience. I noticed this tension in a recent conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective that will be online next week. I had planned to ease the watching audience into the inquiry space with some general reflections ...