How to start a fire

If there is no heat in your heart

and each breath is brittle

If passion has dwindled

and all causes feel lost

Ask yourself

what can I break on the altar of my life?

For there in the gap left behind

waits the first spark to a larger fire

Education for people and the planet

Following another insufficient COP there is a growing vacuum between our day to day lives and what is required to mitigate the worst effects of climate breakdown. Although COP26 was tepid, the awareness and concern for this climate emergency we all face is growing. I believe students and teachers are hungry for a school system that addresses head on the challenges of the present, indeed the reality of what we are faced with renders much of what we do in the business as usual manner meaningless. After all, as the Friday’s for Future placards read, ‘What am I studying for?’ because there is ‘No future on a dead planet’. A wellbeing curriculum that puts people and planet at the focus is the only meaningful route education can take. I am not close to an expert in education, or in anything really. A true expert is recognised by their intimate knowledge of a subject, the way they pirouette with their experience, intuition and insights aligned with the facts as they emerge. I am not that person. Though I could not resist sitting down to write this piece. Education at its best invites everyone to the table and engages with lived experience.  Ideas alongside hard won pieces of information, have to be distilled through a prism of values that asks what do we collectively want as people? What is the good that we want to corporately praise?

Education as if people and the planet matter, has been a preoccupation of mine since my degree in Outdoor Studies and Experiential Education. From then on in I told people my work was to do with transformation and real learning. The reality is I have spent a decade sifting through the sand at the edges of an education fortress whose foundations have eroded. At sea, me and the system I speak of. I wanted to graft myself to something that was going to address the challenges of our age. So much so that I still have not trained to be a teacher and am currently working as a Learning Support Assistant in a mainstream secondary school whilst I look for signs of land. What challenges am I referring to? Those now familiar phrases that spell very real trouble such as ‘climate emergency’ and ‘ecological collapse’ along with growing societal division, the presence of racial inequality and a desire for social justice that currently outstrips us. Anyone in the pub will tell you that you go to school so you can get a job. The same person might also tell you that school was a drag but they liked the social aspect (or found it excruciating). I believe education is far more than an induction process into the world of work. It is a participatory journey towards greater wholeness. Where we can slowly specialise and work out how to be a blessing to others, first by being introduced to the ways we are blessed.

The story goes that our education system has a history of seeing the young people in its charge as resources, units in a capitalist project of immense hubris, on an endless mission towards perpetual unrestrained growth. As the factories closed and job market changed, schools have been engaged in a project to pacify and hypnotise the majority whilst syphoning off an elite to captain the ship as it sails diligently for the iceberg (The greedy minority wager by the time the iceberg melts they will be sipping cocktails on another planet). I am not cynical enough to buy that story whole-sale, but only because I know that inside our school’s individuals are making daily choices to champion curiosity, creativity, rigour, questioning and collaboration. Our education system is not one thing but an unwieldly network of competing values staffed by overworked, well qualified, mostly passionate people who want the best for people and planet. That is my intuition; schools are not a conglomerate of evil and brainwashing, they want to change in response to our times, but they are under resourced, scared and not given a mandate to make bold changes. These people that make up the institutions are in the cross fire as politicians, corporations and activists posture over what education is for. It is a tug of war fight that pulls the young people from apathy through a desert devoid of inspiration into anxiety and disillusionment.

I want to explore how we can own the best in education, for from a flawed system good ideas have been birthed and are still gasping for air amongst the detritus of confused values, antiquated methods and data worship. Ideas that find their footing in primary school don’t get a fair run out into secondary. For example, cross curricular approaches to learning work well, they prize research skills, nuanced thinking, discussion, collaboration and recording work innovatively. But perhaps this is just tinkering around the edges. Do we need to be thinking more fundamentally about how we organise our schools in relation to age, class size and timings of the school day, to hold that children will not all follow a linear path? Do we need to create a society that affords families more time over work, time that might be used to team up in different configurations at different points in their child’s life, patterns that allow for more exploration and serendipity? Ultimately to make journeys, physical and internal, to find an awareness, love and respect for themselves, others and the environment. That last point was influenced by the views of Colin Mortlock in his book Adventure Alternative (Colin founded the degree course I took and mentioned above). Schools do have an important role in offering teenagers that rubric of boundaries to react to, to stretch against, but this is an art form not a blueprint and the blunt instrument of conformity does a disservice to the life force inside the young people. Instead schools can become sites where elders, true experts and mentors are put in the path of the next generation, where those groups sharpen one another for a future that needs both vitality and wisdom, along with a sound scientific understanding of the world we live in.

At its most benign the function of a school has been to equip the future workforce with the necessary skills to lend their backs to the wheels of progress. As the circumstances change so too will the jobs, that much is obvious. Only my feeling is that those defining the word progress have not had the spiritual maturity to understand what it might mean or possess a true vision for what it could look like. Purely equating progress with economic growth does not follow in the context of a finite planet of natural resources approaching a tipping point in its life support systems. True progress asks the nuanced questions around how we create wellbeing for the planet, for the people and life on it. That some people are asking these question gives me cause to hope. In my opinion to explore the ‘how’ of wellbeing for planet and people has the makings of an excellent lengthy school project, it should be the focus. Indeed, a ‘Wellbeing Curriculum’ could become mainstream, not one off sessions on diet and mindfulness but something deeper that equips students to critique the outdated economic status quo and learn about innovative solutions to subjects such as organising and politics to trade and food systems. Of course this would include mental and physical wellbeing on the individual level but it should strive to place that into a political, environmental, economic and social context too. This kind of education values the substance of a person, their character, social and emotional wherewithal or what are sometimes called ‘soft skills’ over that which can be simplified to a number on a spreadsheet.

Each day at work I enter the four walls of a classroom, it is a lethargic bubble burst only by my own cognitive dissonance. Outside the world is coming to the boil, scarcity and chaos loom, inside we wade through the curriculum. The children are kept in incubators where they are not given the sustenance they will need to confront the challenges they will face together. They know it too. Broadly speaking we lose the ‘cleverest’ to the status quo that is self-serving and the ones whose needs are not met, we do not manage to induct them into their life spark and gifting. If they were resources, we couldn’t afford to waste them. Yet they are so much more, they are the continual emergence of life making sense of itself and they are woven into a united whole.

Somehow together topple them.

 

This is not to the wretched billionaire

I am done with my hope and naïve pleas

Earth is more than disposable funfair

Bank balance propped up by backs and trees

 

Their fragile ego is swollen like the sea

Minds that are altered poison hearts now shrunk

Take the power back before we are sunk

 

I thought about writing this to the very richest in the world. Some sort of desperate plea. I have carried a vague hope in their redemption though now more than ever I have pervasive feeling that these people, the billionaires (yes billions) cannot think or feel like we do anymore. Yes, they are still human. Once babies transmitting peace, smudges of wonder oozing innocence. But those days are gone, all those basic qualities squashed out of them by the insatiable game of getting. They are dizzy ego’s marching to the fanfare of their own success. They can’t hear the breeze or sway of the trees. They can’t hear the anger or wails of distress. Shout at them for syphoning off the worlds riches and for treating the most vulnerable, the most innocent, as expendable. Shout at them for these things and more but they will not be able to hear amongst the throng of their own reassuring stories. If they do hear you, catch a whisper, then they will not understand, their minds have been caught by far off ideas of outer space and immortality. Most of all though, of course, their minds have been captured by fear and power in horrific embrace. You can plead with them about the value of it all but I just don’t think they feel it most of the time, when they do it is in rarefied special moments that confirm their suspicions that they might be gods. Instead of those regular moments of everyday love and reliance. What do they value? I cannot say, what will outlast the fires and floods? A concrete bunker? I am sick of holding space for these maniacs, holding a candle hoping for their transformation. No change cannot rest on their action nor be entrusted to them. I am sick of waiting for them to change role and play the saviours. They do not have the substance or spiritual maturity. They would not be able to listen. They could not hold a gaze. Or pause at a sunset let alone a single leaf or bead of water. Their capacity for wonder has been extinguished by the scale of the universe and their bank balances, always too small to remedy their insignificance. Do they love anything? What will they take with them when they die except the knowledge they sunk the world… or burnt it … or both.

At the very least tax them, redress the balance somehow. Disobey, do not particpate, somehow together topple them.

A Universe Within

After struggling through episodes of profound mental ill health Mack is living life as though in a coma. Mack encounters an actual coma patient who somehow entwines together a series of people and events, beginning a life affirming process for all involved. The journey weaves together environmental issues, mental health experiences and spirituality in a search for meaning and vitality. The vital issues tackled in its pages around mental health stigma, recovery, existential dread and trying to be human in a confusing world are themes that many will relate to.

The story is a meditation and celebration of the natural world and friendship.

Available on Kindle

Assemblage

 

He has a heart of gold

Money has ruined him

He doesn’t know who to blame

Buckets of shame

 

The secrets of construction

Rush a broken heart

Place your hand in mine

Let me lead you to the temple of desire

Built to be destroyed

Then looted

Then replicated

Forever more

 

Block thoughts

Cubes of dissonance

He wants to be better

He wants to be fine as he is

The bricks and mortar of sound body and mind

Will never last

 

Your private bomb sanctuary

Is bright red

 

Toxic fury

Unwieldly brain

A fist of neurones and receptors

Tighten

Uneven breath

Unkind words

 

Dust of a nation

Collapse and call us on

Primordial peace

The womb of a dove

Diminished by the dead

 

Still, going nowhere

Built not to last nor rot

Just be

Break bronze idols

Replace with robots