What Actors Know, Self-With-Others & Other Writings
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To conform or to rebel (or both)?
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Mouse in the House
Furry teachers of compassion It’s mouse-in-the-house time of year again. Technically (having caught two of the buggers today), it’s mice-in-the-hice time of year. I love mice. They’re beautiful creatures: sweet, funny, resourceful. There’s some in the compost bin in my garden. I take out food scraps and hear them cheer. What I throw away makes…
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The ‘Privilege’ of Boarding School
A process of healing With my colleague Sorrel Pindar, I’ve been putting together a programme for Boarding School Survivors. You can find out more about it here. We explore strategies for moving beyond a sense of disconnection, isolation and anxiety. Sorrel and I both trace these feelings back to having been sent to Boarding School…
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3 Questions For Effective Collaboration
There’s two concepts in Systems Theory that are really useful if you want to build effective teams and collaborations. A ‘system’ is a network of relationships created when different elements work together. A forest is a system — various trees, plants, fungi, insects, animals, birds, minerals and much more interconnect to create the system we…
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Naked In Front of the Villlage
How Improvising saved my ass. Some years ago I toured a solo show. It was called ‘Echo Chamber’. At that time, I taught all over the world, and was often asked to perform ‘Echo Chamber’ alongside teaching gigs. It was a hard-hitting piece: full of violence, nudity and some pretty dark material. It was tough…
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Under capitalism, it does not matter if I die
3 transformative ideas to put people back into the centre of politics. About five months ago I realised my heart was playing up again. It’s happened before. A few years ago I had a heart attack. Back then, I was on the waiting list for a scan. The scan hadn’t happened because I’d left it…
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The shortest day: mental health in a time of change
We’ve reached the shortest day — at least here in the Northern hemisphere. Maximum darkness. Minimum light. As I look at the storm outside my study window, though it’s daytime, it’s gloomy. Barely above half-light. The clouds are low and dense. Everything, sky, earth, trees, the very air itself, sucks light in and gives out…
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Perfect moments: Finding beauty in the present
I sat last night in my kitchen. Wooden table and white wooden chairs. Outside the wind was, for a while, stilled. No stars. I live in a very quiet place. A few white houses. Fields. Some trees. Peat bog. Behind the house, beyond the hill, ocean. I hear the waves some days. A lighthouse up…
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Marketing Alchemy: Turning Gold into Crap.
Apparently ‘authentic’ is word of the year. Dec 26, 2023 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary just announced that ‘authentic’ is their ‘word of the year’. Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about ‘Authenticity’. I thought I’d reconsider what I wrote back then. Does it still stand up, in a marketing world obsessed with selling ‘the real’…
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Feeling like I belong: recovering from boarding school.
Christmas used to be a time of isolation. Slowly, that’s changing. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me. There’s a tension between what we’re told it is — togetherness, family, community, peace, joy, generosity — and how I experienced it. I’ve always experienced it as a time of heightened anxiety and uncertainty. The…