I forget how much of a put off it can be for me to write here, if I think I have to have a title to pull it all together. It’s one of the ways we ruined the blogosphere (with a lot of help from Google Reader imho) by making tools that insisted on having a title rather than just being today’s log of the web.

So here’s some of today’s stuff.

I worked yesterday afternoon on an idea about an “alternative oath” that came from Liz Slade Here in the UK, on Saturday we’ve a day of what, supposedly, “we do best” – pomp and pageantry in celebration of a new monarch and his missus. And part of that has been a suggestion that we all pledge an oath of allegiance to C3 (as he’s most efficiently, if not respectfully, called). Rather than kick back hard on that and try to get everyone to directly rebel, Liz suggested accepting that people are free to make the official oath to the King or to refuse to, but they might also like to make a pledge to being the best we can be in society and in relation to all life on this planet. She shared some words in a little group I’m in and as I was in the middle of writing a piece of music that didn’t have any words, I wondered what it would take to make the pledge also be a little song. You won’t be surprised to hear that it took more than I initially thought, that I had to record many many takes and change the words a *lot* before I had something I was happy with sharing with Liz and then even more changes once I’d shared it because that’s one of the points where, regardless of what they say in response, you realise the things that need to change. It’s one of my biggest beefs with being a creative human being – that first drafts are always shit, that fifty-seventh drafts can be as hard to write as the first one and show very little progress.

I’m helping to run an Intergenerational Music Making Hub as part of my community work at church. Today we did #3 of 4 in the current round of experiments with this format – it needs experiments and iteration for the same reasons and with some of the same feelings as expressed in the last sentence of my previous paragraph. It’s always good. Like all the interventions we make around the church building, you can’t go badly wrong as long as you stay human, with a touch of humilty and kindness. There are things we learn all the time, but in a delightfully meta way, that’s one of the things that I’m always learning, that the learning is never going to be finished.

I took my version of the oath/song to the hub and tried it out with people. Ugh. It’s bad enough sharing one of your brain-babies with a group of friends on a private internet forum, but actually playing and singing something new, with people who have *no idea* what you’re trying to do, is the kind of thing that only someone with the temperament of a “Lloyd Davis” would do. I can’t give up these little experiments in stretching people’s experience away from the “way we’ve always done things” along many many dimensions. That’s as much as I can say about it today – btw this was only about 10 minutes out of a ninety-minute session, I don’t want to blow it up as a big disaster that dominated the day – it’s more that I don’t think I know what I think about it yet.

One of the things I heard myself saying after the hub was “the challenge in this kind of work is that people come with some identity based in a group and/or a selfishness or expectation that their individual needs are going to be met and that works against us all doing the same thing together.” – and that feels like something interesting.

Well I had a lot more to say today, but that’s as much as you’re getting – it was a full day.