60 years ago today, my parents (who were engaged to be married) were taking the bus to get into town and had to change by the cricket ground at Edgbaston. That was when they heard the news from Dallas – on a street, in a crowd of people waiting for their bus on a Friday evening.

Further research is required to ascertain whether either of them watched the first episode of Doctor Who the following evening. Personally, I doubt it.

I’ve told the story before about my first experience of downtown Dallas. I was on a train from Chicago to Austin in March 2011 and Dallas was a point where there was an extended stop (half an hour or so) to change engines. I like to think that there are northern engines that can handle Chicago winter and southern engines that are more at home once you get into Texas, but I’ve never dug deep into that one. Anyway. Some friends that I’d made on board and I decided to take a little walk while we were waiting and strolled along the road. As we got into the more built-up area, I started having the weirdest feeling of deja-vu, or really that I’d been there before, but I knew the nearest I’d gotten was to change flights at Dallas-Fort Worth once. But then, as I looked, I saw a sign saying we were in Dealey Plaza and everything suddenly fell into place and came into focus. Those familiar landmarks of the railway bridge crossing the road, the green spaces (one might call one of them a ‘knoll’), the tall redbrick buildings all revealed themselves to be the backdrop of that dramatic day, the location for the Zapruder film, a place where a man got shot and the world shifted. I tend not to want to travel to places just to see sights – to be in places where things happened. I’m more interested in the people who are here and now and what’s going on today, but this shocked me out of that present perspective and said “Oi. There’s something else to pay attention to!”

I’ve had time to think a bit more about the thing I went to last night. I think what disturbed me was focusing on the testimony of the newly converted, or as we call them in recovery circles “the newcomer”. In AA, the newcomer is often described as “the most important person in the room”. This is not just to flatter them into staying (although it worked on me!) it’s also a reminder to the rest of us that a big part of the work is “giving away what we were so generously given ourselves”. Our own recovery depends more on being able to help someone who has no hope than it does on sitting around with the same bunch of folk reinforcing our well-worn stories. And that means that the newcomer needs to be welcome, but also to recognise that they have more to hear than they have to say. Much is made in media portrayals of our meetings of the poor addict who wanders in and gets to tell their story for the first time – it’s great drama, but the more important stuff comes after that, when they sit quietly and hear the testimonies of other people who’ve been in a similar predicament – not telling them what to do, but just letting them know that they’re in the right place, and importantly that there is a solution and it’s a spiritual one. This, of course, is an ideal that is practiced less than 100% and often the newcomer has to step over the line in order to know there is a line (as do we all at times). The bottom line is: just because you’re the most important person in the room, doesn’t mean you get to dominate the space or preach to everyone.

I had a lot of love for Martin and Paul telling their stories of coming to their brand of faith, but the setting was confusing, because people who stand at the front on a platform with a mic (whether it works or not) are taken to be the ones who have more important things to say than everyone else and then the Q&A reinforces that. It’s not that I was desperate to tell my own story, just that it felt off, like the content was being shoehorned into a format that didn’t quite fit. So you can see I’ve thought it through a little, but not completely.

Yesterday, I said in a team meeting that I needed to be working out in the open more. Very soon after, I got an invitation to go to a thing tonight, coincidentally featuring someone who is associated with Black Elephant. Fun.

But really working out loud or working in the open is not restricted to going outside and talking to people (the horror!). It means this place. Or this place and all the other places that I have a tense relationship with – the places we’ve come to call social media, but only because “soul- and relationship-destroying online social networks that feed us more crap than the mainstream media every dreamed of” is a bit of a mouthful.

When I first heard that phrase “social media” it was at a conference, probably in 2005 or 2006. It got an immediate “ugh” from me. At the time I was doing that thing where I’d turn up to a conference and record the speakers (with or without their permission or knowledge) and then publish it online, and everybody (I spoke to) thought it was great. People started paying me to do it for them and to create an RSS feed for them as podcasts. Until they didn’t. Until they (or someone in legal) thought through the ramifications because this did seem to be becoming the new normal and maybe people wouldn’t go to the conferences if they could get them free or bootlegged. Ah well, by that time, I’d got new fish to fry. But anyway, the point is that making media was only the means to an end, it was a way of me thinking out loud and making things that other people could reflect on and think about too. And that’s what this place ought to be too, certainly not a place where media is made or *shudder*… content!

I’ve spent much of today working on a new deck for Black Elephant. And I’m still getting used to how to do this sort of work remotely in a team that exists separately in England, Greece and Mali (at least we’re vaguely on the same time zone). Yesterday we just had a bunch of text and the old deck. First thing this morning we had a first draft of the deck and we spent almost an hour in our morning meeting talking through what was needed. Then two of us worked together in Google Sheets to pull in stuff that we’ve used before and amend new stuff and put new ideas in. Just as with blogging, the writing of these things is the thinking. It’s really hard (for me) to think through an idea for a slide or set of slides without typing something out and then looking at it and realising that it’s wrong and going back over and over. This is the work today. We have a better draft. And as the cult of done manifesto says: “Accept that everything is a draft, it helps to get things done.”

And so this evening to St Ethelburga’s in the City, y’know the one just along from St Mary’s Axe that was blown up by the IRA and is now a Peace and Reconciliation Centre. I heard Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw talk about Seeking God in Wild Places. I don’t know what I think about it yet, so don’t ask me. No, I’m on the train and it’s nearly 9:30pm and it’s getting more and more crowded because there’s only 5 carriages and everyone’s trying to get home.

I can’t believe it’s four years since we went to Iceland and then I came back and started work in the church.

When people say “We’ve had enough of the madness” I hope that’s true, but I know that I’ve said it about my own odd choices and divergences and it takes longer than we think. Nonetheless, “the best way out is through” (according to Robert Frost) and we just have to keep trudging.

We smashed the windows of a major bank. A jury acquitted us. This is why – Gully Bujak in the Guardian.

There’s a bit in here about people’s assemblies. I went to a thing at Nesta last week about similar forms of democratic infrastructure that might be an antidote to our current quagmire and impending authoritarianism. Of course though, it’s complicated and in particular, it’s tempting to end up talking about such processes coming to a “better” conclusion, when what we really hope is that means they agree more often with what we believe in and we get our own, “enlightened, progressive” way.

I’d quite like to write some more here, but as is the way when one has “a job”, there’s always another meeting in the way… or somewhere to go. Tomorrow is another day.

Oh and, just a note really that there’s something rumbling in me about coming back to blogging as a remedy for all the splintered remains of the the former microblog monolith. Something about what I need to say, what needs to be said in public, and how my thinking just benefits from me expressing it in a place that’s mine, regardless of which platform you end up reading it through. Sorry, that’s a bit of blogging about blogging again, but I do notice that I’m not being as open and transparent about my work as I used to be and that there’s an irony in it being even easier to publish than ever before (technologically) but the culture into which the writing goes makes it more difficult (at least for sensitive souls like me).

PS. I’m also going to do something about the ads that appear here. If you look and go “what ads?” I’ll have done it properly!

I’ve recently started working with Black Elephant, which is a movement dedicated to building connection through more open, honest conversations among truly diverse groups of people. I believe that this kind of connection, and the sense of belonging that can come from it, should be available to everyone.

The basic unit of our work is a 90-minute meeting called a “parade” (cos that’s a cute name for a group of Elephants, and feels nicer than calling your friends “a herd”). There are some in-person parades, but at the moment, most are online (on Zoom). They’re different from other video conference meetings in a couple of ways:

• there’s a simple structure, with no talking over each other. A couple of days before the event, everyone gets a couple of questions to reflect on and to answer when we get together. These are designed to get us talking about real life, the world and how we feel about it, rather than to stimulate an intellectual debate. There really are no wrong answers and you can reveal as much or as little as you feel comfortable with in the group. No-one will comment on what you’ve said. We just hear each other. We also do very simple intro and outro rounds to top and tail the meeting.
• everyone is there as a peer, these are groups for mutual connection, support and partnership, and although there’s a host who runs the process, we’re doing our best to make sure it’s not “us and them” – the host shares of themselves in just the same way as everyone else.
• everyone gets the same amount of time to share – it depends on the size of the group, but it’s usually about three minutes each per question.

I’m starting my own parade “On Golden Sands” (a slightly ironic reference to my local “beach”) on Thursday mornings at 11am-12:30pm UK Time.

If you’ve been to meetings with me before online or off-, you’ll know that I’m a fan of “as much structure as we need to make something useful happen, and no more”. This format has more structure than something like Tuttle, but not much.

If you’d like to come along, let me know. The first is next Thursday, 21st September 2023 I’m limiting them to 10 people including me, and I want to ensure diversity within parades, so we might need to have some to-and-fro over which week you come. You can also sign up on https://blackelephant.app and then you’ll be able to see the other parades that are available and request a slot on one of them (note that all the times on the site are GMT/UTC – welcome to global community building!)

You might remember a little piece I shared a few weeks ago about the idea of Black Elephants. Well, part of my re-ignited interest was in watching how some folk had taken the idea and the name and made a thing out of it.

And now I’m going to work for them!

First off, I should explain that we’re not creating any new Black Elephants (of the type I originally formulated…) it’s much more about creating communities where we can live better in a world that recognises Black Elephants abound.

So it’s not a straightforward thing to describe (which, as you can imagine, ws a big draw for me!) but it’s a kind of mix of social network and social movement. And the movement bit is the most important – I say that because I see so many people jumping on the “make a movement” bandwagon these days. And I’ve learned quite a lot about making them over the years and it makes be cross when I see people kind of “movement-washing” their essentially extractive and exploitative business. I’m glad to say that Black Elephant (the network/movement) is *not* like that. When they talk about the vision to embrace and encourage *true* diversity as well as to create spaces where people can be themselves and authentically (and safely!) use acts of vulnerability to help build real connection, I believe them – because that’s what I’ve experienced in their meetings.

Over the last year, I’ve been to a few of the meetings (called “parades”) which are gatherings of half-a-dozen or so people (mostly online, but sometimes off-) with a couple of questions set for each parade as the basic structure of the conversation. Turns are taken by passing a virtual baton to each other and there’s no feedback or discussion of what you say, just a place to reflect on something among different folk and hear other points of view. The most noticeable feature to me is that you really do get to meet people you wouldn’t in most other settings. It’s not just for worthy white-folks in Northern Europe or the USA! This piece from Rhyd Wildermuth is a really good summary of what’s going on – I’m not going to try to rewrite it, go and read the whole thing.

And so that’s why I’m going to work on this for a bit. Because I’m up for making spaces like this and I think we can do it well together, while also building something sustainable – a business-like movement, rather than a movement-like business.

So wipe down your RSS reader and look out for heavier elephant-related bloggage as I think aloud a bit more about what I’m doing with them. It isn’t all high-falutin. strategic hand-waving, there’ll be stuff about the practicalities and difficulties of building a new network like this, and scaling globally, without breaking the concept or the people involved. But I can already tell it’s going to be fun and very worthwhile.

It’s two weeks now since I finished my job as Community Worker at the local United Reformed Church and I’ve had some time to think through what I think about the last three and a half years of practicing community in an explicitly spiritual context – that’s how, when I started, I set my own intention for learning, it was the main thing that seemed different to me about the work that I’d done before. There is, I think by (at least my own) definition, something spiritual about social art of any kind, just because it’s always made of people and the thing that connects people, in my view without any idea of religion or faith or science or anything else) is the thing that I would describe as spirit. I finished on my fifty-eight-and-a-halfth birthday, a couple of days after the solstice, a good time to review and think about what’s left of this year.

There are some things that I’ve learned about myself and how I work.

During this time, I grew in my realisation that the thing that had always been different about me in school and the workplace, my relationship with time and other structure, my need for variety, my difficulty maintaining attention and capacity in certain situations was still a thing, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it or improve myself. And that led me to get a diagnosis of ADHD and some understanding of how I need to work differently and ask for allowances to be made even though I’m horribly embarrassed to do so. For example, I was contracted to work 18 hours a week. I tried many different configurations of hours across the week but all of them left me either exhausted or confused or over-compensating to meet my perception of other people’s expectations. And empirically, even given the pandemic and this time of getting used to working with my ADHD, I wasn’t able to do much other work outside of the 18 hours I was committed to – and this was the deal I’d done with myself when taking a relatively low-paid, local job with a regular commitment: that I would be able to balance it with higher-paid freelance work, but that just didn’t happen. That’s not only been financially difficult (although the regularity of knowing I’d be paid a salary every month has been lovely) it’s meant that I’ve really felt like I’ve fallen behind with my community and my practice. The one area that I’ve been able to make some progress in has been my music – I guess because a) it’s a thing that I’ve been able to incorporate easily into the church community work; b) it’s a much easier thing to pick up and do half an hour of (and it’s a good balm for ADHD overwhelm) and c) because I know that it’s really my core practice and always has been.

And then there are things that I’ve learned about community building. These might arise from pathologies of mine, or of this church, but I think they’re more general than that.

I’ve become (even) more aware of the importance of varying tempo. I came a cropper during the pandemic when I was tempted to do everything every week. A weekly rhythm is good for some things (dementia café, community lunch) but monthly is better for others (a cooked lunch for older people, book club, a bigger intergenerational music group) and six monthly or annually works too, but only if you can take a break from the things that happen weekly for the biggies. Christmas and Easter are, predictably, busy for everyone in church. I think, if I were starting again, I’d go more gently with fewer things rather than trying to crack every nut at once.

A related issue is scale – there’s a temptation (that word again!) to just try to get everything as big as possible, serving as many people as possible and while it’s true that in this situation, one of the problems in doing this was the difficulty of growing our capacity to serve bigger groups, I think, on reflection, I’d like to have introduced some nuance into what scale is appropriate to which kind of activity. I had some really valuable (mutually so) interactions with people when there were fewer people around than we’d expected. And there are things that I wish I’d allowed to grow more by experimenting with letting them be less personal and intimate.

I repeatedly experienced the clash between supporting community and generating revenue – this isn’t new and it’s not just about this church or churches generally. It was a good space though in which to consider how to use space, how to share space, what limits you need to put on people using the space and how the organisation’s relationship with people who use the building is affected by money being involved. We had a few opportunities to look at whether we wanted to keep doing something for the money that might be getting in the way of helping people.

I think there’s a much bigger thing about what church is for now, where the line lies between church as a group of people and church as a building, how to know when to let an institution die or transform and when to put all your energy into keeping it alive and growing. And if a church (building or community) needs to die, how to give it a good end. There’s also something about the use of places of worship in the wider community – these buildings that are no-go areas for lots of people, for various reasons, but which could be doing much more to provide what people really need.

Overall, the idea of this job was to help reduce loneliness and social isolation in the town. I feel like I did some of that, but there’s so much more to do and I think it needs something more focused on personal and interpersonal development as well as changes in the social institutions we have. That’s where I find myself now, thinking about that.

Anyone reading my blog for the first time, please know that this isn’t meant to be a polished essay, it’s a learning in progress and I may have left something out or over-emphasised something. It helps me to be saying something and I’m interested in what other people think.

I’ve been reminded by Dougald in the comments of his latest newsletter that I did a bad thing. I posted some writing on Facebook that really should have been on the open web. I remember writing it, on 24 April 2019 – we were having new carpets fitted – but I don’t know why it went into that walled garden, it probably made sense at the time (actually seeing the tags of people’s names, I probably just wanted to alert them in an easier way than emailing them to say “Hey guys, pay attention to me!”). Of course a year later we were being trampled by the Elephant of global pandemic. And today’s news is of the possible collapse of Thames Water. They just keep coming!

That last but one paragraph that I’ve emboldened looks like it might be useful to dig into, eh?

I woke up with an “excessive-certainty” hangover – it comes from hanging out with people who seem absolutely sure of their rightness and are very reluctant to consider theories other than their own. The usual disclaimers about “people” apply – namely “no, not all people, obvs” and “yeah I’m a people too”. It can sometimes be difficult to spot, especially if you broadly agree on things, but there’s a vibe that I definitely notice the lack of, the morning after.

I get talking to people often about the parallels between recovery from addiction and the “state the world’s in right now”. It’s an interesting way to look at things – it’s hard to argue against the idea that we’re addicted to growth for example. But talking about it with people who’ve little direct experience of recovery is different from talking to those who’ve sat in the ruins of their life and had to have a good look at themselves. And yeah, I think there’s something more to write about the more complex dynamics of addictive behaviour in relation to how we think about climate crisis *and* think about our ways of helping each other deal with it. It’s a bit fuzzy at the moment, but I hope to get it more in focus.

There’s another something that’s taking shape in my mind around creative collaboration (and the late, lamented “Centre for…”), scenius, regrowing a living culture, empty shops, local democracy and resilience, finding different ways of looking after each other, y’know, the usual. And yeah, it’s as well-thought through as that.

I thought we had a power cut the other day. I thought that it was just coincidental that everything went off just as I was turning the oven on for dinner. So I waited and looked outside to see what was going on in the rest of the street (nothing) and looked on Twitter (nothing) and so looked on the UK Power (or whatever) website which said nothing had been reported in my postcode so please tell us what’s happened. And that got me muttering under my breath about useless infrastructure and privatised utilities and bastard Tories and all that. But hey, look at the first paragraph of this post – “excessive certainty” I was sure, because I’d seen other people elsewhere, earlier talking about having their power off, that this was just another slippery slide towards anarchy and chaos. My certainty extended even as far as me looking at the fuse board and being sure that nothing had tripped when the nice man from the infrastructure bastards called me back. But no, taking it slowly and going and turning everything off, resetting the trip switches and then turning things back on one by one meant that I now know that it was the oven and it was no coincidence – I was wrong.