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All posts for the month June, 2013

Carpe Diem

Posted by geoffmead on June 23, 2013
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The carp he is a wily beast
All day he makes me wait.
I cannot tempt him in the least
He scorns my meagre bait.

I’ve never caught his like before
Not once in all my days.
I’ve studied ancient fishing lore
And tried the modern ways

I’ve hung from trees and paddled boats,
I’ve hidden in the weeds,
I’ve camouflaged my fishing floats
And cast among the reeds.

But nothing yet has brought success
In this elusive chase.
I’m much distressed as you can guess
‘Cos I am losing face.

My brother Pete is next to me
Upon the lakeside shore
He never catches less you see
He always catches more

It’s getting late, I’m desperate
To catch this noble fish.
O gods take pity on my fate
And grant my fervent wish.

I dress the hook with luncheon meat
The best that we could buy
I sit down on the fishing seat
To give it one last try

There’s my float out on the water
And underneath, the fish.
Carp he nibbles just a quarter,
A dainty little dish.

Suddenly he makes a blunder,
He grabs the bloomin’ lot.
Like a flash the float goes under.
Oh what a silly clot!

I lift my rod and strike it home
The hook is in his lip.
No matter where he wants to roam
He won’t give me the slip.

He ducks and dives, he twists and weaves
Across the murky lake.
He thinks he’s free, he misconceives,
He’s heading for the take.

He’s on the line, he’s mine all mine
From tip to taily fin.
His head is up! A certain sign
That he is all done in.

I haul him to the landing net
And get him on dry land.
8 lbs, says Pete, I’d like to bet.
Here let me take your hand.

O little brother do not wince,
No need to look forlorn,
You’ve just caught the biggest fish since…
The biggest fish… since you were born.

I smile, I grin, I laugh aloud
At his cack-handed praise.
I’ve made my older brother proud
This is the day of days.

Fleshy Bodies

Posted by geoffmead on June 18, 2013
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During our week at Uley (see last post) Alan Woods, a fellow-member of the Artful Leadership Collective, suggested that we explore the embodied nature of our knowing by drawing life-sized outlines of our bodies on huge sheets of paper and then intuitively illuminating them with colour.

It was a brilliantly simple and profound exercise. The images quickly took on the unique form and character of each artist, revealing our life-and-death relationships with our own fleshy bodies: shimmering lines of energy; wildly imagined limbs; looping twisted guts; pierced bloody organs; flowing lines and harsh sudden marks.

When they were all finished, the whole group explored the aesthetics and meanings of each self-portrait. The discussions were surprisingly intimate as our sense of embodied selfhood revealed itself subtly (and sometimes dramatically) under our collective gaze.

My image was likened by someone to that of the Cerne Abbas giant – although without the club and obvious erection – and I did indeed feel disconnected from it, unable to inhabit the distorted pain-filled body I had drawn. I added the small figure of a man standing on the giant’s foot; “I’m alright,” he seems to say. “I’m real. This other thing is just a projection.” He feels somehow more substantial and larger than the giant; he gives me a voice that enables me to reclaim myself. I like this defiant, life-affirming, articulate part of myself.

Towards the end of our time together, the group created a “word-hoard” – nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs – on separate pieces of paper that we laid out on the floor to make a single poetic statement about the experience of embodied image-making we had shared in the previous 48 hours. Some of us (the 5 men as it turned out) then drew on what we had collectively created to write individual poems. Here they are, strangely beautiful, with sincere thanks to fellow artful inquirers: Alan, Bethany, Chris, Doug, Ellie, James, Marcelo, and Sarah.

Untitled (Geoff)
Wounded circling darkness
flows over a fiery archipelago
of falling fleshy blood.

The mythical flood
radiates sensual compassion
in a majestic patterning dance.

We tiptoe in vital mud
pierced by healing waves
as the spirited ground spins free.

Reach forth bold sprite;
trust the maelstrom.
Love joyfully.

The Falling  (Alan)
Bodily bold, I the man, became fluid
Falling with all my flowing, fleshy blood
Splittering and splattering into the dark pools of sensual compassion below

Pierced by knowledge
I can stretch my trust through fleshy space
Reaching and spinning to the shoreline
And emerge from the vital mud spirited by lightening
I joyfully know my grounded fleshy heart, skin deep and with deep, majestic flesh.

Embodied Life Forces (Marcelo)
bodily surface becoming fluid
a cruel dance of forces
patterning

sensual mud, flowing as blood
circling, spinning confidently
through the pierced flesh

slithering forces dance
transmutating our
ephemeral archipelago

Becoming (James)
Reach out in a fiery dance of love,
Be bold, moving through shadow to a spirited darkness and a glowing glee.
Meet me at the ground of our becoming,
Through vital mud, tiptoe to me.

Untitled (Doug)
Love fiercely and
trust through fleshy wounding
when darkness radiates and floods the heart.

Witnessing presence, sets compassion free.
Grounded spirit, emerging healing, majestic life.

How can we show up
as the people who have lived these lives?
How can we live present to loving purpose?

Out of Eden

Posted by geoffmead on June 16, 2013
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flower

I’ve just spent a fascinating week in Uley (Gloucestershire) with my partner Chris Seeley and 7 other friends and colleagues from the Artful Leadership Collective exploring our practices as teachers, leaders, facilitators, consultants, artists, storytellers, writers.

On the second day we considered two main questions: What does it mean to live and work artfully; and what is our relationship with our own practice? We began by making images in response to the questions before discussing them.

Using my intuition rather than following a preconceived plan, I drew the picture above. The flower came first, rising out of multi-coloured  foliage; then the seeds blown on the wind and settling beyond my ken; last the randomly distributed letters of the alphabet.

A key idea to emerge as we interrogated the images to see what they revealed about artful practice was that of “wilding” – of stepping outside the neatly cultivated conventions of the system-world to revel in the abundant fecundity of the life-world. We realised that in different ways, we all invited our clients to recognise and trust their own wild beauty and intelligence.

My picture reflects an aspiration to re-enchant the world through language, scattering my words like wild flower seeds in blogs, books, storytelling performances and workshops. I’m more naturally a wordsmith than a visual artist, so I’ve turned to poetry to portray what I think about the joys of living and playing outside the garden.

Leave the rows of scented stocks;
Walk among the hollyhocks
In the forest and the glade,
Camouflaged by dappled shade.

In the garden life is tame:
All the flowers just the same.
But it’s clear in every child
That our nature’s to be wild.

Humans do their maker wrong
Living where they don’t belong.
Let the heart speak, let it yearn.
Let the spark of wildness burn.

Blossom forth and take your place,
Feel the breeze upon your face,
Bathe your soul in summer rain,
Bask in sunlight once again.

Missing the Boat

Posted by geoffmead on June 6, 2013
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titanic

In 1997, like millions of others, I went to the cinema to see James Cameron’s epic film Titanic. I sat unmoved as Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet went through their romantic shenanigans but driving home afterwards, I suddenly found myself weeping for the needless folly of it all. Why hadn’t the captain and crew turned the boat sooner? Why had they disregarded the warnings? Why had they all been so besotted by their own myth that they hadn’t seen disaster looming?

I was reminded of this moment recently, reading page 100 of Thomas Berry’s book The Great Work, a meditation on the state of our planet and a call for action.

Long before the collision those in command had abundant evidence that icebergs lay ahead. The course had been set, however, and no-one wished to alter its direction. Confidence in the survival capacities of the ship was unbounded. Already there were a multitude of concerns in carrying out the normal routine of a voyage. What happened to that “unsinkable” ship is a kind of parable for us, since only in the most dire of situations do we have the psychic energy needed to examine our way of acting on the scale that is now required. The daily concerns over the care of the ship and its passengers needed to be set aside for a more urgent concern, the well-being of the ship itself.

Berry’s use of the Titanic metaphor piqued my interest so I trawled the internet for some more historical details of the actual event. I read the stories of survivors and of some who had planned to make the voyage but had changed their minds for various reasons: family affairs, illness, urgent business elsewhere, etc.

My favourite “missing the boat” story was that of a certain Mr. Frank Carlson who, at 8.10pm on Wednesday 10 April 1912 as the Titanic slipped its moorings at Cherbourg, was standing at the side of the road 5O miles away kicking the tyres of his broken down car in frustration, a first class ticket for New York in his back pocket.

Of course, we cannot miss the boat or jump ship. For good or ill, we are all on board and there are no lifeboats. There will be no lucky escapes, no survivors, if our ship goes down. I don’t know if there is yet time to avoid the iceberg but there’s no doubt that we are still going full steam ahead and it’s pretty clear that those on the bridge aren’t listening to the warnings from the crow’s nest.

We first class passengers, in the industrialised world, wrangling over our perquisites and privileges aren’t making life any easier. It’s time for us to take more interest in where we are going and to decide that rearranging the deckchairs to get a better place in the sun is not our main priority, for there’ll be no-one left to weep at our folly if we don’t.