A marker for a new beginning

This post is written with a degree of trepidation. After a gap of almost a year I plan to start again. The last year has been a mad one but I am about to enter a very different phase of life and I hope to have more time for reflection and writing.

I plan to write shorter, more reflective, more regular and, hopefully, more interesting and useful posts. I will aim for most of them to be just a few hundred words with occasional longer more academic ones.

My content will encompass:

• Exploring some themes of contemporary thought that reframe how we engage with landscape and with place
• How these might effect how we relate to the environmental, political and cultural situation we live in
• How they might open up a non-theological way of religious thinking, beyond theism and atheism
• And most importantly, how I am grappling with embodying all of this, how to live it.

My hope is that atleast some of this will be of interest to some, and dialogue might build up around my rather tentative thoughts.

So a new cairn is built in my virtual / physical life – lets hope the path beyond it travels some distance this time!

Failures of Feeling

I have an unfinished entry on Heidegger and our relationship to the earth which has been waiting its final paragraph for weeks, but bloglines drew my attention to this today and one sentence so struck me that it gets in first.

Jeanette Winterson has been one of my favorite writers for years. For anyone who isn’t familiar with her story, she was adopted and brought up by extreme fundamentalism pentecostal parents and left home at 16 with the knowledge that she was gay. She was never reconciled to her ultra extreme mother, who she only ever refers to as Mrs Winterson.

Her father died over Christmas and the article below reflects on that event movingly but for me one sentence  struck me so strongly :

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Nothing more to add – but do read the column.

And if fancy trying her her novels, try Lighthousekeeping or go further back to The Passion or Art & Lies.

In lieu of an ‘About’ page

I will write a more nuanced explanation and context soon but just so I can go public here are some rough thoughts on why I am attempting to blog again.

1)I am doing an MA in Philosophy which is inevitably challenging my thinking in new ways. Whilst I am far too insecure in my thoughts on many of the texts I am studying to voice them publicly there will some responses that I will be interested in trying to articulate in the blog.

2)The garden, the project in Brighton I am involved with, is seeking to re-articulate its vision, develop a more reliable programme of activities, re-think how it operates and re-work its web presence. The vision of the garden and my own thoughts, whilst closely related are independent, so it seemed a good time to create space for me to explore my own thoughs in a way that can hopefully have a strong dialogue with those of the garden but remain separate.

3)Whilst I am extremely engaged with the whole ‘Derrida religion without religion; Zizek materialistic Christianity, Caputo theology of the event’ space (to throw in just a few co-ordinates of the current discussion) I feel that they all fail to engage adequately with our human situatedness as part of the landscape-earth-cosmos. I will save words now and shape this out better in another post but my hope in this blog is to jot on my attempts to weave a single cloth from these threads. Pete Rollins in his response to one of my posts on his blog recently said that to move away from Christianity as a ‘narrative that facilitates a more fully engaged interaction with the world would require the creating of language fit to do that’. I guess I want to try floating a few thoughts that might edge towards a possible new language. Anyway, will try to map this out better soon – for myself  – if no  one else!