Thursday 13 October 2011

Sketches of Spain 2 - A Walk Into Aracena


Sustained heat has a smell, in the same way that damp has. Damp’s smell, I am more familiar with. It is an amalgam that enfolds other scents, and with Autumn coming, leaves falling, mulching leaves will soon become part of its odour. I assume sustained heat has a variability too, but I am new to it, becoming aware of it, aware of its possibility, which is obvious now, when I walked down the track for the first time from Finca el Tornero, where I was staying with Dark Angels, into the town of Aracena.

The landscape around the town of Aracena was foreign at first, dry, dusty, with chestnut trees, cork trees populating the hill sides, shading pigs, wild boar, wild mushrooms sprouting, occasional fig trees and vegetable plots. White houses dot the landscape, with a lake shimmering in the mid-day heat far behind me. Men are unloading horses to work in a ring. On my walk back, I will see one of them, further down the road, and even though I do not ride, I work with enough riders to see the stillness and quality of how he sits on the horse. There is a unity between man and horse, that demonstrates a working skill – this is a man who can ride a horse not just for pleasure but as a working animal. He looks back at my staring wonder, clearly puzzled not perhaps realising the full extent of the appreciation of the man in the Panama hat. It is always a rare privilege to watch someone use themselves well, demonstrate a skill, that demonstrability lies in its very ease, lack of effort, its stillness.

Stillness in action, stillness before action, stillness before words, 'negative capability' as Keats called it. The waiting to hear the word, see a way forward, thinking as Heidegger would have it. Poise and balance, freedom in thought and action, as Alexander would will it. These are not simply abstract notions but the concrete realities of a living life discovered, and rediscovered in any skilled activity, that benefits from poise, balance and thought, as exemplified by a man on a horse.

Next week, will once again see me in Spain, when I will get round to thanking my fellow Dark Angels as promised last week.

Thursday 6 October 2011

Sketches of Spain 1 - A Warm Thank You To Dark Angels

I find it is always good to stretch myself, try new things, find myself on the other side of learning, remembering what it is like to be new to something. So it was last week when I was in Spain, doing a writing course, which not surprisingly, since it was a writing course for business, was full of professional writers. Who were all frighteningly good, when it came to writing, leaving me somewhat nervous as, apart from this blog, I do little writing that is for public consumption. My normal use of language is spoken, conversational, looking to help people turn things around and in therapy part of this work is to find words and work with stories – which is why I came to be in Spain with Dark Angels. Who are specialists in myth, stories, branding and communication and whose mission is to help people use words more ‘engagingly and imaginatively within the business environment’. My mission was in part to learn to write better for public consumption, it is increasingly part of my job, and then perhaps more importantly to see what I could borrow from the Dark Angels cookbook and introduce to therapeutic practice. Two exercises have proved readily adaptable and are likely to be part of my repertoire for years to come. The first is the six-word story, the second is more adapted and invites clients to write a poem by completing some lines to say for example, why they are sad or angry. The poems have been moving in themselves but more importantly have allowed words to be attached to feelings, feelings placed in context, the non-verbal to become verbal, which allows for further elaboration of and the opening of new avenues for exploration and reconstruction. The six-word story offers a similar potential by taking a fragment of speech, and asking clients to take it as a story and elaborate their meaning world from there. Both are simple tools readily adapted from the world of business, which like the world of therapy and the world in general, moves in narratives, with characters acting out their roles in their respective worlds, roles which can enhance people’s lives or harm them. In the therapy I practice, PCP, we use self-characterisations, as an assessment and research tool, and the nice thing is that the person completing them, gets to become their own researcher and are hopefully not then trapped in some interpretation of the therapist – meaning here is always to be negotiated. So it is with business writing, similar skills, standing in the shoes of the client and a Dark Angels exercise similar to a self-characterisation. There are differences of course, important differences, but as with most things, many skills cross contexts, and by the end of the course I am happy with what I have written, and know that I can write. Dark Angels give you wings to fly as a writer way beyond the world of business and they have much to teach beyond that world too. I'll be returning to Spain and Dark Angels again next week, in the meantime my thanks to Stuart Delves and John Simmons – two of the best trainers I have worked with. Also, thanks to my fellow Dark Angels, who will get a personal mention next time.