Today I read Won’t you celebrate with me, Lucille Clifton’s magnificent poem to honour her own triumphant arrival. It’s a short but wonderfully joyous poem, and my stomach churned in what I hoped was wild, untrammelled admiration when reading it.

i had no model… what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up

I might have seen myself there; and I might have seen my closest friends. I certainly read a story that I knew.

A story of emergence.

I’ve heard so many of us coaches talk about what we mean when we talk about emergence. About responding to the moments that we find ourselves in when working with individuals, teams and groups. I’ve talked a load of crap about it myself.

As if emergence was a stance I could tap into. An encounter I could somehow colonise and use to develop others. A moment when I could respond to what I thought was happening in a room. A fancy term for coming unprepared.

Emergence in mood. Emergence in temperature. Emergence in inquiry. Emergence in relationships. Emergence in participants.

Not. Emergence. In. Me.

But somehow, as I read the poem, I’m finding myself walking what Lucille calls this bridge between starshine and clay; I’m sensing that it’s maybe not like any of that at all.

From somewhere in the space between mystery and the knowing that I cling onto, I’m stumbling my way into an understanding that maybe an emergent coaching or facilitative stance is one in which we all become. Whomever ‘all’ might mean, and whatever ‘become’ might feel like

And that going there could scare the living shit out of me.

You see, it’s striking me that emergence may well be a thing we do together. Not me facilitating them. Not me observing and seeking to respond with wisdom. Not … the nots go on, and on the more I open up my soul to it.

I’m listening to that churning as I write these lines. It’s acting as a divining rod for what, if I were braver, I might call insight. And I’m wondering if, when I come to the end of all these nots, perhaps it will divine a sort of is.

I could write a thesis on emergence. I could list the papers on stuff like Constructivist Grounded Theory and/or the five friggin action research cycles to facilitate human potential. Clever stuff like that. Stuff for using with (read: doing to) my coachees and those with whom I sometimes work. But does a thesis ever touch a human soul? I have absolutely no idea.

And then I think of ice, a glass of water and what happens when they meet.

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And that feels like the point at which I find an is.

I’m not sure how to put this without losing myself in mad abstractions, but I’ll have a go.

When freezing ice cubes meet a glass of tepid water, everybody in the meeting changes. The ice doesn’t allow coldness to emerge in the water. It melts into the water. Water emerges in the ice, and coldness emerges in the water. And both have to let go of what they were before the meeting started.

Both have to let go of who they were before the encounter started.

Both have to let go.

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Then, a few days later, I came across Here.

I’ve never really listened much to Mumford & Sons. That whole banjos-and-jumping-about-while-singing-in-an-accent-that’s-not-your-own vibe that characterised their first compilation kept me at bay for years. But Here, when it found me, had something to say to me.

I can’t turn every sentence into an artful metaphor to make professional self-disclosure a bit more sexy. That would be more sickeningly self-indulgent than I could cope with. However, some of the lines, when I opened up to them, were pretty fecking challenging.

Though I came here to explore. Not confess.

The run of living-as-performance artefacts dotted around the song got me thinking first. I mean, final serenades, saved pictures, and incomplete songs might all appear without apology in any airport display of spiritual self-help books. And maybe in a few ‘how-to’ coaching textbooks too.

And, for sure, they might not have felt too out of place in some of the metaphor-laden coaching conversations I may have been party to co-creating.

Although I really hope they would have.

Those, however, are the easy metaphors. So far I’ve been deep diving into three or four that have been way more challenging. The stuff that feels like he’s laying down rather than simply pointing at.

The gun and blade line is magnificent.

Is there anything about myself, or my beliefs, that I may have felt I needed to protect in the coaching room? Did my self-protecting ever manifest as attack? And whether it did or didn’t, what damage might my gun and blade have inflicted, in the moment that I turned to them, on the level of togetherness we’re building?

What about my need for financial or emotional security? For me, those have always been hard ones to throw on the table. The bills I need to pay, my personal lifelong broken places - shit like that keeps hovering in view. I have no idea what disturbance it might create when and if it enters my client’s view as well. Are credit cards, the key to life?

Marcus Mumford, you’re nailing my human condition well here.

And as for that line about a trophy with my name on it? That one cuts deep.

It’s so easy for me to fall into the old credentialising trap. The LinkedIn post-nominals, the books and gurus quoted, the personal book and research paper citations. The crap that makes an average guy like me feel in some illusory way significant. They’re all trophies that bear my name.

Might they be ways of covering up my shame about whatever insignificant thing it is about me that I find unsettling? Or my feeble attempt to prove that I matter to my colleagues and my clients?

And if they are, once I let them into a room of any sort, what is it that they really say about me?

And as for the substance that I maybe crave?

Ah now, Ian, we’re getting to the nub.

Why am I really here in this coaching room? What is it in me that draws me here? Whose cravings and longings are being met? And how much might this matter anyway?

Perhaps Lacan had it nailed when he said that I crave and long because … Ah, shit, there I go again, reaching for the guru’s blessing.

But if I’m surrendering to a lifetime longing, is my client surrendering as well? Are we just two longing souls meeting in this conversation? And if we are, is that ok? And if it’s not ok, what must I do?

Does the pact we’re making ever need more from us than acknowledgement?

Then

Can we swear that we can forget?

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The day, according to the good book Google, on which I formally embraced ‘middle old age.’

I didn’t feel it, but then again, I didn’t find myself raging against the dying of the light either. Day 27,010 of my life felt pretty much like many of the others that had gone before.

In the weeks on either side of that day, I’ve spent time with family and other people who have meant a lot to me across those, now, 27,024 of those days.

I spoke to an old pal yesterday (met him in July 1965), spent time with my first friend (met her the day she was born; I was 16 days old), watched a close friend (March 2001) light up a stage in Dublin, and caught up several times with my business partner (March 2015). I do, to the best of my knowledge, have more than four friends - but I’m not here to reproduce my iPhone contacts list, so I hope you get the drift.

Recently, someone told me I was now an ‘elder’ - and for a moment (ok, a tad longer than that) I embraced the archetype. But it didn’t sit easy with me. Though it does seem to be one I’ve noticed a growing number of people, particularly coaches, embracing.

For me, it feels like a potential portal into narcissism.

Unless……

On a side note, this image shows me that AI has maybe learned too much about me from our conversations … as all I asked it to do was to reproduce an image of how it ’thought’ I might fit the character of ‘elder-fool’. In all but the hairline and the absence of an all-black outfit, it got me pretty well, I thought.

Oh, and the dog. I spend more time avoiding than I do embracing our dog.

I’m also aware that it’s not great art. In fact, I’m aware that in many senses it’s not art at all - and I am somewhat disappointed in myself for not commissioning a human artist to paint the image. But what can I say? I’m a cheapskate.

But here’s the thing: dotted around this absurdly honest image are several truthful notions. Notions I would defend with my whole being if I had to. Notions that define, for me, the subversion of ‘elder’ into ‘elder-fool’.

Though I’m aware that this is just my own perspective, the product of my own 27,024-day journey away from the house where I was born…

… and your journey may well have taught you something totally different. Given you different notions that you would defend with your whole being if you had to.

And that feels to me to be at the core of what it means to be human.

And, if you’re a coach, what it means to be a human coach.

Mining the data of your own life, your own journey from the house where you were born, to assemble the notions you would defend with your whole being.

And yet, acknowledging that of all the 8.3 billion of these data sets currently active around this planet, ours is only one. And our client’s might be quite another.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate that.

In friendship

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The year in between has been relatively unique. Unique, that is, in my time on this blue marble hanging in space. Stuff has happened that could only happen once in my lifetime. And other stuff happened that may not ever happen again.

Some of it has been great; for instance, my colleague Siân and I hosted the promised agendaless retreat, where around 20 of us spent two days building friendship, having wonderful conversations, and generally wasting time together in the most beautiful of ways.

Some of it has been arduous. Completing and defending a postgraduate research thesis, I discovered, is no walk in the park. Deciding what to do with it post graduation is no easy job either!

Some of it has broken my heart. This isn’t somewhere where it feels appropriate to talk about the death of my son, save to say that it happened, and as I have no more sons, it won’t be happening again.

Some of it was unexpected. When I wrote my last Substack entry, Siân and I had never heard of the word ‘joojinta’, and the thought of introducing a new business into the world was a zillion light-years away from where our intentions were heading. But here we are, and we’ve gone and done it. And you can meet our web pages here.

(Editor’s note: the website is a work in progress, very far from the finished article. But the fun of self-build is immense, and so it may end up a bit like the Basilica de la Sagrada Família. A sort of testament to ambition over ability.)

And some of it has been beautiful beyond words. These 11.5 months have reminded me of the wonder of my closest friendships and the infrastructure they create for my life. Especially when that life is deeply disrupted by either pain or joy.

This image is an approximate rendition of ‘where the light gets in’ - an original photograph taken by one of my closest friends and given to me last Christmas in a moment of untrammelled intuition. That friend, along with one or two others, including my esteemed and above-mentioned business partner, has chiselled open for me a space through which light has entered, in many unexpected moments of grace.

For which I am incredibly thankful.

But I am not the only person whose child has died these last 12 months. Along with many, many others, my heart has also been broken by the brutality of the genocide in Palestine. Again, I don’t want to go into this other than to note that since Oct 7, 2023, the Israeli response to seeing 36 children die in what was indeed a horrific attack, has resulted in the death by warfighter of, according to conservative estimates, around 21,500 Palestinian children*.

And to leave you with this poem

The Idea Has Failed
By Basman Aldirawi

I sympathise with God a lot:
My heart, too, has been let down.
If we could sit together now
we’d share a cigarette. I’d rest my hand on His shoulder, and
we’d cry together until a light rain fell,
washing Gaza of this cloud of smoke
that does not belong to the sky,
stopping the din that kills another child in Gaza
and the blood that’s spilling from the world’s hand and mouth.
Life will spread across Gaza’s chest, and there will be a resurrection:
Not a wound nor a scar on her.
But scars do not die, ya Allah.
I hear Him cry: “A billion silent, a million killed.”
The sound of weeping rings out
And though I am no obedient worshiper, I pray.
I remember the faces of families and friends,
the streets, the cities, the sea,
the faces of everyone I’ve ever met, every day in Gaza.
I pray and I hear His voice, with every explosion and severed limb, shouting:
The idea has failed
The idea has failed

#FreePalestine

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*to May 2026

So I have no idea where this project might take me - and I have other things I could be getting on with. However, the invitation to engage with Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project, Haruki Murakami’s novels and the 10 potential portals that, together, offer as invitations into a deeply embodied experience of grace is one that for the moment feels like a developmental opportunity. One that I’d love to see move beyond myself into a co-creative space.

As I say, I have no idea how to go beyond composing a few Substack rambles, but, should grace decide to get involved, perhaps the creative beauty of both Justin and Haruki might draw us all deeper in. And who knows what might happen then,

Ten portals into embodied grace. The very concept creates a visceral reaction in me, I’ve personally unpacked them as part of a several-year-journey-of-discovery; sitting with the music and novels - both created in relatively obscure genius - asking myself WTF does all this mean?

And somehow in the last six months with the (apparently) final Bon Iver album SABLE/fABLE and the most recent Murakami novel The City and It’s Uncertain Walls I’ve begun to piece some stuff together. And to be deeply enchanted by the piecing.

Portal one - The Portal of Solitude and Loss

It’s hard to find it when you knew it / When your money’s gone / And you’re drunk as hell…
Bon Iver | re: Stacks

Bon Iver. re:Stacks

(click the link to hear the song)

Music, as the title suggests, plays an important role in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

That song can make me feel so terribly lonely. I can’t really explain it… the chords… the smell of jet fuel… I hadn’t even been thinking of her, and suddenly there she was.
Toru | Norwegian Wood (Murakami)

Both of these beautifully delicate artistic gifts offer themselves as possible entry points into experiencing grief through accessing memory. The sort of memory that allows our past to suddenly ambush our present. That kinda moment - I’m sure that everyone has been there.

I know I have.

In Norwegian Wood, it’s a song that awakens memory; in Re: Stacks, it’s the ache of recounting what’s been lost — not just a person, but a part of the self.

For any of us who use a Developmentalist framework to make meaning this to my mind, to a great degree articulates the move from Socialised to Self-Authoring, digging as it does into the place where the narrative others handed us (our past, our roles, our expectations) starts to fall away, but no new form has yet arrived to give us respite from a sense of deconstructive pain.

Every time I listen to the song or re-read the novel I find myself confronting a question: How do I live when the frame of meaning has collapsed, and memory is all that remains?

As I write this I find my emotions considering the matter of what memory might I have that still find me uninvited? Hasn’t fully opened itself up to my searching. And if it did, what might it want from me?

Let me share another window that opened up. It’s one that raises for me the possibility that Justin might be catching a vision - maybe seeing the possibility of experiencing a different developmental state.

This is not the sound of a new man or a crispy realisation / It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away…
Bon Iver | re:Stacks

Back in Norwegian Wood Toru is in a complicated relationship with Naoko, the -girlfriend of his dead-by-suicide best friend Kizuki.

It’s like I’m split in two…says Naoko; One of me is inside watching… and the other one’s outside pretending.

In the same way as Re: Stacks is not about offering crispy realisation, but about discovering partial clarity through pain I’m sensing that Naoko is beautifully expressing the vulnerable in-between-ness of connection and isolation. Physically together; emotionally exiled.

And then a redemptive portal momentarily opens up.

What happens when people open their hearts? ponders Toru, glimpsing but unable to fully articulate the nuances of what he sees. They get better.

It lacks nuance for sure, AND it gives hope to the soul.

In the space where language falters, where what’s felt can’t quite be said this couple, still, I’d suggest, in early experience of Self-Authoring meaning making, catch glimpses of what it might mean to be Construct-Aware. And in the glimpses they recognise that identity is fragile, fluid, and found amid the trauma of living in the both/.and.

There’s a lot more to explore in both re:Stacks and in Norwegian Wood - but this project is an emerging thing for me and I’ve no idea really where it wants to go yet. So I may or may not go back to it. Meanwhile all ideas and suggestions are welcome.

in friendships

Ian

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I’m almost finished what has been an extraordinary few days of reading Haruki Murakami’s most recent masterpiece The City and its Uncertain Walls. I’ve been an avid reader of Haruki and his work for years - I’ve loved his writing, marvelled at his insights and joyfully inhabited his imaginative inventiveness. His novels, I’d go so far as to say, have (for better or for worse) contributed significantly towards making me both the man and the coach that I am today.

But I’ve never wept my way through one of his books before.

Self understanding. Shadow and self. The nature of soul. Consciousness and death. Reality and Estrangement. Experiencing the many faces of love.

Woven together in such delicate patterns, touching such depths of the heart.

‘Transfixed’ is probably a good word to use about how I’ve responded.

Nothingness, eternity, and soul - I forgot to mention that one. I look at this line and though my mind struggles to fully comprehend it my body speaks to me of its truth. I wonder what happens in you….

I carry stuff in my heart that only an anam cara will ever see. Not necessarily because it’s traumatic to speak about, or been painful for me to have gone through the process of gathering it up - but because I need to be with those with whom I can go beyond the limits of language in order to open this particular window into the mutuality of loving attunement.

And without an open window to try to share would possibly create an unnecessary sense of estrangement. And I’m not willing to take that chance.

And those with whom I go on developmental journeys will undoubtedly feel the same. So I should never presume that I’ll become their anam cara. No matter how close our relationship becomes.

These are two of the many astounding sentences on the nature of shadow. I’d love to sit with you with a glass of wine and wander with you through them all.

But, for now, if either of these two phrases touch anything deep inside you I;d love to hear your thoughts.

And then there’s love.

At heart this is novel is an exploration of everything it is to love.

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I was reading Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s thoughts on David Wagoner’s poem ‘Lost’, and it felt like my life was looking into a mirror.

A slight element of didacticism aside, Wagoner’s poem itself makes poignant reading, but Pádraig’s simple exegesis on one word, placed not too far from the centre of the poem came to me with its own clarity and stopped me in my tracks.

Here.

Think about it for a moment.

I don’t need to find my way here - I am here

It’s impossible to leave here - because here is always here

I don’t need to imagine what its like to be here - I just need to open my eyes to see here

I read another poem today - one that emerged from my home city, Belfast in the aftermath of us carefully picking our way through the debris of violence, mistrust, hatred, failure and loss - and taking our first tentative steps towards building together a fragile peace. Written by Belfast’s first poet lauteate, Sinéad Morrisey, the last line broke my heart.

With a rain like that lashing into the city
And a wind that blew streets dark before you could blink -
It's as though the angels are angry, sitting in the sky
With heads in hands and howling it out all over us.

I can't think what they haven't got used to by now.
The great gap in the street where his knees hit the wall
Meant wheelchairs, rather than coffins.
Sinéad Morrisey | Belfast Storm

Here is not always a resolved place. Here can be a very ambigous place. Here may offer a halfway house. Here can be clothed in failure. Here is sometimes a place where you end up in a wheelchair rather than a coffin. And you call it a win.

It’s important for us coaches to remember that sometimes.

As I think about this, in a patch of devasted rubble some four thousand kilometers from where I’m sat, 14,000 babies are preparing to starve to death. The next 48 hours in Gaza will reach peak suffering; certainly peak sudffering in my lifetime - all seven decades of it.

14,000 coffins. Not wheelchairs.

Many of the coaches with whom I am priviledged to spend time have been deeply impacted by this suffering. Stuff is surfacing in us that we never knew was there. Many of us are spontaneously breaking down in tears. Whilst also coming to terms with our deep levels of anger.

Today that is here.

That is the world we find ourselves in. A world in the middle of a howling storm.

It’s also the world that our clients are finding themselves in, and many of them too are spontaneously breaking down in tears. Many of them are also coming to terms with their deep levels of anger.

And for them also that is here.

And none of us will ever be the same again.

My colleague Siân and I were talking with some coaches this morning; and though I can’t remember why, I felt drawn to read a line or two from Haruki Murakami’s evocative comments about coming through storm. I’ve read the lines below.

Our storm at the moment is mostly vicarious. None of us will be amongst the 14,000. None of us has, or likely will, live through what our fellow beings in Gaza have endured, and are enduring. And we need to be very careful that we don’t make even a miniscule sliver of all this about us.

But a very basic reading of the runes might leave us wondering about what might be written in our own stars. Wondering what our own here might have in store. And all that we can really say is that there are places we may wish to go, there may be places we desperately wish we had never left, there are places we imagine we would rather be, and there is (always) a place called here.

And all that we can resolve is that we will show up here. Show up for ourselves and for those whom we are learning to love.

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…the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws….
Solvej Balle | On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1)

Despite, or perhaps because of, their somewhat prosaic title, Books 1 and 2 - the only books of the 7 volume novel currently available in English - have evoked a noticeably visceral response in me.

Perhaps it was a follow up line that landed most powerfully. That got me thinking about my relationships with family, with friends, with colleagues, those who engage with my work. With compassion, anger, politics, spirituality, the world….

Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable.

That one was so beautifully unsettling. A doorway into such disjointed wonder.

Facing improbable exceptions to what we believed structured and scaffolded our life. Encountering sudden cracks in everything we thought we knew. Living through previously inconceivable breaches in the bulwarks of our hopes, plans, budgets, businesses, marriages, beliefs, friendships, families….

For Rumi and Leonard Cohen these cracks are the places where the light gets in.

And that’s what’s so beautifully unsettling - because sometimes it takes awhile to see the light when we’re cracking under the weight that comes seeping through those improbable breaches in the walls we’ve taken years to build.

Mary Oliver, with her usual forensic insight, encapsulates all this ramble in four short lines.

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver | The uses of Sorrow.

I can’t imagine any way towards flowering in these sudden cracks that doesn’t involve love.

Love, togetherness and the experience of mutuality.

The level of love that allows us to share the deepest, most joyous, energising, painful, hurting, beautiful, fearful, collaborative, independent, paradoxical, earthy, divine, funny, tragic corners of our lives with those with whom we choose to share our lives.

The love that springs from wondering.

That’s a notion I find myself coming back to more and more these days.

As a friend, as a coach, as a father, as a partner, as a colleague, as a free spirit, as a dreamer, as a grandfather, as a quaker, as a research student. In whichever shaky, inconsistent, cracked, breached and suddenly improbable place and space and place I find myself to be.

Understanding begins in wonder.

Wondering about you rather than about me. Wondering about the stories that could be told by trees. Wondering about the muse behind this art that made me catch my breath. Wondering how it is our species can be so brokenly beautiful. Wondering if this moment could maybe last forever.

And wonder leads me into love.

Which always was the doorway into joy.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask.
The more I wonder, the more I love.
Alice Walker | The Colour Purple

In friendship

Ian

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And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, towards silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth
Mary Oliver | When Death Comes

Our lives are as common as they are singular

The music of this moment will eventually dissolve into silence

The courage that it took us to reach this place of intimacy is precious to the earth

I think I can trace the genesis of my adult developmental journey to the moment when I first came across this poem. Mary Oliver’s presentation of the simple beauty of living a life full of curiosity and dedicated to amazement whilst preparing ourselves to welcome the moment of our death seems to me to encapsulate what it is to, as she puts it elsewhere in the poem, make of my life something particular, and real.

At the end of a short presentation I gave at a University research conference last week I was offered another opportunity to develop.

You’ve mentioned leading from love,’ asked one very imposing looking gentleman in the back row, ‘how exactly does that differ, do you think, from servant leadership?

Not something I’d given much thought to - like, ever - but something I was being asked to comment upon in the here and now.

And all that I had to offer was something that appeared to be stirring somewhere inside me; something that seemed to need to be spoken. It’s scary when that happens, and you find yourself learning stuff as you listen to your own voice.

In a room.

With people evaluating you.

And preparing to comment!

I think it’s a radically different thing, I heard myself say to a chorus of oh shit voices in my head, and its radical nature lies in allowing the breakdown of the separation between the leader and the led; and the depth of mutuality that can emerge between colleagues when it’s fully broken down.

I’ve been applying this thought to my coaching practice ever since.

We coaches ask ourselves the in service of what? question so often. And it’s a really great question to be asking, even if we don’t always give ourselves a full and frank reply.

But I’m wondering now if a more challenging question to ask ourselves might be for the love of what?.

Or even for the love of whom?

Could we see our coaching sessions as expressions of love?

Is that too radical a thought?

And might thinking it invite us to embrace the radical nature that lies in allowing the breakdown of the separation between the coach and the coachee; and the depth of mutuality that can emerge within the relationship when it’s fully broken down?

And if we could do that, what might emerge in our practice?

Could we sit as two souls, each opening ourselves to the other? Each bearing witness to the others’ story, and observing what arises in ourselves as we listen. And, attuned together, reaching out to the wisdom that lies beyond our individual boundaries to discover what our responses to these arisings could point us to.

And if we could conceive of this how might we describe, to ourselves at least, the loving nature of our work?

The coach as harbinger of grace.

Now there’s a thought I’d like to ponder further.

In friendship

Ian

Today I’ve been reflecting on the work of three friends of mine. Reflecting and becoming deeply moved by their work as, respectively, poet, musician and philosopher/theologian - and its collective relevance to my own work in offering developmental and/or spiritual companionship to coaches and others exploring the complexity of their life contexts.

I’ve known these guys for years, though they’d likely say that they’re more likely to identify as the friends of one of my daughters, and they all offer something that I find illuminates my work and the stance I take when carrying it out.

Maybe you will find that too,

I’ll start with the poet, and share a few lines from one of his poems.

A reading from the book of exile

chapter three

and he is inching toward glory
with only his own story on his back
he has patched up holes that opened
where his coverings have cracked
and some shoes were never meant for hiking so
he left them far behind
there are simple things he needs
on journeys such as these
foodandloveanddrinkandwarmthandcomfort
and a bag that’s small enough
to carry all the failures and the idols
that he’s picked up on the way

there are some days
he only moves
an inch or two

this is the pace of glory here in exile
Pádraig Ó Tuama

Inching towards glory is such beautiful imagery for depicting our human condition. I see it in my own story - the one I carry on my back - and see it in the stories of those with whom I have the privilege of being invited to inch alongside across some of the places where they feel that their coverings might have cracked.

And I’ve discovered that inching is a good pace to move at when you’ve left your comfortable shoes behind. A good pace to stick to when you’re open to uncovering grace.

And this discovery has affected my coaching profoundly.

And then there’s the musician. The inestimable Peter Wilson, better known as Duke Special.

This is an old song of his, first recorded back in his dreadlocked and multitude of black mascara days. To me the poignant truth feels even deeper when he’s singing it at fifty.

(Play the song here →. Condition )

Coaching for me is all about being-with. That’s the what and everything else is a how.

A modality.

And being-with another human as they work through their stuff entails moments of deep intimacy and profound revelation. Being-with to hold the moment in which light dawns whilst someone grasps the deep, deep personal truth and beauty of which Duke sings has moved me to tears time and again….

I am holy
I’m disaster
I am fucked
I am an answer

The philosopher/theologian Pete Rollins introduced me to the notion or raveling.

It can be what happens when, as Duke puts it, All these fragments start to roar/
Playing like an orchestra and, for instance, the sober and the wrecked, the lonely and the contented and the perfect and the broken all make their presence felt simultaneously.

The moment that feels like we’re totally unraveling,

Both Unraveling and Raveling according to Pete mean to become divided into separate threads. But without the un, the negative connotation of the first term is nullified and the process is turned into something affirmative. Nothing changes, yet nothing remains the same. Instead of fearing the horror of unraveling, we learn to revel in it.

And so we sit with, we accompany, we journey with our clients as companions as they maybe feel their world is unraveling, and we hold the space until they learn to ravel.

And then until they learn to revel in the wonderful and wounded paradox of who they are.

For me exploring all this requires us to be living in the shelter of each other. Creating with each other a system of being-with, and offering it to the world.

In friendship

Ian

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My friend Christian Scholtes, when commenting on the Michelangelo and David metaphor said this: It may well be that David from yesterday, from today, and from tomorrow, are three fairly different statues. I loved that comment.

He’s right of course, and his comment led me to reflect that, throughout my life I have discovered experientially that today’s me can simultaneously be existing in its fullest form and also unfolding into what will become its fullest form. And that for me, just like for the pictured rosebuds, this can always be a state of grace in which I live.

Not waiting to ‘develop’. Not seeking to be somehow ‘better’. Not nitpicking at myself and fearing the day when my personal or professional fraud might be exposed. Not hankering to be more ‘evolved’. None of that,

And yet aware that tomorrow’s me might be a fairly different statue. And feeling complete in both realities.

Always fully enough, always unfolding into more

This week I’ve been reflecting on one particular aspect of the enso - the beauty of imperfection.

The gap in the circle above is a pretty big one but when I found this image it touched something deep in me and connected me to grace.

Said in various contexts to be a symbol of enlightenment, of elegance and strength, of emptiness and infinity, of creation and impermanence, of non-duality and the interconnectedness of all things, the enso is drawn with a single brush stroke quickly and without hesitation. In this way it is an expression of the moment; of living right here, right now, and of embodying one’s actions with all of one’s being.

I’ve seen many ensos over the years, and the gap is never exactly the same size. And yet to me there always appears to be such grace flowing from the simple image. Imperfection comes in many guises.

And every enso reminds me that I am enough.

And that I will always be enough.

For me this belief sits at the heart of my coaching stance.

A friend of mine had a ‘big’ birthday last week and his wife curated a memory book made up from collected stories from old friends. In putting together what I wanted to say I dug into John O’Donohue’s Beannacht - his beautiful blessing for his mother.

It’s stuck with me since as an open doorway into an existential experience of grace.

Beannacht (Blessing) | John O’Donohue

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

In friendship

Ian

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.
Mary Oliver | The poet dreams of the mountain

Mary O:over’s beautiful poem worked its way back into my consciousness this morning. I have a feeling it knew that I needed to re-read it.

It’s a short poem, but my goodness it covers a plethora of big enormous themes. The ones that presented themselves most strikingly to me today were around taking the rest of my lifetime to rest, to count the stars, see big pictures, take slow steps and think appropriate thoughts.

And, of course the humdinger.

The one about looking back and forgiving everything,

With that one I may have discovered a new developmental practice.

A coach with whom I work shared some of his practice with me earlier this week. I’d heard his metaphor before, but never quite in the way that he framed it.

‘It’s like Michelangelo creating David.’ he said, ‘he just approaches the marble and allowed his chisel to chip away everything that wasn’t David. That’s how I see my coaching.’

I may have teared up.

Coaching as creating and holding the space for our clients to identify and chip away everything that isn’t them. That feels like something worth doing for myself too.

I suspect Mary Oliver might be hinting at something similar in the poem. The pathway to forgiving it all seems to be one in which I make by walking. By walking slowly it seems. Taking slow steps and thinking appropriate thoughts. Resting often and rediscovering the clarity and brightness of the stars. The clarity and brightness that the busy-ness of life has been smothering for years,

Gaining new perspective on the stuff I need to forgive in myself and to forgive in others. Looking back at everything. And then forgiving it all.

Letting it all just go. Until all that’s left is what is simply me.

Like I said, a new developmental practice.

In friendship

Ian

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‘If you did drop into someone's consciousness, you'd have all their memories and desires and hang-ups right there in front of you. And as you say, in an eternity you'd get the chance to know everything once enough time had passed. You'd become unable to judge anyone.'
'You'd end up being completely compassionate,' I said. 'You wouldn't be able to judge someone once you understood them and their motivations... it would be like judging yourself.’
Scarlett Thomas | Our Tragic Universe

I remember reading those lines some years ago: I suspect that they played a part in triggering my developing interest in the interpenetrative nature of human souls.

And a parallel understanding that much of what I had been taught across a plethora of human learning contexts had purposed me for prioritising individuating over learning to live in mutuality.

I read a really interesting post on LinkedIn the other day. I wouldn’t say it was decrying the value of an individual focus on inner work, but it was advocating strongly for placing a deeper focus on systemic activism as the prime developmental vehicle for changing the world. I liked it a lot …. although at the same time I hated it.

I liked it because the notion of systemic activism sits at the heart of what we coaches like to describe as work. Some of us talk about ‘system nudging’ - though to my mind our global system is now on the road to being so intransigently warped that a 9.5 on the Richter scale would hardly initiate a change of course. Hence the need for radical activism - though as an interventionist collective I’m not sure that we coaches yet agree on what radical activism might look like.

And I hated it because it didn’t mention mutuality.

Didn’t highlight the interpenetrative relationship between self and system, depth and breadth, congruity and connectivity and such like, The stuff that creates the deep connection between inner work and activism.

The connection that stands between a human being and terminal loneliness.

Loneliness is my curse---our species' curse---it's the gun that shoots the bullets that make us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers
Douglas Coupland | Eleanor Rigby

Loved it because I have a depth of understanding that no matter how much inner work I throw myself into it will never make me feel less lonely.

Hated it because it appeared to me to miss the mutuality of micro-system.

Miss the validating power of love.

Which, of course, is the place where inner work and mutuality entwine.

If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.
Haruki Murakami | Kafka on the shore

And, as with so much, this brings me back to Martin Buber and the I-Thou encounter. The place to which I always return in my reflections on how my coaching stance might bring something of lasting value in the moments of mutuality in which I find myself each day.

And in the quiet of this morning I came across a poem that I’d like to share …

In friendship

Ian

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You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood
Junot Díaz |The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings
Martin Buber

Realising that the other person is also just like me is the basis on which we can develop compassion, not only toward those around us but also toward our enemy. Normally, when we think about our enemy, we think about harming him. Instead, try to remember that the enemy is also a human being, just like you.
HH Dali Lama 14

I wanted to share a slightly adapted version of Ram Dass’ compassion meditation with you - whoever you are - as a step on the journey towards our sheltering is each other. This meditation means a lot to me and I hope it finds you well.

In friendship

Ian

I bumped in to my friend Jonathan at our Quaker gathering last Sunday. He was wearing a brown hoodie bearing a message that I was enough.

Well, to be strictly accurate it said ‘You are enough’ but as I was the only You in his sightline I took the message personally.

I am enough, You are enough, We are enough. Identifying as I do as a developmental, and at times spiritual, companion these feel like they could be my central tenets.

I have the immense privilege of being able to explore and work through the nuances of being-with alongside executive coaches and a few organisational leaders. Mine is not a particularly large or busy practice and my work isn’t particularly ground breaking. In today’s world it seems like it’s mostly about treasuring and seeking to help co-create what the Zen Buddhist poem "Verse of the Kesa” describes as a formless field of benefaction.

The term signifies a potential to benefit others in a vast, unrestricted way, without being contained by personal limitations or self-interest. And to create together what my own developmental & spiritual companion described to me as the wisdom of no space.

The place where we no longer need to understand ourselves in terms of archetypes, values or purpose.

The place where we no longer need to prove our identification with any one particular cause or point of view by criticising its detractors.

The place where we can live unfettered.

Where we can simply be because being is an end in itself. A life predicated on a realisation that there is no need to feel we have to dance to anyone else’s tune.

Long ago I wrote a Linkedin post entitled ‘What would happen if I just let go?’ I have a feeling it was an ok post and so I spent 5 minutes searching for it today before the irony struck me. Searching around to rediscover some old thoughts about letting go … really?

Think about it

I can’t remember what shit I needed to let go of when I wrote that post, but it’s probably not the shit I need to let go of now. And, subject relevance aside, clinging on to a several-year-old process that was once emancipatory hardly smacks of plunging into the grace of unfettered living.

Though it may speak to a fear of freedom that’s lurking in me somewhere.

I found a joy back then when I embraced abandonment - as I recall we were in lockdown at the time and the whole letting go experiment brought me to discovering that in the midst of (global) winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer (Camus | Return to Tipasa)

But that was then.

And now there may be more to fear.

More of a need to cling to the new shit I onboarded after letting go of all that other shit.

And part of that new shit was a deeper understanding that to embrace the freedom of living completely as myself - whatever that might mean in any particular context - can be scary.

It comes without a safety net.

It’s a very vulnerable state of existence is inhabiting somewhere outside of the norm, And whilst that sounds ok when you talk about it in a Zoom breakout room, setting up base camp there is a different thing altogether.

The grace of unfetterdness is elusive all right.

Living there can mess with your head.

Which is why, I think, we need the shelter of each other. Need to know who, when the shit goes down, will have our back. Need to know how to practice being-with each other in a way that will heal each other’s wounds; repair each other’s skin
(Lauren Oliver | Pandemonium)

Or as Indian philosopher/mystic Osho put it allowing the other to see you as you see yourself.

Intentionally

Unfettered

And oozing with grace.

PS Keep thinking Corrymeela, Co Antrim, 2 days of building a shelter.

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Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires
René Girard | Generative Scapegoating.

Generic masculine pronoun use with its patriarchal exclusionary connotations aside I’ve always found this to be a very profound insight.

Especially in my work as a leadership coach.

Girard’s core thought here is that in many instances people don't know what to desire, and thus we mimic the desires of others around us. Starting at a very young age we are reinforced in this belief by our exposure to advertising, peer pressure, parental or familial expectations, employer KPIs, social media postings and online influencers and a host of other agenda driven forces operating with various degrees of bad (or good) faith.

In this environment it's easy to lose sight of desires rooted in our core values, easy to forget what works best for our own unique life.

Easy to present a mimer’s mask to the world because we don’t really know what our real face looks like.

Easy to lose out on love in the face of insecure driven-ness birthed in mimetic ambition masquerading as authentic desire.

Easy to welcome mimetic desire into a coaching conversation and call it a goal.

Dr Simon Western in his excellent book Coaching and Mentoring: a critical text writes about the importance of coaching bringing an emancipatory intervention. I love that frame; keeping it front of mind has, for many years, been my first defence against collusion.

It’s easy isn’t it to collude with the mimer? To let second hand desire sit uncovered in the conversation and pretend that this is following the client’s agenda.

Easy, perhaps, because mimetic desire can sit unchallenged within ourselves.

And yet, carefully holding a space in which our client can hear for themselves the voice inside that, as Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady once put it, keeps calling out that someone else's dreams don't get you nowhere is one of the most emancipatory gifts we can offer to anyone.

And how about ourselves? Where might our own emancipation lie?

To what degree might our own mimetic desires be causing us to shape our coaching practice in a way that is causing us internal conflict?

That’s a question I’ve been working through for myself over the past few years.

It’s a question that’s challenged me to experiment with this whole In the Shelter gig. Because I have an instinct that maybe, and perhaps counter intuitively, it’s in the shelter of one another that we can learn to break free from the need to mimic each others’ desires.

I mean, what’s the point of taking off the mimer’s mask if there’s no-one around to see our smile?

And so to ‘’the shelter experience”

• 25-27 November 2025 in Corrymeela, Ballycastle.

• 24 places max, 18 minimum (ie 12 single rooms and 6 double)

• Ex VAT cost between £240 and £340 per person

• A theory free, experiential deep dive into living int he shelter of each other.

We’d love to see you there.

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So many lives in shadows
With so much to give away
Brilliant dreams in waiting
To see the light of day
Luka Bloom | Don’t be afraid of the light that shines within you

So a couple of days ago I noticed that a close friend of mine had sound tracked one of her Instagram posts with a few lines from this Luka Bloom song.

For the uninitiated, Luka is the artistic name of Barry Moore, younger brother of Christy. For the very uninitiated, if you’ve never heard of Christy there’s a whole raft of great music waiting for you on the platform of your choice!

But to get you started here’s Luka singing about the light that shines within us.

Luka Bloom | Don’t be afraid of the light

It’s a bit of a long ago song - nearly 20 years, if I remember correctly - but one that’s been playing somewhere in my head all week.

Maybe because February kicked off with Brigid’s day. Maybe because the sun was shining after the storm. Maybe because I’d forgotten all about the song, and hearing it again rolled back a whole lot of years. Who knows?

Whatever it was, as we Quakers say the song spoke to my condition at the time and invited me to reflect upon the relationship between creative inner light and fear,

I’m not one who holds a clearly defined position on saints and stuff - to do so would imply that I knew something about the subject and I don’t - but if ever there was a patron saint for coaches it could be Brigid. She’s pretty darn eclectic.

Claimed by poets, healers and scholars, she’s also in there with dairy workers, Irish nuns, fugitives, blacksmiths, boatmen, chicken farmers, sailors, new mothers and a whole bunch more.

That’s one heck of a lot of light. One heck of a lot of dreams in waiting.

One heck of a lot of shadow.

And I’m pretty sure us coaches could find an archetype or two to identify with somewhere in her portfolio.

More and more these days I’m finding that the notion of grace resonates - both. with myself and with many of those coaches and leaders with whom I am privileged to work.

As Luka puts it

Out of the cold, dark winter space
We come together, looking for Brigid's grace

The grace that unlocks new creativity in us. The grace that allows us to dive into deeper understanding of our current condition. The grace that equips us to hold safe, open and inviting space for our clients to discover answers to their dilemmas.

The grace that earths our conversations in love.

I, by the way, interpret the whole Brigid’s grace thing as referring to the grace that allowed this, perhaps mythologised, figure to somehow connect so deeply with the individual & collective psyche of such a plethora of differently gifted people.

Again, not that much different from a coach.

And, if the song is to be believed, the grace that enables us not to be afraid of the light that shines within us.

And this, I think, is what this In the Shelter thing is all about. Opening up together and helping each other find grace.

Though, again, Luka puts it better than I can

We dip our open hands deep into the well
Where our rivers run to
Who can tell, who can tell?
We warm our hearts and faces
In the heat of the burning flame

Because finding this grace gig isn’t a solitary journey - it’s one we take with friends. With, as Karen Ellis talks about, the starlings we find to fly with.

I love that image.

And if we’re going, as I suspect that many of us coaches might discover life’s invitation will take us, into the heat of the burning flame of 2025 living, then it’s an image that we may need to creatively and lovingly embrace together.

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“I need, I think, to work out who I can be, both professionally and personally in the light of the way the world has been changing these last four weeks” so (broadly) said many of the coaches with whom I’ve spent time over the last couple of weeks. And for sure the world has been changing both radically and fast.

I’ve written elsewhere about Network State and the Techbros’ journey towards disrupting what they deem to be a failed operating system. (For the uninitiated, the rest of us call it democracy.) Seems like I’m not alone in my musings on this - coaches I talk with around the globe are feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle waking up after his 20 year sleep. Except in our case it’s only been four weeks.

Or has it really?

Economist Milton Friedman in his 1970 New York Times published Doctrine stated that ‘a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders’ and Trump 2.0 has been the inevitable destination ever since.

However we’re here because we’re here and wringing our hands about it isn’t going to help us do much about it.

Coaching, as they say, isn’t about fixing the past, it’s about shaping the future.

Together.

Though not necessarily by all doing the same thing.

“I need, I think, to work out who I can be, both professionally and personally in the light of the way the world has been changing these last four weeks” Revisiting that one, I suspect, might take us towards thinking about a wild flower pushing its way through concrete.

In the last few months I’ve come across three beautifully different, yet interdependent, analyses of how these wild flowers might look in the context in which we now live.

And these days as I talk with coaches, friends, family and members of the Quaker community to which I belong, I hear and see the emergence of all three.

Each of the three comes as all or part of the title of a book - each written within the last 3 or 4 years, each offering an intriguing and compelling vision to aspiring wild flowers around how to push our way up through the concrete that seems to be entombing everything we ever thought we knew about what a good society might look like.

The books themselves all make interesting, and at times compelling reading, But I’m not here to talk literature. Or anything to do with content, strategy and so on - I’m not sure that I’d know how.

I’m here to drop three images into souls.

And if any of the three connect with you I hope you find a way to open them up and let your wild flower grow and flourish.

Healer

This is a path of restoration, through which we reintegrate previously exiled aspects of our nature: physical. emotional and transpersonal
Nicholas Janni | Leader as Healer

Hospice

Before anything can happen, before people can sense, hear, relate and imagine differently there must be a clearing, a decluttering an initiation into the unknowable: and a letting go of the desire for certainty. authority, hierarchy and of insatiable consumption as a way of relating to everything
Vanessa Machado De Oliveira | Hospicing Modernity

HopePunk

There’s something about (Punk’s) rebellious attitude coupled with creativity that we need to adopt for our time, rebelling against an establishment that has, for too long, grasped tightly on control
HopePunk | Mike Perk & Charles Matthews

I have my own visceral response to these images. I can feel them all in my body and in my emotional infrastructure. I’m not sure yet how best to translate feeling them into being them and I can see that how I live my wild flower response isn’t necessarily how anyone else will. There are, at the last count, 8.062Billion ways of responding to ‘the mess we’re in’ (PJ Harvey | Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea)

And that assumes that each human on the planet only finds one response - one way to be - and that’s kinda nonsensical.

But I have a pulse, and I have the incredible privilege of being invited to listen to what matters to a reasonable number of other human beings - and so personally and professionally I am seeking to understand, and perhaps refine, my stance on being.

So as I said - if any of the three images connect with you I hope you find a way to let your own wild flower grow and flourish.

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Brief November update

We’re thinking that we should probably cap the numbers at around 20-25, and already I’m blown away by the thought of spending time with the people who are expressing strong interest in hanging out together in this unprogrammed space. Pretty soon I’ll be able to be definitive around dates and costs etc and we’ll take it from there.

But whether you can make it or not, we can still build this shelter together - not just for coaches, but for artists, writers, and other healers, hospicers, and hopepunks; anyone who cares about being, practicing, or hanging out together in the mess we’re in.

In friendship

Ian

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‘When we dare to hold those forced to the ground, dare to hold them close, the truth of holding and listening sings and we are carried into the wisdom of broken bones and how things heal.

These are the quiet braves we all need: the courage to wait and watch with all we are, the courage to admit that we are not alone, the courage to hold each other to the ear of our heart, the courage to care for things that are broken.’
Mark Nepo | The Exquisite Risk. Daring to Live an Authentic Life

Mark Nepo’s beautifully insightful phrase ‘The Exquisite Risk’ is one that I wish I had shared with most of the people with whom I worked last week.

But I didn't.

And so, after the train has left the station, I’m sharing it here now in the hope that maybe some will stumble across this little Substack blog and let Mark’s sublime words touch their hearts.

We’re living in remarkable times, and those of us who have been given the immense privilege of working as coaches in these remarkable times - if some of the coaches with whom I spent most of last week in intimate conversation are anything to go by - may well be asking ourselves some questions about our whole understanding of authenticity.

We may be, as Mark Nepo might put it, being asked to face the Exquisite Risk implicit in putting our career prospects where our values are; and that in the world ahead may require us to show a significant level of courage.

And to create a whole lot of opportunities to ‘hold each other to the ear of our heart (as we) care for things that are broken.’

And just how broken things actually are, systemically speaking, we may only be beginning to discover.

If you’ve come across Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book ‘The Network State: How to start a New Country’ you’ll know that it’s pretty much the TechBros’ bible. The roadmap to global domination by billionaire, laid out in succinct and tax efficient steps.

‘A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognised founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition’
Bali S Srinivasan | The Network State: How to start a New Country.

Because if you can found a start-up business that ends up making you one of the 5 richest humans alive before you’re 55 years old, then perhaps logically the next step is to get into founding a startup nation.

Of course the TechBros may not be successful in bringing this ambitious idea into reality, but I’m not sure that us coaches can, with authenticity, bank on that.

And we’ll be selling our collective soul is we collude with it.

Sometime back I mentioned to my friend Natalie that I was focusing on learning to love whatever it was that I was learning to see. With the invaluable help of the many coaches with whom I have the immense privilege of working I feel that that parallel focus is working a change in me.

And it’s from this change that the whole ‘In the shelter’ idea has germinated. The desire to personally take the Exquisite Risk of believing that ‘we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don’t assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.’ (Nepo | The Exquisite Risk).

And having taken the risk to offer at least one opportunity a for some of us to ‘hold each other to the ear of our heart’ and hug one another until we are brave.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

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So this was my opening gambit.

It’s bubbling up in me that I need to put my own stake in some ground somewhere. To co-inhabit a space of mutual shelter – even if it’s just a pop-up. Even if it’s just for a fleeting sliver of a journey round the sun.

So I’m evolving a tentative offering – not a Harthill offering because it might really be a colossal shit show, but an Ian (and hopefully the yin to my yang Sian Lumsden) offering. Maybe towards the end of 2025. Maybe in somewhere like the Corrymeela Community, that beautiful place of reconciliation birthed in the N Irish conflict, situated way out on the north coast of Ireland.  Maybe premiering a short film on the subject currently being created my own anam cara, Irish actor Rachael Dowling.  Maybe none of those
(LinkedIn January 31 2025)

Since then I’ve witnessed the ‘hopefully Siân’ upgrade itself to a ‘definitely Siân’, and the ‘maybe’ around showing Rachael’s film evolve ever closer to becoming a redundant adverb. The film offers a powerful insight into the transition from being ‘had by’ personal trauma into a place of holding it, and I’m very excited about the conversations it may provoke.

I’ve discovered that Davey Village at Corrymeela Community on the North Coast of Ireland is still available between November 25 and 27 2025 and reasonably well priced (total ex VAT cost should be between £325 and £450 depending on a few factors that I’ll be able to provide soon)

What I love about Corrymeela is that we’d be washing our dishes together, making our own beds, and generally dipping into the stuff of life together.

Sheltering each other.

Also the pubs in Ballycastle are excellent places - some of which offer live music. Though we might also create that for ourselves.

The rest of what we might do together depends on what each of us might bring to the experience. Sometimes, I suppose, mutual being-with invites us to take a bit of a risk; but poems and conversations and early-winter beach walking and laughter and listening and the exploration of kindness and the telling of magical tales can all be ingredients in the creation of a collective expression of love. Along with dozens more that right now I couldn’t even imagine.

Of course it still might be a colossal shit show.

But I’m hoping maybe not.

I think we have a maximum of 30 places, some getting single rooms and some doubles (cheaper of course!) and all with en suite bathrooms. And we need to book pretty quickly so it would be great to gauge the level of interest even more quickly!

So if you’re up for being part of this adventure please drop a comment - letting us know
a) that you’re in
b) what ‘in the shelter of each other’ conjures up for you

If there’s anything you think you’s like to suggest something for us to do together, then please do send a message.

That feels like enough to be going on with for the moment. Hopefully there’ll be more to talk about, so I’ver included a ‘subscribe’ button. As far as I know subscription if free, but I;m not a Substack veteran, so I’m unsure. If it costs money don’t subscribe!

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