Dialogue

On forging a speaking practice

Under the flowering May in May, Marsh Lane, Reydon, Suffolk (photo: Mark Watson)

Follow me into this field tonight, and wait by this tree. Listen! Can you hear them? Singing out across the dark land, from the hedges and trees, hawthorn and gorse, all around the commons of Westleton, the old quarry and heath. In an oak in the lane, two invisible singers soar in an incandescent duet. We stand listening. The land is listening. The nightingales are singing in the May. A moment when you throw yourself into the wild green arms of the brimming world, and let life roar inside you.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about death is what it does to your experience of time. Everything intensifies into a moment. Suddenly everything you knew in linear time, the past, present and future converges into one non-linear moment, revealing the beauty and complexity of a life. When people whose lives Mark had touched spoke in celebration of him, it felt that everything condensed in time and space, until you caught sight of his multi-faceted being on this Earth in a sudden beam of sunlight. In a sudden burst of song.

In the bluebell wood it is not just this visit that counts but all of them. It’s as if I have always been here, under this tree, beside these plants, as I follow the nightingale track on this bright morning, all the way from Minsmere to our old neighbourhood of Reydon. In two weeks the bluebells that shine under this cathedral of hornbeams may be gone. In June the nightingales will cease singing; by autumn they will have vanished back to Africa. And some of them may never return here. I might never come here again, so I want to be with everything, be fully alive, the way Mark was here last year, sitting beside me on this log in the wood, immersed in the colour of the flowers, this liquid blue, the brightness of the golden oaks on the tumulus, the honey scent of alexanders as we brush past, the rise of the foxgloves behind us.

Our linear time bullies everyone into narrow and superficial conversations, so we never get to allow the extraordinary capacities we have for transformation within us. Mostly we chirp to each other like birds kept in separate cages. We are not even aware of the world beyond the bars. Our individual desire to control our fenced existence blocks the relationships that would liberate us.

The nightingales however are free, untrapped by mechanical time, they know that the here-and-now is what matters and pour everything they know into their song. The bitterns booming in the marshes, the thrushes shouting from the greengage. You get up at sunrise to hear their voices; you stand in the garden at dusk to remember their resonance, their rainbow melody. Here we are, here we are, they sing. Here I am, I say, I’m listening.

Vibrancy

Last Sunday we held a contemplative activism sangha in honour of Mark, who loved these weekly metaphysical sessions. We began them as lockdown started in 2020 and Mark famously got everyone out into their wild leafy neighbourhoods, foraging wild things for fritters. At the time of his burial, Liam and Valerie were in France and so made nettle and dandelion fritters in his memory. ‘Those times were so vibrant,’ Liam said.

Lockdown was like the death of a life you once loved, a collective moment when everyone urgently had to attend to the business of being alive, to question who and what really mattered, to notice the spring happening outside their doors, as if for the first time. As soon as ‘normal’ life returned that vibrancy we held between us got buried in our own individual versions of business-as-usual.

But when the death of someone you love interrupts your life, you ask yourself the same urgent lockdown questions: what really matters? If I were to leave suddenly, have I done and said everything I meant to? And, though this Red Tent column is destined to run until autumn equinox, I wanted to write now what has mattered most to me in my life.

So today on this most vibrant of moments on May Day, I wanted to introduce the speaking practice, founded on a metaphysical partnership held over 35 years that sometimes felt it spanned aeons. Our daily practice began as soon as we met, when Mark was a professional tarot reader and I was a fashion editor for a newspaper, when he told me over an unfamiliar circle of cards: you will leave everything you know, your job, your relationship, the country. Afterwards we walked along the canal in Camden Town on a sunny day, and I felt exhilarated, as if my life had just begun. Eighteen months later at summer solstice we left everything behind – friends, family, houses, work, and went to Mexico on a one way ticket. The dialogues which formed the basis of the book we were to write together on the road, were all about leaving, about closing doors, saying goodbye, making an elegant farewell. Keeping the sweetness of things in the locker room of the heart, like honey bees in a hive.

Leaving is all about making a move in a civilisation that tries to stop everyone doing anything but. Stay put, we are told, be safe, be comfortable, be secure, and most of all stay under our control, in the boxes and identities we have made for you. Mark and I were, like everyone else, trapped by our different classes and genders, by stereotypes and archetypes, our inherited traumas and collective karmas, Metaphysical practice was the way we liberated ourselves, and nearly all of this liberation happened in the dramaturgical dialogues that we held in the decades that followed, as we travelled across continents, as we returned to England and put down our seakale roots in this East Anglian shingle shore.

We never left this coast once we came, but inside between us we kept the moves going. A drummer we once worked with in France told us: as a creator, you always return to your first love. Music was Mark’s and dancing was mine, a shared language of sound, shape, colour, frequency. And that was what we were doing really, in our speaking, in our shows, in our love of flowers: we were dancing and singing in the May at this urgent time on Earth. Here we are, here we are! Are you?

(left) Mark and me in some very unstructured tailoring, London 1989; (photo: Gavin Watson) ; (right) in the dressing room before Lucy's 60th birthday party, London, 2018

Dynamic dialogues

When Stephen Aisenstat talked about the five ways of attending to a dream in California (as described last year in Territory) he related a dream he had had in the Australian bush after an encounter with a goanna. I had to tell that dream, he said, as it was not given me to keep. It had to be spoken out loud. That’s the crux. When it is spoken with the physical voice and heard, the dream enters the fabric of the living world. The dream then is not yours but becomes a shared thing, a country you are visiting with another, because you are exploring it with the world in mind.

For ten years we would speak our dreams out loud, taking turns, every morning, and even when the practice of dreams segued to other attentions, we always spoke each morning in this way, and sometimes in the evening at six as well: we called them dynamic dialogues

One of the hardest things to bear about Mark vanishing from this Earth, it is that I no longer have anyone to speak with at this depth. I feel like one of those almost-extinct birds singing in a forest but without their mate responding. And although I keep up the practices on my own, visit the plants, light a May Day eve fire, I know you can only go so far with solo metaphysical work. You can only go so far in knowing yourself, or this Earth, on your own. If you don’t speak of the connections you make in your imagination, of your encounters, your deep-time soul, to another being in a cherished space, they are not heard in this world, they don’t land .

We held different speaking practices: as dynamic dialogues, with dreams in the dreaming practice, and with plants as our plant practice. Shared with others, these became ensemble plant dialogues or Earth dialogues, and during this month I plan to expand on and give methods for them all. The structures we used were all based on work we had originally done with hallucinogenic plants: with San Pedro in Ecuador, peyote in Mexico and mushrooms in England and America.

The intent and frame of these communications enabled us to negotiate territories where we would otherwise lose our way and each other. It is challenging to enter other dimensions with others, to go down into the depths of the kiva, to step into the unmapped ‘right hemisphere’ realms of the imagination and this mysterious Earth. But if you have an intent to explore together come what may you can do the core work: move out of the stuck and isolated positions where you are trapped in history, and encounter the luminous forces of the planet, its many beings, its song.

Roles in a speaking practice

What makes these dialogues possible is an agreement to speak within an agreed container and take certain roles.

DYNAMIC DIALOGUE This is not a chat, or a bro banter; this is not a conversation, a debate, or a case for the prosecution or defence.. There are no winners here, or people to be saved, or sorted, or blamed. Just as we practised different positions of perception in The Uneasy Chair, where you see the world standing on the cliff edge and then crouching down on the beach, it is to recognise that in a dialogue both viewpoints are needed: the one immersed in the felt and physical experience of life, and the other seeing everything that is going on from a more ‘objective’ vantage point.

In a speaking practice both emerge, and it is key that you know what position you are speaking from, and that neither stance is superior to the other, and neither of you has it down. This flexibility is what creates the dynamic. In most conversations there can be either too much know-it-all cliff (the solution) or too much swamped-by-inner-forces beach (the problem). This was hugely helped by the temporary roles we interchanged in the dreaming practice.

DREAMER AND VISITOR The practice is simple. You (the dreamer) tells the dream to your dreaming partner, asking the questions: what does this say about my daily life, my biographical life, my self on the social level, on the mythological level and from the perspective of the Earth? You tell the dream out loud. The visitor to the dream listens and can ask questions but only to prompt the dreamer to go deeper into the dream. Not as an inquirer, but as a fellow explorer. As you do the territory opens out between you; you discover its language, its topography, its mood. Something catches your eye, you both look at it and it opens up like a flower. It could be an object, a detail, or a feeling. Mostly though it is a position. Mostly it is a position where you are stuck or held against your will.

To move and liberate the will formed the main dynamic of our speaking practices. You cannot do this metaphysical work if you are not able to ‘dance’, to move freely in your soul and spirit and make connections with other (not just human) beings. So you need a lot of love and forbearance, as the inherited conditioning of class and gender, of country, race, civilisation, will pit you against one other, and drive you back into separate cages. Mark and I were very different people in temperament and background, but we shared an unwavering intent to explore everything.

That intent between people is what stops the world falling apart.

Everything is a dreaming

In these dialogues everything is a dreaming, that is to say an opportunity to connect with the imagination and break free from the cage of history, to make a container in order to enter the non-linear dreaming of the planet, using your native capacity as a dreamer and visitor to link what you see with acts in the world. You engage in this dual-action speaking practice to remember what Aboriginal academic Tyson Yunkaporta calls our function as a custodial species. Not as commanders or stewards of a territory but as mycelial connectors and pattern seers, among different species and elements, between the worlds of sky (mind and spirit) and earth (land, relationship, activity), which Indigenous peoples have always practised in ‘images, dance, song, language, culture, objects, ritual, gestures and more’.

‘Creation,’ he reminds us, 'is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.’

Knowing how to see the world of flowers with what the Yaqui people of the South Western desert call ‘ see through freshness’. To behold and celebrate them as they are in their original forms.

Knowing how to listen to nightingales singing across England in May. How to keep ourselves and the world in alignment with that song.

Shelf

(left) Cover of '52 Flowers That Shook My World', 2012; (middle) Frostenden woods at bluebell time, 2009 (photo: Mark Watson); (right) cover of 'After Ithaca', 2022,

Normally for this Shelf section I select a book that forms the background or inspiration for the subject of the post. The writers so far have ranged from Carlos Casteneda in Mexico to W.G. Sebald in Suffolk, from Annie Dillard on holding a writing practice and Vanessa Andreotti on facing the storm. I have a sheaf of other texts I am keen to recommend but none of them quite fitted this subject. And then I realised there were several books that had come directly out of these dialogues: our own! Those dialogues we held in a 10-year journey across the Americas, and later those that helped make ourselves at home in England (the dreaming practice which underpins much of this work appears specifically in the ‘Blue Mushroom’ chapter in 52 Flowers That Shook My World and ‘Australia’ in After Ithaca).

So at the risk of self-promotion both these books can give a fuller picture of the background and process, how Mark and I crafted a dialogue that could skip the quotidian details of our lives, and go straight to a kiva attention at the drop of a hat.

The Red Tent is really a primer for the work, to give you the structure and tech for your own practice, but these books contain the story. It’s not just my story of course, it’s Mark’s too, and the story of people we met on the road who helped create the shape and dynamic of the dialogues: all those who sat with the trouble, by washes in the Arizona desert, on cold mountain nights in the Andes, on hotel rooftops in Guatemala and Chile, in the back rooms and back roads of England. We never wanted the dialogues to be just between us and were always finding ways to engage others in the work, in talks, teachings, performance, and writing.

To join the ensemble, to join the dance. Come what May.

This is the first post in a trio that will share the intent and ‘tech’ of our speaking practices. In the next post, the first step of ‘The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor’ series, I plan to write more in depth about the dreaming practice we began in Australia.

Thanks for reading everyone and hope to connect again soon. Merry Mays to all.!