Welcome to The Red Tent!

A metaphysical practice for collapsing times

The time of sunflowers (photo: Mark Watson)

At some point you turn to face another direction. At the end of summer this year, I walked out of the back door into the bright morning and heard a cry. Above my head circled four buzzards, calling to each other in the clear September sky. It was in that moment a medicine circle I had encountered thirty years ago came back to me. The circle is a wheel of four cardinal winds. It shows how a deliberately lived life can be measured in four directions, each one marking a stage in the challenging process of becoming human. Each one is governed by an animal. The fourth wind comes from the East and is directed by the eagle or condor.

At the end of the garden before you get to the wind-blown raspberry canes and mint flowers there is a small red tent. It’s been up there all summer and will stay until the frosts arrive. On sunny mornings, I come out and sit in the entrance with a notebook, and on clear nights I sleep here, so I can see the stars and planets above me, the moon as it rises and sets over the oaks, and Orion appearing over the roof, heralding the shift towards winter.

I have wanted to write a Substack series for some time, but I had to wait for the wind to change. I couldn’t find a title, or voice, that sounded true: everything felt too weighty, prescriptive, elegiac. But when I heard the buzzards, I realised I had been focusing on something else all summer: I had been writing notes by hand in this tent, drawing circles and shapes, remembering key moments in my life, phrases from people’s work that had acted as tools, as back up, in all the alchemical stages I had undergone. What I had once called a lexicon for the deep core.

Following the winds

The four winds are part of that lexicon. What I remember from the circle is the transformative journey starts in the South with a childish attention. At first this process of learning and discovery is a delight you share with fellow playmates, as you leave a conventional way of being behind and shed your snake skins. You experience in these freewheeling travelling years a kind of liberation. At the second stage, the West, that delight wanes and your companions disappear: you stumble and find yourself into the dark inner territory of the jaguar, where your shadow past and the history of your culture come to be revealed and transmuted. You are in the Underworld, in the nigredo years, wondering if you will ever get beyond its gloomy chambers, it endless ledger, the wailing of grief-stricken souls.

But one day you are handed a key, and you find yourself emerging beside a fireside in a circle of people, listening to an ancient fairy tale being told under the stars. You are facing another direction; you are now in the ancestral North, no longer alone. You work in an ensemble, become an activist, a speaker, a myth-teller, a teacher of creative arts and kinship with the wild places. The times, you are aware now, are urgent and demand your participation. These social practices are demanding but they bring back everything you ever loved about being human and on the Earth. These are the salty albedo years, tapping into deep time memory, when the first exuberant journey through the ancestor mountains, underpinned by your sojourn in the Underworld, deepens and starts to make sense.

Then one day, you can’t talk about the myths or ancestors anymore. You realise no one is listening.

It would be easy, perhaps at this stage, to become bitter and retreat. But of course you can’t. Because the fourth direction is all about transmission, bringing back what you know to the people you live amongst. When you face another direction, it is always unmapped. You feel bereft. What can you do? You look at where you are and you start from there. If you are a writer, you start with what your hands are writing.

So, today I am writing what I see from this red tent, pitched as it is in a wraggle-taggle garden, by a small rented cottage, surrounded by a land of salt marsh, bird sanctuary, nuclear power station, maize field, ruined abbey; as a dweller of an invaded village, a dispossessed town, a divided country, a civilisation in decline and fall, in a time of climate breakdown.

This is where this series starts: with an intent to share tools and practices gathered over 30 years, ways of seeing that might bring space and time into this present moment, hemmed in by a dark collective history and the loss of a promised future. A kind of inner activism that faces the ‘wicked problem’ of the crises we have inherited as people of industrialised nations.

The posts will be short and hopefully practical. There is no point to metaphysics if it doesn’t work in the world, if it doesn’t touch all that lives and breathes. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to understand what you are saying, it means no one is left out when you are saying it.

Sharing a practice

I've held several practices over the years: on the road in South America, working in the gig economy in Britain; when I had enough money to buy new shoes, when my third-hand boots were full of holes - but all of them have been about navigating the different directions and finding ways to bridge the dimensions beyond the world experienced as consensus reality. I’ve held a dreaming practice, a plant practice, a community activist practice, a mytho-dramaturgical practice. Most of these have taken the form of a dynamic dialogue with my partner Mark; some of them were explored with others, and others transmitted in workshops and performances. All of them have used writing as a way of recording and making sense of what knowledge and insights they brought in their wake. Some of these assembled into a shape and became books.

What I haven’t yet done is shared the ur-practice if you like: the metaphysics that underpins all of them.

So this Red Tent is unashamedly metaphysical, with its roots deep in the physical Earth. What I hope for the series is that it provides some clarity of sight in clouded waters, some grit and resonance in a frictionless machine-finished world. That it gives a sense of connection to the Earth and those who love her in isolating and fragmented times. Although I teach writing, it has always been less about conjuring words to be read by others, and more as a tool for honing perception, a way to access and navigate what is sometimes called the right-hemisphere attention, what storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls rio abajo rio: the dreaming fabric of the world.

What is the Red Tent?

The Red Tent is an existential space that explores the solarising rubedo stage of alchemy, the East wind of a medicine wheel, steered by the soaring scavenger-raptors of the sky. It is a time you take to sit with the trouble and embody your presence in time in all dimensions. A place where your physical body and intelligence and memory is at the core of a ring of concentric circles that ripple outwards to touch the neighbourhood, the lives of others, the stories of the world, the living and breathing planet.

It is the colour of the rising sun as it comes out of the North Sea. It is a beacon on the edge of the United Kingdom as it falls apart. It is a cut-price festival tent made from fossil fuels bought on Lowestoft High Street, that could, in another season, be a shelter made of bracken, or the canopy of a tree, or a crack in the mountain, a woollen cape keeping us from being buffeted and drenched by the storm.

What matters is that this temporary refuge for metaphysical attention is outside, that it has its feet on the earth, that it faces the sun, that when you go there it is just you and a notebook at the entrance, uninterrupted. This is where we begin.

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