The Gathering: One Week at a Time
Photograph: Phelim McDermott
Yesterday an estate agent came to our house to give us a valuation.
“Are we selling it already?” My daughter asked.
“No. Not yet. Not till we know where we’re going,” I explained.
“But we do know where we’re going!” she replied, “We just don’t know where it is yet.”
She is right, but today I don’t feel her five-year-old conviction, only my forty-seven-year-old fear. We have committed to finding a home for Improbable, and as part of this Phelim and I will be moving home as a family as well, and I am scared. However, I have just finished a novel and that was scary too, but from it I learnt that the great thing is to begin, and then to keep on. Not as in the famous phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On,” not in a British soldiering-on-no-matter-what kind of way. Something more vulnerable. Not carry on regardless, but regard-full. Carry on with care. Carry ourselves, the children, our fear and begin from here.
And we have begun. We sent out an invitation, and we gave it a name, this thing that is not a novel, a show or an Open Space event, but an ongoing happening, a home. We called it The Gathering.
This name helps. This already gives me something to gather. It makes me think of birds, gathering twigs, moss, wool. Every nest has to start with a first wisp of something. Or it makes me think of building a fire, gathering the wood, laying it down, and this in turn reminds me of a passage from a book, the Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. As it opens Macfarlane goes to visit his friend, Roger Deakin at his home, Walnut Tree Farm. Macfarlane describes how Roger had bought the farm many years ago when there was little on the land but the inglenook fireplace of an old Elizabethan steading. Roger laid his sleeping bag down in this hearth and built his home slowly out around it. The result was a house ‘as close to a living thing’ as any Macfarlane has known. I’d like our Improbable home to be like that - almost alive.
But we do not even have a hearth yet, let alone a house, so, for now, this space will have to be where the fire gets laid, where our sleeping bags lie, and the place from which to build out, one straw, one stick, one word at a time.
‘One word at a time’ is the first exercise I ever did with Improbable - two people doing an impossible thing, trying to tell a story between them, as if they were one person. Like most impro games, it is an exercise that is designed to help you practice how to begin, and then how to keep going, so it feels good to stumble upon it here, now. This is how we will find and build our Improbable home - how else? - just as we would grow any other story, laying down one word at a time.
One week at a time I, Lee or Phelim will write about this process here, as we gather more things to make it happen. A huge thank you to everyone who has sent in a clue, a stick, a straw, a word so far, in response to our initial invitation. We have received a wonderful range of thoughts to which we are slowly replying. Meanwhile, you can follow our gradual gathering here, every week.
For now, this week, our list of clues looks like this: we have wood, words and birds, some marshes, a docklands, a farm, my fear, an estate agent’s valuation, a twelve acre field of long grass and grasshoppers, and -maybe - one castle. It’s a good start.
