The Very Latest Plan

A year and a half ago - in Jan ’25 - I wrote a blog called ‘Letting Go of The Plan,’ about how our vision of The Gathering as a creation centre, based at Bore Place in Kent, might not be unfolding quite as we intended. It was also about how my recent life hadn’t gone as expected, when I received a diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia on the day after my 50th. I wrote about how Improbable’s practice and understanding of improvisation - the ability to say ‘yes’ to the unknown - had helped see me through that diagnosis and the intensive chemo which followed, and how it was also helping us navigate the uncertainty around The Gathering’s progress.
 
Well, after this, during ’25, we made a new plan.
 
You might find this contradictory. We’re improvisers - why do we keep making plans?! People tend to think that improvisation involves having no script and therefore no plan. But this isn’t quite true. We make plans all the time- we can’t help it. I think improvising is like putting a magnifying glass right up against the minutiae of life - it’s a way to look into the long grass and study the great jungle hidden there. When you look that closely, you will see that each instant of your life contains plans. You can feel this in your body when there is a step you didn’t see coming and a jolt runs through you because the ground was not where you were planning it to be. Improvising is a bit like getting a whole series of those jolts one after another - you keep making the plans, even though the ground keeps shifting.
 
One of my favourite impro exercises that Lee and Phelim teach is called ‘one word at a time.’ Two people try and behave like one, telling a story or giving a speech, and each person must take their turn to say one word at a time. It is very simple, extremely difficult, and it contains everything - all the impro wisdom and practice that there ever was, is and will be. Very often, when you say your word, you already have a plan for what should come next. We speak in sentences, so words tend to come to us like necklaces, already threaded strings, each word a bead. When your partner says their next bead of a word it is invariably not the one you had planned - this can feel delightful or infuriating or both, but there is nothing for it but to come up with a new word, make a new plan. Sometimes people feel as if they have gone blank - they can’t think of a single word to say. I believe what is actually happening in that moment is that ten plans at once are trying to make it through and there is a log jam. Or sometimes your plan may be to make your partner do all the hard work. Whatever way you look at it, planning is happening.
 
Anyway, to get back to the plan of this blog:
There we were in ’25 with our great new plans: we would build a scaled down version of our creation centre, make more of a nest than an ark: we would convert the old oast house at Bore Place. Meanwhile, I would be in fine health - that brush with death was an extraordinary chapter that had happened when I turned 50. I was grateful. It had taught me a huge amount. But now I was ready to move on, with my newly accrued wisdom, and found our Improbable home.
 
And then…
 
Yup, you guessed it: more plans on the scrap heap.  
 
That autumn we didn’t get the funding we wanted to make the oast house version of our home happen, and my test results showed up a molecular relapse in the leukaemia.
 
Oh shit.
 
Sometimes, even if you know that the practice is to let go of the plan, it is also important not to skip over the ‘oh shit’ moment. The anger. The grief. The disappointment. Because sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it seemed like such a good plan. Your idea for a next word, in that ‘one word at a time’ story was simply brilliant - surely you don’t have to throw it away?!
 
Yes, you do.
 
But it isn’t wasted. Look through that magic impro magnifying glass again and you will see that the soil out of which the grass is growing is made up almost entirely of thrown away plans, of brilliant ideas and lost words, all quietly decomposing, enriching the earth - wasting away, but not wasted.
 
So, what’s the next plan then?
 
Well, you’ll be glad to know we have quite a few.
 
In terms of The Gathering we are now in Sevenoaks, Kent- we have no building but we are here to stay, nonetheless. We are keeping our ears to the ground, in case a building should happen to come our way - if anyone knows of an office or creative space that could suit us, please get in touch. From 2027 we will continue to hold our summer residencies at Bore Place, but this year, we have decided to make a different plan. There are several reasons for this:
 
Firstly, Phelim is performing in the Tao of Glass at Soho Place all summer. If you are feeling sad not to be on a summer workshop with us, go see this show - it’s like a workshop in itself. It’s sort of a poetic lecture demonstration of our practice - a thing of beauty grown from lost and fractured plans, with an original score by Philip Glass - what’s not to love?
 
Secondly, we want to draw a line under our grand dreams of a home at Bore Place - to let those plans gently start to sink into the soil/ soul, so they can begin to break down there and enrich us, not diminish us. It has been important to be able to dream there – their land is regeneratively managed, and it has helped us to regenerate also. But it seems right to let our presence at that site lie fallow for a year, until summer ’27.
 
Thirdly, there’s my uncertain health situation. It is quite likely that I will have to go back into hospital to have more intense chemo and a stem cell transplant. I have my ‘oh shit’ moments about this - plenty of tears and fears - but I am busy making plans too, one word at a time. You can follow these on my Substack, and through my Poems on a Pole each month, and you can join in my ‘Fun Raiser’ to help support and fund my wellness adventure. It’s strange - we framed The Gathering originally as a collective treasure hunt for a home, and this has morphed, for me, into a treasure hunt for health - my body is the home I am working on right now, but part of the greatest gift of this project is the sense of community around me. My deepest wish is for it to be for the good health and cheer of us all, so do please join in.
 
And lastly, since the only reason we wanted a building in the first place, was so that we could focus on and share our practice, we are keen to get on with doing just that. In many ways it is a relief that we don’t have to worry about property deeds, or who is going to clean the toilets, and can put our energy into the more serious business of play. So, in lieu of a summer residential, we are programming a whole year’s worth of workshops, based locally in Sevenoaks, and online, to help us embed our practise here. We set out to find a place to house our practice, but now the task is the reverse: we want to make the practise hold and deepen our relationship to place. So, watch this space for workshops in storytelling, writing and, of course, in improvisation, for all levels and ages. Announcement coming soon.
 
But whatever our plans, the good stuff - the actual happening, the story, the real treasure - is what will unfold between us, and that relies on you turning up, and making it so. Over to you, for the next word in the story…..

Image: Tristram Kenton