Start Here! Part Two:
Navigating the waves and the winds
Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.
There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.
Found the coin?
Why make a journey away from the known?
We are sailing out into the unknown to a place the maps don’t reach. Beyond sight and sound. Into the so far away future that is just so inevitably close.
This map is for the future, not the past. Let those miners of deep and ancient wisdom bring up their spoils from the depths behind. I am translating what is true into a new story made to carry us beyond the known and into the impossible beyond.
I want this to work for you: for us. I want us to be able to go on this voyage together. It can’t be like you know or else it won’t work. We’re looking for pragmatics – Ways to chart a course without getting windswept forgotten.
I can be clearer: I am thinking about the ways in which this can be accessible, help keep you awake against voices saying ‘go back to sleep’. Remember we promised Rumi long ago: Do not go back to sleep.
So here it is:
A Bright Ship will chart islands of enquiry one at a time. We’ve got our whole lives so we can take our time. We’ll sketch the islands perhaps, or else focus in on a seemingly small detail and open it out until it speaks its truth. The story is always hidden in the details. But we won’t overlabour the exposition. Won’t get lost in the excavation. We want consistent ruptures of imagination. Close to enquiry often. Many small wisdoms.
Said straight: I want to respect and honour your time and attention while making space for something new. My words fuel your imagination. I want something lean you can take in your pack for the day. When we need to, we’ll draw together what we’ve been working on through something a bit longer in format. We won’t waste time if we can avoid it.
Lets say it quick and clear now, then:
We are sailing to that unknown place that is tomorrow. We sail on words across oceans of imagination, the vast great swell and crash of human memory and culture and really the stories that make us make sense. We are sailing for the future to unmap the stories made before today.
This is the moment, right here, and if no-one has told you I am telling you (but you probably know): we need something like voices thinking forward, not backwards. Maybe voices speaking to the future, not from the past.
The voices inside this head are a pluralist position, finding many truths that make sense side by side instead of one sovereign at the top or the centre telling the others what’s what. We won’t have space for any belief who wants to take up all the air on their own story.
We are making the road by walking the way:
Through many voices across dimensions we will draw out a story too big to be told in one hit. Drawing down the story will open up many more roads. By the time it is inside our hearts it will do what all good stories do: Rewrite the world you thought you knew.
When we’ve made the road ahead we’ll be able to tell the story back from the beginning of things with all we’ve learned since someone tried to tell it long ago.
There is no return journey from this threshold: Since we are questing for the home that is ahead and not the one behind.
We are sailing out into the unknown to a place the maps don’t reach. Beyond sight and sound. Into the so far away future that is just so inevitably close.
If we have tuned our ears to hear the whole story we will know that the unknown is wild in the Hopi sense1: Something difficult to claim.
Why make a journey away from the known?
To seek out the wild unknown.
Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.
There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.
Found the coin?
’The Hopi world for wild, tumpqa, means hard to approach, hard to get hold of.’ Robert Bringhurst