Field Notes: spinning and gathering
Collective discernment | My two-yr-old's take on Van Gogh | Name change | My book | Wayfinding
I have tabs open on my laptop and clicking between them is making me spin: online food shopping/research about pension schemes/military occupation/vulnerable people being deliberately starved/Van Gogh’s paintings/Artificial Intelligence. I opened this post with a paragraph about why this was making me spin, but I deleted it, because I suspect we all know that dizzying mix of confusion, despair, mundanity, beauty, horror.
Reality is unsettling and unreality is making it more so.
I have been thinking about the word ‘intelligence’ in Artificial Intelligence. It comes from Latin and means ‘understanding, knowledge, power of discerning’, and is assimilated from ‘inter’ meaning between and ‘legere’ meaning choose, pick out, read. It contains the older root ‘leg-’ which means to collect or gather. As in, gather things from which to choose and discern between.
AI has access to vast knowledge which it feeds us through its own filters and ways of discerning. It is intelligent. But we humans are alive, our intelligence evolved connected to every other living thing. We get to discern what the artificial kind feeds us — or doesn’t. Intelligence is about gathering and choosing between kinds of knowledge, and AI might do the gathering and sifting quickly, which can be helpful*, but I do not know what process or biases it uses to do this, it does not know my soul, and it does its gathering using vast resource-hungry data centres. I do not want to be consumer of knowledge it serves up to me as an isolated individual sitting at my desk, I want to collectively gather and discern what we need to inform our path through this world, at this time, even when that is hard and frustrating work to do. For that, I want to stay connected to the reality — seen and unseen — of the world we were born from and depend on.
So much of that world is unfindable, unknowable by AI — like what it really feels like to walk through the world on a bright May morning, or what it really feels like to try to survive under military occupation. Or like love — not the hokey slogan feel-good version of the word, but the intimate, world-shaking, rolled-up-sleeves truth of it. Or like what happens when the fragmented parts of ourselves, our societies, our world decide to come together and reject the narratives that benefit from this fragmentation — about self-sufficiency, independence, growth at all costs.
Here are a few things I am trying to gather at the moment, individually and collectively:
myself, around a steady core — internally, and in community — that can steady me when I spin.
hope and light when darkness descends. Seeking and finding these things are discipline and shelter to me.
plain everyday joys, which turn out to be the ones that line my life with meaning.
clues about how humans used to live, and do live, and might live.
food that we grow not because we are good at it (we got a letter asking us to make our allotment, er, less wild) but because there is the gift of good soil, and because I feel alive when I am digging and sweating with the Earth, and because it seems to touch something sacred, and connects me with others (an encounter at the allotment last week: “my wife thinks I’m still at work! But I’m here with my broccoli in the sun!”).
What is making you spin? What are you gathering — or releasing — to inform or steady yourself?
🖼️ My two-year-old daughter, looking at a print of a painting by Van Gogh recently, said “slow”. I queried her, checking I’d heard right and that she had picked the right word. She said “Drawing. Slow”.
I have been looking at his paintings again and have decided they are kind of slow. The way he often painted real scenes impressionistically and with vivid colour gives the effect of time slowing down and stretching out, each moment rippling and pulsing with a uniqueness that is hard to see at the speed of life, as if Van Gogh were savouring the hereness and nowness and this’ll never exist again-ness of what he was looking at.
As I looked at his paintings through the lens of my daughter’s observation, I began to see a strange and quivering existence. I am not sure that this is what my daughter meant when she said “slow”, but still, it was a gift to imagine existence through his eyes, and through my daughter’s.
📝 My narrative non-fiction book proposal finally went out on submission to publishers last week after being previewed at London Book Fair a few weeks ago. And A FEW publishers are interested! 🫠 Please send your good thoughts, love, prayers. You’ll be the first to know of any developments. I hesitated to share this because publishing seems to blow with the winds and early interest might not translate. But I am trying to step out of my cocoon, and to do some growing in plain sight.
Book proposals are strange things. Exposing, frustrating, clarifying, satisfying. I wrote a bit about these and other related/tangential thoughts recently, here.
📣 This newsletter was born as RedLands — a nod to the red soils I have lived on and learned from in Devon and Zambia.
I’ve decided to change its name now, to Field Notes.
Field Notes will still gather eclectic-but-connected observations while walking and living, and while working on a book. I think this name will better hold the things I want to gather for the road ahead.
Sometimes I’ll share notes from behind the scenes of my writing desk, or dispatches from our westcountry village which act as a lens into the luminous, fragmenting world beyond. Sometimes I’ll share things from history or myth or the sacred. Sometimes I’ll think about community, culture, and who we are underneath it all. Sometimes I’ll write notes off the beaten track, or while travelling, lifting my eyes to the horizon. I will always try to point towards beauty and hope, and to gather shards of light.
So look out for Field Notes from now on — and thanks for being here.
🙋🏻♀️ I don’t usually plug my non-writing work here, but I’m for hire! If you’d like to work with me, get in touch:
As a Hillwalking guide: I’m a qualified Hill and Moorland Leader accredited by the Mountain Training Association, and Outdoor First Aid trained. Get in touch if you’d like to work with me one-to-one or as a group. I tailor walks, and incorporate points of natural, historical and cultural interest too. Dartmoor and Exmoor (UK) are the uplands I’m closest to but I can travel by arrangement. (I’m thinking of setting up some regular low cost themed group walks — any local interest? Let me know!)
As a coach: I’m a qualified ‘transformational coach’, with training accredited by the International Coaching Federation. I listen deeply and love doing so. I can work with you to think about who you are or who you want to become, and the patterns that might be supporting or blocking that. In person or online.
As both! - I love to combine walking and coaching, exploring the inner whilst we navigate the outer. The two go so well together.
Clients have said kind things:
“You helped liberate my thinking. I’ve found clarity where I was struggling. I feel like I’ve jumped into a cold lake with you, bracing, and that you’ve warmed me afterwards.”
“I feel more confident and able to make decisions. I feel in a safe place in our sessions, and very listened to.”
“I feel so different, I’ve shed all these old scripts and can hear myself better.”
In case you missed recent posts:
*I know that AI can be extremely helpful, even game-changing — in job applications, in getting organised, in medical research and more.
Eagerly awaiting book news! Excited for you xx
Did you read Iain McGilchrist’s article about AI in Resurgence, back in 2023, the Love is a Verb issue? He calls it Artificial Information-processing rather than Artificial Intelligence as it is entirely left brain on overdrive. Good luck with the book.