TREES

 The blossom has gone now and small fruits are forming on the trees.  A large ash tree in the cemetery is dead due to ash die back.  There is something about trees and timescale which is interested.  Dogs are the same they run a bit faster than us and you need to accept that they will hopefully not outlive you.   I walked around the cemetery with Clare and thought about the roots of the trees connecting all the bodies, what was above and what was below.  I am going to make a soundscape and record the noise of the trees.  We may also listen to them with stethoscopes at the playground and try to work out what they are saying.  It was nice to be doing a festival of the mind project it made me think about practice and about building a space to hold something - perhaps an event.  I suppose the job of the trees project is axiological.  Guattari uses this word a lot in chaosmosis which is not an easy book but is sort of relevant here. ...

 I am in a conversation about a public dialogue about trees for next year run by the UK Treescapes programme. Plant a tree for 73 was all the thing as well as entering the Common Market in 1973. These are the redwoods in San Francisco. What I said is we need to do a takeover like is happening on Radio 2 next week on sustainability. I also talked about Nabil Hamdi and Small Change and also the Simple Stories work I said we should do a projection against the House of Commons.  It made me realise we have thought quite deeply about public dialogues but perhaps in a different way. 

I am reading your writing and it is taking me ages and I want to go and walk in the woods. While I was in Dorset I thought about the tree planting we did in December and I went and visited my tree. It wasn't very large and I thought about the timescapes of trees.  John pointed out this tree that had once been a pollard and now looked strange - it had been wrapped in a hedge a hundred years ago but had not stayed in one place. Trees are growing and changing and their timescapes are different from ours.   

The blossom is coming out in the cemetery. I photograph it every year  and every year it surprises me; how lovely it is and how much there is of it.  We had a good meeting about the Black Poplar today I didn't know much about them but was pleased they didn't look like normal poplars which are my least favorite tree. I'm always playing catch up at these meetings as I'm never very sure where it fits in to the rest of the project but the team were there and it felt familiar and I felt useful.  It reminded me of some of my other work brokering arts science partnerships and how the disciplines can effectively work together.  I then went on to try and do some writing and this got muddled up with the meeting as i didn't take a break to switch over.   My writing is about multi modality so I did a bit of reading and watched Gunther again on youtube   I know its not always useful to roll everything together but I did wonder about the potential to generate muti-modal...

    I went to a talk last night about global warming and the coming end of the world by flood.  It was a Social Sculpture that focused around conversations about a conceptual ark that contained things but also hopes and dreams.  The work was well presented and had clearly engaged a group of people in conversation, they had taken more ownership over the reality of a dying planet and their potential to enact change.  I wanted to tell them about Plenty Coups and the idea that imagining a future from this present moment may not be helpful and we need collective radical hope that equips us to deal with the unknown which will surely become present itself in the next couple of millennia.   I will try and answer my own question.   If this project is successful what will it do ? At this point it would be tempting to go to the case for support and list our projected outputs and outcome yet this is not what I was asking.  "If these trees survive they wi...

 Hope is a fragile thing, like this tree. When I planted a tree in December, my mother said, 'you should pre-dig the holes when you do tree planting with the children, otherwise it will take too long'.  I profoundly disagreed with her. But to give the children that task required a leap of faith.  The whole point of the 'Voices of the Future' project is that we have the faith that the children can dig the holes for the trees. They might be smaller and are light so the pushing part was hard and they might not like the worms and the bugs and the soil that cracks in their hands, but they could plant the trees.  Each tree will live longer than each child, if it is lucky, and the tree will provide some goodness back to the air.  So the success of the tree project is partly in that simple act, that would only have happened in the context of the project. It is also in the way that the science has now become our mode - placing science as mode at the heart of the tree pro...

 At the discussion on Friday, which I listened to with a kind of Covid-y tiredness but couldn't help but find exciting, we discussed the energy of hope. We spent some time reading the transcripts from the children's listening exercise. Johan talked about the format of the fairytale as one we could follow.  He talked about Hansel and Gretel and the form of the fairytale being about overcoming some kind of danger and going into strange spaces such as the forest. We also talked about small stories and tall stories.  This felt like a really positive way forward and we agreed to explore tall and small stories with the children.  While I have been ill I made it my mantra to walk in the woods everyday.  Here is a photo from a tree walk.