ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

My Dad broke his neck and entered a coma on the 14th October, my Birthday. Endings and beginnings. At the time I was on the other side of the world, about to make the longest journey of my life.

Days later, we would take the decision to switch off his life support. I cannot tell you if that was a hard, or easy decision. My Dad's body left him on the 14th, was he still there? I don't know, I couldn't sense him in that body, yet, I could feel him in mine.

The days in between those endings, a blur, like my first memories, neither true or false. Uncertain, so uncertain. It’s in that space that I now recognise, my stories crumbled. From then on, nothing could ever quite be the same again.

Whole chapters of beliefs vanished. In an instant and yet somehow not. In that passage of uncertainty, the illusion of certainty disappeared. A story collapsing, itself a trauma to deal with.

Has there ever been a place with a sense of more certainty, than in the body of a white man, born in the second half of the twentieth century?

What happened next was the embodiment of my grief. I held onto it, cared for it, learned to live around it. And began to build a new illusion, one that helped me make sense of what had become the un-sensible.

At endings the ‘aha’ moments come thick and fast. There’s grief, lots of it. I grieved for the old self, for my old family. There will forever be a before and after. I felt that as the certainty and illusion of my story faded, there were two ways to act. Act quickly to try and patch up the story, with a focus on my individual needs, a place of dead ends. Or, act slower with others, letting our new story emerge, a place of possibilities.

I grew up in the Peak District in an outdoor activity centre with two brothers, outside was our happy space. It was freedom, boundaryless. At uni I painted and drew on blank canvases, the limit, my imagination. In the end, it was natural for me to choose freedom, to choose possibilities. In many ways my Dad’s last act was to set me free.

What manifested? Well, the Re-Action Collective. I don’t have a word for grief, at times it’s everything, fierce, raw, and at others numb and senseless. If there was anything that works as a metaphor, maybe, compost? It’s messy, entangled, complex, interconnected with everything, and over time, when cared for, it becomes nourishing. It is both the end and the beginning.

And so I created compost. I built connections, sort commune, put my hand up and found the others. Those that are having the ‘aha’ moments, often gentler moments, less traumatic but still just as important. I’ve had many of these since my Dad’s passing and if you treat them from a place of uncertainty, they can be delightful, they can take us towards freedom. When feared, the opposite happens.

One such moment was reading the book ‘Citizens’ by Jon Alexander. Jon put words to what I was feeling, the consumer story of acting independently, where my value and purpose showed up in ownership, and material possessions was the illusion that had vanished. I needed a new illusion to make sense, a new story. The word for that? ‘Citizen’ the framing? Togetherness, creation, acting with others. A story to be written collectively.

That is what I wanted. That is what ‘WE’ created. I put my hand up, others quickly joined, and trusted me. And from then every single connection and action we took was critical. All our contributions suddenly mattered.

I can’t tell you if there is a hierarchy to compost, I have a sense that things happen when they need to, and that over time there is balance. So, it’s not surprising that Re-Action is like compost, ruleless, democratic, a shared space...messy. To get involved, you turn up when you need to, and as you feel, there is no obligation to act, yet we do collectively.

The collective isn’t exactly clarified. Reimagining the Outdoors, is a vague enough purpose to keep us in a space of possibilities. I have the title of steward and citizen, also vague. Ask me what those jobs look like, and I couldn’t tell you. Not because I’m trying to be awkward, but because I’m happiest in uncertainty. Give me a defined title and I see a closing of doors to my future self.

My grief shifted my perspective, and that is what we do at Re-Action. We learn to love the things that exist, we attach new stories to them, we care for them, we give them new life, new meaning. We change perspectives about our separation from nature, change perspectives around the value of art, storytelling, creating, sharing that has become our currency.

Re-Action is the embodiment of my grief, it was born from my Dad, his final act wasn’t to set me free. His story carried on, through us all, he is here in everything we create.

My nephew was born a year to the day after we switched off the life support. Endings and beginnings, make of that what you will.

Why do I offer this all up now? Our stories are ending, and new ones need writing. I have been here before.

We can only arrive somewhere desirable, if we act collectively and from a place of possibility. As we each have more and more ‘aha’ moments, it feels right to demonstrate that there are others, acting together, figuring out what comes next. That, we have open arms, offering softer landings, where we have a need for all of us to nourish the new illusion.

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." -William Blake