Just as I feel ready to begin connecting the various points on my map of the space that Refigurations is tracing, time has overtaken me. I am charged with making the implications of this space explicit. I’m having to translate this comfortably open and experimental vocabulary into ordinary language.

I have to make a leap. To have faith that the ground I’ve covered provides enough pointers that I can fill out the picture as I bring others along. To trust that we can help each other further along by building on this scaffold.

And so suddenly new uncertainties crack open. Through this crack rush in a sense of adventure. I’ve landed right between intention and realisation!

Perhaps the spirit of Adventure is an essential ingredient in making new discoveries. Nothing original is created without establishing contact with the hot and dangerous, the molten and unseen, which lies just beyond the limits of control. Embracing this perspective, Adventure raises the spirit above the ordinary and fixes the gaze on the horizon. It attracts the energy needed to set sail. It conjures the collective strength to do what hasn’t been done before.

Here’s the task: to help unblock frozen energy in the minds of others. To untie the double binds that others carry with them. To create a space where it is possible for others to let go of stale beliefs.

There is only one way to do this. To create spaces where the perception of reality can deepen.

This brings me to a first articulation of my role as a teacher: my responsibility lies in crafting a space where others can learn to attend. (I instantly have to admit to the incompleteness of my own attention. And of my own perception and knowledge. This is as much a challenge to myself as it is to anyone who think they can learn something from me.)

This turns my perspective thus far on its head. Rather than discovering this space by moving through my own circles, I’ll have to go back to the beginning and set out in a different direction. One that isn’t determined by me. See where others go and venture with them. Try to help them get to know the space we’re journeying through as they help me crafting entries in a collective vocabulary. It’s really a co-creative adventure.

Crafting a space… Let’s use the working title space craft for this new perspective. Space and craft: two words that distinguish the undertaking from “a vehicle that is used to travel outer space”. This is not outer space or empty space. Not even an abstract virtual space. This is the lived in space where learning takes place. It has texture and feel. It has real people and events, each with different positions and directions. It has the characteristics of exactly where we are and who we are when we meet.

Simply put, craft is ”modes of practice that continually return us to an awareness of necessities”. Craft is the kind of practice where awareness touches directly on the living world without mediation. Finger on string, foot on ground, pen on paper, eyes on ball, hand on rudder, blade on wood, mind in world. We each have different practices but we can triangulate across them.

Perhaps we can say the purpose of crafting space is to create communities of learning where this triangulation can take place with as little resistance as possible?

Space craft is then the craft of bringing together the particular elements that are conducive to someone’s learning and/or unlearning. The skill involved is knowing when what is needed. This will be different for each person. It will be different for each group. It is the complex task of finding a way through a large tangle of collective assumptions, expectations and certainties in order to open an invisible door might not even have a handle!

This brings a better real life metaphor into view.

Wayfinding is how traditional navigators in Polynesia travel between islands separated by huge expanses of open water without chronometer, map or any other tool than the navigator’s mind. In “Wayfinders”, Wade Davis describes the genius of Polynesian navigation as a craft of empirical observation, deep intuition, memory, knowing the elements and interpreting the clues of the seascape.

To understand the sagacity of this skill it is necessary to imagine being out at sea in a canoe with no land in sight and no instruments at hand to determine your position. How do you know what to do and where to go? Wait for night time and look at the stars?

Yes. The Polynesian wayfinders know the names of more than 200 stars as well as all their constellations. They know the arc of their movement created by earth’s rotation at any given time of the year.

But more than that they know the ocean. They know the different kind of waves created by local weather systems. They recognise the pitch and roll of deep ocean currents. These expert navigators can distinguish as many as five different swells moving through the vessel. They understand the reverberation of waves across the hull of the canoe as saturated with meaning. They can read the refractive pattern created by an individual island group forensically as a fingerprint.

They read the weather, the winds and the shape, colour, character and place of clouds. They know where the wildlife moves and read seamarks much as terrestrials recognise landmarks.

They know when to take measure of sea and sky, study the winds, their impact on the waves. They see the colours caused by the path of the sun as a clue to their own position in space.

They use their canoe as a compass which divides the horizon into different parts and sets out direction.

Combining all this, they use their memory of the unique positions of stars, the time they appear on a particular night, and their bearings as they cross the horizon, as an indicator of location.

The needle in the compass is the wayfinder herself. Davis remarks: “it [i]s one thing to know what to look for, these clues and signs and indications; it [i]s quite another to pull it together and confront in the moment the ever-changing power and reality of the sea”. Awake for twenty-two hours a day, the wayfinder sits secluded and monk-like observing the ocean and the sky with the sole task of keeping track of the position of the canoe.

Wayfinding has enabled the Polynesians to sail distances of more than 10,000 kilometres – the span between Hawaii and Easter Island – without any other tool of navigation than the human mind.

This is no small feat. One doesn’t need to be a seafarer to recognise this, just open any textbook on navigation. Wikipedia reads: “Until the mid-1750s, accurate navigation at sea out of sight of land was an unsolved problem due to the difficulty in calculating longitude”. And yet this problem was solved by the people who migrated across the Pacific millennia before the Europeans arrived.

This contrasts the technological paradigm with the mindset of craft. Where technology provides a recipe to follow, craft is a skill slowly acquired within a practice. You have to fail to learn a craft, sometimes you have to bleed. Where technology allows a user to act in the world without any knowledge whatsoever of how a gadget modifies or amplifies her behaviour, craft always leaves a practitioner with an acute awareness of her relation to the surrounding world.

Davis describes how “the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got where you are. One’s position at any one time is determined solely on the basis of distance and direction travelled since leaving the last known point.”

This is the kind of reckoning needed for crafting a space of learning. We have to know where we are and how we got here. More than that, we have to know why we are here. We have to get clear about where we have come from and where we are going. That sounds simple but in my encounters with people who have ended up in my classes, no one so far have been able to even begin answering such questions.

In crafting space there is no room for recipes, procedures or tick box exercises. That would only introduce abstraction and distance into the community of learning, which could leave learners unable to communicate given the wrong context. If we are to move anything or anywhere each of us need to know exactly how and why we arrived in the space where we find ourselves together.

First questions: Why are you here? What brought you here? How did you arrive in this space?

The metaphor of wayfinding reverses the thrust of the notion of ‘learning to navigate uncertainty’. Rather than finding a way of moving through the world, the task becomes to learn to attend to how the world changes simply as a matter of existence. Learning to recognise the different nuances within a space in order to help untangle whatever knots we’ve brought with us in here. Building a learning community by being present together here and now, rather than focusing on an issue we want to solve in the future. This must be the focal point for space craft.

Indeed, the complete attention to what occurs in the present is what enables wayfinders to reach their destination: “The metaphor is that the Hokule’a [canoe] never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her”. That could read as a description of the meaning of a space of learning.

This is what we are aiming for when we are crafting space.

Space craft. Holding the different nuances of a space in our mind and connecting with a shared intention. Letting the aim arise out of the collective journey.

While the metaphor may sound well… non-literal, it has very basic implications, which I am testing out on an everyday basis. And there is a long way to go! There are all sorts of practical aspects related to this craft. It needs a lot of practice.

But I have a lot to go on. There is a straightforward connection with many of the things I touch on in my thesis related to ‘holding the space’, engaging with creativity and journeying through our assumptions about the world. As well as with many of the conversations that inspire Refigurations. Perhaps space craft is not all that new. And I certainly don’t intend to invent the wheel again. But as a framing for my inquiry, it seems to offer something very concrete: a perspective that allows me to craft my own practice as a teacher (a title that still sits rather uncomfortably with me).

So I’d like to try this out. See what the notion of crafting space can offer in terms of creating a frame that brings different inquiries together and perhaps opens up for a way of translating some of these insights into other vocabularies.

So to begin, let us move into space.

At first it looks like complete darkness: there is nothing here except a Beckettian void. There are these words glaring off the screen and even they seem disembodied, voiceless. But the place where we are each sitting and reading these words is not the space. The space is stretched out between us, a field which holds each of us and brings all that we are into view. It has been described as the Theosphere but its name is not important – what matters is that we are here, forming a sort of community of inquiry. Why are we here? What brought us here? How did we arrive in this space?

And we see that the darkness is not equally black in all places. Our questions point to different shades of grey. So we look for the grey areas and move into them. Like watching the sea after we realise it is not just a big empty space but one that it is full of signs which carry meaning. We note down what we see, where we’ve been and ask ourselves how we got here. We make these observations and take them as clues to where we might be going.

On this basis it is possible to make some first reflections:

The space looks different to each of us. We’ve arrived here for different reasons. We have different experiences and powers of observations. This could be a huge strength if we learn a form of communication accepts failure.

We’re not sure what is going to happen next. But what happens next is probably important for where we end up. How do we know what is the next step?

This is confusing. It is not a comfortable position to be in. We will have to deal with our impulse to look to others for an answer. To fill out the silences. Even to make sense of being here together in the space.

If we can withdraw our inclination to make sense, we might also avoid projecting ourselves onto the grey fuzziness that surrounds us. If we can sidestep our expectations and accept the absence of any recognisable form, we can begin working with simply attending to the space.

We can become aware of our own thoughts about being here. Suspend what think we know and be observant. Then it might be possible to embrace a sort of radical openness and allow the situation to unfold according to its own dynamic.

And when we get to grips with this situation, perhaps it will become clear what the next step is. Can we trust that clarity will arise of it’s own accord? We certainly need trust in each other to proceed…

…

The spaces we craft together will be very different not least because our community manifests in different locations at different times and with different people. The starting point will always shift. The purpose of gathering will vary. The institutional, cultural and linguistic set up will differ. But across these differences we find similarities of practice. And these similarities point to the possibility of a shared language describing creativity.

As we return to the practice of space craft, we begin creating a shared ritual where meaning is magnified and a more coherent perspective can establish a collective language.

First we have to meet, to make a connection. That means we have to give up our positions and travel across the space to find out what it looks like from the perspective of our fellow explorers. This is the most difficult part of entering the space because we have to let go of ourselves. But it is where the Adventure lies.

And from here on anything can happen!

I want to finish with a last observation.

The distinction between the mindsets of technology and craft ripples through the space. It exists in a wealth of contrasts such as quantitative and qualitative dichotomies and the differences between power and strength. But in observing the differences we see that they constitute each other and as such are not in opposition. The stand in relation and one is contained within the other.

This is important because it gives us a vantage point where we don’t have to worry about our vocabulary. We are not taking a position that is either one or the other. We simply observe that one is what it is because of the other. We see the possibility of both positions obtaining at the same time. In this way, the metaphorical and literal co-exist, not as ‘abstract’ versus ‘concrete’ but as ways of describing what we observe. There are better or worse descriptions but there are no right and wrong positions to elaborate or defend.

So when we’ve explored sufficiently we can move on without worrying about leaving behind definitions. The important part is that we learned something and can articulate where we have been. As Wade Davis says elsewhere, a language is an old growth forest of the mind. If we can make ourselves intelligible to each other, perhaps we can illuminate that part of the human mind which is able to travel 10,000 kilometers without a map, a compass or a chronometer.

Space craft is a radical disposition, it is not polite, civil, activist or into the business of saving anyone or anything. It doesn’t get blinded by ideas, it navigates by dead reckoning. It doesn’t seek explanations. It cares about being helpful rather than being useful. It builds courage to look where no one is looking.

The framing, purpose and setting will be different every time we put our attention to crafting space. I guess it will be difficult to point to generalities for long periods of time. But there are already lots of leads. Which starting points generate interesting conversations? What do we already know works? How do we deal with particular obstacles? Which descriptions best illuminate the space? Where are the generalities between creative practices? What specific changes in perspective can help unblock the imagination?

What gets us stuck?

It is open for anyone to join the Adventure.

TBC.