Renewal

Hello,

It has been almost six months since I last wrote here. A great deal has been happening in my life, work, and wider practice, and it feels right to begin again by sharing something of where I now stand.

The return of the sun this week has felt meaningful. For a while, it seemed as though it might rain forever. That feels, in some ways, an apt image for the last period of life and work: full, demanding, generative, and at times difficult to see through clearly until now.

Over the last year, a number of strands that have existed alongside one another in my practice for a long time have begun to converge in a much more defined way. My work as an artist across writing, film, and performance. My teaching and facilitation. The one-to-one work I do with others. The embodied, reflective, and ritual processes I have been developing over many years. And the field-based work that has become such an important part of what I offer at Hitchin Lavender.

For a long time, I have been asking how these different elements belong together. Not just practically, but philosophically and artistically. What is the deeper continuity between making a film, writing a text, guiding a meditation, holding ritual space, or supporting someone through a threshold in their life or practice? What kind of knowledge is being generated in these spaces? What kind of authorship is possible there? What forms of meaning emerge that are difficult to account for within dominant, overly narrow frameworks?

Last year, I returned to formal study and completed my MA in Creative Writing, receiving a Distinction. That experience mattered to me deeply. It did not feel like stepping away from my practice, but returning more fully to its roots. Writing is where so much of this began for me when I was nineteen. To study seriously again, and to discover that this work could be deepened and strengthened through research, felt not like departure but recognition. My graduation takes place in two weeks’ time.

Alongside that, I made the decision to formalise and investigate what I have been encountering through creative practice for more than three decades. I developed a research proposal and submitted it to a number of universities. In January, I learned that my first-choice institution had accepted both the project and my application, and I was offered a place at the Royal College of Art, in the School of Arts & Humanities, as a PhD researcher.

This research feels like a natural continuation of the work I have already been doing for many years, but also a sharpening of it. At its heart, it asks how embodied forms of meaning-making, ritual process, and storytelling can generate sovereignty and authorship, particularly for those whose lives and practices are often misrecognised, marginalised, or othered by dominant systems. It asks what happens when meaning is not imposed from outside, but generated through lived experience, attention, relation, form, image, gesture, memory, and embodied encounter.

This matters to me not only academically, but personally and artistically. I have spent much of my life working in and across forms that do not always sit easily within conventional categories. Film, performance, writing, ritual, teaching, field work, dialogue. I have long been interested in what happens at the edges of forms, in threshold spaces, and in practices that allow people to encounter themselves and the world differently. The PhD gives me a framework through which to examine this more rigorously, but the impulse underneath it is the same one that has animated my practice all along: how do we create spaces in which something real can happen? How do we become more fully present to our own experience? How might creative and ritual practice become sites of transformation, resonance, and authorship?

This is one of the reasons my return to Hitchin Lavender this year feels especially significant. This will be my ninth year returning there, which is extraordinary to think about. Over that time, the work has evolved, and so have I. Yet the essential impulse remains the same: to create a space in which people can slow down, listen, attend, and reconnect through embodied practice, creativity, landscape, and shared presence.

The land itself has always been part of that process. There is something about being gathered out there, under the changing light, in open weather, in relation to horizon, scent, ground, dusk, moon, and season, that alters the quality of attention. What emerges in those spaces is often subtle, but no less real for that. Sometimes it is quiet recognition. Sometimes release. Sometimes reorientation. Sometimes simply the feeling of having returned to oneself.

This year I return with more clarity about what I am offering and why. The work is not about performance in the social sense, nor productivity, nor self-improvement as a demand. It is about encounter. It is about creating conditions in which reflection, feeling, imagination, ritual attention, and creativity can become available again. It is about offering spaces that are grounded, person-led, and generative. Spaces in which change is not forced, but held carefully enough that it can begin.

That return begins on 1 April, with the first Full Moon gathering of the year, which feels fitting. So many meaningful journeys begin with the Fool: with openness, uncertainty, sincerity, and the willingness to step beyond what is already known. I can think of no better archetype with which to begin again.

I have also reopened my books for a limited number of 1:1 consultations. These sessions are for those seeking support with creativity, direction, transition, practice, or a deeper engagement with the questions that are arising in their life and work. As with everything I offer, the aim is not to provide a one-size-fits-all answer, but to create a space in which something more truthful, more grounded, and more workable can emerge.

There will be more to share in the months ahead about the research, the workshops, the writing, and the wider practice as it continues to take shape in this new form. But for now, I wanted simply to mark this threshold and let you know that the work is continuing, deepening, and opening outward in new ways.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. And thank you, as always, to Noel and Tim for inviting me back to teach and share this work within the extraordinary landscape of Hitchin Lavender.

More soon.

John