I have been neglecting this blog – in part because of family issues and in part because I’ve been busy preparing a talk on deep mapping for the Hydro-citizens research network I’m involved in, a keynote paper for a conference on the Gothic (don’t ask!) and, most urgently, a presentation for an event next week called: ‘Resilience – just do it?! A workshop for PhD candidates, early career researchers and senior researchers and practitioners’, in Groningen on October 9th – 10th. The organisers have framed the event as follows:

“With regard to disaster resilience, policies are often focusing on rebuilding the economic and physical infrastructure of a community. However, resilience is a community-wide and holistic characteristic, which demands a broad conceptual underpinning if it is to be translated effectively into policy initiatives. As a result, planners and policymakers are increasingly asked to include the social side when planning for resilience. Concepts such as community identity, social capital, place attachment, community cohesion, sense of place and community participation are relevant in this context. Recent research indicates that having strong personal networks, high levels of participation in community activities and a sense of belonging in a community can contribute to residents’ resilience. Moreover, a ‘sense of place’ and community identity can enhance community resilience as they, for instance, exert substantial power to mobilize people into proactive action in recovery efforts”.

My own involvement is with one of four themed tracks, which is outlined as follows:

“This track specifically focuses on the social side of resilience, aiming to pay attention to the concepts highlighted above, and seeking to create a dialogue on how the social side of resilience could be integrated in planning for resilience. One specific focus of this track is the role that the arts can play in enhancing a community’s resilience. The arts can create a focus for community interaction and participation, in this way, fostering collective action and the development of social capital. Research suggests that the arts can be considered to have a so-called ‘survival value’, by building resilience and providing the innovation necessary for communities to cope with change”.

As it happens I actively dislike the term ‘resilience’ (which seems to me central to the new conservative eco-scientism) and am increasingly uncertain about the tacit instrumentalism implicit in the idea that “the arts can create a focus for community interaction and participation, in this way, fostering collective action and the development of social capital”. (I’m also uncomfortable with all those ‘top down’ concepts being applied to communities whose own ideas and experience rarely get a look in). So the title of my presentation is: Coping strategies and the art of social translation – with the term ‘coping strategies’ borrowed from the landscape architects Maggie Roe and Ken Taylor – taken as an active vernacular alternative to ‘resilience’.

While I’m in Groningen I’m also going to meet with Prof. Hans van Ees, Dean of the university’s newest faculty –  University College Groningen – which aims “to become an internationally recognised centre of innovative interdisciplinary education and related research on complex societal challenges”. This is happening through the good offices of Dr Bettina van Hoven, who is Associate professor Cultural Geography (Faculty of Spatial Sciences) at Groningen. ( Mary Modeen and I have recently invited Bettina to become an associate member of PLaCE International UK). In relation to this meeting my primary concern is to listen to what Prof. van Ees has to say about the potentially very valuable initiative for which he’s responsible, but I also hope to interest him in the work of PLaCE International and in approaches like deep mapping as potentially an integral part of what UCG is hoping to achieve. I have been reading the Horizons: Imagining Futures platform proposal he and a small group have recently submitted to the university, which seems to me to propose exactly the type of educational vision we now desperately need.

I will report back on this trip in due course.

This book, in which I have a chapter and a co-authored chapter,  is edited by Brett Wilson, Barbara Hawkins, and Stuart Sim. The publisher’s blurb reads as follows

Art and science are often seen in contemporary Western society as almost entirely separate and polarised fields of human enterprise. In contrast, a growing number of practitioners are realising that art and science are both intimately concerned with how we conceive of the world around us; not just as individuals, but also as societies. Art and science share a common embodied imagination, cognitive creativity, and independent spirit of inquiry at their heart, and both can summon up the visionary power of revolution for our senses.

The editors and contributors to this book clearly highlight the many underlying themes that have always connected art and science throughout our history and show, through a range of essay styles and voices, how a hybrid art-science movement is now emerging. This new movement offers a broader trans-disciplinary perspective to avoid relying on narrow specialisms and short-term fixes when addressing growing global problems such as climate change, economic instability, and provision of food, water, and healthcare for a rapidly expanding world population. Practitioners, researchers, and students in the arts, sciences, and humanities will all find much in this volume to stimulate and inform new ways of thinking about their own disciplinary approaches.

Brett Wilson took early retirement from his professorial post as a university scientist to become a “scientist in residence” in an arts faculty.

Barbara Hawkins is a university-based arts educator and film maker with a special interest in practice-led arts research.

Stuart Sim is retired professor of critical theory and 18th century English literature and a widely published author. They have worked together for a number of years on previous projects and are founder members of Project Dialogue.

I am pleased to see that a substantially revised and extended second edition of this book is now out. Not least because it contains short chapter of mine, a pair to another for a new book on writing for practice-based doctorates put together by three enterprising Australian academics. (More on that another time).

The response to the first edition of Elkins’ book was very mixed. It is indicative that Amazon UK’s  “Most Helpful Customer Review”  (which when I checked it yesterday said 23 of 24 people found it helpful) was by someone calling themselves “Mada about music”, who gave it 3 out of 5 stars. The review was entitled: “Very much a mixed blessing” and was published on the 10th of  May 2010. It reads as follows and, I would say, is probably fair comment (although perhaps just a little ungenerous, given that Elkins had, for all his art historian’s ‘Neo-colonialist’ orientation towards what he persists in calling ‘Studio Art’,  at least raised important issues).

“It’s never a very promising sign when the editor of a book that deals with the kind of complex debates addressed here gives the impression that he’s not really familiar with the field under discussion as something that is lived with and debated by real people, rather than simply addressed as part of a disembodied ‘discourse’. (On p. 118 Naren Barfield is referred to as “she” which, unless he has recently undergone a sex change, may come as a bit of a surprise). This may seem a very trivial point, but I would suggest that it’s indicative of a type of “high altitude” thinking that’s so busy trying to demonstrate it’s own all-inclusive authority that it can’t be bothered to really attend to the finer grain of other people’s concerns or arguments or to do the necessary homework required to “dig down” into what is actually at stake”.

“This is a book clearly written to cash in on a change in the American education market but is based on experience that has mostly been gained in European and Australian contexts. It may be of interest and value to those who wish to reflect on doctoral level arts education in the USA, but as a participant in these debates in the UK I can’t really recommend this book wholeheartedly to potential PhD applicants or to those involved in supervision. The first section is somewhat confused in intent – who exactly is the audience for these very various – and in some cases very out of date – chapters. (One chapter was written for a conference in 2002 and promotes arguments that have long been discredited by more recent doctoral work). The second section, made up of extracts from the written element of eight PhD projects (without more than the briefest contextual information), is ultimately of dubious value other than as an indicative sample of writing styles”.

“My main objection to this patchy book it is that, from where I stand, it comes across as a lazy attempt to cash in on an educational situation that really requires a much more considered and thoughtful approach, put together by an editor who really ought to know better. The choice of contributers to the first section inevitably results in an uneven mixture of disparate views that, to someone whose been involved in this area for over ten years, are as predicable as they are dull. This is ultimately a book for those academic managers and administrators who need to “have an informed view” on the subject before they attend that next all-important committee meeting on updating the curriculum, and not really for arts based doctoral students or their supervisors. If you’re in the former category, then you may find it useful in parts, if not, you probably will not.”

“Hopefully in due course someone will recognise just how far short of what is needed this book falls. If we then get a book that really does take the time to look properly at the historical development of the arts practice doctorate, makes informed sense of the issues involved, and examines the potential this has for helping to reform a higher education system that currently singularly fails to grasp what is at stake, this book will have served one useful purpose.”

I have yet to receive my copy of the second edition, but from information already available there are some obvious changes. Elkins has clearly substantially reworked his own contribution to Part One. His original contribution is now entitled: “Six Cultures of the PhD Around the World” (this replaces his “Three Configurations of Studio-Art PhDs”) and he has added three further sections – a “List of PhD Programs Around the World” and two new sections. One is entitled: “Fourteen Reasons to Mis-trust the PhD” (to which Judith Mottram has provides a “Notes in Response” section in addition to her original contribution) and the other “Positive Ideas for PhD Programs”. The other new inclusions are my own chapter – “Singing Across Thresholds” – and two new additional chapters from Mike Wilson and Jonathan Dronsfield.

The second section, which in the first edition included eight examples, is now extended to nine. Of these only three are carried over from the first edition. The new selection, interestingly, now includes examples from Japan, Mexico, China and South Africa, whereas the examples in the first edition were drawn from the UK and Australia. All of which suggests that this second edition may well go some way to addressing the criticisms of the first reproduced above.  I look forward to reading it, since the invitation to me from Elkins to contribute to this second edition was made on the basis of an interesting condition. I was not to refer to or comment on his own position vis-a-vis Studio Arts PhDs in the first edition.

The implications of that request, in the light of the realpolitik behind the acrimonious debate around the economics of the MFA as the existing ‘terminal degree’, or rather of introducing arts-led doctorates in the USA (and lets be clear, that’s what this book is really about), is I think obvious enough to need no further comment here. Professor Elkins has always been a canny political operator in terms of that politics and I am sure nothing has changed in that respect. When (if) I receive my copy of the second edition, I’ll comment further.

I’ve just returned from a conference called Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature & the Environment at Falmouth University. I went partly to give a paper (see abstract below) that would allow me to test out thinking I’ve been doing around issues relating to animism and our need to recognise that we live in a polyverse (a constellation of worlds) rather than a universe, and partly in the hope of catching up with friends and colleagues.

An unexpected and very real pleasure was to see Dr Adeline Johns-Putra, who has moved from Exeter to Surrey University since I last saw her. Among her various roles Adeline is the Chair of asle-uki – The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland), which was founded in 1998 and gave its support to the conference. One of the many interesting aspects of the way the conference was put together was the weight given to visual art and the inclusion of two artists’ panels (which in turn included two colleagues it was very good to see – Anne Robinson (from LAND2), and Gina Wall (from PLaCE, Scotland). This approach gave added weight to a very interesting inter-disciplinary (indeed almost multi-constituency) exchange. Having spent some time talking to Adeline I’m very much hoping that LAND2 and asle-uki can work together at some point in the future which, if her initial discussions with Judy Tucker are anything to go by, could happen in the not too distant future.

I’m also particularly pleased to have met Dr Ruth Hehold, who organised the conference, and Mike Tresidder, who teaches Cornish and works for the Cornish Language Partnership/Keskowethyans an Taves Kernewek . Mike gave a fascinating paper on the history and particularities of the Cornish Language and, talking to him later, I found he was able to give me a number of helpful insights about the relationship between Cornish and other Brythonic-derived languages and the different cultural roles they play in the modern regions/nations where they’re now spoken. This provided further food for thought in relation to my recent exchanges around the Cliff McLucas seminar in Aberystwyth.

I found myself presenting as part of a panel called Poetics alongside the poet Alyson Hallet, who’d been a visiting speaker for PLaCE at UWE back in December 2010. This was very fortunate for me because her powerful, moving and highly poetic paper – Hearing Voices That Are Not There – broke much of the ground I then tried to cover from another angle. Her web site – thestonelibrary.com – is well worth a visit.    

Abstract

Since 1999 I have been ‘deep mapping’ the traces, locations, and implications of a quasi-pagan, ‘animist’ mentalité that permeates the oldest Borders ballads, sometimes called the ‘supernatural ballads’ (of which Thomas Rhymer and Tam Linn are probably the best known). My concern has however been primarily with the possible implications of that tradition – when seen through the creative lens of testimonial imagination – for the development of contemporary cultural praxis. This in many ways parallels Felix Guattari’s promotion of ‘ecosophy’ – namely of a practical, transversal thinking that works at and across the intersections of environment, society, and that confluence of persona and forces we call ‘the self’.

In this illustrated presentation I will draw on my own research, creative work,  and texts such as Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex Academic Press, 2010), to connect ecosophical thinking both with a tradition of vernacular singing and those elements of my work inspired by that tradition.

My aim in doing so is to illuminate an ecological praxis that acknowledged the centrality of continual flow, flux, or translation of energy and matter across the semi-permeable borders that differentiated one region, society, or person from another. From this perspective physical locations – landscapes – are indeed best understood as: “a polyrhythmic composition of processes whose pulse varies from the erratic flutter of leaves to the measured drift and clash of tectonic plates” (Ingold 2000: 201). It then follows that the environment of living beings as ‘landscape’ becomes: “a tangle of interlaced trails, continually raveling here and unraveling there” (Ingold 2011: 71), in much the same way as the traditional song landscapes of the ‘supernatural’ ballads heard through time.

I have been out and about a good deal – ‘on the road’ in a return to how things were when I first began working as a peripatetic visiting lecturer back in the 1980s. Odd.

First, however, there were two very interesting days at the Transgressions conference here in Bristol, where Antony Lyons and I presented our seventeen minute film of the same name. It was very good to meet up with old friends and fellow travellers – the photo above is of (left and then clockwise) Gini Lee from Melbourne, Rebecca Krinke from Minneapolis St Paul, the film-maker and ME/CFS patient advocate Natalie Boulton (who is also my wife), David Smith from UWE here in Bristol, and Mary Modeen from Dundee – and to meet a bunch of new and interesting people. Among the material generated by those new (to me) people I was particularly impressed by Renata Tyszczuk’s presentation – The Satelite and the Fly – which offered an extraordinarily concise and effective ‘ecosophical’ insight into our current environmental situation. (You can find her research at http://www.shef.ac.uk/architecture/people/tyszczuk_r). I then flew north with Mary to spend two days working at Dundee, mostly with her Arts and Humanities MA students, before going south again with them to Leeds, where Judy Tucker had organised a two day symposium around issues of place. There I caught up again with Judy and the poet Harriet Tarlo (with whom Judy collaborates), along with other old friends who teach at the university there.

Three lectures, two seminars, a dash of studio teaching, and the usual level of participation in a symposium when you’re an ‘elder’, may seem a lot of work in under a week but, talking with Gini, Rebecca, Dave Littlefield (who was an organiser of Transgressions), Mary, Judy, Harriet and others with whom I share common cause was a great pleasure and a source of real energy.

Perhaps because of all this travelling I notice I’ve even started to learn to be more patient, knowing that it takes time to process images and ideas and for them to find their place in my imaginative processes.

Photographs I took during my previous trip to Dundee in the summer are only now beginning to surface in a creative context. Where they’ll finally come to rest I don’t know, but at present the centre of gravity for imaginal work remains the proposed third bookwork in the Debatable Lands series. This is currently looking like being a novelistic evocation of life on the Borders, a lengthy mix of image and text (currently running to almost 60,000 words) dealing with three generations across the C20th and into the C21st in which two sisters, Lizzy and Kate Oliver, play a central part. Not at all what I had intended but, like Between Carterhaugh & Tamshiel Rig where the whole Borders project started, as much a matter of ‘inner necessity’ as anything else!

I include one of Kate’s photographs for this work below, which utilises a photograph taken in Dundee. So it goes.

Recently we had a sudden and brief eruption of fungal growth resulting a a ragged version of a ‘fairy ring’ in the old graveyard in Clifton – new life from old. I’ve had the no doubt extensive mycelial mesh beneath these strange fruit on my mind since I took this photograph. This image has now become linked in my mind with the fact that I have just returned from three days of animated conversation and warm hospitality in Ireland, during which time I stayed with two artists with whom I’ve been working who are each part of wider mycelial networks of their own. These two were Cathy Fitzgerald (http://www.cathyfitzgerald.ie) who I stayed with at her home in the middle of Hollywood – now officially on the map, as Cathy proudly showed me – and Pauline O’Connell (http://paulineoconnell.com), along with Eamon Colman and their son Ruben in Kilkenny.

I was in Ireland for a number of different but finally linked reasons, the most fundamental of which was my continuing search to find, listen to, and establish links with creative people of all kinds who are open to working for the development of a multi-constituency thinking. A thinking that, following conversations with Antony Lyons, I’ve come to think of as ‘mycelial’ in its approach to building connectivity and the potential for active community. The trip was very productive in that I think there is an understanding of the importance of cultural engagement with rural issues in Ireland that chimes very closely with my own concerns. I sense this as part of a shifting pattern of energies that, like Eamon Colman’s paintings, brings a sense of occasional joy despite the general gloom.

Of course this can be misconstrued – I’m not interested in the rural as something ‘other’ set over against the urban – but because I think our deepening ecological problems are most visible there – sometimes starkly so. These are problems that can only be addressed ecosophically, that’s to say as at once environmental, social and personal, each level of activity shifting in response to the other. Fortunately there seem to be a growing number of people willing and able to sense and respond to the demands of these shifting forces.

Before I went to Ireland I had been working with an international group who are thinking about problems of coastal flooding and all that involves. The project – a series of Between The Tides workshops – was organised by Owain Jones, Antony Lyons and Bettina van Hoven and has enabled me to start to think about possible future work in that area and to open up links with ongoing research that relates to the deep mapping project I was responsible for in Cornwall.

The image below is of Bettina van Hoven and my old friend Simon Read, who has been working tirelessly on environmental issues around coastal erosion and the protection of salt marsh over many years. The photograph was taken down on the levels below Brean Down.

Installation shot of exhibition on from 7 September 2013 – 5 January 2014
Gallery 8 (photo Christian Shaw)

(Left) Keith Vaughan The Singer (Right) Notes on an anxious landscape: Sidhe, etc. (2013), mixed media on paper

This work takes Keith Vaughan’s The Singer as its point of departure, along with scattered thoughts and visual notes on aspects of vernacular music in general and the post-war folk music revival in particular. The term sidhe (fairy) refers both to the central role of the ‘good neighbours’ in the supernatural Borders ballads central to the British vernacular song tradition and to Vaughan’s otherness as a homosexual.

Notes on an anxious landscape: Women/Place (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

This work takes Peter Lanyon’s images of Zennor and other Cornish Towns as its point of departure. It is a musing on the possible interrelationship of two aspects of his work: the extra-marital relationships with various lovers said to be central to his experience of place, and the claim that he largely transformed the English landscape painting tradition by shifting its focus from landscape traditionally understood to place. The image also owes something to my long-standing interest in ‘deep mapping’.

Gregory Maloba at Corsham Court (for Reg Boulton and ‘Rikki’ Richardson) (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

Before their marriage my parents-in-law – Reg Boulton and ‘Rikki’ Richardson as they then were – both studied art at Corsham Court (where Lanyon taught part-time). My father-in-law also attended a short painting course with Keith Vaughan, whose work he much admired. This image includes three photographs of Gregory Maloba, a Kenyan student at Corsham and friend of Rikki’s, together with material from a newspaper, as its point of departure. Other elements derive from Maloba’s vast concrete independence monument in Kampala and a map of the Corsham estate. After leaving Corsham, Maloba studied and taught art at Makerere University, where he had an incalculable impact on contemporary East African art.

(Top) Small anxious landscape: all the others? (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

(Bottom) Small anxious landscape: Les Girls (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

Like the other two ‘Small anxious landscape’ images, Small anxious landscape: all the others? reflects on the social context within which the post-war art world was located at the time my parents-in-law were students. Also to the emphasis on ’social reconstruction’ (of traditional norms as much as of social infrastructure) after a war that, despite everything, many young people clearly found a liberating experience. The sub-title references all those from that period who, unlike Keith Vaughan and Peter Lanyon, were not able to have a career as professional artists, with the various freedoms that licenced.

The photograph used in Small anxious landscape Les Girls was taken by my father-in-law, Reg Boulton, and includes his future wife ‘Rikki” Richardson (on the far right of the image). I was very taken by the different stances and expressions of these four young women that, with aspects of Reg and Rikki’s family history, provided a starting-point for Small anxious landscape: Les Girls. Also in my mind was the very public recent exposure of the sexual abuse over many years of music students by their teachers, a situation that raised questions about Peter Lanyon’s affairs with two of his students, seen by art historians as of the greatest importance to his experience of place.     

(Clockwise from top left – photo Christian shaw))

 Song / Place / Singer: first and last thoughts (2013) acrylic on paper on board

Night thoughts (after Zennor) (2013), acrylic on board

Song / Place / Singer: Peter Lanyon and Keith Vaughan (2013), acrylic on papers and board 

Landscape + Sexual Encounter = Place? (after Peter Lanyon) (2013), acrylic on paper on board

A photograph by Judy Tucker of Deb Gardner and myself working on the hang of our four person show. More on this soon.

Mel Shearsmith and I have been working with the Parlour Show Rooms in Bristol on a four day event focusing on walking and talking, which will also involve the initial stages of what I hope will become a Bristol deep mapping project. We are very sure it will be more interesting the the annual influx of fibreglass animals that Bristol seems to go in for now (see above).

Here is some information about the event.

A FOUR DAY WALKING EVENT EXPLORING BRISTOL

Walking in the City is a unique four-day event exploring Bristol through artist led walks, talks, discussions and an evolving exhibition, curated by The Showroom Projects and PLaCE research centre. The four day event takes place over 12-15th September and explores how walking and talking can change our experience of the city.

Walking In The City is an international gathering of walking artists, enthusiasts and academics at The Parlour Showrooms, in Bristol. This micro walking festival offers an extraordinary programme of performance, talks and an evolving exhibition. Over the four days audiences are invited to create time/space for imaginative wanderings, meditative practice and serious play.

Artists; Phil Smith, Simone Kenyon and Simon Whitehead invite you to join them on walks around the city to re-imagine the every day, explore ideas of the collective, and question what it means to playfully engage with and see the city anew. All events welcome visitors to Bristol, as well as those who think they know this city like the back of their hand.

The event is centered in and around The Parlour Showrooms, which will act as the cafe hub for the duration of the four days whilst also providing the forum for artists Sarah Rhys and Sue Maude to begin a process of ‘deep-mapping’ Bristol. Through this process they will explore the ancient city boundaries, investigate the hidden city waterways, and invite visitors to contribute to an evolving exhibition on the walls of The Parlour Showrooms.

On the first day (Thur 12th) Phil Smith will open Walking in The City with ‘Crabbing in Bristol’; a derive, or ‘drift’. Described by the artist as an: ‘exploratory, destination-less wander through (usually) city streets, detecting and mapping ambiences, walkers’ subjective associations and those emotions and atmospheres ingrained in the urban structure and texture’. Each dérive is unique, and finds its own duration; ‘Crabbing in Bristol’ could last up to 7 hours. After having lived in Bristol for twenty years and now based in Devon Phil is, ‘looking forward to being a stranger here once more’.

The second day (Friday 13th) is devoted entirely to a day long symposium; a sharing of research and discussion in and around walking artistic practices. Entitled: ‘Mapping Borders’ curated and chaired by UOB researcher Cara Davies, the symposium brings together artists and academics from all over the country to discuss practice and research. During the day there will be five panels of speakers including acclaimed academics and artists such as; Stephen Hodge (Wrights and Sites), Misha Myers and Dee Heddon (Stories from the Walking Library).

The third day (Saturday 14th) welcomes internationally renowned artists Simone Kenyon and Simon Whitehead. In the morning Simone leads a walk together in silence to the cities borderlands, whilst in the afternoon she runs a workshop to practically explore embodiment and walking. Simon Whitehead leads a group in search of a place, where together they can howl into the night.

The fourth and final day (Sunday 15th), offers a welcoming and reflective space for brunch and a talk, led by two walking artists/researchers; Jess Allen and Mads Floor Andersen. Here they return to the central question of ‘how can acts of walking and talking affect our experience of the city?’ Following on from this Tim Higgins, Canon at St Stephens church in Bristol, will lead the final walk of the four days, to find the hidden medieval walls of Bristol; hinting that perhaps the ‘stories of the Old City are not locked in time but can be set free to refresh our times’.

Walking In The City is the third event of the In The City Series, a performance programme held in two empty shops on College Green in the centre of Bristol, curated by The Showroom Projects.

The vision behind In The City Series is to hold an open space in the centre of Bristol to consider the questions: what does our city centre mean to us? What is the future of our high street? How do the borders of our city relate to the centre? The series aims to engage new audiences as well as provide access to artistic excellence.

Mel Shearsmith, PLaCE curator said:

‘WALKING IN THE CITY is part of PLaCE’s larger ongoing project to build links with organisations like The Showroom Projects and between people engaged with the ecologies of place, the arts, and relevant academic work.  PLaCE – as part of the recently reconfigured PLaCE International (UK) – is pleased to be co-curating Walking in the City as part of its continuing commitment to facilitating interaction between the performing and visual arts, to engage new audiences and to explore place through diverse walking practices in the South West and beyond’.

Canon Tim Higgins said:

My experience is that telling stories can enchant me and open my imagination. But stepping out and walking inside the space, that is the deep gift of the city; story has the power to change my world view. How I view the world nurtures the seeds of my energy for change. I think what is amazing is we can really get inside that transforming space.