When this “book” began there was still some sense that the Mulberry Bush Trustees might change direction. Letters were coming in to them expressing what it was that was in danger of being lost, and why it mattered. There were offers of help and alternative options, if the vision, will, and capacity for creative problem-solving - and more crucially, an understanding of why it mattered, and for whom - were there. The book began in that mood of addressing the present as a time of possibility and opportunity.
All that is now changed. It is clear that the possibility of averting the destruction is now gone. It has begun. One can hear the chainsaws and trees falling. And one can see, whatever the financial and other factors which are operating, that it is part of a pattern (A clean break with the past), within a much larger pattern within which the Mulberry Bush, and indeed all of us, are living. It is a pattern of the fundamental expenditure of the past, as if it were as ubiquitous and renewable as the environment we have always been able to take for granted, and just as reliably self-creating and on hand when needed.
But the past is not like that (nor is the environment). It will not take care of itself. And we will join it and discover that for ourselves, once it is too late, and irreversible, and we are no longer there to remember who we were or what once was possible.
So the task of this website is changing. In one of the most ephemeral forms of documentation ever assembled - the Internet, for goodness sake; this continually filling and draining lake of electrons - the task is to remember what used to be possible; what made it possible; what made it “impossible”...And why, having been possible, Something - and this is something everyone needs to discover for themselves, because we are talking abstracts and principles, illuminated by the specifics of one demonstration case of what, in one area of British life in one brief period at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, actually happened - is Possible: where, until it happened, and even seen in retrospect - it was not possible.
It is that “seen in retrospect” that particularly matters, because it is that impossibility, imputed backwards, which makes a possible thing impossible in the future. It is that thing that happens when you set out across a chasm with a river raging below, and halfway across on the narrow bridge you look down; and the journey halfway across behind you becomes absolutely negated, and the other half ahead becomes Void. With the qualification that you were fine until someone called out to you mid-bridge and shouted “Don't Look Down!” And then you look, freeze, and - without a safety rope of history, both in the abstract and in detail* - fall.
So this “book” now begins a shift from addressing the present to addressing the future, with some practical tasks involving a belief in the present to continue with as well.
Note:
* This is the role of the adult in a therapeutic setting for children, to be the history which accompanies that child across the bridge, and at the point where something cries out “Look down”, is there to say “Be here, be present, be available through the trust you have in me (and the environment, if it is indeed therapeutic and doesn’t just mimic the rhetoric of therapy) to your future.” Because as soon as that child is there - and it is not easy, and it does not happen once and for all, but needs as much as continuity and consistency the opportunity to experience themselves as being in the future again and again, in the present, until it becomes settled that they are, that they have been, and that they will be - the Void is transformed into “I am here (to stay)”.
(Which is what a former child is indicating when they say, of a person or place, “It saved my life”.)
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