Its website is currently offline for maintenance but the latest Newsletter from the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics on the isle of Luing makes up for that.
The Centre, with Norman Bissell, ran the remarkably successful 2 week Atlantic Islands Festival this summer. The Isle of Luing Community Trust has already raised £22,000 to progress its plan to build an Atlantic Islands Centre on Luing and has now submitted an application for European funding for the project. The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics pans eventually to rent space for the Trust within the new building.
The Newsletter has retrospectives on both of these as well as information on a wide range of upcoming visits:
- to Aberdour to walk the Fife Coastal Path on 24th October, before its AGM
- to Islay for a weekend in mid-February 2010 with visits to distilleries and the nature reserve at Loch Gruinart (in reverse order?)
- to the North of England, sometime in 2010, for a day to bring together cross-border members to talk about geopoetics
There’s also an article by Bill Eddie on a game of two halves when he and his brother (a lesser enthusiast) went bird watching together at Peffer Burn, where what was a transformational moment for Eddie was ‘alright’ for his brother.
What really roots in the mind from the Newsletter, though, is a phrase on Magnetic North’s touring production of Walden. This is an adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical account of the same name – and Luing is seeing the show at Cullipool Hall tonight (11th September).
The account and the performance describe the real life experiences of the author in an 2 year experiment living entirely by his own resources at Walden Pond in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. Unforgettably, what drove Thoreau to this is described as the desire ‘not to live cheaply or dearly but to live deliberately’.
That’s the sort of perspective you tuck into your back pocket for good.
The Newsletter carries a offer to anyone who joins or renews their subscription to the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics by Standing Order – you will receive a free copy of Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White (a key spirit in Geopoetics) for only £1 postage and packing. Go to the Centre’s website for information – it will be back online shortly.
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