Here’s a photo of someone writing in the morning sunshine. It was taken last month at Bore Place, site of our Dark Angels summer residential. If you look closely, and if you know what I look like, you will see that it’s me. Here I am, on a bench, writing. The photo captures a special moment, for me. It’s made even more special by the fact that it was taken by my daughter, Evie, who was our resident cook.
In most other ways, it’s a terrible photo. Evie took it on the cheap point-and-shoot film camera that I bought her for Christmas. The little plastic lens on the camera leaves most of the image out of focus; the film hasn’t caught the colours well; there’s so much else that is technically ‘wrong’ with it. Her iPhone would have done an outstanding job. And yet, I love this image and will treasure it always.
Its imperfection is so evocative. It captures the tone of our time at Bore Place so beautifully, where between us we came up with the idea of ‘baggy spaciousness’. This phrase describes a unique period of time that allows for all manner of creative possibilities to emerge – a quality of time that is often absent from our busy lives. The concept became a motif for the next few days. Whatever plans I then made with my hosting partner Steve, we were careful to allow lots of room for baggy spaciousness.
For me, baggy spaciousness is a playful way of describing something quite serious: the quality of time, soft attention and ease in which we can make and share creative things for the simple joy of the human connection it allows – with ourselves and with others.
In baggy spaciousness we wrote poems, painted sticks, played with kintsugi, made paper cut-outs, improvised songs, wandered aimlessly, dozed off and did many, many other things – from the daft and playful to the deep and profound – because that’s what we felt called to do in the moment.
This is what creative humans do when the world allows us the space we need, in which we can remind ourselves and each other that we are not perfect, we do not have to be perfect, and there is great joy in fully living out and sharing our imperfections.
I often feel that we live in a world that cannot tolerate imperfection. Or perhaps we live in an economic system in which our inner fear of feeling imperfect is turned against us and monetised. We need to have perfect bodies, lifestyles, jobs, relationships, children. We need to make perfect poems, write perfect books, perform perfectly at work. If we don’t, we are failing, and we are failures.
Instead, can we honour our imperfections, work with our human messiness rather than against it? If you’ve travelled with Dark Angels for a while, you’ll know we like to reference Leonard Cohen’s lyric from his song Anthem: there’s a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in. Very wise. Let’s also remember the line that comes before it: “Forget your perfect offering.” It’s not easy to let go of the desire for perfection, but it’s so worth the effort (or lack of effort, depending on your perspective).
That photo of me on the bench is oozing beautiful imperfection and baggy spaciousness. It’s not just a reminder of a happy time, it’s a portal into a special kind of moment. I’m not at Bore Place today. The sun is not shining. It has started to drizzle. Workers in my street just accidentally cut through our electricity supply. By many measures, it is not a perfect day. Yet here I am writing, and I am writing to you. These words are not perfect, but they are the words I have to share.
Here are some more images from the residential