The End of the Beginning

Reflections on the fifth year of The Realisation Festival

Virtually every time I push my clients to go deeper with their gathering’s purpose, there is a moment when they seem to wonder if I am preparing them for World War III. Yet forcing yourself to think about your gathering as stand-taking helps you get clear on its unique purpose. - Priya Parker

Today was my first day back at work after the fifth Realisation Festival at St Giles House in Dorset at the weekend. The three-day schedule does the splits and straddles four days from Thursday late afternoon to Sunday early afternoon. This exertion warrants a three-day recovery period.

As a co-founder of the festival, I am pleased with how it went this year. If I merely describe what happened, the experience of being at the event will not carry to the reader because, like many of the best things in life, you had to be there. The festival is spacious, aesthetic, temporal, embodied, situational, atmospheric, convivial, sensuous and interactive and prose can only carry so much of that. Instead, I will speak from my own experience, and explain what it means as one of the organisers to feel like it ‘worked’. By making this case, I hope to make sense of what the festival is, how it speaks to the challenges of our times, and hopefully have some fun along the way.

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With Priya Parker’s injunction in mind, and without wanting to speak for the whole team, I think our ‘stand’ is something like this: While the mind is often over-fed, the soul is typically under-fed, and this neglect undermines our capacity to respond to the challenges of our times. By soul we mean the experience of being alive, not just as human beings seeking meaning but as embodied historical actors seeking to find, create and do what is ours to do. A good gathering must therefore strive to innovate beyond conventional formats of talking heads followed by Q&A. Our stand is that these times ask something of each of us - a calling - and we characterise that as realisation. We are asked to realise in three ways: as insight (get real) as self (become real) and as manifestation (make real). To realise what’s happening, who we are, and what we should do, we need to unlearn some things and reimagine others. The venue and programme reflect these aims (more below).

This particular year, if I were a caricature of an enthusiastic American sports commentator I would say “We knocked it out of the park!!!” I am Scottish though, and prone to enigmatic understatements, so all I can say is that it went well.

What does it mean to say of an event that ‘it went well’?

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The first thing ‘it went well’ means is simply that it happened.

You don’t need to quote Theodore Roosevelt about being “in the arena” to understand that the attempt to “actually strive to do the deeds” is rewarding, even if such effort inevitably “comes short again and again”, because “there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” To create an event of any kind you need to “know great enthusiasms” and take a risk, and thereby part ways from “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” After four years of trial and error, the whole organising team experienced the 2024 festival as some “triumph of high achievement”. Step-by-step we have created something magical that now has a life of its own.¹

A brisk backward glance contextualises this sense of fruition.

The 2020 festival was hijacked by Covid and relegated to a glorified Zoom call with some redeeming do-what-you-can-dignity. I fondly remember the relief of ‘hopping on’ to the subsequent Zoom call with fellow organisers to mark crossing the threshold of what is often the hardest thing - beginning.

The 2021 festival almost outmanoeuvred Covid but we could not duck the policy sneeze that required us to reduce numbers to thirty people. The intimacy of the smaller group had its charms, and some great ‘content’ was created, but the festival still felt like a promissory note.

The 2022 festival moved up a gear to eighty people, with Alastair McIntosh’s beguiling opening plenary as a kind of Brigadoon experience that felt almost inaugural in speaking from and to the soul in precarious times.

In 2023, we began to get into our stride with one hundred and twenty people, and there were many highlights. I think it’s also fair to say that we tried too hard in some ways and learned a lot about what was essential to the festival and what was merely nice to have.²

The festival is a non-for-profit enterprise, we have made it work by paying for costs primarily through ticket sales, and significant amounts of volunteering. Perspectiva also contributes some of our core funding (particularly towards the costs of the bursary/fellowship programme) much of which stems from The Fetzer Institute or the JJ Trust.

In 2022, 2023 and 2024 we have received additional backing from The Shin Kong Life Foundation in Taiwan; this is a small world, and the freedom of expression at that festival and the love of experimental inquiry are indispensable parts of an open society. We are grateful for their support and glad they could attend the festival this year.

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The second thing ‘it went well’ means is that collaboration proved generative, and something new emerged much greater than the sum of its parts.

Realisation Festival team from left to right: Olivia Lacey, Mark Vernon, Pippa Evans, Jonathan Rowson, Ed Haddon, Nick Shaftesbury.

The festival began as a partnership between Perspectiva and St Giles House. The five directors of the festival and the community interest company that will govern it from now on are myself (co-founder), Nick Shaftesbury (co-founder), Mark Vernon (Director of Programme), Pippa Evans (Creative Director), and Ed Haddon (Director of Operations). This collaboration has been a professional highlight for me over the last few years and we all bring different things to the party. The festival wouldn’t work without Mark’s erudition, depth, and sensitivity; Pippa’s levity, empathy and vitality; Ed’s energising listening and timely candour; Nick’s hosting, generosity and post-tragic determination; and whatever I do, which I suppose is trying to make sense of it all through writing and speaking, and throwing my toys out of the pram whenever I feel we are losing sight of the overall purposes of the event.

We are supported and skilfully cajoled by Olivia Lacey who is the main point of contact for participants. Olivia is our ‘first responder’ for thousands of random queries, and she constantly thinks ahead and troubleshoots to ensure everything works as it should. Olivia has been indispensable in keeping the show on the road for the last three years, and I am very grateful for all she does for the festival.

I am also grateful for the St. Giles House staff who look after everyone on site with warmth and graceful diligence. Three of them - Amira, Monica and Charlotte are below:

From left to right: Amira, Monica and Charlotte at St Giles House.

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The third thing that ‘it went well’ means is that we had the courage of our convictions, and it paid off.

This point applies in several ways, but especially to Pippa’s brilliant idea to begin the event not with a talk, but with a Ceilidh which is an idea with some philosophical depth (merriment following the visitation of companions) but manifests today as Scottish and Irish country dancing. The idea was mostly about learning to move together, permissible touching that doesn’t feel weird, and starting as we mean to go on - with lots of joyous mistakes. Unlike a disco where anything goes, in a Ceilidh you have to collaborate, and you must be willing to get it wrong. It’s also a lot of fun, so it was a great way to begin the event.

I am also proud of our no-phone policy in the main arena so people are neither distracted by messages nor compelled to take photographs. There are usually only two keynote speakers and they tend to stay for the whole event. There is a participatory spirit and a wide range of workshops with many forms of creative inquiry. There is a small group methodology. Perspectiva supports a bursary/fellowship programme to ensure plenty of younger people are there, and others well-suited to the festival for whom the ticket price (£425) would be a barrier. Then there is nature and the sense of ambient beauty. And we encourage people not to initially ask ‘what do you do?’ - a status-seeking inquiry. Instead, we ask: what is your world? We are trying to meet in a less transactional way, soul-to-soul rather than job-to-job, and I felt this year this had become easier, and somehow implicit.

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The fourth thing ‘it went well’ means is that we continue to attract great speakers who leave a lasting impact on people.

Last year Iain McGilchrist was a highlight, with the recording of his talk reaching over 23,000 online, and this year we managed to attract Rowan Williams who is not only a poet, social critic and former Archbishop of Canterbury but also, for many, the ultimate wise man. We’ll share the full video and subsequent panel discussion in due course. The highlight of the session for me was seven minutes or so right at the end of the Q&A where two women - Indra Adnan and Kim Willis - challenged the underlying spirit of his talk about ‘the passions of the soul’. While Rowan means something theologically and philosophically specific in his use of the word ‘passions’ (adjacent to ‘sins’) and nothing in his talk was against ‘passion’ as we more conventionally understand it, there was still a profound challenge at this moment and the creative tension created helped energise the event. (Seven-minute clip).

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The fifth thing ‘it went well’ means is that we invested in our small group methodology as a feature of the festival.

These groups of 6-10 people are a kind of buddy system and they meet once a day from dinner on the first night, to the closing reflection, for about four hours in total. These groups all had a light-touch leader and met together to share experiences and challenges, overseen by Lucy Taylor who helped design and guide the small group process. On the one hand - to get real - it’s just folk talking to each other, and people don’t always even like their small groups. However, sometimes the small groups are charged, intimate, or revelatory, and often lead to friendships or working relationships beyond the festival. Small groups are no less serious for being simple. They are a perennial social technology we risk losing sight of. At the festival, they act as pop-up micro-sanghas offering mutual support where it’s needed, helping to hold and shape the inquiry of the festival.

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The sixth thing ‘it went well’ means is that we rolled with the punches, and successfully adapted to events.

There is always something, as they say, but this year we had to contend with two activist protests. The first was a social media campaign from at least one civil society organisation in Ireland (the lack of personal signatures makes it hard to be sure, and some organisations were listed without knowing and asked to be removed). The other campaign was gentler: on arrival on Thursday afternoon, all festival goers were greeted by local members of Extinction Rebellion in Wimborne wearing pink to signify something, though I’m not sure what. I was wearing a pink shirt when I arrived at St Giles, so I went to speak with them in sartorial solidarity, but that was not enough to find common ground.

Wimborne XR outside the gate to enter the grounds where the festival took place.

The protestors contend that the festival is a kind of greenwashing, which came as a surprise to those of us who have been working on it for five years. The word or even the idea of greenwashing had not come up once. We see the ecological emergency as part of our shared context, we have had environmental campaigners and activists at the festival before including XR activists who come back not to protest but to take part, and there are many other issues explored that are all loosely related to the metacrisis, but not about green issues as such. The greenest thing about the festival is probably the surrounding landscape, carefully curated to encourage biodiversity, so the charge of ‘greenwashing’ seems absurd to anyone who has attended.³

Most of our speakers and participants were untroubled by the campaigns and sympathetic to our response to it, but the attempted tainting of the festival did lead to one of our keynote speakers - Ayisha Siddiqa - withdrawing. I had invited Ayisha after meeting her at a FORGE event at New York University where we were both speakers and was looking forward to introducing her to the festival and vice-versa (if you haven’t read her most celebrated poem, please do yourself a favour). I can’t speak for Ayisha, but I can say that while some sense of missed opportunity remains, no harm was done. We swiftly managed to create an alternative offering for the Saturday morning session that was a highlight of the event for many.

Siva Thambisetty, Associate Professor of Law at the London School of Economics did figuratively “knock it out of the park”. Again I am biased, though this time because I’ve known Siva since 1998 and we argue over whose turn it is to put our children to bed, but the standing ovation spoke for itself. When the challenge became to find a speaker at two weeks’ notice to replace a woman from the global south, who has worked at the UN, and who has interesting personal stories to tell about different kinds of power and the challenge of international governance, Pippa and Mark were quick to highlight a possibility hiding in plain sight.

Siva spoke about her work behind the scenes that helped to create a treaty for the governance of the sea beyond national jurisdiction. The subject matter risked becoming technical, but Siva gave just enough scholarly and legal detail for the human back story to feel like it mattered. In John Vervaeke's language, she spoke as ‘the agent in the arena’ at the UN, and she gave testimony to her experience with a gravity of purpose and lightness of touch that felt captivating. It was a strange experience for me as her husband and co-founder of the festival, and I was tearful at times because I had ring-side seats to the three-year process of negotiations that she narrated, including Siva’s several long trips away from home when I may have fed the children more pizza than a good father should. Some of the tension of that time was released during the talk, and then when she thanked me in such a deft and elegant way at the end, my emotional wobbles heightened, and I was glad Pippa was sitting next to me to stop me from falling off my chair.

In the break-out, Siva worked with Pippa on a negotiation game. We also asked Paul Powlseland to speak about The Rights of Nature, both in general and as they pertain to the future governance of Lough Neagh. Paul’s charisma is singular, and his love of nature is infectious. By all accounts, this was an inspiring session.

Paul Powlesland leading a workshop on The Rights of Nature.

At the same time, Perspectiva did a short workshop on the theory and practice of The Flip, The Formation and the Fun. It felt brisk, but I was touched by the widespread appetite in the room to think at that level of abstraction and ambition and feel our way into practices to help us move beyond critique, and from vision to method.

By lunchtime, I felt the festival was in full swing. The innovation of having a large marquee outside to eat helped a lot by creating a balance between undisturbed ‘work’ in the house, and a spirit of relative leisure outside.

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The seventh thing ‘it went well’ means is that we took praxis seriously.

Realisation is a place where theory is introduced to practice, they smile and blush, one thing leads to another, and before you know it a new Praxis is born. A full list of the workshop activities and discoveries is in the programme, and they are not all formally praxis, but they include art, improvisation, music, chess(!), drawing, poetry and a few good old ‘talks’.

I felt some joy of missing out - ‘JOMO’ - on sessions that were so well attended that I couldn’t get in the room (such was the case with Bettany Hughes having a fireside chat with Mark Vernon) and with Nat Wei which clashed with The Antidebate (The contention selected by the group this year was heavy: ‘Collapse is Desirable’ but the methodology went more or less to plan, and ended with a beautiful impromptu gaelic blessing by Mae McKenna). I also felt proper ‘fear of missing out’ or FOMO over Oaktree reconnaissance and planting with Benedict Pollard, but I enjoyed it vicariously when it came up in my small group (which is partly what they are there for).

Benedict Pollard advises participants on how to plant an oak tree.

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The eighth thing ‘it went well’ means is that we had lots of different kinds of parties.

Some parties were by the firepit, some in the hot tub or sauna, some in the underground ‘bat cave’ disco, and some were with wine over dinner. The climax for many was the live Showstoppers improvisation on Saturday night. Pippa, Jonathan and Sue can make a good song out of almost anything, and frequently do. Improvisation is remarkably skilled, and I share more about it here. You have to be in the room to properly revel in the mixture of music, and surprise, in-jokes, and the thrill of watching a fellow human make things up as they go along as an art form. Even so, I trust the photo below gives a feeling for the gift of well-mannered frivolity.

From left to right: Jonathan Ainscough, Pippa Evans and Susan Harrison.

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The ninth thing it means to say ‘it went well’ is that new friendships were forged.

Sadly my friend and now intrepid author Elizabeth Oldfield was stranded in Denver and could not reach the festival in time to chair Rowan Williams, but she did make it for her session on her book Fully Alive, which I can heartily recommend. I think of Liz in the context of friendship because she describes friendship as her theory of change. The most memorable moments of the festival are often one-to-one, and very often they are with people you feel you are supposed to meet. I don’t want to overplay the serendipity claim, but many report it. As someone who reports to funders on impact, I am sure the main ‘impact’ of the festival is almost certainly not the number of views of any videos recorded, but the lifelong connections forged through the shared experience the festival offers.

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The tenth and final thing it means to say ‘it went well’ is that we held to our vision.

The poet John Keats famously said ‘Nothing ever becomes real till experienced’. For me, that is the quotation that best captures the spirit of the festival. We have created a place and time for experiences to arise. In a sense, it’s nothing new. People gathering is as old as the hills. But I am proud to have worked with others to create the kind of gathering that feels new and renewing, and the challenge of the inquiry - to get real, become real and make real, is timely and urgent.

And this year, it went well.

I am grateful to photographer Patrick Frost for capturing our impromptu group hug of the organising team after this year’s gathering formally ended with a fire stick ceremony. We select a stick from the grounds, break it in two, burn half for what we’re leaving behind and keep half for what we’re taking with us (if you look closely, Ed Haddon is holding on to some circumstantial evidence in the photograph).

See you next year?

St Giles House and Festival Marquee at night under the stars. Photo by Tamzin Muir who celebrated her birthday at the event.

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1. Before we get carried away, Vanessa Andreotti’s distinction between high-intensity and low-intensity struggles comes to mind. The festival does not purport to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, weapons for Ukraine, or any direct solutions for people displaced by the climate crisis or losing their jobs to AI. Our programme is mindful of these contexts and speaks to them; while the people creating and attending the festival often face emotional challenges at one of life’s many crossroads. However, participants mostly have “low-intensity struggles” relating to identity, meaning and purpose rather than “high-intensity struggles” relating to security and survival. The festival is no less valuable for that, but it’s a helpful perspective when considering what it means to say the event went well.

2. This time last year I offered a reflection on the story of The Realisation Festival in general and 2023 in particular in A Festival for the Soul. Those seeking to understand the underlying purposes, and the philosophical case for the festival might enjoy the essay I wrote back in 2019 to make sense of Perspectiva’s commitment to the festival in What’s the point of The Realisation Festival? Just as we were about to take off, Covid struck, which led to an antiheroic but still dignified promissory note in Realisation Festival Online in 2020. Then we hosted a Realisation Festival for thirty in 2021 when Covid restrictions were lifting but not yet listed. Highlights of that year included Bayo Akomolafe; and Minna Salami, who was part of the organising team at the time. We did not have a summary video in 2022, but our opening keynote by Alastair McIntosh was a definite highlight. We prepared a short video at Realisation Festival 2023 that summarised the festival as a whole, and I recently penned Taking Improvisation Seriously to share why I feel the spirit of improvisation is such an important part of the festival.

3. The most fundamental point for Perspectiva is that there is no substantive or financial connection between the ecological crisis in Lough Neagh and The Realisation Festival. That’s not to say there are not important questions to attend to, about colonial legacy, inheritance, what ownership means and should mean, and the ecology and economics of sand dredging - all of these matters were discussed at Realisation this year. However, the exploration of these questions was already well underway before the campaigns against the festival began, and seeking to defame the festival while spreading misinformation is both unfair and unhelpful.

For those who want to know more, the festival team composed a response with links to clarify how we see it. Nick wrote his own letter with significantly more detail because this issue is beyond the festival. The conversation moves on. Lough Neagh is a multi-faceted problem and interesting in its own right as I have argued previously (the comment thread is interesting). The celebrated campaigner Bernadette McAliskey called Nick “a handy scapegoat” for the failure of ecological governance in Northern Ireland, and more generally my sense of the campaigns trying to establish a link between the Lough and the festival is that they were awash with half-truths, conflation, misinformation and scapegoating.

To place the issue on a more positive footing, I suggest these are the questions we should investigate:

1. Scapegoating. How do we get beyond reducing complex problems to simplistic causes and false solutions? What happens when you realise blame is the wrong place to start?

2. The future of ownership. What does it mean to own something and what is the optimal relationship between ownership and collective agency? What follows for who sets the agenda in complex situations? In what ways does the ownership question matter for the future of the Lough, and in what ways does it not matter?

3. After Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is sometimes called “The disenchantment of politics by economics”. Some argue the Lough has been disenchanted by the political economy of Northern Ireland of recent years, particularly an over-emphasis on growth at all costs and a failure to price-in externalities. What kind of alternative political economy grows from a deep understanding of the Lough?

4. Ecology as a form of perception. What can the Lough teach us about ecological understanding, including social and political ecology?

5. Water and Wellbeing. Beyond mere biology, what is the relationship between the health of water and the health of people? How might a shared investment in water help to rebuild social trust?

6. Bioregional Governance. In what ways does the Lough challenge our ideas about the scale of political institutions? What follows for governance if we see Lough Neagh as a Bioregion as part of a Bioregional Earth requiring planetary governance, and not just as a large lake in one country?

7. Hospicing Modernity. In what ways does Modernity obscure how the Lough is understood? And how might we let go of the constitutive ideas of modernity - like progress, individualism, utility, reason, nation-states, growth, extraction, colonialism - that preclude us from seeing it differently?

8. What is the meaning of the Lough? What might it look like for almost two million people to reestablish a sacred relationship with the ecological heart of their part of the world? What does the Lough want? Can we make sense of that question as a basis for action?