Despatches from the margins

I’d walk with each person for around 30-60 minutes; talking while sitting down didn’t generate the same response. They were a form of Socratic Walk. We’d start by talking about different meanings and associations with the word ‘margins’, then look at the margins around us and allow them to shape and influence our subsequent conversation. I recorded our conversations and afterwards listened and transcribed them: each felt like a personal letter to me.

I produced cards with an image of the margins the person chose on one side, and selected extracts from the conversation on the other. These provided the basis for my contribution to the Social Sculpture Festival in Oxford.

It was over a year later, when I was asked to contribute to a conference on ‘Spiritual Places’ at Liverpool Hope University, that I looked again at the transcripts. I realised that in virtually every walk each person had spoken about a time when they had felt on the margins, and that invariably this moment had been a major – or minor – moment of authenticity and wholeness, leading to a sense of transformation. I presented these as ‘despatches from the margins’ which I reduced to a sentence or two. Some of these are given below: