TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 1: The Land Speaks
Hi, this is Megan. This is the first Notes from Dunfanaghy voice memo.
So as I think about the retreat in Dunfanaghy, I’ve just been thinking about Dunfanaghy a lot recently. I’ve been there recently and I’m going back probably a few more times before I go there for the retreat at the end of September.
I’m kind of obsessed with the land at the minute, so let me give you some context for this because I think it’s relevant to all of us.
So whenever I first started running a retreat in Dunfanaghy — like, I started talking about Dunfanaghy in my work maybe 10 years ago, and I didn’t really understand why. I thought it was because I was telling my story, which involved telling my family’s story. My granny’s from Dunfanaghy, and this is the place that I spent a lot of time as a child, and spent a lot of time with my grandfather. And when I thought about Dunfanaghy, I was mostly focused on the people, I think, when I first started talking about it.
But as the years have gone on, and very much at the minute — obviously the people are very relevant — but I am kind of obsessed with the land at the minute, and the landscape around Dunfanaghy is what birthed the retreat. Like, the theme of each day is determined by the landscape, and each different part of the landscape is a metaphor for a different part of my work. And that just kind of all seemed to magically come together. I never engineered that. That just dawned on me one day, like, oh, these things fit together. And of course they fit together, because I have been formed by this place, and so my work has been formed by this place, and the way I view the world has been formed by this place.
But when I say I’m obsessed with the land — I did a geology degree, for reasons I didn’t understand, I think 20 years ago, 21 years ago. And I was just kind of following my instincts. I was interested in physical geography, geology seemed interesting, off I went. But it’s only kind of now, 20 years later, that I’m really properly tuning into the geology around Dunfanaghy — the geology of these rocks and these formations and these mountains and this landscape that birthed me.
And I think I’m coming back again and again to this idea that the land speaks to us. I think that is true. The landscape speaks to us in all different kinds of ways. And the thing that I’m most focused on at the minute is understanding the minute geology of the very specific area around Dunfanaghy, where my family are from.
And I’m fascinated by the idea of the geological present.
So I’ve talked about geological timescales in my work for years. That’s one of the biggest things I came out of my geology degree with — this perspective of thinking about things in terms of a geological timescale. And that has been very helpful for me, because it really puts things in perspective when you realise, you know, humans — humans as a whole species — are a tiny dot in geological time. And then me personally, like us as individuals, we’re these tiny specks. And I find that to be a very humbling and motivating and freeing and, kind of, awesome in the truest sense of the word, perspective.
But whenever us as humans, whenever we talk about “now,” we might mean this minute, this second, this day, this week. We’re talking about this very short period of time. But in a geological sense, whenever we say “now,” we are talking about a much larger span of time.
So the smallest measure of geological time is an age. And that extends from thousands of years to tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands of years — I need to double check that. But so when we say “now” in a geological sense, we are talking about tens of thousands of years.
And so whenever we think about — you know, I talk a lot in my work, and there is a major focus on this in the Dunfanaghy retreat, whenever I bring people to Dunfanaghy — I talk a lot about our real work, the work that only we can do, being propelled and driven by some kind of defining question that we hold, that has been seeded in us by our family, by our culture, by our communities.
It’s this kind of — it’s almost this thing that is passed on to us. Like, there are these larger questions that our family systems, that our communities, that our cultural systems hold. And then at a very young age, a very formative age, we pick a portion of that question and go, well, here’s my version of this, or here’s the part of that that I am driven to try and understand. And we hold that question, usually unconsciously, and it drives and shapes the hobbies that we have, the interests that we have, the work that we end up doing.
And so whilst we might do work that on the surface looks like it’s all over the map, or we might have interests that on the surface seem like this kind of random, very eclectic set of interests — actually, there’s a deeper question that unites all of those things. And we’re just constantly, over and over again, trying to find different angles and different ways in to explore this defining question that we hold. And that defining question is usually kind of an infinite question. It’s usually, by its very nature, unanswerable and unknowable. And so that’s why it holds our curiosity for the duration of our lives.
And so, you know, I’ve talked about that concept in my work for years, and this understanding that we’re not really individuals — like, we don’t just kind of pop into being, we inherit all of these things.
And so the idea of the geological present, which is just a phrase that has been coming to me again and again and again for the past number of months — like, the geological present, this time span of thousands of years to tens of thousands of years — like, this is the moment that our work lives in. Our work is expansive beyond our lifetime. We have inherited things. We are passing on things. We are collaborating with ancestors that have come before us. We are collaborating with parts of our lineage that have not yet come into being. The spark of life is being passed along, the spark of aliveness. And we hold the spark of aliveness right now. And if we can kind of follow that in our work, we are part of that whole story.
So I don’t know how much sense this is making, but this is the kind of thing that I am thinking about going into the retreat this year. And whilst I’ve talked about defining questions and understanding these, like, huge almost geological-scale forces of family and culture — these things that shape us, that are invisible to us and almost imperceptible to us — I’ve talked about these things before, but I haven’t had this language of the geological present before.
And so there’s something I’m very excited — there’s something profound to me about being able to go and stand in the landscape and look at the geology and look at these rocks that have been formed over hundreds of millions of years, and to think about ourselves and our work kind of in the same time scale.
It certainly takes us out of the go-go-go, always-on, checking emails, checking phones — like the little maze that we have created for ourselves with technology and the speed of modern life and all of those kinds of things, and thinking about, like, how can I get people to click on this thing, and how do you get people, like, through the hoops of whatever it is you’re doing online. It’s an antidote to all of that. And it slows us down and it connects us to something primal, I think. And I think that that is the place that our own work is born out of.
And I feel like I am in a time and place where the landscape is very much speaking to me at the minute. It has things to teach me and tell me, and I’m trying to unpick them. And I will be sharing that in Dunfanaghy.
And I will also be encouraging you to do the same thing. Like, not everyone has a particular place or a particular landscape in the world that they were formed out of, but almost everyone I speak to has a particular place in the natural world that they feel a deep connection to. And these places have very pertinent, relevant things to teach us about our work.
There are things that we know that we don’t yet know consciously, and if we listen to the land, it can help us take these things from unthought known — take these things from our unconscious and bring them into our conscious awareness. It can shape our work in very powerful and exciting ways.
So that’s what I have for you today. Thanks for listening.
Thank you.