Writing from in between...

Welcome to In Between Days, my new space for writing, for trying out thoughts and ideas, as I find my way from here to there, or there to here, or then to now... floundering about in this in-between space, in life as in the world.

Hannah Arendt (and yep, it took until the second sentence of this new blog {is it a blog? Is it a newsletter? Maybe it's a blogletter!} to mention her, sorry) has this wonderful phrase

the abyss... between the no longer and the not yet

which I'm using as my tagline here. As so very often, she expresses it best. It's a sort of throw-away line in a letter which I found in Lyndsey Stonebridge's excellent newish biography, and I'm a little puzzled as to why she didn't use it for the title of her extraordinary collection of essays that became Between Past and Future. Maybe her publishers wanted something simpler?

It's a pity, because there's something so much more evocative - more nuanced, complex, delightfully provocative (in other words, more Arendtian) - about between the no longer and the not yet. Since I came across it, I've found it far more interesting a concept than Gramsci's the old world is dying and the new struggling to be born that we've all been using for a while. Rather than being in an interregnum, literally between kings, we are in the creative, emergent space of not yet. There's so much more room to move, to think, to act!

But the publisher in me couldn't quite come at making it the title of the blogletter, either. For that, I couldn't resist turning to The Cure, and one of the defining songs of my youth 😁

Because, while I'm going to be exploring deep ideas here, there'll be personal reflections, too. Partly because I've never had an actual personal blog before! For the last decade, most of my writing has been with and for the Green Institute, at the blog here or at Green Agenda. And before that, for Green Music, and for Christine Milne. It's about time I carved some space, at this time of life and this time of the world...

And that's also the point, really - the intertwining of time of life and time of world. I've left the Green Institute after a decade as its Executive Director. I've given a quarter of a century - half my life - to a political project that I still support but no longer realllly believe has relevant structural responses to the world as it actually is now. The band that has been such a crucial part of my life since we founded it when I was 19 has a big question mark over its future for reasons we may go into later. I've got grey in my beard, my kids are grown up, the world is literally on fire, the technofascist broligarchs are extracting all knowledge and leaving us even more bereft of reality, and I'm not sure that any of us are doing what needs to be done. I still think I was heading in the right direction with my book, Living Democracy, but, three years after publication, I've got more questions, and the hope that infused it is ... dampened.

I'm in between, right at a time when the world feels in between. And so many of my friends and colleagues and co-conspirators feel the same. In our lives, in our work, in our approaches to the world, we're all a little lost, between the no longer and the not yet.

So I'll be writing some things here. I'm sure that will fix it...

There's a bunch of half-drafted pieces I aim to publish shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to hear straight away when they go live!