I don’t make things very often but over the last couple of weeks I have invested time, energy and money in building a sound booth in our rehearsal room. Although I had a rough idea as to what they looked and sounded like ( few years go I had been put in a cupboard lined with acoustic foam to record a children’s story I had written) I more or less improvised rather than following a design. Actually the whole project was triggered by some of the ceiling coming down and after I had repaired it and cleaned up the mess I decided the room needed a bit of tlc. I like to think I am resourceful and I have had a sheet of glass that was part of a shower encloser sitting outside my backdoor for about three years so that became the core of one of two walls I had to build. It was ridiculously heavy but my brother-in-law helped me carry it across the garden and fix it I place. It was almost a perfect fit. Then I built a frame for the second wall with studding and MDF and fitted an old door I had in the shed. That gave me the framework. I clad the outside of the glass with foam (stuff I had saved from an old sofa without knowing what it would be used for) and a layer of MDF. Inside the cubicle I put old duvet covers on the walls and covered them with black removal blanket and then put acoustic foam tiles on the roof and glass and carpet tiles on the floor. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to make something and I was pleased with the result and when we tried it out for recording it worked very well.

At one level – bringing something new into existence that when built seems to fulfil its purpose is, I suppose, a creative act, but it didn’t feel creative. Rather it felt like a steady process of constructing something from existing materials some of which I had readily to hand (you might say were waiting to be used) and some of which I had to go and buy. In terms of a process it felt like the way Tim Ingold describes making as a process of growth brought about through working with the materials. I want to think of making  as a process of growth. This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what he has to work with, and in the process of making he joins forces with them, bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesizing and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge. (Ingold, 2013, p. 21)
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So what motivated me to spend time and over £300 on making the sound pod. Well it wasn’t the idea of building a sound pod to put our lead singer in the box to stop annoying us. No, I was motivated by the bigger idea of producing our musical this year and making reasonable recordings of the songs. We tested an incomplete version of the sound pod and produced some recordings that were better than any we had produced before.

It’s the start of the new year. Not just any new year but the start of the next decade. A decade that could well be my last! At the start of the last decade I was gainfully employed at the University of Surrey but only 16 months later I embarked on a new pathway as an independent writer, publisher and facilitator. A few months later I created my website and started my blog to  some curate some of the events in my life. It has been an interesting decade and a lot has happened to me and my family and most of what happened to me was not planned it emerged from and through the milieu that is life. As I interacted with the world and caused some sort of disturbance in it, the world interacted with me and caused some sort of disturbance in me. A good example of this was the invitation I received last June, from the Harvard LILA team to contribute to their inquiry into learning ecologies. My involvement in LILA was a direct result of me interacting with the world to explore the idea of learnig ecologies and sharing my ideas. More and more I realise that everything that has gone before – what John Dewey would call my undergoing – feeds into my present thinking and guides my decisions and actions for the next stage of my undergoing.
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So what of the next decade? At the start of every year I wonder what next? And every year interesting possibilities seem to emerge. I start this year with optimism. I am looking forward to meeting Doug Cole who is interested in joining me on the lifewide education project which I feel is need of a serious injection of energy and new ideas. I am also thinking about my new book project although I have yet to decide on the idea I will explore. But I am confident that with a bit of imagination and an open disposition something will emerge as I interact with this beautiful and unpredictable world.

As I drove past a cemetry near where I live which looks onto Box Hill .I was struck by the brighteness and beauty of it all. The hill was covered in low cloud, but the whole scene was framed by a deep blue sky. I could not imagine a more peaceful and uplifting final resting place. It seemed to provide me with a rich metaphor for the past, the present and an eternal future fullof hope and possibility.