My little plasticine teacher

Here’s a photo of my new friend Luther. I met him at the start of Making Space, the retreat I hosted in Spain last week with fellow Dark Angel Jamie Jauncey. As a beginning exercise, each participant – including us two facilitators – made a friendly plasticine daemon or demi-god or creative sprite. The idea was that our tiny totems might  accompany us through the five days in Aracena. Having shaped them, we named them and wrote a few lines in their voices, to see what they sounded like and what encouraging words they might offer.

As Luther took shape in my hands, his personality and powers revealed themselves. I discovered he had long and acutely sensitive antennae; not much would slip his notice. I was more surprised when a long pink worm of plasticine that I was rolling between my fingers became his whip-like tail. Luther, it emerged, would be mainly gentle and encouraging, but he could also bring a more fiery energy when needed. He represented both the yin and yang of creative endeavour.

It was a playful experiment, but I was surprised by how meaningful it became, and how useful it was to have Luther around. I put him on my bedside table, so he was the first thing I saw each morning.  He came to represent a balance of open attention and focused action, of being and doing, that embodied a spirit I came to call “soft accountability”.

If I felt torn between going for a swim and getting on with some edits, I asked myself, what would Luther say about this? I didn’t have to follow his advice, but his perspective was always helpful; his presence helped me have a wonderfully restful and restorative time with a lovely group of people, while making significant progress with my own writing projects.

Making a totemic spirit guide is a very human thing to do. The Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel – a half-man, half-lion figure carved from mammoth ivory – is at least 35,000 years old. Anthropologists say we make such objects to remind ourselves that we are intimately woven into a many-layered web of existence – between species, realms, and generations; we are in kinship with each other, and all forms of life – and as such, we all belong; we are connected, not separate, and this is something to honour and cherish.

That’s a lot of meaning for a little plasticine person to hold, but Luther did his work. As Dark Angels we’ve been going to Aracena pretty much every year for almost twenty years. Beautiful words have been written and shared there. Deep bonds have been formed. On a surface level, what we offer as facilitators has evolved over the years. But there’s a through-line of spirit, and it has deep roots.

There is curiosity, companionship, a belief in the power of language to connect, and a trust that it’s ok to show up as ourselves, writing and being together in a way that’s congruent with deeply held and communally shared values.

Perhaps another reason we make totems is to embody the qualities we hope to cultivate in ourselves, in our work, in our relationships, and in our organisations and communities. In a way, the little figures we each made in Aracena don’t provide something that’s missing, they are reminders of what is already here, already available.

And the good news for me is this: wrapped in a blanket of cellophane and tinfoil, Luther safely made the journey home. He’s here next to me as I write this.