Shakespeare in the Mountains is about Shakespeare... this year. My real objective is to bring people together to read, starting with Shakespeare and moving on through a range of other authors that I find interesting. I live in a special place. Nothing seems better to me than sharing this place with like minds: people who know can feel their way into texts, enjoy good company and good food and like
walking in the mountains. In the long term I would like to open this small project up on a larger scale to allow people a refuge in the mountains where they can do what they want to do for as long as they need to. There is a crying need for this. Young people come out of their education trained but not educated. Why take a gap year doing some concocted project in the rainforests? Better still to live in a village, radically disconnected from modern life, and find your own roots. Here you can start an inquiry that will take you through life. It is not only for the young! We already take volunteers in Villandás on the WWOOF programme to help in our organic gardens: those volunteers are not all youngsters. This project arises in part from meditations on that experience:
-the volunteers come under the umbrella of organic farming but that is not all they are looking for.
-the volunteers are of all ages from 18-60
-the volunteers are all looking for a way of opening their world. They don't want a package. They have their own ideas and directions. My ideas about this are not original. I grew up as a teenager in Taunton, Somerset, England reading and walking. I would take books in my backpack up the hills to sit under trees in the woods on the Blackdown Hills or the Quantocks. Wordworth and Coleridge walked the same hills. I was drawn to writers like the earlier Ted Hughes. This was not just entertainment. Later I connected him to other writers like Ted Dorn or Robert Creeley or Charles Olson. Oh, Charles Olson the lumbering disastrous giant! How much I would have liked to be in one of his classes instead of the petty examination-focussed classes I had at Queens College, Taunton. Olson worked at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the second generation after Rice left. BMC is an inspiration to me. Is there any college or university that compares with the open-minded generosity of spirit and action at BMC? So this is what study is to me. Reading and life are inseparable. Reading, walking and life are inseparable. It is not the kind of study you do to get a grade. It is more than that.
