Writing Our Legacy @ Downs to the Sea: Into the Dark Water Part 2

Writing Our Legacy@ Downs to the Sea: Into the Dark Water - Writing with M’Other Water Part 2

Join us for this winter event with the warmth of the Saddlescombe Learning Barn wood burner and light refreshments.

This is a facilitated Writing Our Legacy ‘Downs to the Sea’ project Creative Water Day.

Take part in prompted and independent creative writing, reflection and sharing on the theme of ‘water in people’s lives.’

Optional: a 15-minute gentle walk around Saddlescombe Farm and to the dew pond.

Into the Dark Water - Writing with M’Other Water 2

Swim in a lake or the sea at night, and you will encounter a tiny fraction of the awe-inspiring nature of dark water: the giver and taker of life and the repository of great mysteries. You may sink, swim, drown or be blessed, cleansed or transformed by it. Perhaps it is because we all began life in its embrace - the womb’s primordial ocean rocking us to the life-rhythms of the mother whose every heartbeat, utterance and experience was also ours (for better or worse) in our state of not-two-ness – that we regard it with so much wonder and dread. Perhaps that is the real reason it magnetises us. Or perhaps there are deeper reasons still.

As we descend into the womb of the year to be re-gestated and re-born to the ascending light, Into the Dark Water takes us deeper. It is an invitation to wade into our own dark waters in search of the submerged places in us that hold for us both menace, enchantment, dread and desire, peril and the possibility of salvation.

Location: Saddlescombe Farm Saddlescombe Road, West Sussex, near Brighton, West Sussex, BN45 7DE

What3 words: ///familiar.submitted.keeps`

Suitable for: 18 + adults only (general public – all welcome)

Free entry and free light refreshments and minibus

Facilitator: Razia Aziz: WEBSITE www.waytu.co

Transport: 10:30am - Shared car and taxi pickup from Brighton Station (please book with Eventbrite tickets)

Further information from the artist/facilitator Razia Aziz:

Into the Dark Water - Writing with M’Other Water 2

Trigger warning: mention of danger, death and enslavement

‘Wade in the water, wade in the water children, wade in the water: God’s gonna trouble the water’ echoes the ancestral voices of the Underground Railroad down the generations. They signal the danger and mystery of water and its unfathomable forces – and the promise of crossing to a land of freedom and respite from great suffering. For enslaved people in the US making their clandestine break for the Canadian border at night, the act of crossing the dark water was a prayer, a leap of faith, the body’s anthem to the hope of liberation. For so many who have to cross dark waters since, and continue to do so today, the journey is no less perilous, the outcome no less uncertain, and yet the prayer continues to ring out across the earth.

With the Solstice just a week away, we will sit around a fire, feel the damp earth beneath our boots, breathe the chill air and write inspired by M’Other Water – our spirit of creativity and togetherness completing the circle of the elements.