About Colin

Who am I?

It's not easy to answer this question.  The fact is I'm continually discovering who I am, I'm finding out moment by moment.  So every idea I form about myself is usually out of date by the time I’ve formed it!

 

But there are some things I can say with confidence -

 

I'm alive, human, male.

 

I’m married to Fanny (we've been together since 1997). I'm a dad to four children (Tamar, Kenan, Bridey & Leo), and a stepdad to 2 (Ruth & Amy). I was born in 1953 in a place then called Rhodesia (though I prefer its new name - Zimbabwe). I lived there and in South Africa and in Swaziland for 26 years before coming to England in 1979, back to my family roots.

 

I sing, play guitar, kalimba, marimbas, improvise music for Fanny's Live Rhythms evening's, write songs from time to time. I love to cook, to eat, to drink good wine, to play, wrestle, to fool around.I enjoy words, stories, writing and reading. I've built a wooden house, written a novel, initiated several networks, recorded two CDs of my own music, designed computer systems, re-built a vintage MG.

 

I'm a trained facilitator, I’ve taught community choirs, sung in Folk Festivals, helped hundreds of people find their voices, founded a circle dance group in California (which still dances together more than 20 years later). I’ve been a storyteller, a sales rep, a systems analyst, a leather worker, a music teacher, a database administrator.  I wrote the music for the millennium pageant in Torbay.

 

Yet none of this comes close to defining me.

 

If I get closer, it's as if I've been on the scent of something for most of my life - truth?  Reality?  Love that is more than need, more than possessiveness?  An answer to some core questions; why am I here?  Who or what am I, really?  And what could we humans be if we truly loved one another and could live deeper than our fears and our differences, deeper than our genes, deeper than our wounds?

 

When I was 16 I wrote an essay on the theme of humans evolving towards God.  I know now that this theme has been explored by many fine writers, but at that time I had never come across it.  This was an original thought in me, and it resonated deeply!  This evolutionary impulse kept calling me - new countries, new jobs, new possibilities, new relationships.  It led me to Findhorn, to Tai Chi, to the Tarot, to LSD and Timothy Leary, to Hesse and Jung and Rudolf Steiner, to sweat lodge and trance dancing, to TS Eliot, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi and Hafiz, to Scott Peck and Community Building.

 

It led me to workshops and courses and journeys where I learned the profound stillness of deep meditation and came to realise in that stillness that I am here prior to any thought or action.  I learned what dance can do when you give yourself to it, when you breathe your aliveness down into hips and thighs, and find the rhythms in your feet.  I tasted what it is to be one voice among many, giving expression to beauty, to feeling, to devotion, to harmony.  I felt what it is when someone has the simple courage to face into a difficult truth and reveal it, how inspiring and touching such honesty can be.

 

It led me into wild places and crazy situations.  I learned what it is to walk into the mountains alone for days on end, to see my home destroyed in a wild storm, to lose every penny, to try everything I knew to keep a precious family together but fail (twice!), to have everything I owned stolen from me and wake-up alone with nothing.

 

And it led me to ‘This’ work. Being in groups with Adam since 1998 has stretched me, deepened and inspired me; challenged me to face my fears of being exposed, my secret belief that deep down I was unworthy, wrong, bad….  To meet the parts of myself that can hate, that don't want to love, don't want to wake-up, don't even want to be alive.  It's helped me to realise that my capacity to love is so much more than I knew, that simply being alive is the most awesome and precious gift that we have.

 

And since 2002 it led me into offering the Movement of Being work alongside Fanny. Right now this is my best shot at bringing all that I am into the world, at offering my love and my experience and my presence to others.

 

On the one hand I feel like a beginner, continuing to grow and meet edges in myself - as a student with Adam, with Fanny, with my family and in the melting pot of my peer group and my community.  On the other hand I’m starting to realise that I know who I am. That I’m passionate about truth and I’m ready to work with it. That love is not something I get, it’s something I am. I’m offering my own response to the deep questions which guided me all my life; gradually becoming able to help untangle the complexities of mind and emotion in individuals and groups, beginning to be able to help people love one another and live deeper than their fears and differences, deeper than their genes, deeper than their wounds.

 

For all that I’ve received  ... Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou.

For all that I have to give... Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou.