"Nothing beautiful can be summarized." ~ Paul Valery
The Amber Spark was a three-year experiment that I immersed myself into together with fellow creatives Johannes Buch, Florinda Camilleri and Niels Plotard. At the time, we were all based in Malta. When I first read about it in a magazine somewhere in 2017, The Amber Spark was already a Limited Liability Company set up by Florinda and Niels as their container for doing creative work. I immediately connected with their intentions and sent them an email asking if they were up for meeting. We connected and long story short, The Amber Spark (or TAS as we called it for short) soon had four directors. As Niels said in an interview much later “no one we talked to thought that having four directors was a good idea”. But we went for it anyway. This is us somewhere in 2018.
The three years of TAS were years full of creativity and inspiring artistic projects (you can see a little social media snapshot here). With Flo being a dancer (and a pharmacist), Niels an all round creative artist (who does dance, photography, video, sound and all kinds of things in between), Jo a graphic designer, and me a facilitator and writer, the work we did spanned across multiple sectors, countries, entities and spaces.
One of our biggest challenges was to figure out how to talk about what we did in a coherent way that was simple for others to understand. With such diversity between us, it was not the case of an easy to find target audience with a clean list of services to match. We called ourselves a studio and a collective and did our best to make our common structure represent the four of us in an honest way. The video below is us talking about this in a live conversation (Jo is temporarily missing due to baby – parent dynamics and the realities of home working) we did as a way of reflecting on our work together.
Somewhere in 2019 we decided to liquidate the company simply because it had become an administrative monster that took more of our time and headspace than any of us wanted to dedicate to admin. Aside from the company being our official work container, we entangled our lives together in various ways, including moving into a big house together along with little Robin who you might be able to vaguely hear in the clip above. The company structure was our original way of creating as much stability as possible for ourselves and we extended this by pooling our incomes and having many shared house resources including the main part of our grocery supplies that we created a common budget for.
Despite clear differences in needs, how we defined autonomy, ways (and times) of working and many transformative personal journeys including immersion into parenthood, moving away and back, relationship dynamics and much more, we really managed to maintain a sense of overall harmony and trust which I am extremely grateful for. For much of our time together, we started Mondays with a week preview circle, ended Fridays with a look at our week and held many house meetings over Saturday morning pancakes. There were some house parties (perhaps fewer than we thought there would be), many rituals and some ceremonies to mark important transitions. Without a doubt these practices were central to our well-being through so much experimentation with structures that are so integral to how we live our lives and interact together.
In the subtitle I promised traces, simply because it is impossible for me to do this experience justice if I try to be exhaustive in any way. I’m going to end this post with two poems that Florinda and myself wrote as our way of reflecting on our time together. Perhaps poetry can transmit something a little more abstract and probably a little more deep than the rest of the words here can.
The Amber Spark An experiment in togetherness with radical trust, a company in company of strangers I felt strangely connected to and grew to love. So many hours and days spent in circle listening, talking, listening for the unsaid and saying it. Practicing life and love and work and friendship in beautiful stone spaces and gardens lit up with the spark of our hope. A shape that we formed to support ourselves and each other, testing our separateness and oneness finding our edges and waiting impatiently for things to become crystal clear. Eventually we outgrew what we started, composting the rigid structure that gave us the idea we were something knowable, that we could define if we tried hard enough or talked long enough; yet never managed to. Our next steps diverge yet the field of our trust is always there, ready to spark other fires, equipped with all that we embody from this experience. Wiser, more translucent, more able to dance to the music all around. Greta
Monday. We sit in a circle. Coffee, breakfast, construction sounds. How are we feeling today? We mindfully pour out mind, heart, and soul. Thank you for sharing. What’s happening this week? How’s the cash flow looking? There seem to be some communication issues here. How can we approach this respectfully and honestly? Let’s look at the communication thus far. This can’t possibly be acceptable. We need to ask boldly but nicely. Let’s look up some legal docs while we’re at it. A conversation into work ethic ensues. A deep questioning of who we are and what we stand for, follows. More tea. We shift in our seats. Necks start to ache. We seem to be talking about different things. But we are getting somewhere. Hungry is where we’re getting. Lunch. Shared yumminess. Always with a sweet finale. And a coffee. Let’s get back to it. It’s uncomfortable. More questioning, more reflection. Let’s try this exercise. I don’t have much to share. But that’s OK. So many things float around in the realm of consciousness but outside the realm of language. We can feel them, we just can’t say them. So we smile. frown. stretch. scratch. drink. snack. Live with that lump in the throat. Fall into that lump in the throat. I can’t say that, it would hurt too much. Do I even mean it? I don’t mean it. It goes against our principles. Awkward silences. Aching shoulders. We must come to a conclusion together. But we’re all tired. Tired of finding solutions, tired of compromise, tired of feeling as though we constantly need to guide others for them to do their own jobs. But we are creatives. We find solutions. Four good minds, plenty of passion, plenty of talent. We have all the solutions we need if only we found a way to unlock them. It’s dark now. The streetlights are on, it’s time to stop. The to-do list is the same as this morning’s, actually it’s longer. What are we even doing here? Going around in circles? Time for closing thoughts, and hugs, warm embraces. A few moments of holding and being held.
And there, everything belonged. The questions, the analyses, the discomfort, the things left unsaid, the things said painfully, the worry, the fear and anxiety, the mistakes, the tears, the burning of bridges, the closing of doors, the friction, the tug of war by four… the mischief, the giggles, the crumbling of cookies and the cookies crumbled, the sharing, the listening, the nurturing, the learning, failing, falling, growing, the deepened listening, the deepened feeling, the deepened loving, everything belonged. Everything belongs. Florinda
