Wisdom and Water
28 November 2025
Dear Friends,
This month we are celebrating the new beginning of our much-loved long course, Poetics of Imagination. This is the first of our previous postgraduate programmes to have new life lovingly woven into old bones since we left our home in Dartington, so it is quite the milestone!
This course runs from October 2025 to June 2026, through the form of three modules, each with an in-person residential together with online gatherings and assignments. It offers the same soul-stirring, mind-stretching and heart-expanding content, creative delivery and scholarly rigour as its postgraduate sibling, but with a little more of a mischievous skip in its step now that it is not currently beholden to some of the more restrictive elements of formal Higher Education accreditation.
Led by core faculty members Dr. Valentin Gerlier and poet Alice Oswald, the first residential was held in North Cornwall earlier this month, in a farmhouse, just a few miles south of the blustery Atlantic coastline.
The theme for Module 1 is Wisdom and Water. During the residential gathering, students were invited to dive into and to drink deeply from the waters of ancient poetry and creation myths, and to swim in the ripples of timeless poems and other forms of deep wisdom from throughout the ages. All bringing forth the intent of stepping up to the epic and urgent task of exploring how human beings understand themselves and their world, across time, and civilisation.
Sometimes these deep dives emerged in a more traditional, lecture or seminar style form…Schumacher-style, of course! Imagine students gathered together on sofas, in a circle, with notebooks in hand, some knitting, others sketching or gently cradling a cup of tea, with a sense of eager anticipation and the electric energy of deep listening rippling through the air…
At other times, these deep dives were more active and embodied. The ‘eternal art’ of memory was practised by speaking lines of a poem* out loud whilst walking outdoors (*the poem, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, is featured at the end of this newsletter). The participants then stood together in a circle and added gestures into the experience, not only to aid memory, but to help embody and enliven the phenomena being spoken through the poem.
The art of practising orality* (*communication that relies on speech rather than writing), which is a key focus of this course, was also developed through exercises such as co-creating an imaginary ‘painting’ together, whilst all standing in a circle, each person in turn bringing forth a new visual element through speech. Experientially, this process felt like the formation of a series of transient verbal-visual waves. The ever-growing final ‘image’ was collectively crafted through motion and momentum, drop by drop, particle by particle, until the ‘painting’ could be inwardly witnessed in some form by all…and then released, often with a sigh of relief at having re-membered what had gone before!
There was also an awe-inspiring day trip to the coast path near Tintagel, where students followed the salty waters of the sea until they encountered, once again, the sweet waters that spring from the belly of the Earth, in this instance, through a sacred waterfall. This literal and imaginative journey ‘upstream’ was accompanied by the telling of an Old Irish tale that spoke of the eternally perilous waters of bitterness and the timeless redemption of true love.
To help ground all of these magnificent adventures, the much-loved Julia Ponsonby nourished the hearts, minds and souls of our students, not only with her famous cooking (and cookies!), but with the warm, welcoming atmosphere that she crafted in the farmhouse kitchen.
Then in order to nurture a culture of care while attending also to the ordinary magic of everyday practicalities, the group was held by the wonderful facilitator and Poetics of Imagination alumna Sophie Craven (please do check out her community learning project near Falmouth, The Convivial), and faculty member Dr. Emma Kidd, who, among many other things, supported in epic practical tasks such as searching the local area for lemon squeezers and enabling timely lunch preparations. For what is the imagination without well-tended practicalities and well-cared for people?
We are deeply grateful to all who made this new beginning possible, not least our awe-inspiring cohort of 2025-26 Poetics students!
As ever, we appreciate your time, your attention, and your friendship – and we hope to see you sometime in the not-too-distant future, either in-person or online.
The Schumacher College Team
x
P.S – If you are interested in the theme of Wisdom and Water, do take a look at our recent Substack article by Peter Reason, describing an encounter with the West Dart river here in Devon. Peter gives us insight into the coming-into-being of the Living Waters cooperative inquiry, which will begin again in March 2026.
Poetics of Imagination students enjoy a field trip near Tintagel in Cornwall, journeying upstream, from sea to source, led by Valentin Gerlier. Photo credit: Emma Kidd