Not everyone experiences tragedy, but many who do are changed by it forever. Tragedy can cut so deep that it comes to be recognised as an inescapable feature of life, but not necessarily a defining or debilitating one. Learning from that kind of wholehearted relationship to tragedy matters today, if only because we are in a phase of history where we are witnessing a collective tragedy, namely our apparent failure, despite decades of effort, to respond to the ecological collapse of our shared home.

The point is not to give up, but to recognise that any future success depends on an encounter with the tragedy of our current failure. The Post-Tragic sensibility and stance therefore offer a response to personal and societal hardship that may become critical as the interlocking crises of our times continue to bite. We will need to remain positive, but that positivity will have to be informed by the pervasiveness of suffering and uncertainty.

This evening gathering will bring together Zak Stein and Marian Partington as two leading practitioners of post-tragic awareness to ask what it is and how it can help us.

The writer, educator and futurist Zak Stein has described how the post-tragic turns from strategies of avoidance to look squarely at what has happened and is going on. It is about grappling with the tragic but not becoming stuck in it. “There’s an art to dealing with suffering,” he says, “It steals into a new form of character or identity.”

Marian Partington’s sister, Lucy, disappeared for 20 years before Lucy’s remains were found in the cellar of the house of Fred and Rosemary West. Marian has written about her deep and fierce engagement with the experience. She knows how “the feeling of despair, and helplessness that this is never going to go away, consumes the hope of change.” And yet, her story is one of recovering the human spirit, which carries huge resonance for us today.

As well as hearing Marian’s story and Zak’s insights, the evening will include space for reflection and opportunities to discuss with, and hear from, others.

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The evening is a smaller event in the runup to the first edition of the Realisation Festival planned for the summer of 2021 and hosted by the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury in collaboration with Perspectiva. The Festival is about giving time and space to the Soul for the benefit of Society. We aim to attract those who might describe themselves as, for instance, dejected intellectuals, exhausted activists, aspiring hopefuls, lost seekers, open-minded cynics, overwhelmed romantics, burnt out travellers, deeply confused thinkers, fellow sufferers, ambitiously humble, confidently uncertain, wounded jesters, lonely warriors, recovering achievers, and curious sailors.

For more information see: www.realisationfestival.com   Tickets will go on sale in 2021.

Perspectiva is a community of expert generalists, working on an urgent one hundred year project to improve the relationships between systems, souls and society in theory and practice. We are scholars, artists, activists, futurists and seekers who believe credible hope for the first truly planetary civilisation lies in forms of economic restraint and political cooperation that are beyond prevailing epistemic capacities and spiritual sensibilities.

Our charitable purpose is therefore to develop an applied philosophy of education for individual and collective realisation in the service of averting societal collapse; and in the spirit of serious play and ambitious humility to cultivate the imaginative and emotional capacity required to usher in a world that is, at the very least, technologically wise and ecologically sound.