A new experiment: I'm starting a school that will be offered as a gift

Hello! I’ve got a slightly different kind of post today, about a new experiment I want you to know about. I’m still in the middle of a series about how to inhabit life as a work of art. So far, I’ve written about why to do this (hint: because we’re doing it all day anyway, because imagination is part of the fabric of reality), and two posts about how: on acting and playing with form. Next up will be a third “how”: putting a frame on it.

For now, here’s some information about a new experiment I’m working on. In a way, this is one of my efforts to enact the ideas in the series—to inhabit the world as a work of art by taking creative action. I hope it sounds fun to you.

More soon,

x Ellie

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself hunched over a spreadsheet, trying to squeeze out a margin on a profit and loss statement.

(If you read these newsletters for thoughts about how imagination is an expanded dimension of reality itself, and the world is a work of art composed of each of our constant acts of imaginative co-creation, and you’re shocked and perhaps disgusted to read the words “profit and loss statement”—please stick around. We’ll get out there into the cosmos in a moment, don’t you worry.)

So there I am, hunched over an Excel sheet, fiddling around with numbers. Have you ever had a moment when you felt the excitement and joy dying in you in real time? Yep, it was one of those.

I was crunching numbers for a new conversation series I’m starting, which I’m calling “Edge School: A hedge school for edgy times.” I decided to start this school because I know I’m surrounded—that we’re all surrounded, no matter where we are—by brilliant people engaged in strange and revealing investigations. People thinking in unusual ways about important things; committed to inspiring and world-making creative practices; lighting themselves up with questions and ideas. And I wasn’t getting to hear about it, but I needed to, badly. If ever there were an age that needed us to share our ideas about how to live and think well, it’s now.

There’s this line I love in Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society: “All over the world, the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education.” Illich wrote that in 1970, and I want to be a bit careful with it, in 2026. We’ve lived through years of a culture that reviles expertise, and it has damaged us. Today, we’re losing our educational institutions. Whole university departments are getting chopped, and we’ll all be far poorer for it. We need experts and expertise. We need people who devote themselves to education.

We also need a living culture outside of schools and universities. In fact, our schools and universities—not to mention the vitality of daily life—depend on that living culture. But when there’s a building somewhere over there where learning happens, it’s too easy to cast the rest of life as “not-school” and “not-university”; to operate as though in our everyday lives, we have nothing to learn from each other; nothing to teach. And that flattens us and deprives us of practices that make us stronger and wiser and happier: sharing what we know with, and learning from, others.1

So I decided to start a conversation series—an offering where people could exchange ideas and have vital conversations. An attempt to sustain a living culture.

Then, before too long, I found myself hunched over that spreadsheet, losing the will to live.

I was fiddling around with the food costs when I felt my life force drain out of me. The events I’m planning will include a talk, a shared dinner, and a whole-group discussion. I was trying to find a way to offer tickets on a sliding scale, starting at £5, so that the evenings weren’t exclusionary. But if everyone paid the lowest rate, my spreadsheet was telling me that each event would cost me at least £175 (between food costs, space rental, and the speaker’s fee). So I adjusted the food costs, plugging in the cheapest bread I could buy, the most chickpea-heavy dinner. I played with reducing the speaker’s fee, even though sustaining thinkers and creators in their work was one of my major goals. I toyed with stern wording for the ticket page, about who really has the right to claim a reduced-cost ticket—wording I feared might drive some people away.

And suddenly, the whole process started to feel so joyless. This offering I’d wanted to make for my community started to feel like a burden. Resentment and a sense of failure were already creeping in. Why had I ever embarked on this?

It just so happens that I’ve recently finished editing the first book written by Adam Wilson, who runs a farm where no food is ever sold for money. You can follow Adam’s adventures here on Substack; I’m sure a lot of you already do. All of the vegetables and meat and dairy that come from the land he stewards are offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.

I’ve spent the past few months steeped in Adam’s wisdom, about all we’ve lost by taking the gifts of life and imprisoning them behind price tags. Primary among those losses is the capacity for true gratitude, which means the capacity to receive these gifts of life and allow them to work upon us, to change us. Fruits and vegetables and the bodies of our fellow animals can, miraculously, grow freely on this living world, but when we put a price tag on them, we can convince ourselves that the coins we hand over in exchange for those fruits and vegetables and bodies are a fair and complete exchange. That what we buy is rightfully ours. There’s no miracle in it, and so no need to be grateful; to think deeply about what we take; to allow ourselves to be humbled and changed by gratitude; to find ways to honour the gift and pass it along.

Here’s a passage I particularly love, from the preface to Adam’s book (shared with his permission):

In the presence of food that is for sale, we tend to ask, “What do I want?”, “How much does it cost?” and “Can I afford it?” The locus of consideration is the self, the same one doing the asking and the answering. The same one we disparagingly call a consumer.

In the presence of free food, we tend to stuff our bellies and our pockets. We tend not to worry about where the food came from, how it became available to us, or what it means for us to eat it.

“I paid for it” and “I got it for free” result in the same market-specific condition we might call “freedom from relational responsibility.”

In the presence of food that is a gift, the wellbeing of others springs to mind: “Surely someone needs this more than I do.” In their gentle protestations, I hear people asking, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?”, “What is an appropriate portion size?”, “Are all the other neighbors being sustained?” and “How might I go about making sure that is the case?” This is the sound of gratitude creaking into motion by turning the human heart toward relationship. This is the sound of a consumer becoming a sustainer.

Sitting there with my sad little spreadsheet, I started to wonder whether the same might be true of the fruits we grow inside ourselves, in the form of ideas—which are, of course, ultimately nourished and made possible by the fruits of the soil.

In the presence of ideas that are for sale, we might ask “What do I want?” “How much does it cost?” and “Can I afford it?”. We might ask, of an evening where such ideas are shared, “Did I get good value for money?” Or “Did that please me?”

And whoever happens to be sharing their ideas will anticipate those questions. I know this from personal experience. To share your ideas in a market economy can be a frightening thing, and in the face of the imagined consumer, the more tender ideas too often hide themselves. It’s easy to fall into armoured positions and well-worn thought tracks.

And yet those tender ideas, the ones growing very close to a person’s heart, might turn out to be the ones that most need to be shared. The ones that will best sustain a living culture.

In the presence of ideas (and, indeed, on the evenings I’m planning, food) that are a gift, guests might instead ask, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?”. We might all bring a different quality of attention. A greater willingness to listen. More kindness and wisdom. An openness to being changed by any life-giving ideas that are shared.

In the presence of ideas and food that are offered as a gift, people might leave feeling grateful. Wanting to pass along some of what they’ve received.

And I suspect this might be an important way to re-grow a living culture.2

So I threw out my spreadsheet. I stopped trying to squeeze out a margin, and instead, I asked myself what I would need in order to offer these events as a gift. Here’s what I came up with:

Dinner will be a gift from me to the speaker and the guests (I’m planning for 25 guests at each event). I’ll source the ingredients (likely through a combination of buying, gleaning, and seeking donations from local farms and shops), and cook the meals myself. These will be simple meals—hearty soup and bread—and sourcing and cooking them as a gift will bring me great joy. Far more joy than I could ever have experienced while trying to squeeze out a margin.

But I will need some gifts from others, too, which I’ll pass directly along to speakers and the space I’m renting. For this first season, I’ll run a monthly event between September 2026 and March 2027. That’s seven events, at a total cost of £1,750, or £250 per event. That breaks down to:

• £100 for space rental

• £150 for the speaker fee

At present, I am not looking for any reimbursement for my time. I am very fortunate to have a home and work that pays the bills. If this all goes well, and Edge School continues beyond the first season, I might need to rethink this. But for this first season, I want to offer this as a labour of love.

This is where you all come in.

Might you be willing to contribute a gift of money to help get this project going, and sustain it through its first season?

Offer a gift

If and when this fund reaches £1,750, I’ll disable it so that no further contributions can be made.

None of this money will go to me. It will all be used to pay speakers (i.e., support activists, thinkers, and artists) and rent the space.

So what do you get out of this?

These events will be held at the Moor Imagination Centre, an arts and community space in Buckfastleigh, Devon, southwest England. If you live in the area, by donating, you’ll be helping to sustain this centre, grow the living culture of your region, and also create some nourishing and convivial nights out that you can come along to. (Though offering a gift of money won’t bump you up the ticket queue, I’m afraid, as I’m trying hard not to allow money to become exclusionary.)

But even if you live far away, there might still be compelling reasons to support the project. For example:

You’ll be supporting artists, activists, thinkers, and people working towards social change. Putting money in their pockets so they can keep doing their work.

You’ll be creating a wisdom-sharing experiment that might ripple out in untold ways, through new connections and behaviours and thinking.3 The guiding questions in this series will be “Which idea or investigation is lighting you up, which might help us rise to these edgy times?” and “Which questions are you living? Which questions do you long to explore with others?” The emphasis is on enriching and spreading communal wisdom that is fit for our times.

You’ll be making this experiment accessible to everyone in the area, regardless of their resources.

You’ll be supporting an experiment that, if successful, could be replicated anywhere.

You’ll be working some magic in yourself, helping to dismantle what Adam calls the mine-and-yoursness of resources, in ways that will make you feel more worthy to receive what you need, when you need it.

Offer a gift

If you’re able to offer a gift, I’d so appreciate it. And either way, if you’d like to follow along, you can join the mailing list (and find the call for speakers) here, and follow on Instagram here.

Thanks so much for reading,

x Ellie