The Conference of the Birds

I've just re-read, after a twenty-eight year gap, John Heilpern's account of the theatre legend Peter Brook's journey into Africa with a troupe of actors, including the twenty-six year old Helen Mirren, in search of a universal language of theatre.

It's a great read, as fresh today as when it was written in the late seventies and an inspiration for anyone seeking to uncover themselves and their place in the world. It's full of hard work, and exhaustion, and frustration, and faith, too. And joy.

Heilpern ends one of many chapters of struggle with this quote from one of Gurdjieff's pupils:

I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.

Rene Daumal, from Mount Analogue