My contribution to the Ridge Salon grew out of work I do with Conflict Resolution specialist Raj Bhari,  with a small community group in South London. Our sessions use visual practice and creative writing to very gently explore our own relationship to brokenness and repair, and the group are local women and men who come for a wide variety of reasons.   One week I brought the idea of 'lost words'. I had found some old words and expressions no longer in use, but also wanted to think about the dropping of many nature words from the OED, including 'kingfisher' 'acorn' 'wren'. Robert McFarlane had collected these in his book Lostwordsbook | The Lost Words. Out of our conversation, we invited the group to create new words, using the found poetry technique of cutting up and reassembling words from magazines. Out from the group's creativity came a myriad of new words and expressions, including 'deepend pain', 'lingergorgeous', 'rock-quiet'.  

 

For the Ridge Salon, both the lost words and the new words seemed to me to be like a cloud of bird song, ancient, but always being recreated. Together we learned to make tiny paper fortune-cookies, in which we left old and new words of our own as a gift to Katja.