|
Since Holy Week of 2021 the Seeds of Silence website has posted a weekly quote about silence each Monday.. |
|
|
|
Monday 3rd August, 2026
John Lane, The Spirit of Silence: Making Space for Creativity (Green Books, 2006), 98.
Image: Ahmad Odeh, Ramallah, Palestine, unsplash.com/@aoddeh
|
Guided meditation
For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to accompany this week’s short image-backed quote, click the play button on the image above. To pause, click the same place. |
|
John Lane (1930-2012) was born in Croydon, UK, and after training at the well-known Slade School of Art and the University of London's Institute for Higher Education, became a teacher, first in schools and later at Bretton Hall College of Education in West Yorkshire, whose grounds are now the sight of the world-renowned Yorkshire Sculpture Park: see here.
After moving to Devon, John was heavily involved in a variety of leading arts establishments in the region. In 1966 he founded the Beaford Arts Centre in rural North Devon, which still runs today as Beaford Arts, and continues to manage the foundational cultural assets initiated in Lane's era, including the Beaford archive, a collection of more than 80,000 photographs of Devon life over a 120 year period: see here. John was also instrumental in the creation of Schumacher College - a pioneering centre for ecological, holistic, and transformative education focused on sustainability, systems thinking, and regenerative living: see here - and the touring repertory theatre group, Orchard Theatre: see here. For many years John Lane was also Chairman and a Trustee of Dartington Hall Trust, a charitable educational and rural regeneration organisation which, for decades, has been an internationally famous hub for artists and thinkers: see here. He also founded Resurgence magazine which, 20 years ago, evolved into the Resurgence Trust, an educational charity promoting ecology, social justice and wellbeing: see here.
Lane lectured and conducted workshops internationally on the subject of the arts and spirituality, and was the author of a variety of books, varying in their subject matter from celebrating the medieval woodcarvings of Devon's churches - see here - to the art of ageing well in a positive way - see here. The books for which he is known best include The Living Tree: Art and the Sacred (Green Books, 1988) - see here - and Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society (Green Books, 2001) - see here.
Towards the end of his life, John suffered a catastrophic stroke, which left him paralysed, but with a mind as active as ever. There are no publicly accessible video or audio recordings of John Lane but you can find a small, posthumous website about him, here.
The Quoting Silence Collection
To go to the collection of more than 50 different image-backed quotes about silence, each from a different author, and with links to associated resources, please click the button below.
The 'Quoting Silence:
A month with ... ' Collection
From May 2022 the 'Quoting Silence: A month with ... ' quotes are building into a new collection over the year. From this collection, you'll be able to access all the quotes and resources from any month by clicking the button.
To go to this new collection, click the button below.
To go to this new collection, click the button below.
|
You can search the entire website here.
|
|