Welcome to The Miracle Inn

There is an album by Euros Childs called The Miracle Inn, I love it. The title track is a 16-minute epic made up of seven interdependent songs stitched together by something we call ‘hiraeth’ in Welsh.

To feel hiraeth is to feel homesick, lovesick, melancholic, about a person, a place, or a time that has gone, or in fact, never truly existed, or was never quite attained.

In The Miracle Inn Euros is reminiscing about the times he had at that ‘shack by the beach’ and how it made him feel - he wants to get back there.

‘Third places’ and the interdependent self

So, why name a membership organisation focused on tackling hyper-individualism after a song called The Miracle Inn?

Inns, pubs, clubs, and cafes are third places, societies need third places; they are where the magic happens. People bond, relax, daydream, jam, create and test ideas in third places. They are where so many friendships form, where plans are hatched, and where social capital is built and maintained. Parks, playgrounds, museums, libraries, beaches, bandstands, footpaths, etc, are all third places too, digital third spaces are also emerging and more will emerge.

When we're in a third place (a good one) and we’re mixing with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, communities, we usually feel a bit different to how we feel when we’re at work, or at home. In third places, especially ones we know well and feel comfortable in, we are less likely to feel like an isolated and separated independent self, and more likely to feel like a connected and entangled interdependent self. In other words, we feel part of something - a community - not detached and alone.

The Miracle Inn will celebrate, advocate for, make use of, and create third places to bring people together.

Meeting just to meet, and meeting to create

I guess the ultimate goal of this (ad)venture is to open an actual Miracle Inn, by a beach, complete with ‘peeling black paint’ (and maybe a beer (wild)garden). But until that day comes, The Miracle Inn will meet in digital third places, the pubs, cafes and beaches of west Wales, and, when opportunities arise in real life third places further afield.

We will meet just to meet: to commune with each other and with the more-than-human world; to get entangled, informally. It is easy to underestimate how important this most fundamental of practices is in the historical moment we find ourselves in today. Meeting just to meet - with no expectation of any outcomes - is not a luxury, it feels utterly foundational right now. ‘No agenda’ meetings nourish the soil beneath our society, making it rich, fertile and ready to support the birth and growth of action on the pressing issues we are facing.

But that is not to say we won’t also meet with an agenda, with the aim of doing something in the here and now. We will meet to daydream together and to jam ideas together, to overcome the forces of hyper-individualism that are, I think, robbing us of the time to be imaginative and to ideate (and making us feel stuck). Together therefore, as a membership, we’ll be a creative force. We will design projects, approaches, and campaigns to counteract hyper-individualism and nurture interdependence. We’ll hopefully deliver on many of these ideas too.

All scales of meeting and activity are possible - small is beautiful, but big is too.

To end and to nod back to Euros Childs… I know we can get back to The Miracle Inn.

See you there!

Morgan

Dr. Morgan Phillips
Founder - The Miracle Inn