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 Wednesday, 2 October 2019
Dear Owen, Christine and Hayley What brings me to the big room? Everything…. But specifically? Hope, fear, smallness, shame and mystery. Voices that I want to hear. And service. Always service. I write this in the early morning after a dream where I am covered in caterpillars that already look like butterflies. I go outside and carefully place these creatures onto tall plants that I know will nourish them. As the stories we live by crumble, I feel the tension between the letting go, the holding on, the wish for change and despair of what that could mean.
Wednesday, 10 July 2019
Hello Hayley and Owen, My journey to the big room is handmade; it’s coloured and textured and ripped and stitched and sketched and etched and painted and imagined… but, forever fuelled by a deep sense of responsibility. Working in forensic therapeutic communities, in prison, I saw many pictures … of blame and shame, pain and punishment, them and us, good and bad, right and wrong, perpetrator and victim… so many divisions, so much fear. I have a knowledge that I sensed my own responsibility in all of the above, and yet felt silenced in any attempt to be curious. So this big room for me is a space for us to be open and imaginative and creative, and to pay attention to how we hinder rather than help, punish rather than love,… I'm curious about the legacy of my punitive experience… That experience has, ultimately brought me to the big room. I arrive as a group of many; there's more to me than I know, or ever can know, and there are parts of me that don't feel as though they belong ‘to me’… I’m increasingly able to acknowledge a deep need to belong…and connect… I crave community, and a felt sense of connection. My hope, desire, and intention for the big room is personal in origin, and universal in scope. Christine Monday, 8 July 2019 Dear Christine and Owen, What brings me to the big room… I don’t feel the need here to write about the small spaces in any detail… other than I suppose there were times when they may have been big spaces for me… but in time became cramped, tight, airless, bland and the restriction created sensations that might be called stress. The stress - which others may even call anxiety - is an energy repressed… an energy meeting a limit and it just keeps pushing at that boundary until enough energy is accumulated to break through. Delivered again… into space, and wonder, and possibility, and mystery, and not knowing. There is a story…  |
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