What am I noticing?
Dear reader,
I want to share some notes from my perspective as a listener, scribe and artist, which have been taking shape over the past few months. It has been a confusing time, one that calls for swift and decisive action. The protesters, caretakers, workers, helpers, and co-conspirators responding to real and urgent need deserve recognition and support. They deserve to be seen and heard, not just now, but going forward. And, at the same time, I want to be careful not to name, package, solve, respond, fix too quickly, if at all. There are other crucial forms of change unfolding over time, at a different pace* — undercurrents. We can do so much damage, sometimes, by acting from a place of urgency.
I’ve heard the pandemic described as a pause, a reset, the great noticing, like a moment of winter dreaming or hibernation. As compost, one life cycle ending and decomposing to provide nutrients to the seeds of new beginnings. As a crisis: a public health crisis, a transcontextual crisis of wellbeing, economy, ecology, politics, family, media, education… all the things, all the relationships and interdependencies in between.
As massive waves of protest against white supremacy and police brutality swell with undeniable force in the US, Canada and elsewhere, I hear more people talking about dismantling systems, about the longterm work that has to be done, and about ways of achieving genuine, lived public safety. Dignity. It gives me some hope that we might someday stop seeing people being “arrested for their trauma” (Nora Bateson), or killed when their family members call 911 seeking help. And killed in the street, or asleep in their own homes, targeted so specifically and without remorse.
This time feels, too, like a threshold — described by Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue as a line which separates two territories of spirit:
“If you go back to the etymology of the word ‘threshold,’ it comes from ‘threshing,’ which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life…for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.”
And, maybe these two territories of spirit do not have a known shape, or place, or name. Maybe they are more than two. Are we simply in transit from old to new? From known to unknown? A to B? Somehow, I doubt it.
Are we living now fully in the crossing?
And, if we do talk about a great reset, we also need to ask: who was in need of such a thing? Is it a “new social contract” that we require, or a different quality of listening to those voices who have been calling us to care for each other and the life systems of this planet all along? Who do we mean by “we”?
Poets have never stopped writing. Artists and thinkers have never ceased their dialogue and making and struggle. Communities have never not done their best to survive. Life has been there all along.
“We’re going into a different world. Let’s go differently.” — Nora Bateson
Noticings
In March (remember March?), I was part of a team of wonderful folks, led by Kelvy Bird and Alfredo Carlo, hosting a series of six online learning modules focused on scribing and visual practice (in lieu of in-person modules originally planned to take place in Berlin). The modules form part of a suite of offerings under Visual Practice Workshop. KB and AC decided to pivot quickly to an online offering and initially, it seemed daunting. I thought, maybe we should just take a moment to pause, instead? And I wondered where I would find the energy to draw.
But we did it, and it was beautiful. Participants joined from every continent. Our conversations, held in four rounds each day to span all time zones, deepened each day. Some people joined for one module, some for two, or more. I realized we could bring our whole selves as we listened, spoke, and drew. Even across great distances; even confined to little pixel boxes in rows and columns on a screen; even though our interactions were mediated by devices. Even me.
I wondered, in what ways do we feel seen online? It’s hard to tell who, if anyone, is seeing us, and at which moments. When I call on each individual person in a session, naming 40+ people one by one, we have a moment of shared seeing with this person. Our attention lands on them, specifically, and lingers before moving to the next person. This feels different from the one-to-many or the ambiguous, diffuse attention of large group calls.
Approaching the end of the week, I said out loud, “I didn’t realize this was possible.” Meaning, this kind of relationship, humanity, and learning, in digital spaces. As Karolina, a fellow member of the hosting team writes:
Many of us had never met in person. And still, this was by far the collaboration filled with the most trust & kindness I had ever experienced. It was transformational to the heart & the social field. I wanted to know, how this quality happens.
What is being asked of us?
Some of the questions that came up for me during this experience were: What am I meant to be learning from this moment? What is it asking of me? Of us?
In KB’s model of practice, focused on scribing but relevant to many other fields of practice, the element on the right side of the diamond is join. Joining, entering, stepping in — and as she says, from inside the situation, we make a choice. Sometimes, as scribes, it can seem safer to look and analyze from the sidelines, at a “safe distance.” But we are insider-outsiders, fellow human beings. Yes, we need perspective. Yes, I am an observer. And yet, if we are like anthropologists, sustained by the same food, drinking the same water, sleeping in the same houses as the people we “study” from the edges, we need to step in to the extent that we can, and truly listen in order to do our work.
The idea of safe distance has taken on some very specific, tangible measurements as we strive to keep each other from becoming ill and maintain our own health; and at the same time, in what ways are we perhaps being invited to come into more direct contact and relationship with self, other(s), surroundings, and world?
Can I show up for the experience of another, different from my own? Without taking it on, without trying to own it somehow, without imagining I “get it” or leaping to solve anything.
I had never (knowingly) included my own words in a scribed image, until a recent dialogue session, after speaking them. Participant-scribe. What are those moments when we must break a previously held boundary, when it seems right? Who am I to withhold, anyway?
As scribes, how might our practice as listeners and social artists feed into ways of being, doing, working, and communicating that enact both a refusal to stay silent about injustice and a continual awareness of not placing ourselves at the center?
Our entire sense of humanity seems called for at this moment. Utmost kindness. Listening. Showing up. And as Anthony Weeks writes, it hurts.
As a scribe, I want to be careful not to objectify — language, and information in many forms, pass through us physically in this work. Listening, perception and feeling take place before and as we make the marks, write, and draw. What is our inner quality, as this takes place? I’ve realized the intention, for me, is not really for more people to grasp more things at a faster rate, aided by the display of those “things” in a visual format. Nor is it to “capture the content,” which sounds something like hunting or trapping ideas. Even the language of harvesting, as it is often used by facilitators and scribes, can have an extractive connotation.
I have a lot of practice synthesizing and documenting. I do this work and have seen its value. And, I feel other openings.
My aspiration is to be with, witness, turn toward — and to honour the moment, the people, their stories, and the possibility. As Alanis Obomsawin said in an interview once, we must “never look away.”
I’ve been experimenting lately with non-representational, non-simultaneous “scribing” and image-making. Images created in no particular hurry. Definitely, there is value to creating images in the moment, and I have also seen that there are other kinds of value and insight to be found in letting things reverberate, steep, surface slowly, before calling them by any name or giving them visible form. Some things take time.
Container
I’ve also been thinking about mole madre — the intricate Mexican sauce, which, for chef Enrique Olvera, includes traces of all previous batches, creating an uninterrupted cooking process over the course of years. Like masa madre, sourdough starter. In social systems, maybe we can create a similar kind of carrying forward by drawing from our in-person experiences of learning, connection, and community as we build container online, at a distance.
What are the ingredients? How many people do we need, and how much trust is enough? What is present in our memory? I don’t think it’s strictly quantifiable but there may be a sense of enough, to lean on and live in that existing container, with a sense of shared place, and carry it forward into the new.
Kind of like theatre:
“the experience that stays with you even though it doesn’t.” — Dan Friedman
Thank you for reading.
[*Pace layering H/T Linda Hunter, Leah Lockhart & Katy McNeil]
I can offer free remote scribing/visual note-taking in English and Spanish for community-led meetings, dialogue sessions and events focused on racial justice. If you are interested in generating relationships that build relationships through a series of People Need People sessions, I can help with that. Contact me here if I can support you.
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