I had such a full weekend in the bay area. Nominally, I was at a conference with my fielding friends, and we led a workshop on dialogic practices on friday morning. It went well, and, as I hoped, it got my head back into the conceptual, the stuff that can only be connected when I’m not running around like crazy.
True to form, though, I skipped more sessions than I actually attended, trying to cherry pick on instinct. Just no more room for new ideas right now — I needed space to let some of what I’d been doing, aiming for, hoping, to form some shape.
I did go to one session that really resonated. It was about intercultural conflict transformation, and was a simple conversation among three women who are doing work in the middle east and china/tibet. A palestinian woman from an organization called Abraham’s Vision got me tapped into my hopes for the work with the kids in Uganda again — a hope I hadn’t articulated in connection with this weekend. Someone made a comment about how starting and then abandoning projects does more harm than anything else to the trust of the people involved really hit me — underlined for me what would happen to the individual kids, Anita, and Phiona, and Angella, and Abdu, and all of them — if I disappeared now. A minor loss in one sense, and in the general discourse of western/developing, cross-cultural links, a huge betrayal.
At the end of the session, the facilitator invited a moment of silence or invocation, and a southeast asian woman began a chant that transported me momentarily, made me find my ground.
I think this is part of what gave me the space I needed to start writing again, working on my neglected chapter for the book. That, and just being with people who accept and see me in my edges and hopes and brains.
One of the harder things to make meaning of was being in bp’s home. My mentor, he and his wife are away, and they generously lent us their home. It was hard to be there, in so many ways — in one sense, he’s hallowed to me, and just being in the intimate space made me giggly, like I shouldn’t be naked in the same shower he uses, step on his scale. (And let’s not mention the number I saw on the scale after a summer of too much food and too little exercise). An adolescent giggling at wondering if our dissertations were on his shelf.
Beyond the incursion into intimate space of my Teacher, though, I was so looped by the evident love and warmth between K & B. Pictures of the two of them in the peace of perfect connection, postits with a line from Rumi — “the point of my life is to be in your presence” — on the fridge, over K’s desk. Such a sharp stab of longing and sadness that I had to circle around it, step into my joking self.
And then, find the place to do some writing with ease for the first time in forever, the starbucks nearby.
All of this, all of my selves flipped past one by one quickly — child looking for family, woman with girlfriends, writer, thinker, connector, philanthropist, teenager, yearner, physical being, woman without family who can’t be in a group so readily. All.