In gratitude for another beautiful conversation with thoughtful people sharing generous life teachings, this post leaves a small trace for us to follow to the next time we will connect. Although the starting point was to welcome scattered people, ideas and focus as we were each reflecting on big years coming to an end and new ones beginning, it was the group priority to spend more attention toward stringing together strength. We received beautiful stories of women teaching next generations to knit, and an elder relative who was skilled in the fine hand work of repairing silk stockings. Priorities such as staying open for change, regulating our nervous systems, and connecting with the living world were shared as responses to our times where many people clearly aren’t coping.

Considering the emergent and profound question that arose from the group “can we be settled in an unsettled world, to do unsettling work?” there were opposing viewpoints that found equal and instructive expression. Where one person spoke from personal experience of feeling optimistic that a more expansive and less exploitative reality is unfolding, another voiced that a transformed worldview may not be the ultimate result of decolonization since there appears to be no movement toward policy changes that will benefit the next seven generations. As we closed in discussion about hopes and fears that come up imagining the “social idea of everyone having enough to be, without being controlled,” we agreed that artists will play a big role in that transformation.

The only reading recommendation made was the important article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Tuck & Yang, 2012, which some of the group had not heard of. It will likely come up again in future conversations.

The collaborative art piece pictured above was made among our group soon after the meeting. It shares its own strength-driven presence with wings, muscles, and connective tissue emerge from fluid warmth, which is further warmed by a persistent winter sun. The scattering that is present feels like the joyful dispersal of small seeds of potential, spreading hope and kindness in reciprocity. There is an impression of depth, as in roots and connection, which is the ground from which propulsive momentum is emerging. What better way to begin a new year — together, connected, creative.