Pain/Freedom

Physical pain can be very difficult to deal with. I have been living with different forms of pain in waves for the past 25 years. That's my adult life. For many years it was a few days a month. For the past ten years in can go on for days and weeks and months. At the moment it is weeks. I find myself also struggling in anxiety around it not ending. So then breathing becomes tricky too.

What does this have to do with community development? It makes me stop and forces me to look in...really deeply until I can re emerge out into the world of sunlight and movement. What I find there is wells of despair and wells of compassion....I have drawn water from both. And from this I understand suffering and the effort it takes to lift yourself out of whatever is holding you under. I bring this to my own humanity and towards people I want to work amongst. I understand that time takes a long time, that there is no really beginning or end, merely cycles or waves, going in and going out. Just as we breathe in and out withoutthinking. We long for connection and belonging while also longing for escape. 

When we allow ourselves to show up just as we are, with all our own pain and wildness, we bring a more colourful and interesting pattern to each others lives. We help each other flourish and this for me is community development. 

So while it really is the end of the world to have to mentally work myself through this pain, it brings life into a sharp focus that in the everyday ordinariness we can somehow miss or lose sight of. This can be freedom, the forced relinquishment of the ways in which we see the world, opening more into appreciation and wonder. 

Writing from the heart and other difficulties

...words...don't come easy...to me...

I am in recovery. I love community/arts development work. I find it exhausting because I give it everything I've got...and feel that it is deserving of this devotion. But there is a cost. This cost is my inability to write while I'm living through it. I sit down with all these words floating through my mind and just can't get them out through my fingers and into some kind of form.

Part of this is the desire for honesty in my writing and not all of community development is a bed of roses....or maybe rather it is, thorns included. I feel nervous to put into permanent record the things I haven't worked out from my side. How to communicate with people when every conversation feels like an attack. How to find out practical information from an organising body that is the opposite of organised, how to keep the dream alive when you feel despairing of just getting to next week. All of this with the highs of genuine collaboration of ideas and purpose and direction, great conversations about story and how crucial it is for our lives etc, making connections across country, across the country and across the world. It's a mixed bag and feels good now it's coming to a close but I lost my ability to write and I'm wondering if this is important or not...or does one lead to the other, times of darkness and light, going in then emerging out....no easy answer ...only to just keep going, to write when I can and maybe consider that there is a preparing that happens and a readiness that emerges of its own time, that this time is ok and necessary. 

This process is mysterious and I have always loved a good mystery.