Different Ways of Being
This post is from notes written by Associate Artist Petra Söör, who’s working with us on a project we’re developing in partnership with Sherrell House care home and Magic Me.
A memory that has really stayed with me...
I’m sitting on a bench in a corridor next to Maureen and next to her is Stephanie. They often walk in the corridors together and I feel lucky to be with them, for a moment included in their friendship. Maureen is speaking with a quiet voice and says she likes my trousers. I say I really like her cardigan with embroidered flowers. She says she has made it. And that she likes my jumper too and that she has made that too.
Next to her Stephanie is reading, holding the book in a way perhaps I would call upside down, but I have a sense that she is really reading it. For a moment I’m just so filled with a sense of how this (all these) meetings are expanding my perception of what forms of reality is and can be. How limited and reductive my perception of reality(ies), possibilities, ways of being in the world, the many ways and forms of consciousnesses that exists in the multitude/multiverse so often is - that it almost makes me cry.
I feel so grateful to have been reminded in such a ordinary, tender, brilliant, generous way that this - exactly this is what we need to heal our wounded world and imagine new futures - the reminder of how our thinking about ways of doing/being can fully expand, be blown open, composted and regrown differently. Through their way of being with me there on the bench, listening, sharing, seeing, I was invited to open to this expansion, into what felt like a moment where the future suddenly had possibilities. Somehow speaking of radical inclusion of (different) ways of being, ways of attending, imagining, forms of consciousness that are also so fully present and living, alive, just in another way to our normative ways and therefore so often made unimportant or invisible.
You can find out more about our project with Sherrell House and Magic Me in this blog post.