On Saturday I had the great pleasure of giving a workshop at Berlin Change Days 2020. The theme of this year’s event (happening simultaneously with Toronto Change Days – BCD & TCD were all together for a while!) was ‘Building Bridges’ and I gave a workshop which reflected on a poem I had written about crossing a fragile suspension bridge over a small canyon (this bridge is in Pukaskwa Park, N. Ontario). We all have what feel like ‘fragile suspension bridges’ in our lives and I posed the following questions: “What are you crossing?”, “What’s down below?”, “What do you think is on the other side?” and, possibly most significantly, “Why cross at all?”.
We had a beautiful session, with participants diving into their own experiences of ‘crossings’, while not shying away from the fear of a perilous bridge and ‘what’s down below’.
Over the crevasse,
quivering,
the dangling suspension bridge:
the crying chords arch across,
trembling,
the slatted planks,
in the wind swaying,
and far below,
far, far below,
the rocks gnashing,
the froth rushing.
Simultaneous to my workshop Jouke Kruijer gave a workshop using renowned artworks as a jump off point for deep reflection on ‘Building Bridges’ and I read his great article on LinkedIn this morning reflecting on his workshop experience with a series of pieces by Mark Rothko.
“My workshop is about the unknown. More specifically about our capacity to remain in a state of ‘not knowing,’ to extend our patience and defer drawing ‘what we perceive’ into the realm of ‘what we know.’ The assumption here is that the more we dwell in this in-between state, the more options unfold to help us make appropriate decisions.”
Jouke goes further. While his workshop was underway Joe Biden’s presidential victory was announced, and there was much rejoicing. However, someone was sensitive enough to note that it’s possible that not all the participants may feel like rejoicing. Which raised the spectre of the radically polarised environment that exists in the United States (and elsewhere), and this reality became further fuel for the workshop’s reflections.
Berlin Change Days was opened by Nora Bateson whose keynote opened with the question of ‘where is learning?’, moving on to how our own habituated contexts and patterns of being create our ‘view’ of reality. From what I gathered from Nora’s presentation (I may be oversimplifying, or ‘cutting’ it all into my own ‘view’!) learning is a process of adding more context, and the key to overcoming polarity is to ‘add more context’. To learn about ‘the other’, the dangerous or repellant stranger whose values seem so foreign and ‘wrong’, requires the daring to learn about the context their lives are in, the stories that create their ‘view’ of reality. Nora called this process ‘transcontextual’. It occurred to me immediately that ‘transcontextual’ may be whole lot like a suspension bridge. ‘Bridging’ polar cultures requires stepping out of the familiar cheerleading or shared terrors of one’s own ‘perception’ into, as Jouke put it, “a state of ‘not knowing’”: the unknown.
Part of my description of the perilous suspension bridge crossing was that it was very very foggy. So foggy that you couldn’t see the other side of the bridge. So, not only were you stepping onto a bridge that seemed flimsy, and which ‘swayed in the wind’, you couldn’t actually see where it ended (if it ended at all).
This heightened the urgency of the question, ‘Why cross at all?’.
What longing-calling,
voice of eternity,
could dare us, and bring us to dare,
The crossing?
During the workshop we began dropping into this question. What is that “strange quality”, the “inner belief”, the “vision”, the “something more” (I’m quoting participants here!) that would ‘inspire’ someone to ‘dare the crossing’?
What could inspire us to ‘venture forth’ onto the suspension bridge towards ‘the other’s’ view of reality?
Nora’s exceptionally evocative video-poem, ‘Uncut’, which she played during her presentation alluded to this. An exhortation to refrain from ‘cutting’, ‘editing’, ‘harvesting’ or ‘stewarding’ one another. “What has been cut so I could fit you into my illusions… and what would the wounds say.” The exhortation that there exists – invisible or only partially perceived through the lense of our own agendas and desires (for our own ‘utopias’) – ‘something’ fully whole, ‘uncut’.
I propose that this ‘something’, fully whole, ‘uncut’ (‘voice of eternity’) – something we can feel and experience, but can’t define – is what brings us to dare the greatest and most fulfilling crossings of o
ur lives. I’d also propose that such an endeavour is not so much about crossing from one side to the other, but being in a process of continuously crossing, as if living on the suspension bridge, or even being the suspension bridge.
What’s on the other side?
To quote Nora’s poem, “it remains to be revealed… would it help if I said we were learning together?”
And to quote Jouke again, “the more we dwell in this in-between state, the more options unfold…”.