Hello out there!
Are you still here?
I’m feeling a lot of things about being inactive with my newsletter and generally silent on many platforms, including IRL.
But here I am, sprouting up like the little green shoots around me.
It’s spring and it’s time to call out to the world.
WORLD?!! ————————————
———————— WORLD?!!
UPDATES
There is a Portal: THERE IS A LAUNCH DATE ON THE HORIZON!
The work is turning into a beautiful internally immersive piece of digital storytelling. We will share excerpts on IG and here in the coming weeks. I’m also brewing up some thoughts on what it means to make and experience work that is internally immersive.Workshops and Courses using There is a Portal’s performance as pedagogy are happening with select audiences and a series of public facing workshops will be announced. We’ll be looking at cultural continuity and all the power in our spoken language/s, body languages, exploring micro-gestures of healing and beginning, and reconnecting with memory and all our relatives. Workshop journeys are gateways out of assimilation and into possibility.
Join our universe to learn more!Afghan refugees and evacuees, displaced and fractured from their own futures, continue to face insane hurdles and the crushing weight of government entropy just to find air holes of survival and resettlement. I’ve been steadily walking with the same families you’ve helped since August and while many have cases moving forward - none of them are resettled in a final destination. Let me know if you’d like to continue your support.
Recent insight: “Saving” someone is a simulation. Melting into being utterly human, being vulnerable to heartbreak, is what opens doors to possibility.
Still from There is a Portal digital experience.
Since Shabe Yalda (winter solstice) I’ve gone inside. Observing, avoiding, disentangling, and releasing myself from the many ways heartbreak, grief, overwhelm, violence, and longing shape the way I respond, react, and move in the world.
Through this journey I’m seeing ways in which I could engage with deeper levels of change, designing and shaping what I want - rather than reacting to what I don’t. I’m finding practices that help me divest from feedback loops of harm, and honor all my gifts. These practices allow me be in the full range of awareness and presence it takes to make change. (Come walk with me on IG)
And I am offering my work in the fullest and deepest ways possible, even if it means my “output” is less, that I take more time, and the media announcements are muted.
However, it doesn’t mean I retreat from my community - from those I’ve been in conversation and in relation with for decades. And so I’m working my way back. Back to you all!
How I tend to myself:
Regular walks are helping me to get perspective and listen to something other than the thoughts in my head. (Join me to walk on IG)
Remembering and putting attention on loving relationships has regenerative power.
Finding ways to accept and allow joy in. For me this comes by making a home for my son.
Asking myself for the tiniest gesture - a micro-movement - as an anchor that grounds me in awareness when I feel pulled into the chaotic and intense situations I tend to gravitate toward.
“…What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He, who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.””