Rumi dont go back to sleep11/28/2023 This is more social transformation, community transformation, education work, how we understand ourselves and what we think is possible, and how much of that happens through the words, the language, we have for ourselves and for our communities. I don’t want to put this work under psychology, because I think it pushes too hard toward the clinical, and I don’t want to engage in clinical work. I want to know how we come to understand ourselves through language (maybe, too, through story), how trauma affects that understanding (our stories) and our capacity for learning, and how it is that a creative, language-based process can alter and expand our sense of our own possibilities, our own boundaries, and those of others.ĭo I want to talk about sexuality this time as well? I will be, of course, because the process, this creative process, is inherently an erotic one, and so there’s the piece of the erotics of change, of healing and wellness, of embodiment and the power there. Trauma studies, creativity, resilience, writing, community: These are the main pieces what are the research questions? Why can a writing practice in community make a difference for us? I want to get inside the way that AWA works and understand it better. I want to know how the brain works after trauma, how we learn after trauma, and how creative process (and by that I mean creative writing) affects the ways our brains work, our sense of ourselves and others, our internal elasticity, maybe. What’s the study I’m talking about? How trauma affects, both constricts and opens, our understanding of ourselves, and how creative engagement (both individually and in community) can help us to change, broaden, expand, help us again to complicate the way we know our selves. Then I looked at the education programs and let a new framing fall into place: could this work fall here? And then sociology, anthropology: the study of humans, the study of how we engage in groups, in society: I could fit my work into those spaces, call it I’m interested in how we treat each other and how we use creativity to survive trauma, how a creative practice can be explicitly engaged to alter how we know ourselves after trauma, how we learn and support one another in groups. It could fall into psychology, there are PsyD programs, but that’s a clinical psychology program for work I’m explicitly specifying as non-clinical. The perfect place of course would be the History of Consciousness program at Santa Cruz, but they’re not taking applications right now. I was scanning the disciplines again, looking at programs at Berkeley, at Stanford, at CIIS, at USF, at SF State, trying to figure out where my work fits, and who might accept my MA from Goddard. I picked up a GRE book yesterday: I’m thinking about PhD programs. Still sitting heart-heavy with all the boys who have died recently, and all the so many more kids who are horrified to have to wake up today and live their same lives. I needed that fantasy love story yesterday, and I need it again today. Here was this movie about boys becoming men, boys loving each other for a lifetime, getting harassed but not beaten, not shot or killed. A terribly acted film, but intimate and so important, and I’m glad we got to see it. Black men in England–one Jamaican, one Nigerian–and film dealt with the hostility between those communities, the bible-based homophobia, the racism they faced. Last night we watched a movie, RagTag, about boys who loved each other and who met again as adult men and had to negotiate their desire for each other. Happy Friday! My sense of this week is all wonky, because I’ve been at my day job at the end of the week instead of at the beginning - it feels like Wednesday to me, and I have a little distance from the fact that my fall workshops begin in just a few days! Click the image to see more of nassergazi's photos. What is it that you really want? Remind yourself of it and “don’t go back to sleep.Whirling Dervish in front of a house in Istanbul, Turkey. We don’t need to fall back into the “same old, same old.” Don’t go back to sleep.” This reminds us that right from the morning time, we can break out of our habitual tendencies and become present. Rumi reminds us that “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. This might mean engaging in habits that don’t serve our health and well-being (e.g., drinking/eating too much, isolating, too much TV, too much digital interaction) or with habitual ways of thinking (e.g., negative self talk). Right now is an opportunity (which is really available to us at any moment) to recognize that we may be starting this moment off from a place of auto-pilot, falling into the same old habitual styles of thinking and behaving that we really want to change. People are going back and forth across the door sill Where the two worlds touch. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
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