Relational Currents of Work & Play

There is much movement(s) in our lives at this deep summer time of Lammas. We unplugged from the digital world last week and plugged into Nature’s world. We open this blog with a 4 minute video of our spontaneous co-creation-making with the Quw’utsun Sta’lo’ (more recently named the Cowichan River) on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. While on a hike Michael found an abandoned yellow-jacket wasp nest shell. When we stopped at the edge of the river he found a stick the length of a piccolo, and he began to pretend playing a tune and Barbara joined in with her harmonica. He then slid the stick through the nest entrance and realized he had made a floatable vessel, and it prompted the encounter event with the water that Barbara documented. The video has inspired the focus question of this blog, where is the current taking us?

Following, nature, materials, play, and creation-making helps to reflect on larger relations as we learn “to live beneath the surface where the current bears us forward deeper into the great ocean of shared experience” (Richard Wagamese). One of the things we attuned to while camping in the forested river valley, is how water is a cleansing gift as well as a commanding being to be reckoned with, especially if we choose to immerse our bodies into its unbound body. Water is dense, an impelling force, and can’t be ignored as our relationship with air so easily can be. As Barbara ventured into the deeper parts of the river, she felt herself having to be very aware of how her body responded in relation with the water and visa versa. She had to ‘listen’ to the current closely to find a balance, like leaning into the rapid flow of water at the right angle, and being held vertically upright until she chose to let go and be carried gently downstream.

We found ourselves awed by how water is such a wise teacher for relationships–with ourselves, each other as intimate partners, and in relationship with our world-work. Experiencing the power of the river current we could see why it is so very difficult to move away from the the powerful whirlpool of our computers and the many relationships living inside these little machines. We were reminded once again how easy it is to be carried away by the current of the electronic web. It has the power to throw us off-balance, overwhelm us, and cause us to struggle when we try to disengage. We welcomed re-learning how important getting away for 3-4 days, and going into the heart of Nature, is so vitally important for inner and outer relational sanity.

On our last day we walked the river path and found a place to stop and rest with the forest. We made our own ‘boat’ in the air with the aid of two strong and generous trees. We smiled inwardly with the ease of floating in the air. We hung in that hammock for a long time. The plant beings we were hanging out with became more and more animated and the magic of being welcomed into this forest community was humbling.

Returning home has had its bumps, as reentry into the reality of the human world is not easy after being surrounded by the magic of nature. In our daily life in the city, it is easy to be agitated by all the automobiles, air and sound pollution, and the speeding up of everything. After a few days of integration, we surprised ourselves by spontaneously dancing in the living room together two nights in a row, going to an outdoor concert in the park, and being inspired to start making music together. Something that had opened for us during the isolation of COVID, but we had since lost–and now realizing we wanted to do more co-creating with music together.

The altered states and teachings we were gifted through our spontaneous play in the water, the forest, in our living room and later in our spontaneous co-creating of the art video in our studio, brought us to deepened insights about the importance of Art and Nature as essential teachers. Art and Nature hold the power to re-activate our inherent human ability to enter the flowing currents of altered states of attention and awareness. When we engage life experiences consciously as “trance-based inquiry” (Bickel) and “trance-based learning” (Four Arrows), we are carried by vessels that can assist in reorganizing our inner worlds so we can be water/air/solar/earthen creative agents moving deeper into the great ocean of shared experience for healing and transforming our suffering human world.

We close with sharing how the currents of Studio M* have been carrying us and others forward down the river the last months. Generative fruits. Dynamic. Aesthetic. Creative. Passionate. We are (a)musing ourselves with several projects: (a) co-editing a special issue of the Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal, with collected articles on the application of Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial Theory to Arts and Education, to be published in late fall, (b) co-facilitating an online monthly drop-in Spontaneous Creation-Making happening for the next year; (c) joined by passionate creative thinkers-makers, we co-facilitated a 6 week online Art-Care Theory Study Circle which was a verdant dialogue; (d) Barbara has been in final preparations for a collaborative ritual performance with Tannis Hugill, Bearing Bloodline: Ancestral Invocations and; e) Michael is preparing for a solo exhibition of his 2-D art, “Alot to do about nothing.” (working title), for the end of August at a small artist-gallery in downtown Nanaimo that will become an online exhibition; and f) with the help of our collaborator Hallie Morrison we have been updating and expanding the Studio M* website. Check out the growing Creative Co-inquiry Team page.

Endnote
With gratitude for Ojibwe author Richard Wagamese’s meditation words from his 1997 book Embers that we included in the art-video and this writing.

References
Bickel, B. (2020). Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World. Palgrave Macmillan.

Four Arrows. (2016). Point of Departure: Returning to our Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival, Information Age Publishing.

Wagamese, Richard. (2016). Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations. Douglas and McIntrye, p. 55.

–Barbara Bickel & R. Michael Fisher, August 2, 2024