We went with the flow, together

After a rich and stirring experience at Eroles during week 1 of the "Camp as if people mattered" residency, I felt the urge to put down some reflections. These emerged from the original aspiration that I formulated when we did a dragon-dreaming exercise on the first day: We went with the flow, together. And they are inspired by the mountain landscape and the sense I had of the emergence of a quality of resilience amongst the participants that holds the promise of a truly unique contribution to new paradigm thinking and doing.
Like tiny streams, sourced high in the mountains,
Eager to flow towards something bigger, stronger, deeper
We embarked together on our enquiry as a collective, at Eroles…
Tentatively, respectfully, we offered our aspirations and commitment
Like a gathering of waters, tracing a path towards each other
Coming together to form a small river…
Almost bursting with enthusiasm, dancing over stones baking in sunlight,
Then resting, under stars radiant in cool midnight blue skies, dreaming
Of a braver, kinder, more generous world
Sometimes gasping for air, running dry over the hot, parched soil,
When it got too heated, like the water, we sought cooler space
Seeping back down into cracks in the earth, under rocks, in small pools…
To seek shade, preserve energy and await the moment to emerge again
And to re-engage with the dynamics of the movement onwards
To bubble forth with ideas, new awareness, the pleasure of listening, querying,
connecting with others
Accepting to explore frustration, fear, anger at the multiple sources of pain in the world,
Hearing new takes, observing reactions, listening again and again,
Offering thoughts, experiences, stories, questions…
Pooling, then flowing along again, gently gathering momentum and depth,
Conscious that alone, we could easily drown in the vast complexity and pace of the many challenges,
Or dry up in the face of so many other external forces and seeming lack of resources.
Were it not for the love, trust, courage and compassion that we breathed into the dry, tight spaces
When our minds and bodies tired and faltered, our spirits wearied,
We could have built up barriers, borders, to halt the flow…
But rather, we pulled together, we laughed together, we made music together,
Exploring non-otherness, non-duality, in a delicate, vulnerable human movement
Seeking to find our way through tricky terrain, in all weathers, against all odds
To learn that we can grow our resilience, and inspire others to do so too,
To learn to feel empowered with – not over – and to truly go with the flow
Together.
Jill Mackechnie
Retired UN humanitarian aid worker
now seeking new ways of caring
for people, places and planet
jillmackechnie@gmail.com

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An interview with the facilitators of the ‘Creating Resilience’ programme

Who are you and what have you been doing here?
L: My name is Lex I work with gardens, permaculture and theatre. I made a set of masks to bring to Eroles to look at deep ecology (connecting ourselves to nature) and Theatre of the Oppressed, in particular to work with refugees. I have been here for a week and it’s been amazing.
G: My name is George, I am a descendant of displaced people from Poland after World War II. I work with Theatre of the Oppressed and before I came here I was extremely burn out from other projects, but having been facilitating here this week I’m feeling fully charged and ready to go.
M: My name is Miranda, I came to Eroles Project last year to create a climate change action for COP21. I was invited to come back this year to work with George and Lex as a facilitator. This week I have really enjoyed working with resilience and sharing some of my work in this field from back home in Oxford. I am really inspired by how these collaboration will continue in the future.
Why do you think this work is important?
G: We live in a culture where the sense of urgency and crisis means that despite our best intentions and wanting to give as much as we can of our self to try to help other people, we neglect the self care that is essential to make resilience possible.
L: It is very important to come here to Eroles, in the beautiful Pyrenees mountains, with our busy lives, especially if we are working in any ‘crisis’ circumstances. It gives us a chance to step back and have a look at our patterns, to be effective with how we are with ourselves for long term sustainability within our actions and life as a whole.
M: And within that for me is flexibility. To be able to learn from our mistakes – to be able to keep shifting and changing, learning and adapting from our experiences. To design new ways of working and to keep developing as the situation around us changes.
What are you taking with you from this programme?
G: I am taking away the realisation that you can leave a residential programme, powered up, recharged, resilient and ready to face the world and its challenges; as opposed to thinking it was an ordeal.
L: I am taking away from this process a deeper sense of resilience, deeper understanding that the more I care for myself the more I can truly care for the planet. I’m deeply fired up with inspiration from connecting with people all over the world doing similar projects, it gives me an amazing sense of the future. This has been beyond words, just wow!
M: A deeper sense of trust in my intuition. Fire to continue to sense what is needed and to respond in a non urgent way, and to take this into my projects back home.
How can this type of experience inform people working in the refugee / humanitarian crisis?
L: I think this work hugely informs how to care for yourself and for the group your are working in. I think it is quite a profound thing to know how to look after yourself. I also think if you are going to work in a camp context it is best to go in full so that you do not need to get your energy from there. One of the ways we can do this is by connecting to the present without plans of where we might expect to get to; and to share this presence with others as fully as possible. When we are relaxed internally we become more aware of what’s happening externally, this enables us to focus on the things that connect rather than separate us.
M: The exploration I brought with me; “to turn judgement into curiosity” was something that has become more of a solid thing during the week, so I want to go everywhere with that intention. When we celebrate our differences and our gifts rather than arriving already with the answers, we can develop solutions from who is there and what is emerging in the moment from the collective intelligence of the group.
G: Figuratively and literally to shut up and listen. Not allowing the language differences to create more barriers between each other. We modeled this this week by focusing on nonverbal communication and the power of being physically together rather than verbalizing everything. Also listening deeply to what is needed in these spaces as opposed to coming with our own presuppositions to what we think ‘they’ need.
If you have to choose a moment that you really struck you from this week what would it be?
M: The collective ritual when we arrived at the cherry tree. Sometimes rituals can feel ingenuine, but this was a beautiful spontaneous expression of everyone’s individual gratitude for life, each one in their own style and tradition. It was very special.
L: Connecting with the birds. Working with the body. Being inspired. One moment in particular, a few of us were up in the open window playing music, but we were all discordant. I suggested we looked out at the sky, instantly we came into accordance through watching the birds as we played; watching their patterns, being inspired by the freedom that is in the skies. Another time at night in the moonshine, our cross cultural musical collaboration felt like beyond the mind, beyond the cords, beyond the planning – letting go so something beautiful can come though.
G: My favourite moment was when we all danced around in a circle connecting our past, our present and our future and it seemed like anything is possible.

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There’s no pecking order in poo

Baked by the sun and surrounded by clay and crickets there rests a sack full of communally shit stained toilet paper. It’s getting pretty full as I add today’s batch, before weighing it down with a heavy stone on a solid wall. The modest plumbing here at Casita de Colores is unable to digest toilet tissue so we have been hoarding it at the bottom of the garden.
In total we are 15, activists, artists, journalists, charity workers, from many corners of Europe. Casita de Colores is located in Eroles, a Catalonian hamlet with a fluctuating population of 20-25 people. We are here in response to a provocation to think deeply about the refugee situation, the most important moral and humanitarian crises we face today.
Within the first few days, I find myself consecutively cleaning the bathrooms and carrying the used toilet tissue out and into the back yard. Amidst the sessions for learning, we check-in with one another and share domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning, gardening and taking out the used toilet tissue. I empty the vessel into the black sack, occasionally catching a glimpse of its content and peeling away any ‘clingers’ refusing to depart. As I do so I think about shit, about sanitary, about waste, and about the un-wanted in general.
What comes to mind when we think of waste? We tend to define waste as a material substance, or by-product to be eliminated or discarded as useless or not required. The urban dictionary refers to American musician and composer Frank Zappa as a ‘waster’ for supposedly squandering his musical genius in the pursuit of satire. Yet, if we look at the etymology of ‘waste’ we see that it emerges from vastus, giving it the same Latin root as ‘vast’, meaning a literal space, immense and enormous.
It might seem absurd to embark on a two-week residency, intended to better understand the international and humanitarian refugee crises, by pondering waste – as instigated by a domestic duty concerning shit. But if we aspire to radically think as a species, as the residency title suggests, if we agree that we need to think widely, dig deeper and look systemically at the structures and mental models that sustain our beliefs, then I’d invite you to ponder our societal contempt of shit, of waste and the unwanted as a humble starting point.
For three consecutive years I organised a season of cinema designed to unpick our shared understanding of mental health. These screenings took place at a small cinema with a capacity of approximately 77 seats, with room for people to sit on the floor and up the aisle if necessary. Aware that stigma, the social disapproval of a person or their characteristics, associated with mental health is recognised widely as more damaging than the psychological experiences I attempted to ignore the clinical and diagnostic language as much as possible. The screenings would focus less upon the privatised individual, but rather on the surrounding social, cultural and political context.
In October 2014 as part of this season we screened Kenny, a mockumentary about a Melbourne plumber who works for a portable toilet rental company. Despite his hard working manner and shameless optimism Kenny Smyth, the films protagonist, is constantly belittled by pretty much everyone; employment contractors, his ex-wife, his brother, etc. Kenny literally organises, moves and in many cases handles other people’s shit for a living. In one scene Kenny’s father refers to him as a ‘glorified turd burglar’. Poo related humour and one-liners are plentiful in this Australian comedy, often laugh-out-loud funny, but it tickles us, I’d argue, with a profound perceptiveness; before the opening credits the screen proclaims none are less visible than those we decide not to see.
We arrived at Casita de Colores days after the EU in-out referendum in the UK. Many of us broken by the relentless negativity witnessed first-hand, yet somehow plugged-in and mesmerised by the tragic-comedy politics that followed. The deeply, perhaps intentionally, confused issue of immigration was central to how many people ultimately decided to vote. ‘Britain first’ and ‘Britain is full’ became popular slogans, rekindling the ‘charity starts at home’ rhetoric resulting in a 500% increase in racial attacks. Second and third generation British citizens were absurdly being told to ‘go home.’
When we think of identity in racist attacks, it is perhaps obvious to state that the external has a leading role in shaping the victim’s identity. Yet, we don’t often think of identity as being like this. More often it feels as though identity is something that wells up inside each of us, as individuals, as something that is absolutely ours. Social theorist and political activist Stuart Hall suggests otherwise: ‘Identity is the product of and endless ongoing conversation with everybody around you … you are (partly) how they see you.’
If the dominant culture happens to blame immigration for growing inequality and public spending cuts, as is the current political trend in the UK, and your skin tone doesn’t resemble either Phil Mitchell or Winston Churchill, you are likely to be targeted by racial abuse. If you have been diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety or depression, in a society whose mainstream persistently misrepresents mental health, you are more likely to be seen as violent or a danger to yourself or other people. In a society which diminishes the role of the menial, yet necessary tasks of the working class, you run the risk of being dismissed by your father as ‘a glorified turd burglar’. Who you are, is shaped by how your society sees you.
It may seem small and insignificant to travel to a small Catalonian hamlet to live collectively and think deeply about the humanitarian/migrant crises, but as John Holloway points out; this is the story of many, many people, of millions, perhaps billions. However small or insignificant our actions might seem, we are not alone. The question then may be; how can we knit these many, many people together, what are the unifying factors and where do we begin?
Consider the following scene from Kenny:
EMPLOYEE: “Kenny, I just got to talk to you about something,
I been here for 12 months, he’s been here for 2 weeks
And, honestly, he’s constantly telling me what to do.
He is really starting to piss me off, I mean
Is there a hierarchy here or something?”
KENNY: “No mate, no, there is no hierarchy,
We’re all shit kickers here mate.
There is no pecking order in poo”
Before morality, before art, before religions, science, politics and nations, human systems ecologist David Korowicz observes, the ecological and thermodynamic foundations of our species are to eat, drink, shit and fuck. We create racial, political and social tensions but fundamentally our foundations are shared and they are very, very basic; we’re all shit kickers here mate.
It might sound crude but perhaps these primal activities, surrounded by taboo, swept under the carpet and largely hidden from public gaze in western public life are fundamental to a radical thinking species. You can have utopia, so the dictum goes, but somebody, somewhere still has to clean up the shit. This is how we think of waste, of shit, of the so-called undignified foundations of our species. We choose not to see them and we create social boundaries and discriminatory tensions to keep them at bay from a privileged few.
Perhaps now, given the deplorable scale of our global humanitarian and ecological crises, it is time to strip bare the western myths of political and societal othering and begin to think radically, not as individuals or nations, but as a species. And perhaps peeling away each other’s shit stained toilet paper in a small Catalonian hamlet is a good a place as any to start.
1 The Eroles Project, Borders Residency (2016)
2 Jonny Random, www.urbandictionary.com (2006)
4 The Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne
5 Shane Jaconson, Kenny (2006)
6 Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Project (2013)
7 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (2010)
8 David Korowicz, The Passing (2014)

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