Citizens Lab Berlin: Winter Season on Decolonising Self
Networking Among Like Minds
My friend and collaborator, Catherine van Wilgenburg of Living Colour Studio in Gippsland, whom I met at the NENA Conference in Canberra, November 2022, recently emailed me a link to the work of the Citizens Lab in Berlin. Their work is so closely aligned with ours, and with the work of Kindlehill School’s Buran Bulgarra, I have reached out to see how we might network together from Berlin to Australia. Meanwhile here is a poem I wanted to shared on our blog.
Terrellyn Fearn and Vanessa Reid invited us to sit in circle around a sacred fire. We reflected on the following questions:
What do I need to surrender to?
What do I want to come into a deeper relationship with?
Vanessa captured our sharings and interwove them into the tapestry of this beautiful poem.
The Bones of Our Sacred Fires
I look down to the ground of my ancestors’ roots
to speak to the votana (plants) and allow them to heal me
I feel my grandfather and our ancestral vines at my back
My heart breaks open when I feel into my ancestors
My family is lighting up as we discover more,
and acknowledge our past
Waking up! We are alive, noticing and perceiving
It’s hard to grasp all this with the mind
Grief kicked me out of the efficiency lane
It needs so much resource; the truth is that it needs more space
Wait a bit and see what gifts come
I am done done done with the internalized patriarchy
I surrender to the Mud and the Earth of the Mother
That’s where I want to be
I am centering the fire right now
It’s transformed me with a deep longing to connection to what matters
These simple things of love and breath
To come into contact with life and with death
I’m letting go of being anything other than myself
I come from warriors of truth and honesty
Would I be a different human in knowing my ancestors & what they fought for?
I feel the blessing for my women line who made space for me
so I can open the door and healing for those after me
I have deep feelings, rememberings and knowings
And I have deep un-certainties and un-knowings
It’s easy to get lost and forget the wider connection of inter-connectedness
LOVE… could be as simple as Love?
I am touched and grateful for the profoundness of the heart
I can feel the connection with the spiritual and the sacred
I will not hold myself back for fear
I surrender to all the love that I feel for everything that is alive
Our bones have deeply anchored knowing
When you don’t know where you are going,
you go back where you came from
Where do I belong?
Where do WE belong?
The red moon over the silver lake
Kinship friendships of deep belonging
Weaving the village
The roots go deep and wide
Connecting to my local place
The place at the essence of humus of all life
I want to surrender to what comes after
To the longings and integration
The life-giving compost
To these dark and strange soils
The Great Fires
Lineages lost
How to excavate the griefs and stories and heritages?
Show our honest kindness and kindest honesty
Listen to our poems with open hearts
And deepen my own creative fire
The logs and the wood we place on the fire are our ancestors bones
The white Thunder Beings are with us
The fire is burning down so fast
It’s doing the medicine
***
~Vanessa Reid capturing our collective poem
January 24, 2022
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