Staying with the Trouble
Refugia begins this month | an invitation for this Wednesday
If there’s one thing I want to take into this new year, it’s the wide-awake wisdom of staying.
We live in frayed, disorientating, chaotic times in which we are constantly seduced into leaving. By which I mean disconnecting, withdrawing, distancing, distracting. We leave each other, ourselves and the earth beneath our feet in myriad and multiplying ways. Over and again in ways we are even forgetting, we are leaving. We leave to be right, we leave to recuperate, we leave to numb out and we leave to keep up. We spend, we scroll, we disregard and we deny. We flee proliferate uncertainties for the faux-comfort of binary absolutes.
Last year I lost two friendships, both casualities of the quick and certain exit rather than us both staying, even for just a conversation longer, in the messy middle of our different opinions. There is an alternative landscape just before the last text message that I sometimes long for - a terrain of caring, complex relating where we don’t just agree to disagree but we seek to understand the difference, and to know more, become more, together. We stay, we practice, we become.
‘The times are urgent; let us slow down.’ - Báyò Akómoláfé
I’m half way through a wonderful 6-month grief community experience, Life’s Poetry with Nicola Duffell, and this is what I believe I’m practicing there with others - staying. I’m staying with my grief - for my mother, for this world - in a way that is entirely counter to that demanded by the over-culture. To stay and feel and know from that place - to live from that deeper, stiller place - is a kind of rebellion in my mind. A reclaiming of power and efficacy in the world; a coming back to life, together.
Refugia is my new offering, and the offer is to stay. Stay with knowing, stay with learning, stay with uncertainty, stay in presence, stay with relationships that are rewarding and imperfect, stay with yourself, stay. Staying with the trouble within us, between us and among us requiries us to practice, and reclaim, a relational complexity and agility from which we are alienated in the everyday, and by design.
Refugia is for those feeling alarmed and unsteady with the language of polycrisis, collapse and fascism, for those who at times feel frozen by the seeming speed and fragmentation of these times, for those longing for rest as well as for participation…and amongst it all, heeding the irresistible, irrepressible call back to life.
Guided by conversational encounter, shared reading and therapeutic writing practices, we will navigate our individual and relational responses to the current realities. During our time together we will consider, explore and contextualise these realities, all the while rooting ourselves in the safe enough experience of slow, curious and nourishing connection. We will assemble for 6 months January-June, gathering on fortnightly Tuesday mornings with an ongoing online community space and 1-1 monthly sessions with myself for support and reflection.
Refugia means ‘a small space of safety where life endures’. Indeed, life in this space can thrive among us, even when surrounded by adversity. The terrain we might explore is vast and terrific, and to some extent we will only come to know it by what emerges from our togetherness.
We begin as a group of six on Tuesday 27th January. If you’re curious take a look here for more details, and do get in touch to explore the possibilities.
'The darker the circumstance, the more brilliant the invitation' - Joanna Macy
Ahead of Refugia beginning, I’ll be joined by the brilliant mind and chat of Keri Jarvis this coming Wednesday (7th) at 10am to discuss the necessity of small, intimate community as we emerge into further honesty and reckoning about living in a world of proliferate threat. The emphasis here is on exploring the need for collective spaces of encounter, how we might witness one another in compassion and honesty, how we might practice the relational ethics and agility needed now and in the future, and how to to stay present together and in most aliveness during times of great urgency and uncertainty.
Here’s the link if you’d like to join us - you’d be so welcome. This is a free event and a recording will be available.