Dharma Bum

London

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.

Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of not seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news.

Laurie Penny’s eloquent take on why the riots in London happened. On Al Jazeera

The Postmodern Executive - Hope in a Time of Global Unrest

I have a new post up over at the OC Metro. Go have a look please. It seems to have hit a chord.

I am currently watching CNBC and the DOW is down another 300 points. The riots in London continue unabated, and all this after the debt ceiling fiasco in Washington that lowered government approval ratings to all time lows. Will the bad news ever end?...Read More Here

My New Motto..

via

Days

I had an amazing day today.

I spent the afternoon and evening with Anne Arnold at the Narrative Project. Tonight we interviewed a family I worked with for the writing project we are working on. I am at a loss for words right now but the experience of sitting with this amazing family, and Anne, in conversation about a wide range of things, just brought it all together for me. I am so very lucky to get to do what I do, with the people I get to do it with.

Oh, and it was my birthday, and Michele got me an iPad!

Hope & Despair

Hope is something we do with others. - Kaethe Weingarten

Hope is not contingent on outcome...Hope is relational in some deep, enduring sense. It sits between us. It is sustained and nourished by memories, expectations, conversations and trust. - Maisel

 Hope & Despair in Narrative and Family Therapy is the latest on the reading stand. It includes chapters by folks such as Stephen Madigan, Kaethee Weingarten and Karl Tomm as well as chapters by a couple of writers who have been critical of narrative's ability to meet the richness and complexity of human experience, like Imelda Mccarthy and Carmel Flaskas. Now I can see how some may have experienced narrative practice as overly politicized and therefore experience distance, sometimes resembling a sort of liberation psychology, but my experience of the practice has always been an experience of rich, meaningful and experience near conversations, that are often about the uneven distribution of hope and despair in people's lives. I'm curious, and looking forward to this one. Kaethe Weingarten even quotes the Buddha in her chapter ;)

Present

Artist

Ilona Royce Smithkin

Via

Dear Photograph,

Thank you for everything we had. (Great site. More HERE)

 

Notice

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

-R. D. Laing

 

Theatre-Palooza

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. - Richard III

  For those that might not know, I am currently in Cedar City attending the Utah Shakespeare Festival with the parents. My parents have been coming here, almost yearly, since the mid 80's. As a youngster, my mother used to drag me to various performances of William Shakespeare's work, and over time I really began to appreciate it. So when my parents invited me to attend this year, I thought it would be a good chance to spend some quality time with the peeps, and overdose on some theatre. So far so good. Yesterday afternoon we caught Noises Off which was a pretty hilarious english farce, and in the evening we caught a great performance of A Midsummers Night's Dream in the outdoor theatre, in a very nice summer evening in southern Utah. Tonight I get to catch what is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, Richard III in that same outdoor theatre. Now I'm off to take in some of the beautiful scenenry around here with my dad. Back soon.

Art = Risk?

The things I'll do for art..

So I agreed to participate in artist Carrie Yury's latest project. I was told it will involve being shirtless, rope, hair, and the potential to be tied up.

I'd like to think her latest project is taking on male privilege or something. At least thinking that way will make it easier to take my shirt off..

A piece from Carrie's room series...

Challenge..

I was really captured by the following quote by Imelda McCarthy who spearheaded the Fifth Province Approach to family therapy. Her view could be considered a common critique, and in some ways accurate. While working on the new writing project I hope to use this critique as a challenge to show how narrative practice in family therapy does attend to both the larger societal discourses as well as the immediate family networks in a real and meaningful way. Challenge accepted!

There is also a dilemma I have with narrative therapy. I love the whole thrust of this way of working, but one of the things that I see occurring is that when students begin to externalize, it is possible or them to concentrate only on the larger societal discourses and miss some of the intricacies at the most local level. Problems are located as existing between the individual and the larger social situation or dominant narratives in society, and less emphasis is sometimes placed on the middle range of human networks that people live within. Whereas some some other forms of family therapy have tended to blame families for the problems of family members, narrative therapy has not been at all interested in this. Perhaps for some practitioners of narrative therapy, this has meant that they have missed out on considering the more immediate family.

Gift

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.
- Leonard Cohen