adventures of uncovering

I've read all of the previous posts. Thank you for your offerings, they help me feel, help me listen, to learn who are all the beautiful humans that I am, and will be sharing being doing making time with while in the Sense Lab. I am looking forward to being fed and to feed all of you - in one way or another.

This first meeting was very real for me, in many senses. I am one of those people who is, "....sensitive to lecture class-teacher up front-students in desks in back," situations of knowledge transmission. It is incredible to me that we are essentially learning about learning - opening to what we are able to catch, and wondering about what does not penetrate with direct force. I am incredibly appreciative of the objects and creative meanderings of the space... I cannot tell you how much spaces influence my vitality and curiosity - almost ridiculously so. To have strings to pull, a giant square to grasp, shiny paper to see light bounce off of - all of these things give me moments of delight that refresh my ability to listen and to feel excited about the diversity of textures in the world, giving me matter to relate the ideas that are floating through us in sound-space-time. (I find normal class rooms way way WAY too sterile and deadening.) That we are allowed to literally hide if that helps us listen - is exactly an opportunity to do so if you know that your listening is aided in that way - and to experiment if you wish, to see if your listening can become more rich when you are somewhat anonymous. Questions of learning and listening are extremely dear to me. As a dancer, mover and general enthusiast of body posture diversity, I believe it is crucial to open our hearts in respect to neuro-diversity as it is related to exploring the world with body rhythms.What Amelia Baggs communicated to me was that their relationship to the external world is one of constant dialogue, which seems to often manifest in repetitive gesture. I wonder what we can learn from this...maybe I will try different repetitive gestures as I listen for one class and see how it affects me.

Something that stuck with me was the mentioning that Autistic people sometimes (often?) have facilitators....which was also related to the conversation of a certain striving for independence in our western culture. I think that the world around us, and the people that we surround ourselves with are inherently facilitating our being and doing - and so to think that cutting ourselves off and "becoming independent" is a way to show some sort of ultimate strength is such a fallacy in my opinion. We are social beings and we absolutely need each other: to mirror, to contradict, to listen. We are nothing when not in relationship and we are always already in relationship, and so to think that complete independence even exists is very silly and not entirely worth striving for, in my humble opinion. It makes more sense to uncover the nature of each relationship and to take responsibility for our actions and non-actions.

Lastly, I would like to comment about whiteness being linked to neuro-typicality. This was huge for me, and helped some underlying feelings click together inside my body sensationscape. I see it linked to the interwoven dialogue of nature and culture, where within the western world whatever set of biological instructions we have been given need fit into the white (hetero, cis, male) world as the standard measurement of value. Having grown up in a community saturated with whiteness, I am still piecing together and apart what it exactly is - which is a quite a strange adventure. I often associate whiteness with how it is enacted or performed within society, but not necessarily as a way of thinking in relationship to intelligence , as measured by white values. To be continued .... stretching my listening .....

,,,, Kaï