This article is a prequel to ongoing research into DIY Healing Within Ancestral Lands. A project born of growing up in a family system that was not kind, welcoming or loving. I did not belong. And of being purposefully isolated and cut off from another family system that was not much better. I started this research because I needed to find a way of healing and improving my relationship with myself and others. To be the kind of parent I wanted to become.
\ är′tĭst \
Definition
(noun):
1. a person who co-creates and communicates intentional, reflexive experiences with perspective.
2. a person who interacts with and processes the world primarily through aesthetic experiences, i.e. art.
*An entry from A DIY Healing Dictionary of Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Being. The dictionary is a work in progress and part of the larger DIY Ph.D. - Prefiguring Learning for the Ecocene performance.
warm, inviting, kind
and yet
hiding
probing
interrogating while
observing
in front of and behind
that invisible two-way
mirror…
dancing near and
toward each
other,
holding still,
nearer,
holding,
nearer yet…
hoping
the other does
not back away.
both wondering
what patterns we may be repeating,
will this person accept me will they treat me as well as I’ll treat them will they treat me as well as i deserve will we enjoy each other’s company will they run away…
care, agency, wisdom
Reading that is continually freeing me to (re)negotiate and prefigure a life within the cracks.
\ frē′dəm \
(noun): the capacity to imagine how things might be elsewise, with the flexible support to try, and the hope of possibilities.
(adverb) freeing: the state of imagining possibilities; relieved of the restraints of the singular, opened to the multitudes of potentialities.
(verb) to free: 1. to imagine, illuminate, share, and explore potentialities. 2. to flexibly support, facilitate, or otherwise encourage exploring potentialities.
Often conflated with related concepts of autonomy and agency. Is social as much as personal.
*An entry from A DIY Healing Dictionary of Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Being. The dictionary is a work in progress and part of the larger DIY Ph.D. – Prefiguring Learning for the Ecocene performance.
