Snippets from the Notebook

On Play

Play is not just an act of joy and pleasure but and exploration of our darker feelings; a space to also move to pain and sadness.

Play can let you experience your feelings and free you from living your feelings.

Questions Needing Answers

  • What does the normalization of parkour create/why is it important?
  • What can we do as individual practitioners to further the normalization of play in public space?
  • How do spaces / places / communities permit or restrict individual movement?
  • How do these permission/restrictions change based on identity, location.
  • How can spaces be redesigned to be more permissive? How can laws or societal patterns be shifted to be more permissive?
  • What can the emergence & practice of parkour or these types of interactive urban space activities (like parcon?) reveal about the deficiencies of our cities/spaces?

Whats the body in regards to mobility?
Something you own, that needs to be improved, maintained, fixed. Emotions, history as we relate to the spaces we live in. We interact with those spaces different due to those emotions/history? Our bodies are not neutral; processing truama/emotions through movement.

When we turn our bodies into property, we empty them of movement.

When we practice parkour, we dont just ineract with the architecture but the history there. We’re going to have different relationships to the place and we’re going to be moving with the architecture differently. How is there mobility for moving emotion, trauma, history? Whos history is illuminated through design?

We are always projecting things onto our architecture.

On Authenticity

Staging Conversations: I can test out versions of myself and pick the one that is most authentic and with greatest integrity

On Relationship Building

How can we move from the transactional to the transformative? I want reject consumerism and experience communion with my fellow humans; to move from the indifferent to the interactive.

Healthy Relationships?

How do we know if our relationships (partnerships,friendships) are healthy?

Ask of yourself: Do you honour or betray yourself while in relationship with this person? 
Do you grow in a meaningful way or are you just going through the motions around them, checked out?
Do you feel challenged or complacent?
Do you feel celebrated or merely tolerated?

Our time and energy are finite resources. Don’t be casual with who and how you spend them. The more we pour into powerful, present, intimate relationships, the more powerful we ourselves shall become.

You have the right to protect your energy. If something doesn’t feel good for you, don’t do it. If someone doesn’t feel good to be around, leave. Of course there are times we need to be flexible. There are times when we need to lean in Rather than move away from the discomfort. But it’s ok to also draw a line in the sand and choose to get your lessons in a gentler way. Sometimes the most loving thing to do is to say no and choose a lighter path.

~wonderful words from Sheleana Aiyana

M: The Buddha, The Leaf, and The Importance of Choosing Your Words Carefully

It was a Saturday afternoon in February. Bright, cold sunlight beamed in through our plant-laden living room window, warming Bella as she lay on the floor. Our tiny Buddha sat on the window sill watching us intently– a gift I gave to you symbolizing the peace I hoped we find. Next to him sat a small metal leaf plate with a cone of incense smoking–a gift you gave to me to signify the turning over of a new leaf together in our relationship.

The Buddha and the Leaf–Peace and Love; This is what we wanted for each other, and our relationship.

I remember our conversation that day so clearly, though ‘conversation’ is a generous way of describing what happened. You were standing with your back to me at the sink in our brick-walled kitchen, washing dishes with such vigor that I thought they might break between your fingers. Methodical. Focused. An effort to shut out the noise. I sat at the long wooden dining table that we had build together, white knuckled and fuming. I tapped my foot, my fingers. Impatience. Frustration. Hopelessness. Restlessness.

Leaning back, my eyes darted around the apartment as I tried to figure out what to say next. Something kind, healing. Something that made you understand that I loved and missed you. Something that would just end this fight, and all the fights. Yet everywhere I looked I was met with the memory of past conversations, sparking defensiveness and revealing hurt I had previously swept under the rug. My wall of books were ‘obnoxious’, you said. The couch-‘uncomfortable’. The cats – ‘unwanted’. Too many pots, tea cups, and art that belonged to me. Too much of me, in general.

The reality was that we both were hurting that day, and had been for months–deeply desiring to connect and yet unable to communicate past our personal pain. Each attempt to speak was a superhuman act of love …as well as a textbook case of how limiting stories can blind and deafen us.

This particular morning we flung words at one another with little care to how they landed or the harm being inflicted.

The conversation finally peaked. “You know what, Caitlin?” You stopped suddenly and turned around to face me, a pot in one hand and a brush in the other, soapy water dripping all over the floor. Without flinching or blinking, you said with such certainty that I couldn’t believe it to be anything but the utter truth: “They say that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time around. I spend the most time with you and I hate who I’ve become.”

I moved out that day, and have never forgotten those words.

“Words are events, they do things, change things,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin in her book The Wave in the Mind.

I often ask people “What is something someone has said to you that you will never forget?” The answers that come up most often, not surprisingly, are words of critique or harm, echoing the darker shades of shame, sadness, and insecurity that inhabit our hearts. Usually they’re delivered by those we hold closest–friends, family, lovers–and their power often grasps us by surprise and sends us reeling.

Painful, but also pivotal–and frequently sparking significant life change and introspection.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in that relationship was that there are words that can not be unheard or unsaid. Words that will echo in the dark parts of the night. Words that water the unsprouted seeds of doubt and insecurity planted in our hearts, Words that burrow and fester into something self-destructive, Words that cut to the very pith of who we are. Words that have the power to radically and permanently change how we see ourselves, our relationships, and our world.

The worst part is no amount of introspection and self-awareness can prepare you, because they sit in your blind spots or in hiding spaces, waiting for the right time. In fact, words that would otherwise be innocuous quickly transform into an explosive and destructive force when finally colored by the right time, place, emotion, and speaker. And once you’ve felt them, heard them, uttered them–something has to change. No going back.

Forgiveness?

David Whyte wrote that “all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

So we must learn to forgive harmful words even if we can not fully forget.
But even in the forgiving, we are changed.

Lessons Learned

Sadly, that partner and I no longer talk. We did have a chance some time after to withdraw our words and issue apologies but the pain inflicted by our lack of love in our weaker moments likely will never be fully healed. We both wielded our deep knowing of one another to inflict harm, leaping past a threshold of no return.

The only way left to honor that relationship is to learn and try again. I carry a heightened awareness that what I say or hear today might result in permanent change. I strive for patience in my communication, curiosity in my listening, and kindness in my responses as I grow new love with new humans.

…and I frequently think back to that afternoon in Brooklyn, especially in my moments of weakness, fear, insecurity, or distress. I recall when, returning a few days after our fight to pack boxes and bags, I found the place looking entirely different (though nothing was out of place). I remember holding my partners hand, kissing his face, feeling all the love that was between us… and yet knowing that love was forever different.

M: On Friendship, Labels, and Language→

I’ve been having a couple of really fascinating conversations around friendship and language the last few days. Over the last decade, the integration of the internet into daily life has enabled us to sustain a larger number of personal, platonic relationships than in the past–with wide variances in levels of intimacy and mutual responsibility.

The word ‘friend’, which was past reserved for a smaller circle of intimate relationships, has been commodified and diluted..and is now used frequently and casually in modern society to describe this entire, wider spectrum–from casual acquaintances to those closest to our hearts.

There are a number of problems with this, but mostly, it is that this label of ‘Friend’ no longer communicates any meaningful information about the nature of that human connection or the level of intimacy and emotional truthfulness shared. Everyone has wildly different interpretations of the responsibilities that come with the assignment of the title of friend–with turmoil ensuing.

Brainpickings, a while back, made a pretty lovely post on the subject with a diagrammatic attempt to clarify this striation of platonic relationship. It definitely was a stand out in my memory, and informed my own private approach to understanding, clarifying, and categorizing the relationships in my life (which in turn helps me appropriately invest my time & energy).

Definitely take a read of this quick little article (like 6 minute read!). I also want to drop in this fantastic excerpt from Seneca( on the subject of friendship from Letters). I came across this about 10 years ago, and it definitely impacted the way I conceptualized and approached building my more meaningful Friend-ships.

“If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.

When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.

Those persons who put last first confound their duties–who judge a man after they have made him their friend, instead of making him their friend after they have judged him.

[So] ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself…”

On Having Difficult Conversations→

When facing a difficult conversation, (with partners, friends, family, etc) I learned to ask three questions:

Is what I have to say kind? 
Is it true? 
Is it necessary?

The first two build empathy and emotional awareness, but it’s the last question thats the most illuminating of the three–for the answer reflects how much you value the continuation and growth of that relationship.

Vulnerability, Reciprocity, and Being Able to Fully Express our Love→

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare” – Brene Brown

A good read and reminder: Time is too precious to be investing in relationships and endeavours that are not contributing to our growth, where we can not be our authentic selves, where we have to ‘hold back’, where we find ourselves waiting for permission, reciprocity, support, affection, or respect.

Who are the people in your life that you are most vulnerable with, and in what spaces? Are you giving your time, energy, and affection in the people and things that truly love and lift you?

I read this as a reminder to invest in the people that are ready to celebrate and embrace you wholehearted, who keep you accountable, who commit to your growth, to choose places where you can be vulnerable and honest, experiences where you can be fully expressed… For we all deserve to experience being seen, accepted, and loved, deeply.