Creative Engagement ... And What Else ...

One of our favorite prompts is captured in the three words we chose to title this page … And What Else… There is almost always something else, and yet so often we move on before we give it voice. It is our intention to offer this space for reflection, and invite your voice to inspire others to consider ‘what else’.  Perspectives provide pause and invite our growth as individuals and as community. We hope you will drop in as often as you wish, to join this and other conversations and share with us your what else.
 
Since March, when the world pushed the pause button, we imagine that many of you found your relationship to time changing. Perhaps, like us, you came to feel in that time, inspired to reflect…re-direct and reconnect.  We are curious how the shifts that you made to adjust became gifts that you have come to deeply value.  Close friends of ours were commenting, how this time we were given seems to have inspired newly embraced simplicity for so many.  Our most natural human resources of imagination and creativity have come out to play in ways that, had we not been slowed down, might not have been as pronounced. As another said, “our hands have gotten busy” as have our heads and hearts. For certain, in the absence of access to performance and gallery venues, art and artists have been in process…and look out world when the curtains go up again…And yet those who do not necessarily identify as artists, have also been at their most naturally creative.
 
In the memory of these past 5 months, we, like so many others, huddled together at home in conversations that had time to drive deeply into who we be. Somewhere within this time, we were inspired by a short film that our son, Braydon created as a part of The Citadel Theatre’s Stuck-In-The-House series, he titled The Time We Were Given Time.  For us, it resonated as a gentle meditation on the reality of our times.  So powerfully moved, Greg found himself responding a few days later through poetry. 
 
In the spirit of …And What Else… we invite you to join in the conversation. We offer you these two pieces in the hope that you will share your own responses to how this time we have all been given has shifted and shaped you and your community.  Both were created almost two months ago now.  Whether you are viewing Braydon’s video again or for the first time and as you read the poem, we invite you to share your own perspectives from this moment.
 
You may do so as simply as adding a COMMENT below. 
 
If you would like to offer more than a comment… writing, images, music, video, questions… we encourage you to visit our Facebook page, where we welcome you to respond or upload.
 
We look forward to the creative engagement and inspiration that your participation will offer. Feel free to engage with the ideas that emerge once or many times and extend the circle by sharing this post to your own communities. 
 
With gratitude,
Tami and Greg
 
...

The Time We Were Given Time
​(Inspired by our son, Braydon)

One spring day
With warnings
That we had not heard…
Warnings that we had chosen
Not to hear…
 
And so, feeling like
One spring day without warning,
We went inside.
Schools emptied
Orderly and in the silence
That evacuation drills
Had taught for years.
The rest soon followed.
Shops,
Cafes,
Sidewalks and
Highrises,
Arenas of Competition
Venues of Collaboration
Playgrounds
Parks
And
Places of worship.
Emptying
Out into an emptying
Landscape.
 
The places of our past
And our present,
These places where we
Found comfort,
Did business,
Made friends from casual to best,
Cheered our teams on every stage,
Marked milestones,
Made wishes,
Laughed, lied, loved and lived,
 
And told the stories
That defined our very being --
Became ‘shuttered’
Overnight.
 
We moved away,
We moved inside,
We returned to places that we
Thought we would not return to again,
Packing what we could,
What we should
What we did
Without thinking about
Duration
And like the flocks returning home
Simultaneous to our own migration,
We in obedience to civic order and common sense
Closed our doors.
And went inside.
 
We
Adopted
New vernacular
Overnight
 
Enlisting to
Disinfect
Distance
Test
Trace
In order to flatten the curve
To mitigate
Not congregate.
We scrubbed, we masked
And went inside.
 
For many spring days
In a climate where spring
Remained stuck inside
As well,
For far too long,
We went to sleep mourning the things we had lost
To awaken the next morning to the things we had found.
 
The skies outside the windows
From the homes we felt stuck inside
Expanded
The streets running on every grid line
Emptied
Band width
Swelled
 
T  i  m  e,
So often measured as less, not more
Now lengthened towards a horizon,
Our trust held well beyond
The fog that settled between
Our here and our then.
Our now and our next.
And in that space,
We found breath enough
To see that we were not held but freed
Invited to be stuck in the house
Of our own reflection
 
And in this new now,
We found pieces of ourselves,
Perhaps forgotten, given up as lost,
In the stacks of boxes and hard drives of memory,
We were reunited with words, images and moments,
The trinkets and toys,
The now fading face of a friend ,
A snippet of life, captured on video
Never reviewed and so buried in time.
This stuff of our lives
So patiently waiting in the decades of dark
For some day,
Now this day,
When the box top is lifted
The dust is blown aside
And the light pours back in.
 
Looking up at us
They say gently,
‘Hello,
Have you come back to play?’
And in through that opening
We come unstuck
We lose and find ourselves
In that time we were given time.
…
 
Is it possible that I now long for
That time?

​GDC