As a researcher and educator I focus on the impacts of violence on learning. I include all forms of violence, at any age, and every site of learning. Increasingly I explore nervous systems: how they are vital to keep us safe, and create patterns that can also lead to mess, loss and division. I believe in the brilliance of our beings. I don’t believe we need fixing.
I am passionate about supporting people (including myself) to understand our own (and others) nervous systems so we may learn, teach and engage in life with more spaciousness, more creativity, and more joy.
Exploring Impacts of Violence on Learning
As a gardener I am learning to steward a patch of urban land to nurture the soil, native pollinators and plants, animals and people. I welcome everyone into my front yard. I see it as a place to play, create, and rest in green. I intend it as a project of reconnection: within, with other beings, and with the earth that sustains us.
I am passionate about regenerating land and relationship. I nurture the chance conversations that emerge: exploring violence, nervous systems, creative voice, and ways to support learning, growing and meaningful change.
Growing a Welcoming Garden
As an artist I believe in gathering pieces, finding fragments, and putting them together in new constellations. I look for patterns through the eye of my camera, and create with mosaic made from, and on, discarded materials broken open and re-imagined. I discover beauty in large broken mirrors, highlighting the cracks to encourage us all to see afresh, to imagine new possibilities.
I am passionate about developing my own creative voice and supporting others to explore theirs so we may settle our nervous systems, express our truths and insist on more generative ways of seeing so that we may reimagine our world.
Upcycling Art
As an activist I work towards a decolonized world, one shaped by loving connection rather than violence: stealing land and labour, and diminishing and disregarding so many humans and other forms of life. I dream of a world formed through creativity, rather than consumerism, grown with love instead of hate and fear. I am learning to make choices to do the least harm I can to the earth, other beings, and myself.
I am passionate about learning to live with coherence, reciprocity and respect for all. Like Arundhati Roy I believe another world is possible. On painful days she feels far beyond our reach for generations to come, on quiet days of reimagining, and reconnecting I am sure I too “can hear her breathing.”
Western settler society focuses on “damage,” on fixing, discarding and competing.
I value looking again to discover beauty, strength in the “broken places,” more commonalities between us all, and more loving ways of being with ourselves and each other in this troubled world.
