Retreating in Vancouver, July 9, 2019
A summer’s day in Vancouver greeted us as we four gathered for a Gestare retreat day in Cindy-Lou’s attic studio. Surrounded by the garden and giant trees, mother earth greeted us with her green embrace for a day of deep sharing and reflection. Individually and collectively we have journeyed these last two years through a focus on integration of our work, into a year of resting fallow allowing the ground of all that we have co-created to refresh perhaps reform or reframe into a newly gestating wombspace for our collaborative co-workings.
Stories of mother caring, mother relationships, motherloss wove threads of connection between us in realms beyond our individual and shared artmakings. As each thread of our lives wound into the friendship and immersive kindness that is Gestare, we wove together the affirmations of intention for our co-being in relation. With sweetgrass grown in Medwyn’s garden, a gift from her K’ómoks nation friend and collaborator, we braided our way into reflections on our year of fallow.
Seeds from Gestare co-workings have rooted into expansive workings with the MA poses. This collaborative exploration initiated by Nané and Barbara in Paris during Nané’s post doctoral studies there in 2015, has grown and flourished. Our MA writing is now a chapter in the publication Ma - Materiality in Teaching and Learning co-edited by Pauline Sameshima, Boyd White and Anita Sinner. MA poses have been the focus of conference presentations the most current being at the 2019 InSEA World Congress at UBC in Vancouver the day after our retreat. Studio M* on-line offerings during the winter 2018-2019 brought MA to a new audience in a different way. The contemplative power of this work through practice, learning and teaching is profound and just one example of the ways in which our Gestare collective has gestated and birthed transformative pedagogy.
We concluded our day with one of our founding practices, vocal sounding. Nourished by our integration and re-membering the nine years of collective workings with Gestare during our resting fallow, we sounded our intention for emergent collaborative practices and processes in rich co-creative space.
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