So much more than enough
Part Three - A meditation on working with community trauma
Walking into a new group is never an easy thing. I often doubt what I’m doing, arms laden with bags full of jars & feathers, an old donkey carting the load. The niggling voice of fear biting at the ears of me, persuading the body to turn around, to abandon.
Being the imposter is a feeling you become accustomed to as a working-class woman. Not-enough-ness is a message drilled into the epistemological & ontological paradigm of the working class in a colonial nation. This particular not-enough-ness is a multi-textured beast. Intersectional in nature, insidious. Intercepting & cutting across many contexts simultaneously.
Being poor within our system is an initiation into not-enough-ness. Materiality & wealth bleed into the borders of the emotional & personal. To not have, is to be lacking in. Not having often becomes a metaphor for not being enough. Being poor provides multiple opportunities to embody this metaphor: cueing for free school meals next to peers whose parent’s can afford food, clothes consisting of hand’mi’downs, insecure housing, fridges that are empty, gas meters that gobble pounds quicker than you can earn them, cards declining at checkout tills, agonised, polite faces staring on with both frustration & embarrassment. What folks seldom talk about openly is the projected shame of being poor. The embodied shame of poorness, of not having.
When you’re poor, it is common to be practiced in the tongue of not enough-ness. Shame often mistaken for humility, modesty. Colonial buildings can become triggers. Educational spaces can become places where speaking is prohibited. The habitus becomes something you can become versed in; where you can & cannot go, who you can & cannot speak to. Creating art, writing, just having a voice- they are invitations not applicable to you. This is reinforced. Massaged repeatedly through schooling systems, peers, the wider culture, what is & is not represented. Not-enough-ness, if you’re not disciplined with the application of it’s antidote, can seep into every crevice of your life: an invasive species that decimates the local flora of your dreams.
My therapist once said to me, Hannah-May: “the abandoned love to abandon”. Today, I see that poverty is indeed a form of abandoning, it is a great neglect. The severing of a people from their most basic needs.
I repeat this to myself as I heave bags up the stairs & lay the table for the women. The desire to flee now, so strong in my belly. Trauma looping like some harrowing ferris wheel. The abandoned child learns how to abandon, she learns how to sever the fibres of intimacy so the pain of connectedness need never be a problem. But, these feelings are here to teach me something. They are markers. Signifiers of the intimacy that has already been shared. This fear is an acknowledgement of beauty & connection.
My favourite slogan in fellowship literature is Just for Today 10:
“Just for today I shall be unafraid. Particularly, I shall be unafraid to be happy, to enjoy what is good, what is beautiful & what is lovely in life.”
Recovering from trauma, addiction & a life punctuated with violence has it’s challenges. Allowing yourself to feel joy, allowing yourself to feel happiness free from the vigilance of when those fragile butterflies are smashed can, at first, feel like swimming against a riptide. It’s challenging to recondition the mind & body to feel safe within the cradle of stability & goodness when the dominating experience is one of chaos & struggle. Vigilance becomes a habituated response. Not conscious. Expecting the worse, searching for the worst becomes a means of survival.
I can’t speak for any of the women who you see in these images, I only know fragments of their stories. But what I can share is how much courage it takes to show up in a space that goes against the grain, how much determination & strength it takes to walk out of the door & arrive in a group full of strangers, ready to participate in something that is unknown, somewhere that invites expression & presence.
Sharing this work in poor communities, with folk who don’t have access, culturally or financially to plant work & traditional skills is vital to what I’m doing at hedge school. It’s vital because working with land, with earth, is such a powerful message of love & abundance. It’s a message that pierces through the layers of violence. So clear & crystalline. A crisp chorus above the crashing waves. It’s a message that offers another way, an anchor.
The women gather around the feathers, inks, pigments & plants as if these materials were a fire on a bitter winters night, their faces glow & their eyes are wide with wonder. They dive in, stirring neglected embers, using breath to give life to a long neglected flame.
Awe:
“an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful”.
I hover around the making like a child at the bonfire. Mesmerised. Body blasted by the warmth of what I’m witnessing. Heart full with reverence & fear. Fear for the fragility of this beauty. Fear for the mere temporality of our precious, fragile lives. I want to cry. I want to bundle each of these women up so tightly. Want to tell them they are precious. So very precious. They are beacons of hope. They are brave bright lights & they are so much more, than enough.