Community dreamwork as intercultural peacelearning - an article is born
On dreams, more-than-human trickery, haircuts as expressions of joy and grief, and happy 75th birthday Mom
Dear enchantable ones,
What did you dream last night?
As I have mentioned before, I have been writing down my dreams since I was a kid, so have a very intimate relationship with my dreamworld. Last night’s dream details could be an entirely separate Enchantable post (and will be - stay tuned for that later in the week). Actually, part of my dream last night was about an Enchantable post (probably in part because I was thinking about writing this one). My notes from my dream journal this morning:
I send out my Enchantable and the (Substack) dashboard says something like “low open rate” and it was only 20-some people. I had sent it out at a different time, a weekday morning, so I take it as a sign of it not being the best times to send things out.
Hence, sending this to you on a Sunday 😄 as per (mostly) usual.
In addition to loving and being utterly fascinated and enchanted by dreams, my doctorate - fun fact! - is actually in depth psychology. I don’t resonate with the title of psychologist at all (the program itself was transdisciplinary and offered many critiques of the foundations of psychology as a field), but the depth piece I really do, and I am finding that the weaving together of depth themes around dreams, the unconscious, and bringing in ways of knowing that are more intuitive, embodied, and transrational, are my happy place, a unique part of what I can offer, and part of what I am weaving together in my work.
Which is why today I am SO excited to share with you the article baby that was just born into the world, Community Dreamwork as Intercultural Peacelearning co-authored with my dear friend HyoYoung Minna Kim. I would really, really love for you to check it out. Here is the introduction, as a teaser:
In this article, we will explore community dreamwork as a form of intercultural peace learning pedagogy and community building and will connect this to themes of epistemic justice, decolonial praxis, and the importance of the learning that occurs in the in-between spaces. We will explore questions of formal and informal learning spaces, our assumptions about where learning takes place, and the transformative potential of spontaneous, organic, emergent learning spaces that happen in the cracks of formal structures. We will also explore our experience of simultaneous translation (Spanish-English) as a pedagogy of intercultural peacelearning that promotes epistemic justice and slowing down. We will further critically examine the reliance of Freirean pedagogy within the field of peace education, particularly for its emphasis on rationality, as we believe it is necessary to reach beyond critical pedagogy through emotional, embodied, and other ways of knowing and being to achieve intercultural peace learning and sentipensante pedagogy. Building on Cremin, Echavarria, & Kester’s (2018) call for transrational pedagogy in peacebuilding education, we offer our experience of community dreamwork as an example of a transrational pedagogy that allows access to embodied, emotional, and spiritual ways of knowing.
The article feels like a culmination of decades of my life and work in writing down my dreams, peace studies and education, my decolonial depth doctoral studies, and community building. The PhD scholar and the angsty teenager writing down her dreams in her bedroom are present in this writing. To learn more about what we mean by community dreamwork as intercultural peacelearning, please check it out the article and let me know what you think. We are excited to see how this work moves in the world and what it does.
And this is one of the things I love about writing and the written word: once you put it out into the world, it takes on a life of its own and moves in ways you cannot predict when you write it. It has effects beyond the expected. I am a bit giddy with excitement to see what this article does.
And it already did something interesting, just in its first hours of being born. Last night, when it was published and we received the link, we realized the draft that had been published still had track changes on it. We had had numerous final changes, but there was only one change still visible, and it was this wording suggestion:
More-than-human? More-than-human. I can’t help but think that it was some more-than-humans themselves at work here, playing trickster and highlighting this comment, perhaps either affirming it, approving it, or maybe just drawing attention to the question. You won’t see it in the final version that is posted now, but please just know that this happened. We delighted in it :)
This week, August 1, would have been my mom’s 75th birthday. 75 is a big one, and I imagine she would have wanted to do something special. She loved a party, and maybe we would have thrown her one. But when I imagine what she would have wanted to do, it would have been having our family together. That would have been most important to her, the best celebration.
And she loved to celebrate. One of the biggest lessons I learned from her was to celebrate every moment we can. She once said to me, probably 15 years ago, “We have to celebrate every chance we get! At my age there are too many funerals.” I have taken that wisdom into my life as much as possible, and this week, we celebrate her in that spirit.
This is the third birthday she has missed earthside, and I try to do things for her around her birthday that she loved. I drank a cup of black tea (her favorite), and will make a cup to put by her picture, and will build a little altar for her. We bought a little cake in the market and sang for her (she was a type 1 diabetic but she loved icing. Daphne eats cake in a very similar way, just eating the icing). I found a flamingo wallet in the local artisan market, which is what I undoubtedly would have bought for her, so I bought it for myself (she loved flamingos and artisan markets). We bought flowers. I do things for myself that I would have done for her. That I would like to do for her. That I am doing, for her.
What do you do to celebrate and honor these moments, anniversaries of loved ones lost?
I also got a hair trim this weekend, which I love. Hair cuts are kind of therapy, a way to feel lighter and delightful, beautiful and fresh.
When my mom died, my hair was very long. For the months after her death, I felt a heaviness I had never felt before. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It was the peak of the pandemic, and it felt like individual grief compounded with the massive collective grief we were experiencing, the weight of all of the grief of that moment. So heavy. For a long time, it felt like one of those large metal weightlifting discs was sitting on my heart, immovable, weighing down my whole body.
The only thing I could make lighter was my hair.
So I cut it, and I kept cutting it and cutting it until it was quite short, the shortest it had ever been in my life. It was fun to try different styles and experiment a little bit, and it was the only thing that made me feel lighter. My mom loved my long hair, and there was some aspect of wondering if I had never had it short because of her, the desire to please her, the newfound desire try short hair as part of this new life with her gone, of wondering who I was without her here.
Over time, the grief lightened and my hair grew. But over the course of these years, hair cuts were a way that I processed my grief over time, and are an expression of the interbeing of joy and grief in my life. Right now, it’s mostly joy, but there was something fitting about having my hair trimmed this weekend, the weekend right before my mom’s birthday, when it was such an important part of my own grieving process of losing her.
My mom was big bright sunny Leo energy through and through. LOVED a microphone, a stage, attention. Life of the party, full stop. Loved to celebrate. Loved fashion and play and laughter. Leo embodied. So that’s what we’ll try to do to celebrate her and honor her. Have fun. Play. Dress up. Enjoy. Drink tea and eat cake. It’s what she would want, for sure.
August 1st is also a full moon. May it shine bright and illuminate what we have to celebrate in our lives. I’m celebrating the birthdays of the article and Mom, of visitors coming and going here in Costa Rica, and so much more.
May this inspire you to have fun, play, dress up, enjoy, drink tea, and eat cake, too :)
Later this week I am going to experiment with offering a Substack dream thread, a place to share dreams. I will share my own in the thread, and I hope you’ll join me there. I have been yearning for a place to do some collective dreamwork, and realized this space could be a possibility. I haven’t used the threads feature yet, so it will be a total experiment. Please stay tuned for that, and stay attuned to your dreams this week, and share them on the thread when I post later! (Or in the comments below - you don’t have to wait :) I can’t wait to hear what you’re dreaming about!
Happy Sunday, happy dreaming, and full moon blessings! :)
I feel like your hair story could be its own post or essay. People joke about women getting bangs after a major life event, and there's some truth to that! I've stopped wearing my usual top-knot bun over the past few months and am enjoying wearing it down or in a low side bun. I hadn't thought too deeply about it until this post, and I realize my intentions for changing my hairstyle are probably related to the inner work I am doing. I have enjoyed watching the evolution of your hair (and love your new, sleek look!).