Reflexivity in Sausages?
What cooking campfire sausage has revealed to me.
Sitting down with my laptop to engage with this assignment has been really challenging, not because I find the content difficult in terms of cognitive understanding but because I have to fully come face to face and acknowledge my own triggers, unconscious bias, limited beliefs and narrow world views. To do anything other than that is to dismiss and diminish other’s stories to cognitive information, words on paper. To acknowledge that I have been part of the damaging process as an active member of state education, religion and teacher but also to hold the tension that I too have been damaged by those very same processes is challenging. Below, a short video, as part of friends story telling project tells some of my own journey.
Question. Is it only when we are at our full capacity - physically, mentally and emotionally - that the ugly truth of what underlies our practice is revealed?
Afterall, diamonds only form under pressure and gold is refined in the fire. Simmarily, heat, pressure and time has revealed the once unreadable weblink of my paper. It was always there just not available to the naked eye without a period of transformation.
After coming off the back of a week at university where a migraine had struck, the result of mental overload from an intense “wrestling with my triggers, diving into heavy concepts” kinda week. I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Life is full as it is. Four children, two businesses, home education, state education, pets to care for and just general jiggery pokery of family life. I was straight back into it, with GCSE mocks, a new start at school after 10 years of home education, a failed birthday party due to a third hospital visit in a month for the same child (3 different injuries). I say all this not to justify my actions but to give context to the following incident of poor practice.
As part of my seasonal curriculum with Rooted Wings, the children and I were cooking sausages as a nod to bonfire night - an interesting date in the calendar itself and one that highlights the blinkered lens through which we can unconsciously operate. Cooking on a fire is a westernised, white, colonial concept of recreation - a snub to many who’s way of life depends on this method for existence - not just for recreation. I had cooked sausages for the two previous groups without any complications, catering for everyone’s needs. On that particular Wednesday I forgot to go to the shop on route and only had sausages appropriate for carnivores.
Truthfully, I had registered it in the morning and had meant to pick up some alternatives for the 4 children who are not carnivores. I failed. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that I’d get away with it, there could be a learning point in it, it would go unnoticed by the parents. I did have a conversation with the children that morning about it and we made a deal that the following week the tables would be turned and the carnivores would go without, however…
..not surprisingly I had a email from the parent of the child who said they felt left out and excluded. Yikes!
I am aware of the walking juxtaposition that I can operate from - full of biases implicit and explicit, prejudices, and contractions. A coin of two sides. Some of these afore mentioned things are easy to identity - lighter, more palatable, humorous and more relatable. For example, I don’t like Micra drivers, people who can’t steer trolleys, dog owners who don’t pick up dog poo, cheap butter…
My dark side (or my shadow side I’d rather not show) can create reactions, often big ones, that divide, judge and separate. Those ones I keep hidden and disguised.
“to start down these roads, one must be able to see contradiction as a friend”
I am glad the parent got in touch and we had a beautiful, yet difficult conversation. Did I like the feelings of discomfort, being found lacking in practice, being exclusive, and a child in my care feeling unthought about and unseen? No. Probably because there’s a resonance within me and to my story of never quite fitting in and not really ever feeling seen or thought about too much. Despite the clumsiness, disparity and embarrassment of it all, there were some golden moments to understand from the encounter. It helped me to see that the the child fully identified with the group, enough to have ownership and a sense of belonging (to feel exclusion and inequity). Previously, they have opted out of all group experiences not wanting to partake and finding it easier simpler (?) to be on the outside looking in. I also had open and honest conversation with their parent where we discussed the above experience. Compassion, reciprocity and understanding were evident from both sides.
Personally, if I’m fully transparent, there was also a hurt. A sore point was touched because of the hours I’ve worked hard to create a business where space is held and created for all to come. A place of acceptance, safety and belonging. It felt painful to fall short of a core value of Rooted Wings and to have it revealed by a child in my care.
“Ghosts can be ones best advisers,”
With hindsight, its worth asking would it have been more equitable for no one to have any sausages and everyone to be treated fairly? (Have I considered the sausages in all of this… it’s another lens to explore. They would have then been passed their best though and ended up in the bin, which is also a touchy subject in our modern society of overconsumption, easy disposal of our excess…)
Needless to say, the following week I have sausages, 3 different types but the child chose not to engage and had come with some items of food they would definitely enjoy. Choice and inclusion offered (tick) although clumsy and retrospective (tick, tick). The main point being the child’s upset. Digging deeper, there were four immediate stories to consider and include in the dialogue- the child, mine, the parents, the sausages and those are just the surface ones. What about the trophic cascade of all of the ones that have been formed for hundreds of years all of which contribute to our daily lives; creation, colonialism, racism, gender bias, feminism, patriarchy…..the list goes on. We only have to closely examine any one of these areas to realise that they don’t stand in isolation but as a transactional point of a preexisting result of tropic cascade. In short, there are many, many view points in any one narrative to consider…
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story…. It robs people of dignity…it emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar”
Language:
I feel conflicted in this blog to quote the people and their work. It somehow seems ill-fitting, to re contextualise it, it adds or takes from it which changes it from what it was and puts into a new dimension. It feels diminishing and disrespectful of their work. Yet, here I find myself holding yet another tension; acceptable academic standards in order to meet criteria and the desire to not mis quote or misinterpret another who’s story is not my own and can only be imagined. Despite best efforts words are so clumsy and misleading yet we have to find a common method of communication and understanding to attempt to explain and convey meaning. As this reel highlights - it’s complicated!
“People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)
And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.
I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”
Creation:
A person under pressure facing lots of demands, they dress in a bear suit, leave their office, go to the woods and go to a cave full of other bears to hibernate.
To have no truth means that all knowledge and how we view it is fluid. Yet even a river has banks, a tree has soil, the sea has land… everything is formed against something else…
The overwhelm of uncovering our foundational lens is a lot (regardless of whether we are religious or not) It can feel easier to do what the person in the cartoon above is doing, rather than engage. Going into a cave, sleep it off, pretend the reality isn’t what it is and numb out. Sounds blissful and in one sense it is - it must be as lots of us do it (self included.) There are some brilliant academics, authors, creatives and philosophers some of whom I’ve mentioned throughout blog that can helps us to uncover- but what then? Where do we take it, how does it land and play itself out? if we see ourselves as being ‘of nature’ but we live in a world that is based on ‘dominion over’ it, the struggle is ongoing and exhausting!
Creation theories have a lot to answer for and a massively complicated starting point. Please don’t interpret this as laziness or an unwillingness to explore that. Sometimes, allowing what others have said (especially when said better) is the best way to illuminate meaning..
“Surely no creature other than man has ever managed to have fouled its nest in such short order.”
oof, ouch! (felt that one)
“Same species, same earth, different stories. Like creation stories everywhere cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardner, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”
(steps into bear suit)
“However in creating these mythologies, (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) they have entirely missed out the dark side of modernity. Slavery, genocide, colonialism are the foundation stones of Western modernity, and through new -colonial economic policies and exploitation of developing world labor is the system maintained. The system is held together by ignoring the chasm between myth and legend which is why Whiteness manifests itself as a psychosis.”
(pulls up zip, heads to cave)
My River Banks:
It's the journey, the in-between, the grey, the murky - this is where the real learning and reflexivity can occur. It’s easy to speak about our acquired knowledge and how we have changed when speaking in reflection and call it vulnerability. As I see it, that’s not vulnerability - that's transparency framed as vulnerability, it looks shiny, polished and people admire us for it. True vulnerability is messy, raw, unpolished and risky. We can’t know at the outset how it will be received. In that sense it’s always about the journey, sojourning, pausing along the way - the learning never ceases and the journey folk to travel with us are the diamonds and gold.
Drench yourself in words unspoken, Live your life with arms wide open, Today is where your book begins, The rest is still unwritten...
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Drench yourself in words unspoken, Live your life with arms wide open, Today is where your book begins, The rest is still unwritten... 〰️
1.(Sacred?) Bearing Witness *
*to say you know from your own experience that something happened or is true - Cambridge Dictionary
“In my work, I think a lot about what it means to bear witness. The practice of spiritual accompaniment is a kind of sacred bearing-witness. I come alongside someone to intentionally and lovingly pay attention with them to their lives, and the sacred invitation to fullness that we find there.
What then does it mean to bear witness to grief and pain on a global scale? I read this week that we are at the dangerous moment, when it all becomes too much to bear, and so we numb ourselves and we all stop watching. We turn away, because it feels too overwhelming to keep looking.
But the bearing witness is sacred.
I’ve heard from my directees this month, and in my own thoughts, the retort: “I shouldn’t be allowed to feel so overwhelmed - I’m not the one experiencing death and destruction right in front of me on a horrifying scale every day.”
What I sense we are experiencing though, is the reality of our inherent connectedness with all people, with all creation. When one part cries out in pain, we cannot help but feel their pain too. It is what I see at the heart of all healthy spiritual narratives: the invitation to connection: with our own Self, with the Divine Mystery, and with the Other - human and non-human.”
2.Permission to…
…be curious, ask questions freely, forgive, change your mind, try again, be wrong, do a retake, reevaluate, shift perspectives, argue, make up, fully present, outrageous kind, hold space, wonder out loud, offer compassion, accept the invitation …
“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward.”
“...critical thinking does not simply place demands on students, it also requires teachers to show by example that learning in action means that not all of us can be right all the time, and that the shape of knowledge is constantly changing.”
Are you tough enough to be kind? Do you know your heart has its own mind?
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Are you tough enough to be kind? Do you know your heart has its own mind? 〰️
Originally, my plan was to approach this entirely from an academic, cognitive perspective, ignoring the experiential element of it as it somehow felt too personal, too exposing of my vulnerabilities and shadow side. To do that however, would be continuing the cycle of knowledge being supreme, (cue the holy trinity of state, church and education) the ultimate power and ignoring the lived human experience, separating heart and mind. The challenge is always what to do with the information we have learned. It’s very easy to become stagnated, marinating our overfilled and over indulged brains in our own enlightened cave of knowledge. This quote below, attributed to many different sources, highlights the complexity I feel and see echoed through other’s articles, journals and texts…
“The longest distance in the world is from head to the heart. Taking what we know and turning it into a demonstrable action, something that will elicit change in our lives and the lives of those around us, is true wisdom. The ability to transform knowledge into action is oftentimes quite the hurdle.”
Similarly to Schneider in Reflexive/ Diffractive Ethnography, I also don't have a closure, a conclusion, a way to round things off and leave it on a shelf all parcelled up and looking pretty, neat and tidy. I was heartened to try and not create one either - to leave all these wonderings, uncoverings, learnings, uncomfortable admissions and revelations of my shadow self in a neat box somewhere. They are ugly and uncomfortable.
It’s an ongoing tension within me to know one thing and to pursue another, and somehow be caught in the middle holding the tension of both. Holding tension of what I know and want to leave behind. Yet somehow I am unable to stay where I once was, and yet not fully be where I want need want AND need to be. I’m sure there’s a clever weightlifting analogy or metaphor to insert here about how under tension is where our muscles and strength grow the most…
“Both Brené and Glennon are quick to admit their shortcomings and revise the ways they engage in the world based on their mistakes, new learnings, and new understandings. As educators, they do not simply just talk; they also engage in action in concrete reality. For Brené, this includes free curriculum available for all teachers and for Glennon, this includes her humanitarian work with her nonprofit Together Rising ”
Words are failing me or I am failing the words, either way I find myself continually learning to hold the tension of my contradictions bravely, honestly and openly. I hope that through this blog you can see threads of authenticity, an openness of heart, genuine concern. A kindness and a willingness to journey not just on the mountain tops but in the valleys too and an effort to connect as human to human leading with our similarities rather than our differences.
Who knew that all of these issues could arise from a badly facilitated cooking of sausages on a campfire. I certainly didn't.
“I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.”
