redtruckroadtrip

Paisley, Scotland
June 13, 2015

Sitting at the airport, waiting for boarding (in about 20 minutes).  My heart is so full from the past week, from an abundance of meetings, moments, things I learned, songs, shared vulnerability, puppets and of course the usual package of community issues including but not limited to teacups left unwashed, the hot tub full of slightly squiffy women, snoring, don’t eat my lunch out of the ‘fridge and the mystery of footprints in the butter that hilariously came up in a writing exercise we did, where many animals claimed credit for that. There was one serious meltdown, but friends surrounded him and he was soon sleeping it off. It is noted that in spite of the plethora of chopping axes left helpfully stuck in wood about the grounds for easy chopping, these were ignored with the only incident being someone once waving a hairbrush in anger.  I didn’t film anything for my thesis project, but the week was recorded in my bones.

I have to issue a disclaimer: this is in no way a full report of everything from camp so I can’t take responsibility at this point for leaving bits out that were important to others. This is just a gist, since we are just now getting back. I’m sure more will unfold as time goes on.

One of my favourite moments, just because, was being introduced to our camp cooking staff by the head cook, Pam: “I’m Pam, that’s Val, and that there is our man slave Crian.” She gleefully said. Crian grinning all over. He is a student, working at the camp for the summer. He can get down the hill in 10 minutes, he says, and up it in 20. We walk it in a sedate 28 minutes and we don’t bother timing the descent as we use it to unwind, decompress, look at the wild poppies and bluebells and wonder suspiciously about the secret messages being passed among the sheep as we go by.

The camp was the project of Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor, two Scottish game changers in the world of hearing voices. Both of them seethe with intelligence, kindness and passion for change, tilting at the windmills of the mental health system, with the deep vehemence and conviction of the just. You could accuse me at this point of hyperbole. I get that way around revolution. So when they invited us to come over to this camp, we just said, “Yes,” and booked the week off.

We regularly do what we call ‘Healing Camp’. For that, we invite all comers, those who need some healing and those who like to offer it, and we gather for a few days to work on each other. We take over a space (once an ashram, once a town community centre) and all muck in together. We do lodge during the week. Of course, by day 2, it is impossible to tell who is which and only possible to see beautiful exchanges at work.

This camp took place in the Marthrown of Mabie, (http://www.marthrownofmabie.com/) a hostel site in one of the 7Stanes mountain bike parks in Scotland. The 17^th Century manor house is a pub/hotel, and the trails spread out for 20 miles around. In the centre is a collection of shelters set up as a hostel, sleeping spaces/workshop spaces. Each comes equipped with log fireplace, some kind of nearby toilet and some kind of light. We had been warned to bring wooly sweaters and raincoats against the highland chill, but instead had a week of the most glorious weather, which led to outside workshops, lounging, strolling, a certain amount of playing hookey. The theme was recovery outside the mental health system, in the context of mental illness that includes the experience of psychosis. It included workshops, music nights, and a focus on voice hearing and psychosis, and the possibility of reclaiming lives long thought to be lost. We had ‘Big Tent’ discussions, where we gathered under the shelter, small groups and workshops in the yurt, the tepee and the iron-age replica round house. The cook shack and men’s and women’s bunk houses are earth ships.   Those with lived experience led workshops as well as a few of those whose practices seemed compatible. Rufus May and Elizabeth Svanholmer presented on nonviolent communication and on having dialogue with voices. Ron and Karen presented on recovery, the need for projects outside the medical model, and steps to prepare for recovery. We had a jazz singing workshop, a presentation on the Soteria House in Bradford, poetry (the best kept secret in camp) open mic performances and an arts table run by Helen. We presented on narrative work and ways of engaging with voices, as well as a writing workshop, a mask making afternoon, a brief spontaneous session on nutrition and helping with ceremony. We bracketed with songs and invitations to the spirits to join us and on the last day we burned offerings and sent them in smoke to ask the universe for input and assistance (not denying agency and accountability of our own, just asking for a little help by the by). The camp had a beautiful rhythm to it, between socializing, meals, performances, and Wednesday, which involved escapes to the beach, lying in, sitting in sunshine and generally playing vagabond. A large group of people went into town shopping, others to the pub in Dumfries and the Soteria House folks went to the beach.

It was inspiring to hear people’s stories, to hear so many stories of people thriving – against medical advice.

So just now, I’m in an uncritical blissed-out state, unable to parse the effectiveness of what I witnessed and participated in, but just basking in the joy of possibility.  Here are a few images – more to come.

Karen Taylor with Morning Announcements

Lewis and Karen and I at the airport.

The big tent.

Ron Coleman Morning Announcements

Helen and Barb with our first customer, young Francesca.

Morning Assembly

Lewis and I under a big old tree.

Transferring to the new hard drive. It started out saying 17 days.

Well, the good news is that I am beginning the work of finishing my thesis film. In the next post I’ll tell the story of how this came about, how I began and things radically changed when my friend suicided and my dad was diagnosed with dementia.  I dove into another world and when I returned, after my dad died, I was a mental health counselor (creative arts therapist), a practitioner (and now a teacher) of narrative work, and married. A long slow road brings me back here.

But here I am. Starting with technological changes. We are embarking on a two-week trip and I need to take my hard drives with me. I have 2 tb hard drives, one 500 gb and a 250.  Now, I have a new 4tb drive with thunderbolt so I can put everything on it. It ways about a third of what the old tb hard drives do and it takes up a lot less space. Today is spent packing and transferring. We leave on Friday for two very different places. First, psychosis camp, in the Mithrah of Mabie, a forest south of Glasgow. A retreat for those who experience psychosis from time to time and those who work with them. Weather there is chillier and rainier than here. After that, North and South Dakota. Bismark for language school and Eagle Butte for some dancing.

We moved out of our beautiful lake house on Monday, and into our temporary location, the Senator Inn, which is our staging ground for all the projects we have going on and the packing we have to do for the next two weeks. We leave on Friday, so we have to have everything in storage or packed by Thursday night. Most of our things are in storage, as our new place is not ready until July 1. The room is crammed full of things for the journey and the miscellany of last minute, impulsive, ideas about what material goods we couldn’t possibly live without.  Now we have to sort through this pile with sober second thought. How will we realistically make plaster masks in the middle of a forest in Scotland?  We won’t. We can make masks from found objects in nature.  How many books of stories will I really reference?  (Kindle editions). Could I get prayer tie cloth when we get there? (very expensive).  How many outfits is minimum for a week?  My suitcase is taken up with warm clothing, stout boots, a hat and gloves. In June. You never know in the Dakotas. There is also life. We want to get Lewis’s mum an exercise bicycle (recumbent, easy to use, with a nice variety of settings including an easy one), plus get her some reflexology on her feet. We still need to get some paper to the mortgage broker and we had to make last minute changes to the book that we only got finished last night. Etc.  We were hoping to get to the Great Mother Conference (http://greatmotherconference.org/) which is down the road in Portland, to do lodge with our friend Miguel Rivera, but the conspiracy of time and weather is making that look increasingly unlikely.  Miguel is from California and he had no idea it could rain this hard.

Plus, this morning is staccato. It wasn’t meant to be. We woke up, had a leisurely coffee and intended to go to our favourite gym down the road, except we got outside to discover that we have a flat tire. AAA came and inflated it, but now a trip to the auto shop is part of our day so we are ramped up in a different way, trying to reroute schedules, cancel appointments that can no longer be accommodated. Everything gets pushed. So, I’m up here, transferring footage to the new hard drive. Lewis is downstairs, trying to get a fast workout in (I’ll go down the road later today), and I am planning luggage, imagining myself in the prairie, watching birds, and realizing that we could just leave it all here and everything would work out just fine.

A year or so ago, this domain was hijacked and I refused to pay the ransom. This morning, while subscribing to a friend’s blog, I went back to the old WordPress site and lo and behold, whatever electronic clamp that had been placed on the domain appears to have been cut, and Red Truck Road Trip was free for me to register. So I have, at the normal price, just when I was thinking that it would be great to catch up.

We are moving an hour Northwest, away from our house on the lake but closer to the Penobscot river. If all goes well in the next few days, we are buying a building, a 3-story home for Coyote and a home for us. If not, we will find somewhere cozy. We are thriving. Spring is showing signs of being here for real and so far my relatives are surviving the challenges that surround them, even if some have faced great challenges (my 82 year old mother fell down stairs).  Meanwhile, after 9 years of Coyote world (almost 4 years of them now in this thing called , ‘marriage’), my own world is emerging again, nipping at my ankles with ideas and old business to finish.

Some group has been trying to sell me back my domain name.

Sitting in San Rafael at the Dominican retreat, enjoying the company of the attendees of the Ruth Inge Heize Shamanism Conference. Warm here, hot. In a little grove of redwoods. Over the years I have come to love the respite of the beautiful little courtyard here at the Santa Sabina center. Plus a basement full of art supplies. A break in the hard work left to go.

Cumbria and Oxford. Though before, of course, comes Newark airport, where we are today.

At this point, our travel seems slightly pathological, though it all really has to do with scheduling and Lewis’s term teaching and when we can get away and what weekend works for who among our friends who kindly invite us over. Due to circumstances, including that the flights were staggered in such a way that our choices were a one-hour layover or a 7-hour layover, and since rushing through airports these days is very frustrating, we elected the 7-hour, since it meant we could sit in the lounge (thanks to his three million miles of flying) and have a nice working day. So I have made slides, reviewed integrated event management programs, read idle postings on the internet and played too much with Facebook.

We are off to Cumbria to do a workshop which will be in the Village Hall, Memberley. It’s the 3rd time I have been there and I believe the 4th or even 5th for Lewis. We have a wonderful time whenever we go there.  We are going to do another workshop in Oxford, after attending a conference called Medicine Outside the Box.  In the meantime, we hope for some family visiting, especially my cousin Andrew, who is one of my very favorite relatives, and also my legendary Aunt Jenny, who is an amazing woman, with an incredible history of adventure and a highly intelligent life.  She has a rather frighteningly absolute view of the world and behaviour, and I inevitably upset her to some degree either with my lack of good upbringing (thanks to her sister) or lack of intelligence or just plain contrariness. We will likely take her out to dinner, which tends to head off the intense, critical and sometimes devastating family reminiscing that happens if you are lured into a delicious roast beef dinner at her kitchen table.

We are just back from a conference in Denmark, called Doctor Days, where we spoke to 57 Family Care physicians about narrative practices.  We also did a workshop about one hour southwest of Copenhagen in Praesto.  We got to stay in a little cottage with a thatched roof, which we thought very romantic, but our hosts said was a total pain as the critters nest in it, and it gets soggy and moldy.  We went running along the beautiful Praesto Fjord coastline. We had to get up really early, and the air was crisp though not quite frosty, with millions of twinkling stars.We stayed there 3 days with some of our good friends, including Carson, our friend who has a circus and a farm and is a social justice circus worker. He likes storytelling and narrative ways to help understand people. He’s working a lot with refugees at the moment.

Then it was back to Vordingborg, where our friend Marianne lives.  They have a little tower there, and they are digging out the moat, and they have just discovered the remains of a boat from the middle ages, and another tower, that seems to have fallen right over in the moat.  Marianne is a storyteller and coach, and she is the one who arranged for us to come and stay.  Marianne turns up all over the US to visit us, which we just love.  We hope to see her in Arizona over New Year’s.  On the day we arrived she took us around the shops to find a few things to wear until our lost luggage arrived. We found lovely things!  Excellent weather jackets, boots, and Lewis found a really nice suit.  He is rocking the suit world these days.  Dead handsome, that lad.

We came back and went almost immediately to Kripalu, for a lovely floaty weekend of Narrative work. It was an intense group who really brought their desire for immense change.  A different group than we usually get. Very serious. We shall wait and see how they liked it!  We, meanwhile, got some nice sleep and ate lots of green stuff.

Our flight is scheduled to leave at 7:15pm, and we arrive tomorrow morning at more or less that time at London Heathrow. We are once again going to attempt driving ourselves, and will hope that there is less construction on the M25 so that we will not have to completely circumnavigate London like we did last time (too terrified to get off the road).  I have a suitcase of art supplies and clothes for many occasions, a notebook, some good pens, a good book and comfy shoes for the overnight flight.  More when we get to England.

I am going to continue this blog over the next few days. It’s very exciting!

I’ve been meaning to post this for some time. I find this to be an excellent example of the way narrative work can generalize to LIFE!!!

I’m seeing that this could become my accountability blog. Let’s see. I last saw Lewis just before he got on his flight to Melbourne and I my redeye to Chicago and on to Albany. He got on the plane in his snuggly pod, only to have the slight hitch that the plane was delayed 2 hrs due to faulty navigation equipment. The TSA didn’t want to let them off the plane, as it was an international flight, so the airline, rather wisely, elected to give them dinner as they waited on the ground.

Meanwhile, my plane boarded on time, and we flew uneventfully to Chicago. Lewis and I had eaten copious amounts of Mexican food, including stuffed poblanos and the New Mexico version of pulled pork, so I didn’t worry about eating. I slept again on the plane to Albany. I tuned into the force and found the car, which my beloved coyote had left in the parallel universe that is airport parking, and hit the road, getting as far as the nail salon. I had found the nail salon when I went to be fingerprinted, and found an interesting parallel between having someone twist your fingers on an ink pad and someone twist them while applying a full gel set. I needed new polish and a fill, so I did that, then attended to errands and hit the road! I hadn’t had breakfast, so I stopped just this side of Bennington at Papa Petes, “Last diner for 20 miles,” and had DELICIOUS eggs Florentine with sweet potato fries. I’d like to maintain my bikini-ready figure so perhaps that better be the only meal I eat today.

Meanwhile, I heard from our dear friend (and wedding officiant!) Peter Blum that his ex-wife Merrily had died. Peter Blum has very kindly offered to take me with him at the end of February to assist at a workshop in LA at the Hypnosis Conference, and he was letting me know that we would need to get back early for Merrily’s memorial. She was an amazing artist, who never got to have a show, so the children have planned an art show and memorial for Sunday.

On that sad note, I arrived home, to our VERY SILENT apartment. I am determined to work as hard as Lewis does, so am committed to keeping up with the tasks at hand at least until 5pm tonight (we’ll call the nails a long lunch). Tomorrow starts early! Back to the gym! I am convinced that the weight we bear is not about food and exercise but also about eating just the right amount to maintain our desirable level of anxiety. Some people like more anxiety than others, so it stands to reason that they eat fewer simple carbs. Others can’t stand any so they eat a lot of carbs. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. So the trick is, to learn to live with a little more anxiety, which in my mind means a little more uncertainty. I have to make peace with uncertainty. And there you have it.

I decided after a long break that I would start up again. Life has been active and fun! We have had some adventures, a brief sojurn to Honolulu for a weekend (paid for last year and down to ‘use it or lose it’ status), my first experience downhill skiing (on the Moose slope out in Bolton Valley), the exchange of the 1994 Toyota Camry for a Ford Escape (4-wheel drive) (a win-win situation – we got a car that will carry us through the Vermont winter with a reduction of panic attacks from sliding and the Camry’s new owner is apparently taking it to the Monadnok Speedway and turning it into a race car – a fitting end and one my dad would have really liked), and all of this, of course, interspersed with The Paperwork of Marriage as a foreigner. I have had my electronic fingerprints taken, and learned that I don’t give good fingerprint, so I have had another set taken, this time with good old fashioned ink. The next step is the examination of my file to make sure I am worthwhile considering as a resident of the United States!

Just now, we are in Santa Fe at the Creativity and Madness conference, and we will zip off later today to Los Angeles, where Lewis will continue to Australia, and I will return to Brattleboro to wait for my appointment. I am not allowed to leave the country until I have temporary papers. I am a little melancholy, thinking thoughts about Lily and Shadow and Mavis and Tony and Sally and Keith and Varun and our favorite Dominican Sister at the retreat outside Warburton, the barramundi meals (a perfect food, according to our friends from the north) the sweat lodge we build every year out of tea tree and the fresh mussels the kids collect from the beach at Boole Poole. I will do my best to astral travel there. Maybe I can find something that smells like eucalyptus and tea tree and kangaroo and light a candle for the success of this journey.

Meanwhile, I have papers to write, projects to finish, photography to organize and my personal trainer certification to study for (I’m getting it to be able to work with people on psychotropic medications who haven’t been in touch with their bodies for a while).  Oh yes, and a film to finish!  Yes, friends, it’s that time.