Enacting a Social Gondwana
posted by: Nathan Stevens 31st July 2009
Overview: The lab has gone bush! Today's workshop was actually more of a 'walkshop'. Digital native Jenny Fraser packed up shop with the collaborators in tow and took the group bush, heading out to a breathtaking waterfall on the outskirts of Lismore, the magnificent Minyon Falls.
Walkshop
On the bus ride out to Minyon Falls, driven by Wendy, Jenny Fraser asked the members of the group to draw a Dharma Card, read it and think about it on our walk. The idea being that we had something internally to focus the raw beauty of the bush that surrounded us. Jenny refers to this as walking meditation. Very much the immensity of the natural world, pre-existent to man-made structures, has the ability offer scales in time and space.
The group broke off into tribes and trekked through the wild jungles of the Northern Rivers region. We encountered an abundance of dense greenery intertwined with intricate Strangler Figs (whose seemingly symbiotic relationships with their host trees provides an interesting frame for some of the group dynamic). After a series of switchbacks, the trail descended to a granite river bed littered with large boulders and a delicate trickle of water.
What really struck me about this 'walkshop' was how environment plays a role in the group dynamic offering scale, and simultaneously serving as a metaphor for some of the intangibles of what has unfolded within the group.; the falls, the strangler figs, and the switchbacks all seemed to be fitting frames for some of the Splendid group dynamic.
The waterfall especially provided an immediate environmental form, where at once the water pouring over the edge of the falls precipitated down, broken into millions of droplets, each falling in it's own perfect, individual trajectory, only to pool back into one flow again and continue on down the path that it has carved for itself.
On the banks of the pool at the base of the falls the group collected and shared a few moments with Siddhartha before we made the journey back.
Contemplental Drift.
The group reconvened at the nearby Nightcap Cafe for some sustenance and shared reflection. This meditation walk seemed to bring out certain qualities in the group, refreshing revitalising and reminding us of certain things, emotions, thoughts, understandings, perceptions, asking us to consider meaning and relationships to those around us and our self; to reflect upon our environments of identity.
Thinking back to the other workshops throughout the week, this exercise acts as an extension of Tom's Dinner Party Development exercise, extending the space of the lab beyond the boundaries of the lab, removing the lab from the confines of enclosed spaces and bringing the group to an open place were the group contrasted against the immensity of the world, could be seen as a group, immersed in the wide open plane of the natural.
Today's walking meditation seemed to converge into a social Gondwana. a singular landscape of emerging as many masses coalesce creating a new environment. The subtle walking motion of the group triggered a series of vibrations resulting in contemplental drift; the tendency for creative development to drift, or move thoughts, feelings, and ideas into one another.
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