Being home demands the practice of weaving rather than burning.

They love when I answer that I find home wherever my parents, partner, sibling, cat, books, coffee are (most of those have never been in the same place at the same time).

This is the answer they want to hear.

It helps them relate to me and find comfort in it. This answer adds me like a red pin onto an intelligible map, and locates me in a particular universe that can be tucked away in their memory.

Yet I find home most when I connect my longing to my becoming, and my memory to my imagination. Where that binding site is active, and draws heat like whiskey down my throat.

To find a home for yearning is a difficult thing.

But to find a place to nurture how we have changed upon the return is possible. Home may be the place where we have the space to contemplate how we have changed from that first moment of departure.

Few things change us more than desire or affection.

“Home” is made manifest when a constellation of those loves, desires and affections are transformed into roots for a life committed to a larger idea of love, but kept in focus by a more intimate desire to commune with those we are silly enough to care for.

To fall for or grow soft with.

Home is a place to piece together the precarious belief in things that are always vanishing: our projects, our work, our passions, our communities, our ideals, our families, our Loves.

All these are ideas that are willed into being.

They are challenged not only by reality but by exhaustion and the tedium of everyday things; nowhere more than at home are these ephemeral things exposed as the fanciful stuff of dreamers and romantics.

Why care for such distant things? Why remember the things that will break our hearts? Why expend excess energy on memories that ebb and flow? (Even when we feel such life and luminosity on each eventual return).

But in the home our capacity to sustain the center, to hold things in balance that were once thought incommensurable, becomes a practice in embodied faith.

You learn to yearn and remember from afar. And to sew the seeds that will germinate into relationships, communities and friendships that in the end are impossible to define. Imagination becomes married to intention.

These relationships define us.

The parts of ourself that we leave on the road and the self that we bring back to cultivate are hardest to name.

So we’ll call them “Home”.

“TÁPI” is a portmanteau of the words “talking piece.”

Alaina Winters defines a talking piece as “a meaningful and symbolic object that the facilitator, also called the ‘circle keeper’ brings to the circle. The circle keeper often incorporates an explanation of the meaning of the talking piece into the circle activities.”

Each “talking piece”—whether it’s a handicraft, a stone, a stick or a puppet—carries its own set of stories. As it grounds each new circle of people around it, it carries new stories forward and creates new connections and narrative constellations.

Talking pieces have been used by many ancient and indigenous cultures as a way of protecting and preserving the practice of sharing in a circle.

As we have been taught to say, when someone is holding a talking piece, it is an invitation to speak. When they are not holding the talking piece, it is an invitation to listen.

The talking piece is a very significant practice for us, as facilitators, story-listeners and leaders. We see the world as a place that is full of talking pieces. From a more poetic perspective, we imagine that each of us is a talking piece. We enter into circles, creating new links, new openings, carrying and mapping new stories upon stories upon stories into ever-widening constellations.

The reflection below is a result of the pondering that has come from thinking about what a talking piece is and how that definition has evolved. It expresses some of the thoughts that flowed into and emerged out of the development of this new logo, especially as we dive deeper into the implications of time and space on our capacity to empathize and attune ourselves to the rhythm of life of another person and their surrounding community.

Each object we choose to listen to creates its own time and space.

Carlo Rovelli, the theoretical physicist, will write that in actuality:

“Every phenomenon that occurs has its ‘proper time’, its own rhythm.”

In cinematic terms: everything has a unique timecode or timestamp.

Each object bends the fabric of space around itself in its own inimitable way.

The act of listening carves a singular artifact out of elapsed time and previously occupied space. The listening event becomes a container which gives an object (a voice, a face, a body!) intelligible shape. The container is a distinct tonal signature never to be repeated.

Hito Steyerl will ask:

“What happened to time and space? Why are they broken and disjointed?”

Object by object we trace a new topography of sensed objects above and below us. We draw geopolitics from the traces we felt a few milli seconds ago. We try to attune ourselves to spectral resonances that reverberate like temperamental ghosts in our memory-scapes.

I navigate through the detritus of our recollections as images fade to blur in seemingly random fashion. Perhaps you meet me there.

Z space becomes more important than x or y. In memory we search for synchronicity rather than causal sequences or linear structures. In this way, the past is as deceptive as the future is unknowable.

Structure and causality become smokescreens. Story loses linearity.

Around “the Listened” objects, a new geography forms. There are cracks and valleys, ruptures yawning and mountains grinding against each other, grafting nascent continents where oceans existed.

We become attuned to the spaces in between the yawns and groans. We, the vanishing.

In this land there is constant shifting but never truly empty space. Birth is a creative byproduct of erosion, friction and the restlessness of the ground under our feet.

Upon looking over the Colombian mountains Apitchapong Weerasethakul will say:

“When you look at the sound wave…you analyze it going up and down like mountains. Everything is active and moving, and when you think about movies, movies are the sound and image synchronized, trying to find a balance, and in this place I think there is never balance. The history and the present is always shifting. So I imagine a movie…where the sound and image have been shaken so it is never synchronized.”

We try to find balance as our listening constellates the world into being. We attune ourselves to this a-synchronicity, knowing it is the sound of our body trying to find its place in the world.

Ocean Vuong will reply:

“When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst — into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.”

Each body a nested map amidst maps. The center of each ripple, now as inscrutable and mysterious as the sound and image that carry it into entropy.

I will ask:

“How do we cross those valleys and those mountains to find each other?”

Gloria Anzaldua will answer once and for all:

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails…”

A pause, and then:

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.”

Traveler, there are no bridges, we make bridges as we walk.

No one told me that to be sensitive was a strength. It meant I was attuned to my natural senses.

I have since learned that to be sensitive is in fact to have a keenly calibrated tool called body—always listening and always absorbing. Yes, it can hit overcapacity quite quickly when left to its own devices, mostly because of that unfortunate combination of being a sense-full being living in a cantankerous modern world.

I now ask myself: What do I need to do to reclaim my sensitivity in this modern world ?What do I need to learn today in order to listen and sense with more discernment?

Discernment: The ability to distinguish the skillful process in the mind from the unskillful ones. To understand how to abandon what’s unskillful and to develop what’s skillful.

In our day and age, to be sensitive has little value; it is a weakness in the system. How can we reclaim sensitivity not just for men but for all humans?

The question we must answer today is not “Why are the senses good?” We must start with another question: “Why are the senses useful?”

In the echo chamber of somatic work, wellness and spirituality, it seems everyone agrees that the senses are an unequivocal good. And even outside of this world, most people recognize the critical importance of the senses. But we can’t really say why. There is an unspoken affirmation in the air that to be human is to experience our senses.

I am afraid that this truism is exposed as shallow, not due to a lack of truth but rather to a lack of rigor and honesty in tackling the question as it is proclaimed in an ever-changing world where technology has already transformed the relationship between our humanity and that of experiencing our senses.

The question we must answer, then, is “Why are the natural senses useful?” What is the value of practicing, sharpening and being attuned to them? What do we lose when we become less “sensitive”? What human qualities have been supplanted when we outsource our senses?

To begin to answer this we must be brutally honest:

Is it possible that in today’s hectic, overwhelming world it is more useful to be desensitized and to outsource our natural senses to emerging sentient mechanisms that are more easy to calibrate and modulate than our own unruly bodies?

In short, we have lost a purpose for our senses. Today, there is no compelling narrative for why our natural senses should be developed, retained, recalibrated and taught with discipline in order to experience them at their fullest capacity.

It was easier in the past. Back then our senses served to connect us to the earth; to hunt, track, survive, heal and be connected to each other. But many of those goals have either changed or vanished altogether.

So how can we re-imagine a teleology for being sensitive in a world in which being desensitized is often times more useful?

teleology (tɛlɪˈɒlədʒi,ˌtiːlɪˈɒlədʒi): the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.

We must answer then: How do we reclaim sensitivity with a purpose in this modern world?

A film—or art for that matter—should never feel like a closed arc.

The most honest and compelling stories are the ones we sense began unspooling long before we started watching and go on long after the last scene has cut to black.

The ending is our own, but life transcends the final cut.

2017 felt long and unwieldy, laced with intermittent beauty. This kind of beauty is imbued with sadness because it is a timeful beauty — it is beautiful precisely because we know it will be extinguished. Like a rose we know will wither or a mountain face we know will crumble, they are beautiful because they are fading.

There are many possible responses when faced with this type of sadness-in-beauty.

We can grieve the death of something we initially thought we would never lose; we can pretend it’s not true and hide behind projects of immortality as the Greeks did; or we can keep living with gratitude under our wings, with our eyes open and our senses sharp.

This year I saw many timeless films but none were as timeful as the re-watch that will set the tone for my 2018. Hayao Miyazaki’s [supposed] swan song “The Wind Rises” begins and ends with the answers I choose to face life with.

The film opens with a poem:

“Le vent se lève!… Il faut tenter de vivre! (“The wind rises!… We must try to live!”)” — Paul Valéry, “Le Cimetière Marin” (The Graveyard By The Sea).

The film ends as the curtain drops prematurely on the kind of love we hope to find in life. In the midst of it Hiro listens as his past and his future remind him:

“You must live, you must live.”

He closes his eyes with the wind coursing through his hair and replies:

“Arigato, Arigato”

The last line of the film belongs to the friend who walks beside him:

“You must live.”

To which he adds an invitation:

“First, shall we drop by my house? I have some excellent wine.”

As we walk through the ashes of yesterday and as legacies crumble around us, we must remember that the wind is still rising.

So we must live.

I am eager to dive deeper into the work and thought of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese pulitzer and MacArthur Genius grant winner. Nguyen says in a recent Newsweek article:

“We all are flawed human beings, and we have masks of humanity and we have inner savagery, we’re not virtuous; none of us are.”

This echoes my own (and SoSM’s) beliefs about the nature of our humanity.

In opposition to the feel-good pseudo philosophies of our day, I don’t believe our basic nature is good. We are not paddling back to our essential benevolence, constantly peeling away the detritus that keep us from our better angels.

No.

We are, rather, as Nietzsche would put it, beyond good and evil. Our identity exists in an arena of contestation between forces vying for our attention and our capacity for action. Ultimately, we are moral spies, without a fundamental allegiance to one side, and that is our nature. It also doesn’t mean we are essentially evil either or fallen from grace, as Christians will have it.

No.

We defy both poles and orbit just as gracefully around each.

We exist between savagery and virtue.

This fact must force us to confront the reality that humanization and dehumanization exist on a spectrum. They are ways of relating to the world that are both equally natural to us. To embrace this is to accept that the monstrous is not an outlier condition, as the heroic is also not an impossible mantle to carry; we are singularly capable of both.

ON WITNESS

Anjan Sundaram says the following during his recently published TED talk:

“Ignored people in all our communities tell us something important about who we are. A witness can become precious, and their gaze most necessary, when violence passes silently, unseen and unheard.”

I have always had an uncomfortable relationship to “story.” That’s not the point of what we do at SoSM: REMIX.

Rather, following Anjan’s statement, the point of REMIX is to invite participants into a relationship where they are there to witness the lives of “ignored people”. They are invited to help us see them, sense them, remember them, and for a brief instant, participate in the process of making them more visible.

Perhaps, by inviting vulnerability into the heart of this creative relationship, the hope is that participants may also render themselves visible for the first time, and bear witness to the violence that prevents them being seen as they are on a daily basis.

THE ANTI-STORY

I’m currently reading an anthology of Singapore poetry that is expanding all my notions of what it means to be Singaporean. (It is also making me really excited about running a REMIX in Singapore.) The book is called “A Luxury we must afford.”

I want to point you to an excerpt from the foreword called “We are born with the Dead.” The whole piece is worth reading which I also invite you to read here: https://gweek.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/we-are-born-with-the-dead/

“What comes at the end of a story? What comes at the end of something we tell ourselves in order to keep going? This question alerts us to the limits and risks of merging the forms of story with those of lived life….

What happens when a nation sets itself on a journey as decisive as a story?…The nation is being born at every moment. It ends when it can no longer re-enter the world with collected awareness.

A story is nonetheless a different thing, even an opposite thing. The plot of a story may seem like its driving force, but all of its elements actually conspire towards the end. A crisis may help to move an ongoing story along and serve as the centre from which it pushes towards a resolution.

But, once the story is finished, the end becomes its real centre the lens through which we see how everything holds together. The word “story” derives from historia, literally history: it is something over, closed. A story’s end is such a point of absolute clarity that, should it arrive poorly, we yearn for a better end, another end.

This is how we undesrtand the basic tension we feel: while a nation is born to develop, a story develops to end. The two are never quite an easy fit. It is why a nation built on a story is doomed to a crisis of identity that no other nation needs to face.”

The same can be said of people. We are not our stories, we are not determined by an end we do not know or can predict.

We are always “being born at every moment.” In a state of perpetual disclosure.

To do justice to “the human story”, to witness humanity properly and narrate the existence of particular human beings, means to resist closing the book on an individual’s capacity for renewal and ongoing disclosure. When we resist endings and easy plots we practice an ethics of hope because in the open-endedness of the form, we allow for beginnings and endings to breathe on their own.

Perhaps we need an anti-story for people. Perhaps story, as a form, is as violent to people as identity is limiting and antiquated.

This last weekend in Saigon was an exercise in mindlessness and cacophony.

I felt overwhelmed; like I was standing in the wrong place at each turn.

Because of this sensation, I felt an inner call to return to being more mindful about the small things.

Here are 10 things that I learned:

1. I have allowed too much of my life to be led in an un-mindful manner. This can lead to quick intolerance, easy judgment, increased self-concern and a desire for simplistic change. To be mindful of the moment—given the limited time we are given—means to embrace what is and to attempt to change less. Be patient. Allow things to be exactly what they are and participate in their ongoing transformation.
2. This helped me to better understand the mission of The School of Slow Media (SoSM). I concluded, yet again, that I do not have much confidence in our individual capacity to change large systems in our lifetime — you could say I remain agnostic (or at least have immense misgivings) about our modern, self-appointed roles as messianic “changemakers.” However, I do believe we have a responsibility to look at life as it is, and that the only way that true and lasting positive change becomes possible is when we contemplate what is, before we try to transform it. So we must first look.
3. Our goal is to help people slow down as an act of resistance and life-affirming practice. This means that our target group is the overwhelmed, the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, those who yearn for higher quality of life by choosing less.
4. Following an Atlantic Monthly article I mentioned earlier this week about why For-Profit education fails, we must learn to have more humble aspirations: less ambitious in scope, less “life-changing” in our aim, and, rather, attempt to do a few things well. Our goal is to help people slow down and see better. Do we believe that storytelling can create social impact? Perhaps. Is that where we want to put our efforts? No. We believe that this is a time when we must carefully resist the temptation of brandishing story as a “tool for change” like it’s the panacea.
5. We must focus on “story-telling” as a way of sharing life and being- together— a practice that equips us to choose more humanizing ways of existing in this world. At its best “story-telling” is a craft and practice that can help catalyze positive understanding between people. It is a way to attune ourselves to the changing lives of others (keeping in mind that “change” can be positive, negative or both). Ultimately, storytelling cannot build a school, feed a person or create policy changes. It can merely be a tool to recalibrate our understanding of reality.
6. We cannot deny the fact that limited time, resources and capacity can make media-making a very stressful process. However, at the School of Slow Media we preface (and interrupt) the process with an adamant call to STOP! LISTEN! LOOK! first. It forces us to take stock of what the moment is asking of us. This makes our school unique because of the “sprints-to-slow” structure of our curriculum and experience. Our aim is to pay close attention to the imperative to (a) observe (b) describe and (c) share the world, before imposing labels of “purpose”, “transformation” or “impact” onto what is is unfolding before us. This takes time, patience and humility.
7. Ultimately, media-making is an exercise in contrasts. The “sprints-to-slow” dynamic is already built-into our program but now we are working to refine how it will be the distinguishing feature of the school. The way sea salt makes a chocolate chip cookie taste orgasmic. Or silence punctuates a percussive moment of staccato drums and makes it feel more explosive and emotive. It is the juxtaposition of mindfulness and creative frenzy that makes our program stand out. The dynamic is powerful because it mimics life as we live it, in the ebbs and flows of intensity, without resorting to escapism or fatalism.
8. Festina Lente. “Make Haste Slowly.” This brings me back to Mindfulness as the tool we have chosen to help us slow down and contemplate a fast paced world. Mindfulness is an intentional interruption. Mindfulness is a practice of resistance for our community of resistance. In the end, we believe mindful creatives will practice more mindful, ethical and compassionate media-making.
9. If this is really the case then we need to invest more time, money and capacity-building into mindfulness. We need to finish our books, discuss them, internalize them and take our daily practice—as a company and community—more seriously.
10. All of this should lead us to further examine the relationship of the human being to technology and silence. It should lead us to examine the relationship between information → contemplation → action. This is, admittedly, more cyclical than a linear relationship.
11. The School of Slow Media is a space for creative contemplation. A space to examine our relationship — as practitioners and as a creative community — to reality first, our capacity to communicate it to others, and the possibility of change based on that connective consciousness that we share.

Philosophical Postscript

I’m now thinking of the pre-socratic philosopher Gorgias, a favorite of mine during university.

He argued “first, that nothing exists; second, that even if existence exists, it is inapprehensible to humans; and third, that even if existence is apprehensible, it certainly cannot be communicated or interpreted to one’s neighbors.”

In a Trump-shadowed world, where people are losing hope and don’t know whom to trust, the call to look at the world as it is may be a brave one.

It is certainly difficult to do. It is a call to continually refuse to look away in disgust or frustration but simply gaze at what is happening to us all. This is a necessary beginning.

I believe this line of thinking will resonate with people more than a facile or hyper-optimistic call-to-arms to change the world at large. Many of us are tired of the sentimentality that subtly manipulates, takes us to idealistic heights and then shreds our aspirations. Instead, hope arises when we boldly grasp what afflicts us, unites us and how together these define us.

Naive idealism is the quickest way to becoming a veiled fatalist. It is the easiest way to set ourselves up for failure, and by demanding the impossible, missing what is possible and in front of us.

Unlike the greek philosopher Gorgias, we at SoSM believe that the world exists. We believe that we can apprehend it and embrace it. We believe that we must face it as a community. And finally, we believe it can be communicated and interpreted with our neighbors.

Much more than that we cannot say, but that is a real beginning. This, we also believe, marks the beginning of wisdom.

“The privileged” see STORY as something that can be separated from them.

Story is an object they hold in their hands. They “carry their story.” They “bring their story.” They learn “their story.” They practice and improve “their story.” It is a performance to perfect, a piece of wood they are carving, a stone they are sculpting, a lego tower they are building.

STORY becomes something to use and brandish: bad ones exploit for their own gain, the good ones “leverage for social impact.”

However, in both cases, the elements of story exist removed, or at the very least can be held at arm’s distance and pulled apart from the everyday being of the person’s body and mind.

The second group, the “embodied”, live their story at all times. They can do no other.

They cannot observe it in their hands without bleeding. It is skin they cannot shed. It is tightly wrapped around their muscles and ligaments. There is and can be no distance. There is only being.

For this reason they cannot think of “leveraging” their STORY because their story is something they are at all times. Something to emerge from. Heavy like smog in Beijing and just as inescapable.

“Bring your story.” “Tell us your story.” “Inspire us with your story,” they will be asked. We want to be moved by “your story.”

But it is only to others’ benefit to describe what is to them a tailored molding of pain, stress or duress.

STORY is a very different thing to different people. For some it is a tool in their hand, for others it is taut skin. For some it is a way of becoming, for others it is as inextricable and inarticulate as being itself.

We are not instruments of passion, purpose, or plot. We are not artifacts of craft or narrative.

We are more.

Today’s stories transform human beings into forgettable pixels on a scrollable newsfeed. We’ve become agenda-driven devices. Means for catharsis or escapism.

Are we 30 second social media experiments? Faces amidst fake news, funny cats and poverty porn?

Too many things are fighting for our attention. We are overwhelmed and overstimulated by the cacophony of meaning. We are numb.

Where can we find the “real” human beings in all the bullshit out there?

In Attunement.

Attunement recaptures our ability to sit and listen to each other.

We seek to attune to the singular encounter of the human being in her rawest form.

We are now reclaiming what we have lost.

So we look for austere beauty in everydayness.

We resist the exploitation of single stories.

We persist in connecting and listening to the lives of others.

We insist in sharing human-centered stories.

Only when we give ourselves — fully and fearlessly — over to the encounter with another can we experience true and transformational empathy.

Slow down.

Pay attention to the smallness of each moment.

Slow down.

Refuse to be consumed or melted down.

Slow down.

Inhabit now. Share life. Do not tell me a story.