Post 11: Elders 1: We sit in a circle.

Arrival at the Albany. Image: Roswither Chester

The theatre group begins.

We sit in a circle, elders and younger people, beginning a new process. David passes his glasses case to R in a quasi-reverential gesture, referencing the traditions of the tribal ‘talking-stick’ that sanctions  the holder to speak uninterrupted. We each take a turn naming ourselves, and from where we have come. 

D is turning 90 on Friday…if she lives that long. A hush brushes the skin of each of us in the room. M identifies the county where she was born. F asserts she was born in the same room in which she gave birth to her son. Several talk about being born in countries that differ from where their parents came.  H proudly proclaims an ancestry shared between Cornwall and Wales.

M, from Argentina, strikes a dramatic chord indicating her escape from civil war; in a second round she reveals that her bloodline is German, not Argentinean. Several others in the group reveal similar splits and gaps in lineage. A fine story of resilience unfolds: intimacies, sorrows, deaths, transcendences, clear lineages and admixtures, cocktails of mixed identities, shaken, sipped, passed and stirred. David wishes a tape recorder had been turned on. M says we can rely on collected individual memories to reconstitute what has been important.  E, only 20, exhorts us to eschew the supremacy of technology that her generation too readily relies on.

Mr P takes hold of the case and weighed and measured it in his hands. He takes his time. It is as if he is singing to it too. Becky notes all of this, so graciously noted. It gives him great joy to be recognised--the precision knowledge of the engineer. Becky sees the world in his gesture, memory in the veins of his hands.

The architecture of our responses. The structure of what hums.

We share stories that differ and oversect. Tales of rivers and borders, escapes and escapades.  The people here need to be in this room. It is a place of high drama, and of the softest of experiences, the remembered kick of a baby in the womb, the touch of a loved one, now gone.

Image: Roswither Chester

This is each of us, flying in the present moment, in the warmth of the exchange. It is clear each of us, no matter how young or old, has experienced falling from such shared awareness, into isolation, a place we would rather not be, within and outside these walls, I hear again and again how Meet me…must continue. It has become family, home. Or, for many, a place that differs from the childhood homes that carried gruff and angry residues—the blaming and shaming that arises from a lack of context in which to understand difficulty, disagreement, grief, and even love. P says to me, “If only we could reach in and clean those minds.” But we have to be in a place that is unfearful in order to share in this way.

Colin helps us sense surface, muscle and bone; Esme helps us breathe, Rebecca helps us  sigh and release, I guide the group to  embrace the sense of being held in air. I am surprised when several people say they felt they were transported to Australia in this last exercise.  We are where we have lived, and breathed, and suffered, and loved.  This is the rise and fall of our lives.

Zsuzsi, June 10, 2015.


c. Z Soboslay 2015.