Diffraction

During the ESREA Life History and Biography Conference in Trondheim, Norway in June 2023, we gathered to read “Momo” by Michael Ende, becoming children again as we listened intently to the story. It was a guiding ritual that created space for questioning society with an anarchist lens. Here is the link: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michael-ende-momo 

​We also worked together in collaborative practices, writing and performing. I especially enjoyed participating in a collaborative writing experience. We were given instructions to write a text in thirty minutes. I wrote a text that I then shared within a designated group. We each read our writing aloud to each other and worked to produce a collaborative artifact. We were given around an hour to produce something that emerged from our individual writings. The first presentation was about a hat from an Englishman. The second member of the group presented an indigenous drum from Chili. The third presentation by a Norwegian, wrote about a water bottle that she presented. After the presentations, our group decided to write a collaborative poem.
 
Here is the short essay that I wrote:
 
Viriditas: Greening, Generative, and Life-Giving Power
 
Generative practices like writing can take us on a journey where the inner and outer landscapes meet in synchronicity. This coming together creates a space for diffraction that gives rise to new forms. This future forming process draws from the energetic potential held, or encapsulated in symbolic objects that touch us. An agentic object can take us on new pathways.
 
The cross that I wore to the conference in Trondheim, Norway is a silver replica from a sacred stone alter that is in the church at the Abbey in Romainmôtier, Switzerland. This form can be understood as an aesthetic and spiritual entanglement emerging from the historic link to Celtic crosses found in this Cluniac priory.
 
The cross symbolizes sacred space-time in jewelry. This interconnectedness includes the landscape, the timescape, as well as the dimension of lifescaping. My life’s journey, walking this sacred path, is paved by writing that acts like breadcrumbs marking the way. The words that fall to the ground have taken me to the heartshpere. Here, in the center of my chest, the cross touches my skin, awakening my inner compass through compassion: compass and passion. I have worn it to mark St. Olav Ways and the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim.
 
Here is the poem that we wrote together:
 
The feel of the hat upon my head-I say,
This is me, who I am,
And also is my (?) people, their breath, their rhythm,
The touch of water, how weightlessly it carries me home,
Floating with the stream of life,
Connecting me to my heart and the inner compass that is guiding this journey onwards,
A creative pathway: The Pilgrims Way-St. Olav’s “Leia”
 
This experiential and collaborative learning illustrates how people form self-organizing systems within encounters that can co-construct meaning-making processes in emergent forms. During the collaborative writing workshop, our writing became a form of diffraction, bringing together entangled threads and flows in an assemblage. Transformation happens through the multiple encounters and emergent multiplicities. Movement and flow interconnect historical and cultural contexts in space-time that carries away previous forms in a fluid change process.
 
Social Science methods offer qualitative approaches using autoethnographic and biographic approaches to capture creative evolution that bridges the individual and societal. By listening in a way that creates embodied connections, we touch each other in entangled encounters, bearing witness to each other’s stories. This form of inquiry engenders becomingness-diffraction in action-through emergent conversations.
 
Here is an article that presents concepts about emergent conversations as well as Bronwyn Davies’ more recent book. Davies’ book was a reference for our collaborative writing practice.