Resilience is our business and one of the key ways to build individual resilience is to take time to create space. When someone is very stressed this practice can actually create space in an individuals’ nervous system and help them return to a state of equilibrium.
We endeavour to walk our talk and one of the ways we try to keep our business resilient is to take time to really work on our business, which means taking time out of the day-to-day tasks and making space to explore shared visions for the future.
Last week Siobhan and I met to touch base and share ideas about our work and business. We walked in the woods enjoying the emerging signs of Spring and created space for quiet reflection to see what might emerge.
The idea of enhancing social capital as a way to build social resilience is one that inspires us both.(watch future blogs for more on social resilience). Our business strategy has been to incoporate social responsibility into how we practice and having a larger vision to work towards helps keep us focused and steady in our day to day work.
As a result of our time together a vision for a social responsibility project started to take shape and so I want to put this into words so that we can begin planting the seeds of something we hope will grow.
Our vision is to start to focus on Images of Resilience, starting with a gallery page on this site.
We would like to invite you to work with us compiling this gallery, by contributing images, words or stories to it that reflect resilience for you.
This can act as a place of inspiration and creativity for all us to tap into.
The end goal of our vision is to build interest and invite well known people to create their own Images of Resilience for auction so that we can donate the money to support people who are living through challenging times.
This first image we use in some of our material, draws on nature as an inspiration.
It is a tree growing around a large stone and it reminded Siobhan of Andy Goldsworthy’s resilience inspired “Garden of Stones” a living memorial for the holocaust for the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The work involves 18 boulders set into narrow pathways. Each boulder has an oak sapling planted into it and as the trees mature so they will be intertwined with the stones
“It demonstrates how elements of nature can survive in seemingly impossible places” (www.publicartfund.org)
I was reminded by these images and also dipping back into a chapter that I co-wrote on Resourcing the Trauma Client that Nature can be an amazing resource and resilient force.
In the chapter I refer to the book The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estes,(1995) a beautiful and uplifting story about her Uncle, a survivor of some of the worst horrors of the second World War. When confronted with yet another grievous loss, he set a ground fire on his plot of land and let it lie fallow so a new forest might seed itself saying,
‘ I am certain that in every fallow place a new life is waiting to be born anew. And more astonishing yet, that new life will come whether one wills it or not. ….New seed will fly in on the wind and it will keep arriving, giving many chances for change of heart, return of heart, mending of heart and for choosing life again at long last….’
So please bring your images, stories and inspirations and help us grow the vision and support resilience in the world.
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