W2 Roots & Reaching

Week 2  Roots and Reaching with Julia Westwood

We are used to thinking of the self as something we can describe, a set of facts and traits we could list if asked. But there are aspects of a person that resist language altogether, and these are often the ones most worth meeting. This week we go looking for them, not through explanation, but through image.

This session is a guided creative exploration, an invitation to reflect on aspects of the self through the forms and systems of the natural world. There is a long human habit of seeing ourselves in living things, and for good reason. A growing thing is never a fixed portrait. It is a process, rooted in ground it did not choose, shaped by what has held it and what it has weathered, reaching outward in ways it is still discovering. To let an image like that stand in for yourself is to notice things the thinking mind tends to talk over: what grounds you, what you are made of at the core, how you reach toward the world and what you are reaching for.

Something happens when we make in this way. We stop composing an account of ourselves and start letting something truer surface. The hand moves ahead of the plan. What has been quietly held for a long time finds a form to live in, and in giving it that form we often loosen our grip on it, holding past and present together and seeing, sometimes for the first time, where we actually stand. For some this arrives as clarity. For others, a gentle opening. We do not prescribe the experience. We hold the space for it, and how far you go is up to you.

And there is a quiet truth folded into the whole exercise. Nothing in the natural world grows alone. A living thing is entangled below the surface with far more than itself, drawing on soil and water and light it did not make, part of a larger whole it could never be separated from. To see yourself this way, even for an evening, is to remember something we spend most of our lives forgetting: that we too are held in a web of relationship, that the self was never really sealed inside the skin. This is the ground the whole term is built on, and here it is, right at the beginning, waiting in the roots.

You do not need any experience with making, or any idea of what you are doing. You just need to be willing to arrive as you are and let your hand be guided by something other than the plan. Come and meet yourself from a new angle. You may be surprised who is looking back.

A note on prices and sustainability of the program

Our commitment is to make this program accessible to everyone in our community regardless of an individual's financial situation. However we don't want payments to be a barrier to participation in the program, if you are in financial hardship please reach out to Mowana and arrangements can be made.
We also strongly believe that our facilitators who dedicate their lives to their crafts should be fairly compensated for their services. If you can afford more than the minimum ticket price, your generosity will contribute to the program's ongoing sustainability.