TIGblogs - Brian Smith's TIGBlog

The beckoning of lovely

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:10:00 EDT

Belonging, Jean Vanier

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:10:00 EDT

My vision is that belonging should be at the heart of a fundamental discovery: that we all belong to a common humanity, the human race. We may be rooted in a specific family and culture but we come to this earth to open up to others, to serve them and receive the gifts they bring to us, as well as to all of humanity.

- Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, p. 36

Community: The Structure of Belonging

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:07:00 EDT

I found this book review over at Curledup.com:

Peter Block is an inspirational thinker. To quote from his website, "Peter is the author of several bestselling books. The most widely known are Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (1st edition 1980, 2nd edition 1999), Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (1993), and The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work (1987). Peter is the recipient of the first place 2004 Members' Choice Award by the Organization Development Network, which recognized Flawless Consulting as the most influential book for OD practitioners over the past 40 years." In this latest work, Block has taken the word "community" and kneaded, massaged and squeezed it into extreme flexibility, so that it can compact itself into the microcosm or expand to fill the whole world.

Reading this book took me back to my days as a community activist, when the rage was the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. I was glad to note that Freire's name still crops up from time to time, along with that of philosopher E.F. Schumacher, both icons of an earlier generation of change agents. I'm intrigued to see that community action has not changed - that is, it is still hard to motivate people, and calls for constant shifts of language and even room arrangement to keep the energy flowing. Block wisely refers to America's urban centers as "New Orleans without the flood" and urges us not to become complacent just because our own lives are proceeding according to plan. There are still people in our country who are suffering and who need the assistance of dedicated activists. The distress and chaos "out there" is our responsibility.

Community is a how-to (bearing in mind that "the answer to how is yes," according to Block). It allows the potential activist to do a lot of self-winnowing - asking him/herself such questions as "to what extent are you here by choice," "what is the yes you no longer mean," and "what promises are you willing to make." This sets up any planned meeting with a greater chance of success. Block makes practical suggestions for how to plan a meeting - invite decisionmakers, money-raisers and experts as well as marginalized people who bring important news from the field. He reminds us that we are all citizens of our country but also of our community, and we need to take that responsibility seriously. While many sincere people perceive needs and want to help, they will have to galvanize their vague aspirations and work with a collective gestalt in order to achieve concrete goals.

Here is one example of the radical way that Block approaches the issue of community building: "We need to tell people not to be helpful. Trying to be helpful and giving advice are really ways to control others. In community building we want to substitute curiosity for advice. No call to action." It is input like this that makes Block's work so groundbreaking and, among serious community workers, so popular.

In order to transform our communities, we have to be willing to transform ourselves. For some this will be relatively easy - a quick shift in inner orientation - and for others it will require more deep trenching. In a profound sense, aspiring to improve our environment and assist our neighbors requires that we improve ourselves. That is the challenge of community and the rallying cry of Community.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Barbara Bamberger Scott, 2008

Tamarack's survey on Belonging

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:07:00 EDT

The Tamarack Institute is a truly rich resource for those of us working in community. They recently surveyed 501 people and asked them the question: What does belonging mean to you?

Below is the leader story from Tamarack's site and pdf file with all the reponses.

462 people responded to the question: What does belonging mean to you?

Jean Vanier says that belonging does for human beings what soil does for plants: it nurtures us, and enables us to grow and to blossom.

That’s certainly what came through in the survey responses.

“Belonging,” wrote one respondent, “means feeling safe to be who you are without fear.”

Most of all, belonging is about being – it’s about sense, emotion, relationship - it is at the essence of where we all want to be. It’s a place and a feeling we yearn for. And, when we feel as though we belong, we are in community.

As Paul [Born] continues his research and writing for his forthcoming book Seeking Community - Finding Belonging in Chaotic Times, he’ll share his thoughts on his blog. Join him there, or email Tamarack, with your responses and thoughts on belonging.

Jean Vanier on Belonging

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:07:00 EDT

Belonging

The longer we journey on the road to inner healing and wholeness, the more the sense of belonging grows and deepens. The sense is not just one of belonging to others and to a community. It is a sense of belonging to the universe, to the earth, to the air, to the water, to everything that lives, to all humanity. If the community gives a sense of belonging, it also helps us to accept our aloneness in a personal meeting with God. Through this, the community is open to the universe and to humankind.

Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 17

Challenges for Changing Times

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:06:00 EDT

From BC Healthy Communities:

Closing my eyes, I hear my grandmother’s voice: I just don’t understand what’s happening in the world – it’s going a little crazy! Everything is changing! And it’s all happening so fast! Then I hear my own sixteen-year-old voice rising in reply: Yes, isn’t it great?

Change is like that – welcomed by some, resisted by others. But change is a constant in our lives. As Heraclitus noted centuries ago, “everything flows, nothing stands still” … “nothing
endures but change.” So, if change is ever present, how do we learn to not only welcome and embrace it, but to intentionally cultivate healthy change? How can we invest our time and resources in those areas where healthy change can most productively flow and grow? And what are the most effective levers for healthy change? ...

The Time Traveller’s Lament
To understand some of the changes that have occurred since my grandmother’s time, I need
look no further than the community in which I grew up. In so many ways – socially,
economically, environmentally, culturally – my community has changed. Although it occupies
the same geographical space, with familiar roads and buildings, mountains and monuments, my
local community is just not the same place in which my grandmother and I had our earlier
conversation. Time has travelled on.

And we continue to notice life around us growing a little faster, a little crazier, a little more
complex. We’ve all heard a familiar response to these changes, a refrain that laments the loss
of community. Wanting to fill the gap, some folks look to an earlier time, the “good old days”
when neighbours were known, when work was close to home, when help was just around the
corner. Others look for connectedness a little further from home, reaching beyond the bounds of
geographical community, forging friendships in far-away places. Aided by the internet and other
technological innovations, for example, social, economic, interpersonal and professional
connections now stretch across the world.

While we pride ourselves on global citizenship, however, we don’t necessarily know the
neighbour next door. We pay rapt attention to political events in other countries. We adapt our
consumer habits, knowing that rampant fuel consumption in certain parts of the world threatens
food security elsewhere. We endeavour to influence the policies of developing countries, caring
deeply about the health and well-being of other global citizens. To some it may seem that we
know and care more about what is going on half-way round the world than we do about events
and people here at home.

But while the ways we connect with others may be changing, let’s not be so quick to lament the
loss of local community. Perhaps our approach to community is merely in transition. Perhaps
our needs for community, and our search for meaning and connection within community, are
growing and changing as we grow and change.

The Seeds of Global Compassion are Sown at Home
Here’s one way to look at it: While acknowledging that this is a world of great diversity, there is
something that all humans have in common, no matter which corner of the globe we call home.
Everyone in the world lives in a local community. No matter how different the details of our lives,
no matter how far our travels may take us, no matter how temporary our current location might
be, living in local community is a characteristic we all share.

No matter where it’s situated on this earth, local community not only influences our health and
well being, it also shapes our development. Local community is where we learn about
ourselves, and about other people. Local community is where we learn to take our first steps
toward independence and, hopefully, toward self-authoring adulthood. Local community is
where we learn to build relationships with an ever-widening circle of people, and to consider
ever-widening points of view. Local community is where we learn about the social, cultural and
economic foundations of our society, and experience the ways in which our decisions and
actions affect other people and the environment. Not surprisingly, everything we learn shows up
in our approach to neighbourliness, to environmental sustainability, to community engagement,
to governance. It shows up as our capacity to build healthy community.

Furthermore, local community is where we sow the seeds of global citizenship. It’s where we
sow the seeds of global responsibility and global response-ability. While responsibility has a
moral and ethical connotation, signifying our accountability to others, response-ability is a little
different; it means an ability to respond.

According to economist Fred Kofman, response-ability describes the difference between people
who view themselves as “victims,” subject to forces beyond their control, and those who see
themselves as a “player.” The player, he says, “is in the game and can affect the result. … This
power to respond is a defining feature of humanity .Our response-ability is a direct expression of
our rationality, our will, and our freedom. Being human is being response-able.”1 Each of us has
the potential to be a player – a contributor, a self-authoring adult, a citizen, an agent of positive
change. Our capacity as global citizens is highly correlated with our capacity as local citizens to
be response-able, or able to respond. In this way, active engagement in local community is the
incubator for global compassion and care. Practicing response-ability in our own back yard not
only builds our capacity for global response-ability, it supports each of us to stretch toward the
peak of human potential.

People. Place. Potential.
This now familiar tag line is a key element of the BC Healthy Communities logo. But what does it
mean? Community, we know, is more than a mere collection of people. And community is more
than shared geographical space. At conferences and in classrooms, the University of Manitoba’s
Ian Wight promotes a reintegration of people and place, suggests that “place-making,” in which
planners and community members creatively and collaboratively co-design the physical and social
aspects of cities and towns, just might be the next frontier in community planning.

This fits with my own perspective that people and place are inseparable elements of community-
building. But how does potential fit in?

One way we can think about potential is to consider human needs. Community, whether it is
found locally or globally, offers opportunities for each of us to have a couple of important needs
met. The first need is to belong – to feel connected to others and to feel part of something larger
than ourselves. The second need is to contribute, to play our part in community building, in
place-making, ensuring that others have the opportunities and resources that enable them to
belong and contribute as well.

But there is a third human need that begs our attention: healthy human development. This
need, perhaps less well known in community contexts, is each individual’s need to develop, to
self-actualize, to reach our full potential. We know that children develop. But ample research
shows that adults also have the potential to continue developing throughout their lives. Harvard
University’s eminent developmental researcher Robert Kegan calls this the “hidden curriculum
of adult life.”3 There is much evidence that adults not only have the potential to develop, but
that our very health and well-being depend on it. In adults, as in children, the failure to develop
is the failure to thrive.

Why is this important for community-builders? Think about it. We know that an important aspect
of community is to develop systems and structures that serve the entire population. It is a task
taken on by local elected officials, planners, policy makers, health professionals and
administrators, and committed groups of engaged citizens, seeking positive changes that build
healthy community. The issues are many: housing, food security, employment, the economy,
health amp; community services, education amp; literacy, the justice system, environmental
sustainability, and healthy public policy - to name but a few. And, ideally, the people working so
hard to address those issues have already successfully negotiated much of the developmental
curriculum of adult life. Ideally, their cognitive development, their emotional development, their
values development, their moral amp; ethical development, their interpersonal development –
again, to name but a few – is stretching toward the higher levels of human capacity since this
will be reflected in the policies and systems that shape our shared lives in community.
My colleagues and I often use a simple three-level framework to demonstrate adults’ potential
for development. In this framework, the first level is called selfcentric – here, my focus is on
getting my own needs met; I’m not yet very skilled at taking into account the needs of others.
You may also recognize this level as “egocentric.” We all know children who are at the
selfcentric level – for a kid, it’s developmentally appropriate to be egocentric. But when I ask
groups if they know any adults still negotiating this level of development, heads nod. You may
know some too.

The next level is sociocentric (or ethnocentric). Research shows that most people in the world –
including Canadians – are still negotiating this level of the developmental curriculum – in at least
some important areas of their overall development. But there is evidence that ever-increasing
numbers of people are shifting their perspective to the worldcentric level, gaining the capacity to
express care and concern for all life. This is good news for both local and global citizenship
since, not surprisingly, responsibility and response-ability are going to look different at each
stage of development.

Community development is an important contributor to human development. Building healthy,
thriving communities helps to foster healthy, thriving people. And vice versa. For a community to
stretch toward its fullest potential, we need to engage our best thinking, our deepest values, our
highest morals and ethics, our greatest capacities to solve complex problems. As more of us
reach the worldcentric level of development, we expand our capacity to express care and
concern for all people, in all contexts, not only in our own community, but all over the world.

Developing Community, Developing Ourselves:
The Challenge of Change
When I ask community change agents what draws them to this kind of work, and what sustains
them when the going gets tough, I hear a common response; “We want to change the world,”
they say. But, increasingly, community developers understand that their own development is an
important part of the change equation. They understand that Gandhi’s advice to “be the change
you want to see in the world” applies as much to our own inner development as our actions in
the world. It’s not just what we do. It’s also how we be. And what we’re becoming.

We are becoming the change we want to see in the world. Evidence can be found in our expanding
capacity to make meaningful connections with people who live on the other side of the country, or
the other side of the world. Let’s celebrate that capacity, knowing that the ability to engage with
people much different than ourselves is a reflection of healthy growth and development in our
mental models, our values, our worldviews. It’s a reflection of our growing ability to take diverse
perspectives into account. And it’s a reflection of our growing capacity for care and compassion for
all people, despite our myriad differences. With this capacity we are catalyzed to offer help when
war and famine cause children to starve, when tsunamis, cyclones and earthquakes shatter lives
on the other side of the globe. This is a good news story. And it’s our emerging story.

Which leads me, once again, to the questions posed at the beginning of this paper: how do we
learn to not only welcome and embrace change, but to intentionally cultivate healthy change?
How can we invest our time and resources in those areas where healthy change can most
productively flow and grow? And what are the most effective levers for healthy change?

In response, I offer six propositions for consideration:
1. Adopt a comprehensive and inclusive orienting vision for fostering positive change:
I suggest the orienting vision of “healthy people in healthy communities.”
2. Invest in community development as a practical way to foster healthy people in healthy
communities. Community development is a vital element of health promotion and prevention
– affecting health and well-being throughout the country, the continent, the world.
3. Pay attention to the multiple and interconnected determinants of health: social,
economic, environmental, physical, psychological, spiritual and cultural. Community
building efforts are most effective and sustainable when they address “the whole person
in the whole community.”
4. Also pay attention to multiple and interconnected dimensions of change: again,
social, economic, environmental, physical, psychological, spiritual and cultural. And,
again, addressing the whole person in the whole community.
5. Make response-ability both a personal and a community capacity building goal.
6. Pay attention not only to fostering health and well-being, but also healthy human
development. Set a goal to become a developmentally–attentive community.

For community leaders, capacity-builders, health professionals, policy makers, and engaged
citizens committed to cultivating healthy change - the challenge ahead is personal, local and
global. As individuals, we can and must be the change we want to see in the world. To be
effective we must pay attention to our own development as well as that of our community.

And, together, as a community, we can also be the change we want to see in the world. In fact,
grassroots community building – addressing all of the factors affecting people, place, and
potential – has never been more important than it is today. By building healthy local community,
we foster health, well-being and healthy development in all of our citizens. And, paradoxically,
by building healthy local community we can indeed change the world.

Are we up for this challenge?
Tam Lundy
May, 2008

Finding Belonging in Gaming

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:06:00 EDT

Posted on Wednesday, June 11 @ 06:21:47 PDT @ Worth Playing:

A survey conducted by Information Solutions Group, revealed tens of millions of disabled consumers have gravitated to "casual" video games as a source of relief or distraction from their infirmities, as well as a sense of accomplishment or belonging.

According to the survey, more than one in five (20.5%) players of casual video games have a physical, mental or developmental disability; this compares to 15.1% of the American population overall who are disabled, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Over three quarters of the more than 2,700 disabled consumers who participated in the study described their disabilities as "moderate" or "severe," and the benefits to, and methods of play by, disabled gamers vary considerably from those of non-disabled casual gamers.

Compared to the casual gamer population as a whole (which industry estimates peg at 300 million to 400 million players worldwide), those with disabilities play more frequently, for more hours per week, and for longer periods of time per gaming session. They also report that they experience more significant benefits from playing and view their game-playing activity as a more important factor in their lives than do non-disabled consumers.

A total of 13,296 casual game players responded to the survey, with 2,728 respondents (20.5%) identifying themselves as "mildly" (22%), "moderately" (54%) or "severely" (24%) disabled. Of those, 46% indicated that their primary disability was physical, 29% said it was mental, and 25% stated they had a developmental or learning disability. Over two thirds (69%) of disabled respondents were female, and a third (35%) of all respondents had another person -- parent, adult offspring, spouse, guardian or caregiver -- assist them in taking the survey.

The most common types of disabilities and medical conditions cited by respondents, by category, were:

Physical: Rheumatoid Arthritis/Osteoarthritis (14%); Fibromyalgia (11%); Multiple Sclerosis (7%).
Mental: Moderate/Severe Depression (41%); Bipolar Disorder (16%); Anxiety Disorder (15%).
Developmental/Learning: ADD/ADHD (46%); Autism (15%); Dyslexia (11%).
The majority (61%) of those survey respondents with a physical disability are age 50 or older, while slightly more than half (52%) of those with a developmental/learning disability are under 18 years of age.

Fully 94% of disabled players of casual games said they believe playing casual games "provides physical or mental benefits" -- compared to 80% of casual game players overall. The most common benefits cited by disabled gamers (when asked to choose as many as applied) were stress relief (81%), mood lifting (69%), distraction from issues related to disability (66%), improved concentration (59%) and mental workouts (58%). Interestingly, the top benefits varied significantly based on the type of disability; the top three benefits by disability type were:

Physical: Stress relief (84%) and distraction from issues related to disability (73%)
Mental: Stress relief (87%) and mood-lifting (78%)
Developmental/Learning: Improved concentration (79%) and improved coordination/manual dexterity (73%)
Those with developmental/learning disabilities cited learning (pattern recognition, spelling, typing skills) far more often (61%) than those with disabilities that were mental (26%) or physical (23%).

Furthermore, 77% of disabled players said playing casual games provides them with "additional benefits over and above what a typical non-disabled player might experience."

Of the "additional benefits," responses were numerous and varied, often citing deeper sensations of achievement and "belonging," or distraction from loneliness and/or chronic pain. As one respondent put it, "Our son with Attention Deficit Disorder does not really remember he has a disability when he is playing." Dr. Carl Arinoldo, a Stony Brook, New York-based psychologist of 25 years' experience who has treated patients with a range of physical and mental disabilities, agrees: "With some forms of depression, a person may be very focused on something that clearly amounts to a misperception of reality. So the chance to distance themselves from the perceived negative situation and relax may allow them to think more clearly and consider the situation later in a more realistic manner."

Gary Robinson, a 58-year-old North Carolina resident with severe physical disabilities, states "Games like Bejeweled and Peggle, with simple controls that are also mentally challenging and engaging are ideal for me, because my mind moves as quickly as the next guy's but I type with a mouth-stick. In some ways, games like these are the greatest thing that's appeared on the computer scene for people like me."

Among all disabled gamers, nearly two thirds (64%) said they play casual games every day, and an additional 28% play several times per week. By comparison, 57% of casual game players overall say they play daily. In terms of time spent playing, disabled gamers are more "avid consumers" than the average casual game player:

60% of disabled gamers play casual games for five or more hours per week, (vs. 52% of casual gamers overall)
40% of disabled gamers play for 10 or more hours per week (vs. 29% of overall casual gamers)
24% of disabled gamers play for 16 or more hours per week (vs. 13% of overall casual gamers)
Gary Robinson estimates he spends four or more hours each day playing casual games. "Let's just say that playing the games helps my whole well-being; sometimes they give me a direct and immediate purpose in life, and that's an important sensation to have every so often."

When asked to choose the single most frequent time for playing casual games, 26% of survey respondents with physical disabilities, and 29% of those with mental disabilities, indicated "late at night, before bed," compared to just 11% of those with developmental/learning disabilities. The latter group indicated weekends (30%) was the time they played most often. This is presumed to be due to the large number of children in the category.

Almost half (44%) of all disabled gamers indicated that they had recommended playing casual games to others with significant disabilities, and more than a tenth of respondents (11%) said that a "physician, psychiatrist, physical therapist or other medical professional had prescribed or recommended playing casual games as part of the treatment" for their disability.

As for solitary versus companion game play, 44% of disabled gamers said they played casual games with other people at least part of the time. Of those, more than one in four (28%) said they played casual games with other disabled individuals. Among respondents with developmental/learning disabilities specifically, 60% said they played casual games with other people.

When asked to pick their favorite categories of casual games, disabled gamers' choices closely mirrored those of non-disabled players, with "puzzle" (84%), "word and trivia" (61%) and "arcade" (59%) being the three most-cited genres. "Card" (54%) and "hidden object" (51%) games rounded out the top five categories among disabled gamers.

Only 26% of disabled casual gamers said they also play traditional, "hardcore" video games; among those respondents with physical disabilities specifically, that figure dropped to 18%. Among all disabled gamers who also play hardcore games, 25% said they played hardcore games on a daily basis -- compared to 64% who play casual games daily.

This international research was conducted by Information Solutions Group (ISG; http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com) for PopCap Games. These results are based on online surveys completed by 2,728 respondents randomly selected between April 2 and April 17, 2008. In theory, in 19 cases out of 20, the results will differ by no more than 1.9 percentage points from what would have been obtained by seeking out and polling all PopCap.com users. Survey subjects were presented with exhaustive lists of various types of disabilities by category in order to assist in accurately categorizing themselves. For the purpose of this survey, a disabled person is defined as one who has a significant medical condition or a physical, mental, developmental or learning impairment/disability. This includes, but is not limited to, medical conditions that affect mobility, vision, hearing and learning. It also includes chronic diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome; mental disorders, such as depression or anxiety; and developmental disabilities, such as ADD/ADHD (recently re-diagnosed as AD/HD -- Predominantly Inattentive Type), dyslexia and autism.

Friends

Wed, 21 May 2008 09:05:00 EDT

We spend our free time with friends. We can relax with them and allow our masks to fall. It is all right to be ourselves and we can do what we like, we are not constrained by rules. But friendship also implies commitment. A true friend feels responsible for his friends, during bad times as well as good, in success and failure, humiliation and sorrow. So there is commitment. Friendship without commitment is not true friendship.

- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 173

PREVNet's 3rd Annual Conference: Creating a World Without Bullying!

Sat, 17 May 2008 10:05:00 EDT

Join us in Toronto for PREVNet’s 2008 conference this May 28-29. There will be 24 educational workshops, keynote presenters, and many opportunities to meet and interact with Canada’s foremost researchers and national community organizations dedicated to bullying prevention and promoting safe and healthy relationships. Space is limited, so register today! Conference fees are $200 CAD (tax included) on or before April 25th and $250 CAD (tax included) after April 25th.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact PREVNet's Administrative Coordinator at: 613-533-2362 or 1-866-372-2495 or via email at: prevnet@queensu.ca.

At Home Where I Belong

Fri, 09 May 2008 09:05:00 EDT

This is borrowed from M.L. Gallagher over at http://recoveryourjoy.blogspot.com/:

One of the many things I love about C.C. is he enjoys entertaining as much as I do. Last night was no exception. We were eight for dinner. My sister J.T. and her husband, and two other couples.

The evening began with a bang when one of the guests sat on an antique wooden chair and it collapsed beneath him. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt though he did have to put up with our laughter and teasing for the rest of the evening. He managed to do it with equanimity and grace -- though he did keep repeating everything he said three times!

What struck me last night was the sense of familiarity. As though that scene was one I'd experienced many times in my life. It felt like a place where I belong.

Belonging and what it means -- to Be and to Long for something -- has always fascinated me. My parents' nomadic lifestyle uprooted us several times, two of them across the Atlantic to distant shores. For my mother, those journeys took her to a place where she found her 'belonging', at home amidst her familial roots, at home with the language and culture of her birth. I've often wondered where my father found his sense of belonging. At the age of nine he was 'sent away', across the sea and further yet across Canada to Gravelburg, Saskatchewan where he attended a Jesuit school. It was a long way from his home in London. For a child, that uprooting left him without family, without a home where he belonged. Perhaps that is why he held his family so close to his heart. He filled his longing for belonging in the familial structure he had never known growing up.

John O'Donohue, Celtic poet, scholar and philosopher speaks to what he calls the deepest calling of our soul: the longing to belong, in his book, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. He says, "To be human is to belong. Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature. The word 'belonging' holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: Being and Longing, the longing of our Being and the being of our Longing."

In the Tao, everything is connected to everything. As humans, we are connected through the act of creation and the rites of passage we must all travel to come into this world. We arrive, unaware of the importance of our being part of the human race, of the significance of our soul's journey in relation to the world around us. As we grow, we begin to find the meaning, or maybe not, in our journey. We begin to understand our soul's yearning for belonging and look for ways to soothe the ache of not always knowing where we belong.

Sometimes, we know little of what we must do to feel like we belong because we've never known a sense of belonging. And sometimes, in our attempts to break free of places where we don't belong, we carve out our own unique place in the world that keeps us apart and unsettles our belonging. We can't see in our struggle that where we belong is not dependent upon where our roots were set, or where our familial bonds kept us captive. Where we belong is where our spirits find peace and comfort. Belonging is not a place. It is the spirit's voice within us, calling us home to our soul's journey back to where we were always meant to be, back home within ourselves.

One of the couples last night spoke of their roots set deep into the prairie soils generations ago. T.A.'s family came to these lands as homesteaders four generations ago. D.A. doesn't question how deep her roots are. As far back as the family stories are told, her family has always lived upon these lands.

Deep roots. A known sense of belonging. A being at one with the lands that support her, ground her and give her life rich and vibrant meaning.

As I sat at the table with evening light deepening into night, candle light casting a golden glow upon the smiling faces gathered around me, I felt my belonging settle into knowing.

This is where I belong. Gathered around a table laden with food and wine and surrounded by loving people. A place where friends meet to exchange stories and laughter. A place where caring for each other deepens as we see each other in the light of friendship strengthening with our shared experiences.

In creating an environment for others to find a place where they belong, a place to come home to for however long they stay, my longing to be accepted is soothed, my yearning for belonging eased.

It is here I belong, in this place called home, a place where I am free to be me, in all my beauty, warts and all. A place where C.C. and I grow together as our unique and individual journey homeward frees us to be all we're meant to be. As we create memories that belong to the unique story of our love growing ever deeper, we become rooted in the truth of who we are, together and apart.

This is my place to belong. My place to come home to. This is my soul's journey into love with all I am and all I can be when I am at home where I belong within me. It is here that love grows. It is here I belong.

The question is: Are you at home longing for belonging, or have you come home to the wonder and joy of being right where you belong?

Belonging in the DTES: 100 men and women love me for me

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:05:00 EDT

"So one day after my divorce I'm sitting and thinking, oh my god, what's going to happen if I go to hell because nobody loves me? So I made a wish. I said please let me be somewhere where a hundred people will say I love you. And it was here [Downtown Eastside of Vancouver]. Everyday somebody says I love you or people on the street blow me kisses or touch their heart, you know, from across the street and these are signs that mean I love you. I don't know what I did to my parents for them to hate me, but let me tell you this: being here, around people that love me is everything. I'm probably going to die alone, but I know that one hundred men and women love me for me. I tell you, this is the place I got my wish." Helen Hill (bottom)

Altruism: Part Two

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:04:00 EDT

An Interview with Dr. Pamela Cushing

This issue explores the theme of altruism with particular
reference to L’Arche as a kind of laboratory for what we might
learn about it. L’Arche is built on the altruism or generosity of
the many young volunteers who come as assistants to share life
with people with developmental disabilities in its homes and
programs. These young people accept a lifestyle that is radically
different from their peers who are not in L’Arche. They come
for a year, or two, and some stay much longer. What motivates
and sustains this kind of generosity?

Beth Porter – For your PhD research you interviewed over
100 L’Arche assistants across Canada. What did you learn
about altruism from them?...

Pamela Cushing – I anticipated that many assistants
would name altruistic motives as the reason they came to
L’Arche. In fact, most of them
were uncomfortable with the
term “altruism” and even strenuously
corrected me, saying in
various ways, ‘actually, for me
this is not about sacrifice. It’s
about living a full life.’ I was
struck by their thinking that if
they got something positive out
of the experience, this cancelled
the altruism in their initial motive. A massive American
study done by sociologist Robert Wuthnow suggests this pattern may be true of our culture in general.
He found even people who gave significant time to volunteering
were highly reticent about making altruistic claims,
preferring to attribute their actions to personal satisfaction
or happenstance. I think there’s danger in negating altruism
as part of their motives. Pure altruism is rather rare.
I discovered a blend of motivating elements in each assistant’s
story: 1) an altruistic impulse; 2) self-interest – an expectation
of growing and learning by giving of themselves, or an
expectation of adventure through living in a different country
and with new people; and 3) a pragmatic element – coming to
L’Arche made sense at the time. These motives didn’t usually
function as discreet variables but worked in concert.
One assistant said he saw L’Arche as a practical setting in
which he could embody what he believed from his faith and his
studies but had not been able to live out in a university setting.
He saw ‘doing good’ – being altruistic – as part of his identity,
and being a L’Arche assistant gave him a context to live this
identity. Another assistant had been involved in community
service but then went through a period of what she called
“chaotic, destructive self-indulgence.” She said, “I felt L’Arche
could be the moral compass I needed.” It could help her return
to the person that she wanted to be, which included serving
others. In both these stories self-interest and altruism are in a
productive tension, the fruit of which can be healthy service in a
context where the caregiver’s awareness of what is being
received enhances the dignity of the service.
What discourages altruism among young people?
Indifference, and cynicism. When young people are recognized
and rewarded in an interpersonal, social way, not just by
adults but by their peers, for other knowledge and other experiences,
that dampens their desire to be part of social change. If
everyone in your Facebook network is discussing the best songs,
latest parties, and blogs, you are not going to get much recognition
for trying to talk about your latest volunteer venture.
Cynicism is a seductive attitude because it
allows us to be passive. It feeds hopelessness by making problems
seem so big and systems so impervious to our resistance
that we allow ourselves to do nothing at all.
How can these negative influences be countered and altruism
nourished?
There are some encouraging attempts to address these attitudes,
either through giving young people opportunities for
practical action that is valorized, or through research that
relates, for instance, to character education. In the latter area,
the Templeton Foundation funds a number of studies that
examine, for example, how goodness and personal and social
responsibility are nurtured in young people, and how competence
in ethical and moral reasoning is developed.
Part of the magic I observed at L’Arche is that it gives assistants
the needed relational context in which their compassion
or generosity are recognized. Assistants talked a lot about the
importance of being part of a community of support that
includes the people with developmental disabilities. There are
those little moments where you can decide to do the bare minimum
or you can decide to do more. Part of us wants not to do
more. If your co-workers feel frustrated and don’t share the
desire that you have, it can be hard. Most individuals have a
very difficult time continuing to give unless they have a supportive
community around them that helps them feel nourished
and stay true to their ideals. This is especially important in
face of indifference from the broader society.
The ability to get behind the label and to come to know
the person – an ability children have – usually needs to be
relearned in adulthood. Knowing people is key. There’s no ‘the
disabled’ in a L’Arche experience. It’s Peter, it’s Roy. And then
you see they are just like you. L’Arche assistants acquire this
new learning within a powerful counter-cultural setting and
they often have a sense of having grown. This can be a strong
source of motivation. L’Arche regards such relations as normal,
and it needs to be careful in so doing, that it does not dampen
the assistant’s initial sense of radicalism and heightened awareness
of the social injustice to which people with disabilities are
subject in so many little ways.
Anthropologists are increasingly recognizing the importance
and complex diversity of the particulars within a culture, rather
than trying to find cultural universals that tend to gloss over
their internal differences. Sherry Ortner, for instance, says the
danger for social scientists is to see the ‘other’ as a category.
You have to see the other person as having the same mixed,
complicated motives and desires as you have, whatever their
ethnicity, class, education, ability, religion. One-on-one
exposure to others is a way to see people as human beings,
not bundled together and labelled.
In my own youth I had exposure to a lot of different people
through travel and volunteer work that my parents did. This
kind of experience helps counter stereotyping. Jay and I ask
ourselves as parents, are we doing enough to model service, to
introduce our child to those who are different, and to nourish
the roots of empathy.

13 Solutions Identified by Youth:

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:04:00 EDT

► Develop a language of belonging to inform the emerging dialogue on belonging
► Celebrate diversity in meaningful ways to foster a culture of intentional understanding
► Nurture leadership capacity among youth with disabilities who are eager to be ‘Ambassadors of Belonging’
► Create opportunities for belonging at the local level through community networks
► Cultivate strong, resilient and diverse relationships at all stages of life
► Organize team games and group activities to foster relationships based on a common goal
► Develop inclusive and accessible online technologies that reinforce face-to-face interaction without replacing it
► Encourage story telling as an effective way to develop understanding, acceptance and trust
► Focus on schools as a primary site for promoting a culture of inclusion and understanding
► Emphasize a spirit of commonality and integration rather than difference and segregation among community centres and Independent Living Resource Centres
► Invite family members to contribute and share in initiatives that celebrate youths’ abilities
► Commit to a dialogue on belonging that is proactive, intentional and long-term
► Recognize youth with disabilities as vital companions and guides on the road to understanding belonging

Becoming Human - Chapter 17 - Belonging Breaking Down

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:04:00 EDT

by Jean Vanier

Insecurity is, I think, at the heart of one of the great human dichotomies: the need for belonging and the need to be oneself, a real person, fully alive. In the fulfillment of the need for belonging, is a certain surrender of the self to the group, the community, the culture that provide a set of received truths. But to go further in the search human fulfillment and inner freedom we need to reflect on the certitudes of the group, even to question them and take the risk of going against the grain.

It is when we act as individuals, allowing our deepest selves to arise, that what I call the principle of insecurity is most evident: we choose to live a certain insecurity and question things held to be true. However, to be insecure in this way is also, I believe, an important quality for the group or community; the things the group holds dear can be a looked at, reflected on, questioned, and deepened, the better to find the truths contained therein. Let us look at this in more detail...

In many countries of the world, the family, the village, and the tribe still remain strong; people feel bonded to one another. This bonding gives security; people know what to do and what to believe. Elders or leaders have a real power and authority. If someone falls sick, they are looked after. But there are disadvantages to such strong bonding. Members of the community sacrifice their individual consciousness and freedom at the altar of security and unity, the altar of bonding. For some, this submission can cause pain, particularly for those who are young and ambitious, who do not want to be enslaved in ancient traditions and in the collective poverty that is embraced by many such communities. The human urge is to liberate ourselves from what we perceive to be oppressive belonging. We want to find freedom but we want to find it within some kind of structure.

Among humankind, the family represents the basic social unit. However, everywhere we look, this basic place of belonging is breaking down. Let me take the country where I live, France, as an example. In Paris, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce and in the rest of France, one out of three goes the same way. Statistics show that everywhere, more and more people are frightened of commitment.

And why is this happening? I believe it is because our Western societies have place the power, rights, and needs of the individual above those of the group. We have developed societies based on the principle of competition; people must work hard in order to succeed. Now, in a certain context, this can be healthy, particularly since a group can stifle both personal consciousness and freedom, as well as the development of one’s gifts and capacities. Competition stretches our capacities but a focus on individual values and rights can push us into a terrible loneliness.

This is a loneliness that can bring some people, especially those who feel ill-equipped to live in the competitive world or who have never truly belonged in a family, to the depths of despair, where they lose their sense of self and of meaning. This is a place of insecurity at its most profound, insecurity in its most negative aspect.

But this loneliness can also cause us to seek out new ways of belonging, in places where we are helped to find a meaning of our lives, places where we may live out an idea, where we may experience a true bonding with others. In the same way, this loneliness can cause us to search for new ways of bringing greater peace and justice to our society, to struggle with and for those who have been downtrodden, so that they may find an equitable place in society. This is a loneliness that will push some to seek new ways of healing the broken and those who cry out in pain; it will push others to seek truth and a new relationship with God.

A society based on the Darwinian "survival of the fittest," where we all fend for ourselves, has serious disadvantages. It promotes a strong, aggressive attitude and the need to win. It can paralyze the development of the heart, prevent healthy cooperation among people, and promote rivalry and enmity. It tends to marginalize those who are weak and even those who reject individualistic principles and want to live in and for a society based on truth and justice for all. In a society that encourages an ethics of economy, of winning, and of power, it is important to be admired. In such a society, an ethics of justice, solidarity, and cooperation, and ethics of the common good, can quickly fade into the background. Individual success is all that matters. How can Western societies encourage the development of personal consciousness, freedom, and creativity and, at the same time, help us to not fall into self-centered attitudes and motivations? How can we orient the development of the individual towards works of justice, the struggle for peace, and helping others to develop their gifts and find their place in society?

Airbrushing Away Diversity

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:04:00 EDT

'We often talk about embracing diversity in Canada, but ... true diversity, in the broadest sense, that's missing'

Bruce Ward
The Ottawa Citizen

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Sydney turned nine a few weeks ago, so now she's bugging her dad to get her ears pierced. Michael Shaw, her father, doesn't see that happening until she's older, but Sydney has a way of overcoming his objections. Little girls have that effect on dads.

Sydney attends the local elementary school in LaSalle, a Winnipeg suburb, she goes to birthday parties, tells jokes, and is a lot like every other kid. But Sydney is different. She has Down syndrome.

Had Michael known that Down syndrome was present before she was born, he and Leslie, Sydney's mother, would have terminated the pregnancy.

"I know there would be no Sydney, and that tears me apart now," he said. "She's a wonderful, joyous child."

Michael and Leslie, both university professors, wanted a perfect child who was bright and athletic.

"We got Sydney," he said. "She has enriched my life to a degree I didn't think was possible. She changed my whole focus on life, on what has value and what doesn't have value, and what we consider valuable. We don't all get to be Wayne Gretzky, and there's nothing wrong with that."....

When Michael accepted his daughter's special needs, he learned how to be a father.

But he worries that one day children like Sydney will be airbrushed out of our society because of their perceived imperfections. That's why he's on the board of the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS), an advocacy group concerned about the coming of broader prenatal testing in Canada and the implications for the future of Down syndrome children.

Until last year, only women 35 and older were routinely tested to determine if their fetuses had the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. As a result, many couples like Michael and Leslie got the diagnosis only at birth. (In a twist of fate, prenatal screening did show the condition was present in Sydney, but the doctor did not pass on the information. She thought the positive test result was incorrect because Leslie's age did not put her in a high-risk category for Down syndrome.)

In February 2007, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) issued new guidelines recommending that every woman, regardless of age, be offered noninvasive prenatal genetic screening.

There are some 35,000 people in Canada with Down syndrome. It is the most common genetic disorder, occurring once in every 800 births.

About 80 to 90 per cent of Canadian women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis choose to have an abortion. If the Down syndrome population continues to dwindle, there will be fewer people like Sydney -- and less funding for the services and support they require.

The CDSS says some doctors stress only the grim statistics and daunting challenges of raising a Down syndrome child in their discussions with couples facing a Down syndrome diagnosis.

"We would like to see information given to women in a fair and balanced and value-neutral way," said Krista Flint, executive director of the Down syndrome society. "We don't think that's the case currently -- we know that's not the case. Families involved with (the society) tell us regularly that that hasn't been their experience. The central message they receive is 'Don't have this baby, it could ruin your life.'

"There's certainly a social construct around the existence of disability that says people with disabilities are less valuable than those without disabilities." Ms. Flint feels that even the language inherent in the process of prenatal testing is to some degree biased.

"Screening means in and of itself to keep out that which is not wanted. I have yet to hear a family who have a child with Down syndrome describe their child as something they didn't want."

She stressed that the society is not involved with pro-life/pro-choice debates. But she suggested that the way women are provided with information about prenatal genetic testing tends to lead to termination.

"The obligation of the medical community, as well as organizations like ours, is to ensure that women have the opportunity to hear not just about the challenges of a life with Down syndrome but also about the richly rewarding lives that are possible for citizens with disabilities. And I don't think that happens."

Dr. Phil Wyatt, a member of the committee that drafted the guidelines for obstetricians and gynecologists, said the goal was to avoid a paternalistic attitude in providing "the best possible information upon which patients can make the best decisions for themselves.

"Many of these issues are complicated and complex and rather than taking the old-style approach -- 'We'll tell you what's good for you' -- we wanted to summarize the information on a scientific basis and make it available."

The SOGC's intent is to make sure people are "given unbiased information in the proper context about what conditions can be detected through prenatal screening, the impact both positive and negative they may have on women's lives, and to provide some assistance in helping them reach decisions that are best for them."

But what women are actually being told by their doctors is open to debate.

"I don't think any of us would disagree that there can be a wide variation in what various individual physicians say to various patients," said Dr. Wyatt.

Many women are waiting until their mid-30s or later to have their children, and prenatal testing becomes more significant for older mothers. When the mother is 25, the risk of a significant chromosome abnormality -- the most common being Down syndrome -- is one in 476 pregnancies. At age 35, the risk is one in 204.

Prenatal testing can also detect heart defects and cleft palate, which are not chromosomal abnormalities but are present in two to three per cent of pregnancies regardless of the mother's age. Knowing that a baby will be born with a heart problem means a cardiac team can be ready in the delivery room, for example.

The children born to Sydney's classmates may never know someone with Down syndrome. Yet as Michael points out, there has been no public discourse on prenatal testing, no debate in Parliament or in the legislatures across the country.

"We often talk about embracing diversity in Canada, but we mean cultural diversity. People of different abilities should be part of the Canadian fabric. True diversity in the broadest sense, that's missing."

The way Michael figures it, Sydney is not that different from the other kids in her class, or from her six-year-old sister Allison, who has no disabilities.

"The things that separate her from her peers are much less than the things that bring her together with her peers. She does all of the things a nine-year-old girl should be doing, and has the same wishes and desires."

Look, he says, the only difference between Sydney and the other girls in her class is a single chromosome. And a single chromosome is the difference between a boy and a girl.

"But we don't tell parents, 'Oh, we've identified your fetus as a female. She's more likely to be predisposed to breast cancer, she's more likely to be sexually assaulted and she's more likely to have a lower paying job.'

"Yet when the single chromosome is for Down syndrome the medical profession chooses to give a litany of what can go wrong when there's so much that can go right."

Those born with Down syndrome suffer from mild to moderate mental retardation and are at high risk for a variety of health problems, including congenital heart defects. But parents like Michael are undaunted.

"For the first time, we now see Down syndrome folks living into their 60s, holding jobs and outliving their parents. They're contributing to society. I often tell people my greatest goal for Sydney is that she be a taxpayer. And that's in the realm of possibility."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

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Tyze...looking forward to the launch!

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 06:03:00 EDT

A Wisdom so Beautiful

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:03:00 EDT

I marvel at some men and women who have suffered sometimes severe illnesses or handicaps, but who have gradually come to accept and embrace them. Several years ago I was invited to Montreal to meet men and women with physical handicaps. I had been asked to talk to them but when I met them I felt unable to speak until I had listened to them. I asked them to tell me their stories and how they had suffered. Each one explained the bitterness they had experienced. One said, "I had polio when I was seventeen. To begin with, my school friends supported me. Gradually, they stopped visiting me. Now I have no friends." One after another they talked about their pain and their anger with society. Then one woman with polio spoke up, "How can we criticize people in society for not accepting us if we fail to accept them in their non-acceptance of us?" Suffering had brought her to a wisdom so beautiful. She radiated love.

- Jean Vanier, Our Journey Home, p. 164

The Art of Living ... Youth Empowerment

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:03:00 EDT

I don't have personal experience with this program specifically, but can appreciate the sentiment and mission of the work:

The Art of Living Foundation was inspired by the programs of spiritual leader and humanitarian His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that began in 1982. It has been a nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational and humanitarian organization in the U.S. since 1989. Accredited as a United Nations Non-Governmental organization in 1996, it is now one of the UN's largest volunteer-based NGOs. It works in special consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council, participating in a variety of committees and activities relating to health, education, sustainable development, conflict resolution, and disaster relief.

Our Mission

To strengthen the individual and society by offering programs inspired by His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that eliminate stress, create a sense of belonging, restore human values, develop life to its full potential, and encourage people from all backgrounds to come together in celebration, wisdom, and service.

The Foundation engages in a wide array of educational and humanitarian programs that uplift individuals, make a difference in local communities, and foster global change.

"Disability is Natural"... or is it?

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:03:00 EDT

An excerpt from Biodiverse Resistance:

In a comment on another disability blog someone recently mentioned the website "Disability is Natural", so "naturally" i went to have a look at it...

I had actually seen someone wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Disability is Natural" and the red and green apple logo at 2 different disability events (i believe it was the Liberty Festival in London, either in 2005 or 2006, and the protests against the Welfare Reform Bill at the Labour party conference in Manchester in 2006), but hadn't realised it was a website. At the latter, i think i tried to argue with him about the slogan, but didn't get very far with it...

I see the point that the slogan is trying to make - that disabled people are a natural part of human diversity, and deserve to be accepted and accommodated rather than "cured" or eliminated, and of course I wholeheartedly support that - that's the basic foundation of the social model of disability. But the use of the slogan "Disability is Natural" betrays a clear lack of understanding of what the social model is truly about.

Under the social model, a clear distinction is made between impairment and disability, which the medical system and the individualised models it promotes conflate into one thing. Impairment is a physical or mental difference which prevents a person from being able to carry out daily activities considered "normal" for humans to be able to do - eg. standing/walking, seeing, hearing, feeding oneself, reading and writing, understanding verbal and non-verbal forms of communication as used by most people, etc. Disability is the lack of equality in society caused, not by impairments themselves, but by the failure or refusal of society to accommodate people with impairments - eg. by not making buildings accessible to wheelchair users, not providing information in formats accessible to people with visual or hearing impairments or learning disabilities like dyslexia, not allowing people who need help with personal care to have choice and control over what support they recieve, assuming that everyone "should" be able to understand all forms of communication in the same way, etc.

(It's worth noting that, while impairment is therefore something with a "concrete", outside-of-society existence, and disability something that exists because of and depending on social factors, what is and isn't an impairment is still contested, especially in the neurological area, where the distinctions between, for example, preferring one method of communication over another, and actually being unable to use one form of communication, get kind of blurred - and what constitutes an impairment still depends to some extent on what is considered "normal" for people to be able to do - eg. dyslexia wouldn't have been an impairment for many people in societies without widespread literacy. But this is a tangent...)

Physical and mental diversity is natural. Impairment is natural. But the social model states quite emphatically that disability isn't natural - it's socially constructed, and can be socially deconstructed. (It's also worth noting here that being socially constructed, despite what a lot of people seem to think, doesn't necessarily mean that something "isn't real". It's very real, but it's society and not nature that makes it real.)

Several quotes from the disability history page of the website make it clear that, when the author says "disability", ze actually means "impairment":

From the beginning, mythical perceptions and stereotypical attitudes have portrayed individuals with disabilities as different, aberrant, deficient, incompetent, and more. But like gender and ethnicity, a disability is simply one of many natural characteristics of being human... There have always been people with disabilities and differences in the world, and there always will be.

...

Some people are born with conditions we label as disabilities; others may acquire a disability through an accident or illness; and, if we live long enough, many of us will acquire a disability through the aging process. Disability does not discriminate!

...

But the problem never has been the disability; the problem is (and has always been) society's beliefs about disability. People with disabilities are not broken, and they don't need to be fixed!

Old attitudes and perceptions—not the disability itself—constitute the greatest obstacle facing people with disabilities. This attitudinal barrier may not always be visible to the naked eye, but it rears its ugly head across all environments and results in children and adults with disabilities being socially isolated, physically segregated, and excluded from the mainstream of American society.

Of course, in a social model understanding of the term "disability", "attitudes and perceptions" are "the disability itself"...

(edit: the author is Kathie Snow, who wants quotes to be attributed, and who is the non-disabled parent of a disabled son. I was kind of curious as to whether the author was a disabled person...)

Becoming Human - Chapter 1- Loneliness

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:03:00 EST

by Jean Vanier

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the liberation of the human heart from the tentacles of chaos and loneliness, and from those fears that provoke us to exclude and reject others. It is a liberation that opens us up and leads us to the discovery of our common humanity. I want to show that this discovery is a journey from loneliness to a love that transforms, a love that grows in and through belonging, a belonging that can include as well as exclude. The discovery of our common humanity liberates us from self-centered compulsions and inner hurts; it is the discovery that ultimately finds its fulfillment in forgiveness and loving those who are our enemies. It is the process of truly becoming human....

This book is not essentially about the formation and organization of society; it is not essentially political in scope. But since society is made up of individuals, as we open up to others and allow ourselves to be concerned with their condition, then the society in which we live must also change and become more open. We will begin to work together for the common good. On the other hand, if we commit ourselves to the making of a society in which we are concerned only with our own rights, then that society must become more and more closed in on itself. Where we do not feel any responsibility towards others, there is no reason for us to work harmoniously towards the common good.

Over the last thirty-four years, my experience has been primarily with men and women who have intellectual disabilities. In August 1964, I founded l’Arche: a network of small homes and communities where we live together, men and women with intellectual disabilities and those who feel called to share their lives with them. Today, there are over one hundred l’Arche communities in the world. Living in l’Arche, I have discovered a lot about loneliness, belonging and the inner pain that springs from a sense of rejection. Community life with men and women who have intellectual disabilities has taught me a great deal about what it means to be human. To some, it may sound strange for me to say that it is the weak, who have been my teachers. I hope that I can reveal a bit of what I have learned - and am still learning - about being human, and about helping others to discover our common humanity.

It was only in l’Arche that I really discovered what loneliness is. There were probably many times before l’Arche when I had felt lonely but until then I had not seen loneliness as a painful reality, maybe because I had succeeded in keeping myself busy by doing things. Perhaps I had never named it or needed to give it a name.

When I started welcoming those with intellectual disabilities into l’Arche, men and women from institutions, psychiatric hospitals, dysfunctional families, I began to realize how lonely they were. I discovered the terrible feeling of chaos that comes from extreme loneliness.

A sense of loneliness can be covered up by the things we do as we seek recognition and success. This is surely what I did as a young adult. It is what we all do. We all have this drive to do things that will be seen by others as valuable, things that make us feel good about ourselves and give us a sense being alive. We only become aware of loneliness at times when we cannot perform or when imagination seems to fail us.

Loneliness can appear as a faint dis-sease, an inner dis-satisfaction, a restlessness in the heart.

Loneliness comes at any time. It comes in times of sickness or when friends are absent; it comes during sleepless nights when the heart is heavy, during times of failure at work or in relationships; it comes when we lose trust in ourselves and in others. In old age, loneliness can rise up and threaten to overwhelm us. At such times, life can lose its meaning. Loneliness can feel like death.

When people are physically well, performing creatively, successful in their lives, loneliness seems absent. But I believe that loneliness is something essential to human nature; it can only be covered over, it can never actually go away. Loneliness is a part of being human, because there is nothing in existence that can completely fulfill the needs of the human heart.

Loneliness in one form is, in fact, essential to our humanity. Loneliness can become a source of creative energy, the energy that drives us down new paths to create new things or to seek more truth and justice in the world.

Artists, poets, mystics, prophets, those who do not seem to fit into the world or the ways of society, are frequently lonely. They feel themselves to be different, dissatisfied with the status quo and with mediocrity; dissatisfied with our competitive world where so much energy goes into ephemeral things. Frequently, it is the lonely man or woman who revolts against injustice and seeks new ways. It as if a fire is burning within them, a fire fuelled by loneliness.

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urges mystics to a deeper union with God. For such people, loneliness has become intolerable but, instead of slipping into apathy or anger, they use the energy of loneliness to see God. It pushes them towards the absolute. An experience of God quenches the thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxically, whets it; because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each and every human being as God loves them.

Loneliness, then, can be a force for good. More frequently, however, loneliness, loneliness shows other, less positive faces. It can be a source of apathy and depression, and even of a desire to die. It can push us into escapes and addictions in the need to forget our inner pain and emptiness. This apathy is how loneliness most often shows itself in the elderly and those with disabilities.

It is loneliness we find in those who fall into depression, who have lost the sense of meaning in their lives, who are asking the questions born of despair: What is left?

I once visited a psychiatric hospital that was a kind of warehouse of human misery. Hundreds of children with severe disabilities were lying, neglected, on their cots. There was a deadly silence. Not one of them was crying. When they realize nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.

Such loneliness is born of the most complete and utter depression, from the bottom of the deepest pit in which the human soul can find itself. The loneliness that engenders depression manifests itself as chaos. There is confusion and coming out of this confusion there can be a desire for self-destruction, for death. So, loneliness can become agony, a scream of pain. There is no light, no consolation, no touch of peace and of the joy life brings. Such loneliness reveals the true meaning of chaos.

Life no longer flows in recognizable patterns. For the person engulfed in this form of loneliness there is only emptiness, anguish, and inner agitation; there are no yearnings, no desires to be fulfilled, no desire to live. Such a person feels completely cut off from everyone and everything. It is a life turned in upon itself. All order is gone and those in this chaos are unable to relate or listen to others. Their lives seem to have no meaning. They live in complete confusion, closed up in themselves.

Thus loneliness can become such uncontrolled anguish that one can easily slip into the chaos of madness.

Let me tell you some stories, from my own experience, of the damage loneliness can create. I met Eric for the time in 1977. He was in the children’s ward of the local psychiatric hospital, 40 kilometres from the l’Arch community in Trosly, France. He was blind and deaf, as well as severely intellectually disabled; he could neither walk nor eat by himself. He came to l’Arche at the age of sixteen, full of tremendous needs, anguish, and fears. He often sat on the ground and whenever he felt someone close by, would stretch out his arms and try to clutch that person and to climb up on them. Once he succeeded in getting someone to hold him, his actions would become wild: he would lose control, struggling to be held and at the same time, jumping up and down. Holding Eric under these conditions became intolerable for anyone and, inevitably, it ended in a struggle, trying to get rid of him as he fought to remain held. He was someone who seemed to be living in immense anguish.

Anguish is inner agitation, a chaotic, unfocused energy. Anguish breaks sleep and other patterns and brings us to a place of confusion. To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefore unloveable. Loneliness is a taste death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget their inner pain.

Eric was a terrible lonely young man. He needed to be loved but his needs were so great that no one person could fulfill them. It took a long time in l’Arche before he found inner peace. Little by little, as he learned to trust those around him, he discovered he was loved.

By way of contrast, Pierre was the seventh child in a family of thirteen, a man who had spent seven years in prison. I met him in Montreal. He had run away from home when he was twelve years old because he felt unnoticed and unwanted by his family. So, for a long time he lived with gangs on the street. In his heart, Pierre was a lonely man who felt lost. He had no where to go, no meaning in his life. He needed a friend, a teacher, someone who could help him find himself and a sense of purpose.

When he was sixteen Pierre committed a crime, which I believe was a cry for help. He went to jail for it. While he was there, he fell in love with a woman who regularly visited the prison. They got married and his life took on a new meaning; he finally had someone and something to live for. It was the beginning of his process of becoming human, and it happened because he felt loved.

In our l’Arche communities we experience that deep inner healing comes about mainly when people feel loved, when they have a sense of belonging. Our communities are essentially places where people can serve and create, and, most importantly, where they can love as well as be loved. This healing flows from relationships - it is not something automatic.

I have come to learn that embodied in this approach there is an important principle: the necessity of human commitment to the evolution of the new, the necessity of accepting constant movement as the key to our humanity and as the only road to becoming truly human.

In Eric and Pierre, there were chaos and disorder. Yet in the midst of the chaos there was a way out. Are not all our lives a movement from order to disorder, which in turn evolves into a new order?

Haiku: Belonging #2

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:03:00 EST

One Deep Breath's prompt of belonging also brought out these poetic offerings...

From This Girl Remembers:
I hear a footstep
After a silent evening
You are home at last
-~-~-~-~-~
Cats curled on my lap
Each carefully ignoring
The other’s presence
-~-~-~-~-~
In conversation
I make the wrong reference
You know what I meant
-~-~-~-~-~
Watching a movie
The audience is quiet
Then two laughs ring out
-~-~-~-~-~
Two forks in the sink
Two spoons, two glasses, two plates
Four hands as we wash

From Tumblewords:
Winterland
White, wool, gloves, ice boots
Snow angels

And, from Ackworth born, gone west:

Balancing Complexities.

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:02:00 EST

I think this is a fairly well-balanced article from the Globe and Mail, November 3, 2007. First, here's a video from a Mom's perspective.

‘Autistics': We don't want a cure

ERIN ANDERSSEN

People stared from the moment they entered the drugstore: There's a brat with a bad mother, the looks said. Six-year-old Griffin Lambert insisted on going down every aisle, touching each item on the shelf, opening jars and breaking seals. His mom, Andrea Bradford-Lambert, tried to distract him in a quiet voice, but she knew he was tired from school.

At the checkout, Griffin was pushing the soap across the scanner too quickly for the price to register, and the frustrated cashier yelled at him. Griffin started screaming. “Once he's started a meltdown,” his mother sighs, “there's no going back.”

Helplessly, Andrea flashed the card she now carries in her wallet for these occasions: “My child has autism,” it reads. “He may communicate in ways that seem unusual to you.”...

The card doesn't always work, but this time the cashier apologized. “I felt vindicated,” says Ms. Bradford-Lambert, who lives in Barrie, Ont. “She was very nice to Griffin after that.”
Videos
Griffin

My child has autism

Andrea Bradford-Lambert sees her son Griffin, 6, as different rather than disabled
The Globe and Mail

At home, he reads books, uses words like “ubiquitous,” and recites facts with a photographic memory. But the shoppers saw only one side: When his mom finally dragged him out the door, Griffin was still hollering and trying to lick the ice-cream cooler.

Not long ago, families of kids with autism hid behind closed curtains to avoid public judgment. Today, card-carrying parents such as Andrea-Bradford Lambert want their children to be seen as different, rather than disabled.

They have been joined by an increasingly vocal group of adult autistics (as they prefer to be called) who say they do not want to be cured. They say autism should be seen as part of the “neurodiversity” needed to evolve smarter human beings, just as biodiversity helps life flourish on Earth.

Evolutionary advantages aside, their perspective also becomes a question of human rights: Who decides what kind of people ought to exist?

“We need to get away from the idea that there is only one optimal way to be human and that we all have to aim for that. You'd think we'd know better by now,” says Michelle Dawson, an autistic and a researcher at the Rivière-des-Prairies hospital in Montreal. Her work has shown the IQs of people with autism to be higher than previously believed.

Ms. Dawson asks, “Are a person's rights contingent on them having a certain kind of brain?”

The number of children being diagnosed with some form of autism is now roughly 1 in 150, a significant rise since 1980, although there is considerable debate over why.

Autism is diagnosed along a broad spectrum and manifests itself differently in each individual. Intellectually precocious children with social difficulties such as Griffin Lambert, who have Asperger's, a milder form of the disorder, are grouped together with kids who injure themselves and cannot speak, dress or wash on their own.

People with more debilitating forms of autism may never live independently. Others mingle within the “neurotypical” mainstream, perhaps seeming quirky but often contributing unique abilities.

Autistics and their families are not alone in challenging how society defines disability. The deaf community has debated whether children should be given implants to help them hear – some people argue that the implants leave them in limbo, cut off from deaf culture while still outsiders in the hearing world.

But the idea that the neurodiversity of human beings warrants the same protection – and even celebration – as, for example, racial diversity is a controversial concept, particularly for parents with a child at home who can't speak or hug them, who are fighting for publicly funded treatment for their kids, a prominent issue in the recent Ontario election.

Autistic activists such as Ms. Dawson are demanding new thinking about a disorder that has been called worse than cancer, a blight in a society that assumes abnormalities need fixing. The United States recently devoted $1-billion to “combat” autism, including research into genetic screening that might weed it out in vitro.

But definitions of normal have always shifted, autistic activists say, pointing to 1970s medical books that listed homosexuality as a disorder. In their view, forcing people with autism to be more neurotypical is like trying to make left-handers right-handed.

Some parents and autistic adults are eschewing words such as “disorder,” preferring to be called “differently wired.” They speak of an autistic heritage – Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, Wolfgang Mozart's music and even Microsoft. (Though Bill Gates has never said he has Asperger's, autism bloggers have diagnosed him on their own.)

Traditionally, autistics who cannot speak have been considered mentally delayed, but technology and research have proved otherwise. Amanda Baggs, a non-verbal autistic, has become a star on YouTube by using voice-dictation technology on her computer to produce a film about her life called In My Language. So far, it has been viewed by more than 300,000 people.

The movie shows her rocking back and forth, rubbing her face in a book, while humming one long note – her language, she says in the onscreen text in the film, is “about being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment.” Yet since she doesn't speak words aloud, people do not believe she is thinking: “They doubt I am a real person at all.”

Her writing is so articulate that some viewers accused her of feigning autism until she posted her medical records on her blog.

On the other hand, New Brunswick lawyer Harold Doherty has been accused of “endangering” autistics by detailing the life of his son, Conor, on his blog, and advocating for easier access to therapy. Conor, 12, has severe, low-functioning autism. He communicates verbally through sporadic shrieks and requires constant care; at school, he receives behavioural therapy in a separate room.

One afternoon, while his father was momentarily distracted on the phone, he wandered out the door and across a busy intersection. “He doesn't understand the risks of cars,” says Mr. Doherty, who worries that some day his son might be abused and unable to tell anyone. Conor often bites his mother and has pulled his father's arm away from the steering wheel while driving.

“But they don't like us to talk about that,” Mr. Doherty says. He believes that people who make the case for neurodiversity often trivialize autism and deny the difficulties faced by families with disabled children. People with Asperger's don't have any business telling him what kind of treatment his son needs, he says.

“Some of them are gifted. Great. But my son isn't. And many autistics aren't,” he says. “If I could cure my son with a wave of my hand, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

A fine balance

Tanya Stephenson sometimes lies on the floor with her son, Tyler, 5, and eyeballs marbles as they roll across the floor, stepping for a moment into the world as he sees it.

“You've just vacuumed your floor, you think it's pretty clean,” she laughs. “There's a little piece of paper here, and bit of food someone dropped there. So when the marble knocks into stuff, it goes in different direction. It is pretty cool.”

Tyler can lie there for hours with his face squashed to the floor, marble after marble. This intense concentration is a symptom of his autism diagnosis, which is medically defined by a string of letters – ASD/PDD-NOS, a designation that in itself speaks to the complications of defining autism. Within the autism spectrum, the acronyms stand for “pervasive development disability, not otherwise specified,” which means Tyler has some of the characteristics of autism, but, unlike Conor Doherty, not severely enough to be diagnosed as strictly autistic.

For a long time, Tyler didn't speak, and when he did, he echoed language that he heard, often quoting sayings from televisions shows in context. He used to sit for long spells staring at an empty space in the wall. His mom would wonder: Can he be happy doing that? “Maybe he saw something that I certainly couldn't see,” she says.

The Stephensons, who along with the Lamberts have helped form a Barrie, Ont., playgroup for families with autistic children, decided to try behavioural therapy, which uses intense repetition and modelling to teach language and life skills. Tyler gets 20 hours a week from a therapist. Recently, his parents taught him to hold a pencil by putting it in his hands 10 times a session, five times a day, for three days.

He now tells his mom that he loves her and gives hugs. “Maybe people will say, ‘Well, you taught him to hug you.' But isn't that what we teach all our kids?” Ms. Stephenson says. Her two other children, Jaymie, 7, and Tyler's twin sister, Hannah, are not autistic.

Each time they undo a behaviour that identifies Tyler as autistic, they wrestle with the choice. When he scores in a video game, for example, they have taught him to squeeze his hands together instead of flapping his arms wildly.

“And we debate this,” Ms. Stephenson says, “because if you're at a football game, you see some pretty wacky stuff happening when people are so excited because someone scores a touchdown. They look more odd than my son does. So why don't we try to squash that behaviour?”

In the end, while Ms. Stephenson knows that some autistics and families would criticize her for it, she wants Tyler to have a relationship with his parents, to enjoy the magic of his world while still participating in theirs.

“I am not trying to change that really unique part of him,” she says. “I am saying this is who he is, this is the way he is and if you understand him, you will find he can bring a pretty neat perspective.”

But how does that perspective get communicated, she asks, if he doesn't have the social skills to share it?

Many scientists are reaching a similar conclusion: Erasing all traces of autism might short-circuit human intelligence, potentially editing out the capabilities that create mathematicians, engineers and software designers.

A smart cure might instead tinker with the autistic brain, targeting the trouble spots while preserving its strengths – the ability to focus, to see detail sharply and to distill a complex environment into simple parts.

Some neuroscientists theorize that autism starts with a genetic glitch that skews the connections in the brain over time, improving some, but disabling others. If so, science may find a way to jump-start the stalled connections, possibly with drugs, without snipping the improved wiring.

“My hope is that we can find a way to have our cake and eat it too,” Cornell University neuroscientist Matthew Belmonte says. “That is, we can preserve those unique and very productive perceptual and attention capacities, but combine a way to share those gifts with the broader social world.”

Dr. Belmonte, who has a brother with autism, compares it to mingling at a cocktail party, surrounded by conversation but always thinking of that profound and pithy rejoinder 10 seconds too late, after the subject has already changed. “We've all had that experience,” he says. “Picture all of life being like that.”

The cure he envisions would allow what is profound and pithy about autistic thought to enter the conversation.

But even this approach raises unwieldy ethical and scientific complications: How does one safely “nudge” a child's brain? And if that child may grow up to be an adult comfortable and even proud of his autistic traits, who has the right to “tinker” in the first place?

The cultural perspective on autism, says Laurent Mottron, a prominent researcher at the University of Montreal, has been prejudiced by the way science views difference: When a person with autism performs a memory task as well as a neurotypical person, but using a different part of his brain, this is typically described as a deficit – not, as Dr. Mottron suggests, simply “a different way of being a human being.”

‘Yakkety-yaks'

While people promoting neurodiversity object to the idea of a cure, they are not opposed to technologies and other measures to help autistic people get by. However, they say the focus should be on helping autistics rather than making them more acceptable to “neurotypicals.”

In blog discussions, autistics sometimes even speak of themselves as a “superior species.” Neurotypical people get called conformists or, as one prominent autistic put it, “yakkety-yaks.”

A popular quote from Temple Grandin, an acclaimed American agriculture researcher and bestselling author with autism, describes the world if autism was eliminated: “You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”

The overtone that autism endows people with superpowers further fuels the tension between the parents of disabled children who want cures (some of whom, like Mr. Doherty, accuse the neurodiversity camp of being ashamed of its “lower-functioning members”) and adult autistics who say they would not want to be changed. The latter position is making its voice heard in literature and art.

In his new biography, Look Me in the Eye, John Elder Robison describes a difficult (although creative) childhood, of knowing he was odd without understanding why, and the relief of being diagnosed with Asperger's in his 40s. But in an e-mail, he makes it clear that while he respects the choices of others, he has no interest in being cured. “We need understanding and empathy,” he writes, “not a medical ‘cure.' ”

Back in Barrie, mothers such as Andrea Bradford-Lambert and Tanya Stephenson are busy with the practicality of raising boys with autism, also hoping that society will eventually understand and appreciate their sons for their strengths and weaknesses.

At a recent hayride to pick apples, their group shared the wagon with a seniors club. Ms. Stephenson informed them at the start to be prepared: “Our kids may act strangely. But they are good kids and we are good parents.”

Sometimes people just need to be educated. Soon, for instance, Ms. Bradford-Lambert will show her card to the mall Santa so Griffin can sit on his lap without bells being jingled in his face.

“I think we're moving a tiny bit closer to acceptance,” Ms. Stephenson says. “You can learn a lot of really cool things if you live and flow through different worlds. And who is to say that our world is the normal world?”

Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

CDSS National Conference Coming Up!

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:02:00 EST

151 More Ideas to Nurture Belonging: 143 - 151 Ideas

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:02:00 EST

Plan Institute hosts a week-long leadership training retreat each year and invites leaders from around the world to attend. Each of these leaders is interested in applying the model of social networks to address the aspiration of a good life for people whom are vulnerable to isolation and loneliness. This year the Institute invited The Belonging Initiative to host a dialogue with the leaders to explore contribution, citizenship and belonging.

The conversation was rich and many ideas were put forward to encourage our society forward in this work. We tried to harvest some of this inspiration, collecting 151 Ideas to Nurture Belonging and 90 Contributions and Gifts that connect people together - some of these will need a little interpretation on your part.

151 ideas to nurture belonging and citizenship
143. participation
144. follow the rules of the
145. celebrate difference
146. welcome each other
147. assist a refugee to adapt while holding on to their traditions
148. gain knowledge
149. cultural celebrations
150. sticking to the right side of the road
151. ethnic background ie cultural event/gatherings

Suicide and Social Networks

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:01:00 EST

It is very clear to me how the social networks that keep us safe, healthy and secure in our sense of belonging may share similarities with inline social networking sites such as myspace and facebook, yet differ in some profound ways also.nbsp; Here is an article by Rob Hyndman that speaks to the differences:

"Something in the Globe yesterday really stopped me short. It was an article by Andre Picard titled “Holidays, suicide and Hope” about the dynamics of suicide and holidays, especially Christmas. Picard was debunking the myth that suicide rates are higher at Christmas. Why? “Scientific research repeatedly points to the importance of social networks and the value of the age-old medicines called friendship and belonging” as having emotionally healing powers, and these tend to be more abundant during the holidays. “Hmmm, social networks”, I thought, “I wonder …”. Picard was obviously not writing about online social networks, but still …

But moments later, not so much, for what else did I learn from the Globe not one page away? It seems social networking causes suicides (or rather, it ‘opens the door’ to suicide, which is just a cop out, of course - a way of pretending to mean something without actually saying anything):

"But the popularity of these sites also opened the door to abuse and emotional trauma. People have been contacted by their high-school bullies, harangued for their opinions and attacked by anonymous masses. In one tragic case, a New Jersey mother set up a fake MySpace account that she used to psychologically torture a 15-year-old girl who eventually killed herself in despair. I know we’re all friends and all, but it may be time to replace Facebook with a little face time."

Got that? Not an opportunity to be included in a community of like-minded people; not an opportunity to enjoy “friendship and belonging”, not a possible cure for emotional trauma or for the damage caused by abuse, but something to be avoided. To be fair, the piece isn’t striving for much in the way of sociological observations - it’s shooting more for a sly, knowing pose, and it’s so much easier to hit that mark when you criticize something popular. (Bullying was a serious problem offline long before it appeared online, and it’s trite to point of infantile to observe that online bullying is inevitable, and not a function of online anything.) But still, it’s fascinating to me that for all of the brainpower involved in publishing a newspaper, they so often fail to make the interesting connections between the different bits of information they contain - here, only one page apart. Update: and again."