I want to feel that warm spring air on my face and be back into spending hours everyday outside. My body is already tired of computers and winter. It has been quite a time these past few months since leaving northern MN for South Dakota. We have kicked into high gear while Milt finished the film (Video Letters from Prison,) and we have made plans to move permanently to Cass Lake. We had the chance to visit our straw bale house for a couple of days on this trip and it felt so right to be there. I walked around snow drifts dreaming the gardens into place, the large flower pots protecting my front door, the berry bushes putting on fresh green leaves.
As the winter has crawled by, our plans for Video Letters have bloomed. This film moves the heart in such a wonderful way that we’ve decided to form a confluence between my family constellation work and human development passion and this film. Our plan is to begin setting up facilitated screenings that will take 3-4 hours. We’ll do these intensives with all kinds of groups for the first year but always with the idea of introducing tools and ideas for strengthening the family. We’ve already done a few trial runs with a federal judge and his colleagues, a CD counselor and his prisoner re-entry group, a group of high school students, a group of artists, etc. Each time we do this we come away more clear on how we want to do this. It is a struggle to remember that we cannot “save the world” but that we can operate in small, steady steps to have some influence on the way the world is turning. I feel in the deepest part of my soul that it is the center that crumbles–and that center is the way we do family and basic communication. Too many have left important connections up to weak substitutes such as television and video games.
I hope to be spending more time on my blog from here on out. I am never actually sure who reads it so please leave a comment once in awhile so I will be encouraged to continue.
Jamie
I have been strangely absent from my blog for the past weeks. The new year came and moved in while I was still getting settled. So many things have been coming to us and we race to keep up. Milt’s film, Video Letters from Prison is getting a lot of movement now. The post production is done and it goes into the public broadcast system in June. In the meantime, we are discovering that this powerful documentary is indeed a way for us to finally talk about the heart and soul of the family. Today we met with a federal judge, a bunch of legal systems people and a juvenile judge. By the time they watched the film the women were all in tears. They really understood that without this core strength of the parents and the lineage, a child is much like a wingless bird. He cannot fly.
After the meeting, I went into a tailspin. Something about that meeting brought up all the memories of all the many ways I have tried to become an advocate for the young people. I was having flashbacks of my early years as a resource teacher in an elementary classroom for emotionally disturbed children. And the time I worked in a teen attention center. And the talk I gave last spring to 90 incarcerated youth. And the book I wrote about adolescence and my own children’s teen years. There is probably no stronger desire in me than to be able to somehow turn around this destructive cycle of children left to raise and fend for themselves somehow. When I wrote Albert’s Manuscript, (somewhere here in the mix and also at smashwords.com) I felt like the great spirit was talking to me and urging me forward. Albert learned that when children are treated well, they become weavers on the loom of the new world.
It would be sweet if the many lines of my life converged at last I could take a place of strength and voice and confidence in helping these lost ones. I believe it is what I came here to do and perhaps I have been too self-absorbed to get on it. When we showed Video Letters to a group of high school students in Lincoln, NE in late October of last year, a young man practically cornered me and wanted to talk about his own father. His sadness was like a scent that lingered around his young body. It hurts me to know how many just like him are out there trying to figure out this freaking world alone.
Milt recently read that swearing can bring down your blood pressure. I’m practicing that but won’t subject anybody to my experiment here.
So, in the coming weeks I will be exploring ways to create a toolkit that could be used by families, children, careworkers. We shall see what evolves. I am exciting about taking the concepts of Family Constellation Work and making them much more widely known. A child stands in the lineage of two parents. In order for a child to stand strong, both lines must remain open. There, that is the simplest explanation I can give.
In the meantime, my straw bale house stands alone in the freezing snow without us. We left right before Christmas and are back in Rapid City, SD for the next few months working our tails off to see this film get properly launched. Milt just created a Face Book fan page for the film so do check it out and become a fan. (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Video-Letters-From-Prison/227630477599?ref=ts
Blessing to all in this advancing new year.
Jamie