Meet Miss Sarah
Maybe playing hide-and-seek as a kid was just as important as anything I learned at school…
I’ll name three practices that changed my life and helped me find my way. First, though, I’ll tell you that I am not a disciplined person, ask anyone who knows me. These things that I list seemed more like compulsions than discipline, at the time. The desperate need to find my way made me grab hold of these habits as I did.
Three Practices that Changed my life
Here they are.
and if you need them, may you grab hold of them!
[snap & Wink]
Just Like
That…
1) Art. I’ve always felt drawn to creating through all kinds of art making. Admittedly, I’ve never thought too highly of the art I make, I never wanted to exhibit. My creative projects are where I can mess around with Big Questions and gain insight.
2) Free writing. Starting the day with three pages of stream-of-consciousness journaling that I rarely re-read. I have, however, surprised myself often there, and had one brilliant “automatic writing” experience in which I blurted out my future career as an art therapist. With a pen and a blank page is how I plumb my own depths.
3) Meditation. Ten years of daily meditation, now rather unkempt, but it’s okay, I return when I’m in nature, in the garden, and when I work as a therapist and as an artist. My practice is an unreligious mindfulness technique. Best practice for strong determination.
Maybe playing hide-and-seek as a kid was just as important as anything I learned at school…
In my 20s, these three practices — art meditation and journalling were central. So was travel, school and a hounding sense of dread about how in the world to proceed.
Through all of these experiences, and all the rest, I found my way.
Above any experience stood my mentors, elders, and the teachers I followed. Wise ones who told their stories while I stood, so lucky to listen in. Sometimes these people were the only ones that believed there was at all A Way for me to Find. Some of my teachers I only met by reading their words, lucky to have stumbled upon those books, those passages on those pages. Two of my teachers, Polly Young Eisendrath, and Stephen Jenkinson, I have had the good fortune of reading their books AND hearing their stories. Other mentors never wrote any books so I am among a smaller and lucky audience. My friends, too, I hold in such reverence.
As much as my manners have matured, it is to reflect those good people—my realest way of remembering some that I’ve learned from the more that these good people have imparted.
My way led me to graduate studies in art therapy, psychoanalysis, and the Orphan Wisdom School. I co-founded The Arterie in Burlington, Ontario—a successful creativity and psychotherapy centre, alongside my friend and colleague Claudia Corradetti. And The Arterie begat Arterie Productions during lockdown.
And now, my way has brought me to co-found Finishing School with Esther Kalaba. This is certainly my dream: to work with my friends.
Esther and I have a shared history of letting our good conversations become art projects, like this one. So here we sit, so fortunate to have been able to carve out the time to write to Mysterious You.
In thanks to our teachers, we two are called to do our part, maybe starting with these words you read here.
I’m searching for ways to tell you how our lived experiences, yours and ours, might have resonance, younger to elder, now in 2020, and that this chain of transmission of wisdom is endangered. Otherwise, it surely wouldn’t be humble me, on the shores of Lake Ontario, reaching out to wherever you sit, through the blazes of electric pixels.
Need I impart to you how very lost I’ve been? How close I’ve come to a royal mess, many times; finding my way only incrementally. Two steps forward and one step back until a recent tipping-point of understanding, which still can only be a drop in the bucket of what it takes to be a real elder, like the Old Ones, the Poets, for instance.
But still, this mission to invite you to join us this year at Finishing School persists. We are at the foot of a mountain of technical and leadership challenges. Might it teach me what I haven’t yet learned? This work we’re doing in founding The Finishing School grows out of the fact that the life I am living as a healer, and now this invitation I am making to youngers, is modest praise of people who did so for me.
Would that you be more efficient than I as you overcome the crippling conviction that neither you nor your choices matter that much. How wrong to think so. It is my most recent discoveries, through independent study, that have led me to the most impactful changes in how I understand the consequences of my manners, my words and deeds. No religion necessary, just good learning from life.
School. The hallowed respite from the Everyday. That ivy- or cement- covered opportunity to live as if change itself is at bay.
Even so, the question of “what’s next?” haunted me at school; does it you?
Me: I became afraid to finish and felt like I couldn’t and got stuck for a few excruciating years while I worked some doozy-bad, and funny jobs (Ask Me About those in class). The survey classes of undergraduate studies were dizzyingly broad. I “honed in” on an English degree, which although I remember every day, but did it get me any interviews? It took me a number of unfulfilling jobs and a few years of earnest seeking to focus any further. Finding art therapy as a field of study was my Finishing School, the training and the practice, all now 17 years of it. This Finishing School, this one-year program is for you to benefit from wayfinding through art prompts, reading, lessons, contemplation, walking in nature: a recipe for Wayfinding that we didn’t invent, Esther and I, but we sure do practice.
And here we are in 2020.
The Great Pause.
For so many of us: the lockdown away from Covid been a game-changer already. The way I see it, the more devastated you are by the consequences of lockdown, of the social unrest that has come alongside, the more intertwined you are with this world: maybe less of a cushion is your personal privilege? If you don’t know how to feel about the state of world affairs, much less your own, Finishing School will be good for you. Just a warning that the cost to recognizing how consequential you are, is that you’ll end up as troubled as these times we’re in. This is adulting. The troubles of the world becoming yours, too, one generation at a time. There is no time for keeping up appearances, especially when appearances are so besotted with The American Dream. It is due time that we, Gen-X, extend the invitation to you, Gen Z, Millenials?—you who are coming of age.
In my circles, many agree that the Boomers are generally pretty spotty with coming through for their youngers, as we’re trying to do here. Please don’t read pretention into our curriculum of wayfinding as it comes from our experience as adults, as professionals, and also entrepreneurs. We’re saying it matters that we’re older, wiser, and that a lot is at risk, as you know—your own wayfinding is one variable. We’re not promising all the answers, but to spend a year with you on the Questions, with the faith that wisdom abounds if you keep the Question alive, feeding it more questions, ever better ones, that lead you to questions worthy of a career, an identity, enough to spend a life on. Like I have so far.
I am not sorry that Finishing School is a business, a paid service, money. We do have scholarships available, and moreover, for the dollars that we’re asking, you have now as much of an opportunity to ask Big Questions about Money as about anything else!
My real longing is that Esther and I would host you at a beautiful place, and share beautiful meals.
But since we all can’t travel in Fall 2020 anyhow, I end with as heartfelt an invitation as I can make to all you who read this, a Fourth practice that changed my life:
Please find a beautiful place near by, where you can walk about, and ideally get lost, and found again. Ideally, nature abounds on this walk, even if its a city walk. Go there every month at least once, barefoot in the summertime.
If you want inspiration for how to find your way on those walks, apply to receive our therapy-inspired, creatively-crafted, online-curriculum for offline-wayfinding. This program is especially for those of you who relate to the lostness that I tell of from my 20s. Especially you who wish for a modest little tribe and a couple of elders-in-training with whom to live it out.