I can’t figure out how to summarize what this group process has meant to me. Instead I decided to share some excerpts from my journal.

After our first session, (no date in my book):

 What I want to write:

• thread with Maria about how it’s richer on the margins than the mainstream believes
• to Michelle and Andy about dharma and dissolution and change
• to Sally and Michelle about not bringing ourselves to the room (my experience of that: why I did it, what it made me wonder
• something about spirituality (what?)
• something about change versus being stuck

It was a different time, then. It’s always a different time. I was starting to wonder why I hadn’t ever talked to tutors or learners about being lesbian, begun to wonder why on weekends I took the stage to speak my truth and through the week never spoke it. How to cross that bridge? Some parts of being a dyke, whatdoes that mean, were still so new to me. Some part of me wanted to keep my intimacy private with people I knew while defiantly pushing it into the faces of strangers I thought feared and loathed me. But friends were dying all around me and at their funerals the Christian preachers were saying they were sinners and the wages of sin is death; saying they deserved it.

I didn’t talk either about being charged for assault for slapping one of the men who knocked my girlfriend to the street, tore her shorts and broke her glasses into her face, though we did talk about it on queer radio. Again, speeches to strangers so much safer than a conversation with someone I’d see again and again, someone who saw me as in a position of power.

And I think we – my colleagues at ALFA and I – were very careful, though our politics our values were very important to us, to try not to impose our views… When Michelle and Sally say they don’t talk about their spiritual practice I recognize my own hesitation about bringing my politics and values to the program. And I continue to wonder how that contributed to silence. Yet it is true that as teachers we’re in a different position – our role is not to raise our issues, though questions of faith and spirituality and values may well be connected to how we might best support learners as they try to make changes.

On October 1, 2007 I wrote:

The question of change is central – what students want to change, what we implicitly agree to help them change. That’s why we’re careful about naming ourselves…it’s none of my business to try to change…I don’t have the right to try to change your faith. But I do have the right to foster an inclusive space wjhere everyone feels comfortable to learn. So wouldn’t naming who we are help that? Another reason we (or I) haven’t done so is that I thought that students would either not accept my sexual orientation (making the program inaccessible to queer learners) or think it was irrelevant. There’s the rub – between how we strive to foster a ‘safe’ space and our own position. Of course we have lots of power, as the instructors or program coordinators. Are we assuming that students see us as free of social markers? (Only a white person could think that!) Some students have asked staff to match them with a different tutor, saying they want a ‘real’ Canadian when they have been matched with a person of colour…

What happens when the space becomes one where we don’t feel comfortable to teach? We’re still the ones in a position of power, even when students are saying things that make it feel otherwise.

And on November 16:

My story of being stopped in my tracks when a student said queers should all be shot was a story about me. My reaction, my self-doubt, my could-have-said, should-have-said, might-have-dones. Was it really about diversity and difference? Maybe…Michelle said it made her wonder how safe the program is for queer learners. And people of colour are confronted with racist statements every day. Was it such a shock for me because it was one of the first times I had felt threatened for being who I am? Why has the story stuck with me so long? Why do I think it has something generalizeable in it? Does it? What did I leave out when I told it? What has escaped from the memory, and what have I held onto?

The larger picture is that since then my quest has been to try to heal, to recover. So much of that story is still handing on what it was to lose so many friends – the intense grief, in my 20s and so many funerals – and the atmosphere of indifference and hostility that surrounded my grief. At that time, too, I was critical of gay men who were politicized by the epidemic, seeing them as in crisis because they had lost some of their privilege. (So few took the broader view – how is AIDS affecting people who don’t have the resources to pay for drugs or set up clinics and counseling centres – but can we be surprised, given this culture’s fixation on social pyramids rather than diverse communities?)

And literacy work has shown me how unhelpful dogma can be. We need to be soft.

Try to be soft / open.

Have to be hard (to survive).

What happens when we make ourselves disappear? We can’t, we don’t, but we think we should – yet  we are there.

From February 21:

Lunar eclipse last night. Susan wanted to draw the circle of the earth on our window – from the arc you can see how HUGE the earth is. So easy to forget. We’re so used to seeing the moon, sometimes larger than others as yesterday when it was first rising in the pink sunset hues of easterly sky. As the eclipse deepened the lit side of the moon became more brilliant (I saw its light concentrated through the lens of the scope shining on Susan’s eye…). The shadow side of the moon became an orange, a colour hard to fix, hard to see, a varying shade, an unusual deep reddish orangish definitely shadow.

The eclipse was, to me, a perfect metaphor for what we are doing with this project – what we are trying to catch glimpses of. How what is unseen is huge.

 From April 25:

I left the story group feeling as though I don’t have anything particular or profound to say as analysis of the conversations we’ve had, though I am interested in the echoes and reverberations, fascinated by the many connections that have arisen.

But I am aware of how my own thinking has changed, specifically about how being grounded in some kind of spiritual understanding can help this work.

And I realize how my comfort with doing body work has changed. When I think back to the first session, I was so nervous about leading the group in a breathing and stretching exercise. Much less so now. Is it that I am now more able to be in my own body? At home in my own spirit, too?

From June 13 (notes during the group session):

Curiosity is so very important…and helpful!

Time, and trust, are essential for this kind of group process to work.

            “The best way to be spontaneous is to prepare, prepare, prepare” – who said that?