These times we’re living in are strange. We have the long-term impacts of social and geographical isolation. We have been separated from friends, family, and favourite haunts for a long time. We did it to be safe ourselves, and to make the world safe for others. Now the messaging is changing. It seems like there’s talk about “pre-COVID” times and “post-COVID” times but what about COVID-now?
This post offers two free downloadable PDF resources that we hope will be a gift to individuals and communities working to make sense of our experience of COVID over the past few months and begin to process what has been a pretty traumatic experience.
The first offering are some gentle questions from Dusk Liney from The Listening Squad with artwork by talented Tasmanian artist Elizabeth Braid. The Listening Squad crew offer amazing strategy retreats and have a podcast on contemplative listening. Dusk is also a Doula and Matrescence facilitator and she’s been running Listening Circles for Mummas through lockdown. Her voice here is a quiet invitation to healing that will hold safe space for you – just as you are.
This second offering is mine – I’m Talitha Fraser a NZ/Ngāi Tahu, Melbourne-based writer. I’m interested in theopoetics, radical discipleship and feminist theologies. My contemplative practice brings together photography and poetry, philosophy and theology, observation and mindfulness. Creating this resource was, for me, an exercise in practical theology – I knew I needed this and so I had to make it. Whether you are conscious of it or not, this life experience of a pandemic we are in is an extraordinary one and there is strength and wisdom in you – likely loss and grief and anger too – that is good to hold space for and acknowledge. This is less gentle I’ll admit, but it’s when we look into the shadows, I find, that we can see the play of light.
itellyouarise 