FIELD NOTES #3: What is your Experience of a Companion?
One of the distinctive qualities of the Discovery Cards is that they invite us to explore them within the spaces and relationships of our actual lives.
This summer, I went to the Bay Area with the first handful of mostly finished cards to share with others about how they inspire exploration of our inner and outer environments.
On June 28th, we held a workshop at Crissy Field, a National Park with marshes and shoreline overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
We began the day with a land acknowledgement of the Ohlone people, the indigenous stewards of the land, led by Aya and Vero the city’s stewards of the Land. Rafi, a long-time MR community member who helped us to organize the event in the Bay Area, had set up an altar for us to start; seashells, jewelry, and pieces of wood were arranged on a special dark blue textile with prints.
Then we began a short hiking tour, first through the reclaimed marshlands and eventually to the beach.
On the sand, Karin introduced us all to a Moving Rasa Discovery Card, Coloring, showing a visually impaired girl sensing her environment at the beach. This card would be our companion at the beach. Karin guided us to play with, or practice, our relationship to the sand by scooping it. We explored big scoops and small scoops, fast scoops and slow scoops. Noticing how we had to use our body in order to achieve our scooping, first with our hands and then with other body parts. She brought our attention to the temperature shifts when we explored surface scoops versus deep scoops. Each invitation met us in different ways, inviting us to expand our movement interactions to literally connect in granular ways to inner urges, emotions, energies, and imaginations.
Each mound and pattern we created uncovered dormant stories and emotions. What began as one small invitation became a conversation with the beach itself.
After our morning tour, we came back to the center for a shared potluck. Beautiful dishes like Rafi’s incredible king oyster mushroom adobo became another expression of our cultural connection to the land, inviting us to acknowledge it in the way we nourished ourselves.
I invited us to allow our morning exploration of the card and the sand as our companion to inform how we experienced companions in our lives.
One person spoke about how their friends were their companions. They did not look for one romantic partner to fulfil all their needs.
Another reflected on their complicated companionship with the monitor lizard. It is an endangered animal. Yet its skin has long been used within their Pacific Island community to make ceremonial drums. They found themselves holding both gratitude for those traditions alongside grief for the possible loss of the relationship with the living world.
Experiences with the cards continued to unfold long after we set them down, helping us meet places, people, and everyday moments with greater curiosity and care. Click here to see a video of one of the participants reflecting on her experience.
Continue the Discovery
Whether you're at home, walking through your neighborhood, or sharing a meal with friends, a Discovery Card can become a companion that changes how you meet the world around you. Click the button below to receive some audio and written facilitation gifts with some of our first finished cards.