Root System Mediation

ROOT SYSTEM MEDIATION:

“I hope to offer this practice for folks to engage with art as a resource for themselves in processing grief and aligning with their humanity when faced with circumstances that ask them to push past it.

Art can serve as a vehicle for fostering a deeper connection with oneself and cultivating the capacity to attend to our needs.”

- Cyrah, Lead Teaching Artist

An Offering to Pause and Process: 

There seems to be a common feeling of depletion and exhaustion. We are over a year into a deadly pandemic while navigating a seemingly endless onslaught of terror; fueling tragedy and trauma around us. It often feels like there is little space to process our emotions and the compounding grief we are experiencing, especially if we are unable to access traditional ways of processing. Our Root System Mediation offering was created by Lead Teaching Artist Cyrah Dardas as an invitation to acknowledge our grief by carefully creating a container and ritual to process our emotions through embodied drawing. 

This drawing mediation intends to bring awareness to hidden root systems. While reflecting, we notice the patterns and networks within all living things around us like wondrous trees. We are reminded of the strength and support within our complex root systems and honor interdependence and interconnection as a way to tap into our innate aliveness and inherent resilience. It is a portal to reconnect us to our shared humanity in a context that continuously asks us to disconnect from ourselves, each other and the natural world.

What Is A Drawing Mediation?

“Meditative drawing has been an important tool for me as an organizer, an educator and frankly just as a human living in this world, to center and regulate myself.
”

— Cyrah

A drawing mediation is a reflective tool for kinetic relaxation. Firstly, it creates space to process emotions in a safe and healthy way. Using art as a process, the practice of drawing mediations focuses on the healing power of drawing while engaging both the mind and body. The goal is not the end product but to reflect, regulate and replenish through the joyful act of creating. The intention is to use it as a practice in which you find new meaning and depth with each engagement. In doing so, we might find new awareness around our inner voice and other voices within us stemming from our ancestral lineages to our social context.

How To Engage: 

Download the drawing prompt here and follow the suggested guided steps.

Steps:

1) PAUSE:

Create a calm, comfortable space.

2) PROCESS:

Envision the root system supporting the tree. Consider:

- What would the roots of the tree look like that support its structure?

- How might the roots beneath the tree mirror the top of the tree?

Using a pen or pencil, draw the root system that you are visualizing beneath the tree.

3) REFLECT:

- What makes up your root system?

- Where does it live inside of you?

- What is its form?

- How has it informed the way you have grown?

- How does it support you?

4) REPEAT:

Continue to make space to come back to this practice.

“ I think about root systems as the things that aren’t so surface about who we are. Yet what everything is built upon. By examining those things you can become more aware of them yourself”

— Cyrah

For More Resources Check Out:

Expression Through Line

Centering Care in the Classroom

It is imperative that we all prioritize care, connection and wellbeing. Join us in bringing this process into your class or learning space.

Expression Through Line  is a wonderful activity to playfully create space to check in on students’ individual and collective wellbeing. Through an approachable medium students use art to process and express their emotions. It is a deceptively simple lesson that helps students name and normalize their emotions while also teaching students how to reflect on what art is trying to invoke.

Bonus: you don't need to be an art teacher to make it happen!

Centering Care with The Boggs School:

“Its wild you can do that with just one line!”

— Boggs student

This lesson was born during our latest AIR partnership. We teamed up with our friends at the James and Grace Lee Boggs School to deliver our media-based programming based on the theme: Community as Care. We embarked on delivering the AIR program virtually as we all navigated uncharted territory surrounded by grief, loneliness and a tumultuous social and political context as COVID reached new heights in the darkness of winter. Lead Teaching Artist, Cyrah Dardas, focused less on “creating” and more on cultivating a virtual space centered on care through the use of art and media. She developed the lesson Expression Through Line to create the space for Boggs students to share their emotions through the use of art and normalize talking about our emotions with each other. As we continue to navigate the collective trauma, change and ongoing grief of the pandemic, we invite you to center care and connection with young people using the Expression Through Line lesson!

PIE in 2020: Facing Change

The transition from one year to the next is always a time of reflection, and 2020 is incredibly ripe for such a practice. As we look back on the last twelve months of relentless change, it's mind boggling to think of where we have been and with so much loss, what we have created.

January 2020, PIE Board Retreat

While navigating the uncertainty and grief of COVID-19, we answered what felt like an intuitive call to tap into our resilience and innate aliveness. As a team, we moved with each other in new ways, both interpersonally and programmatically. We produced new resources and media that met the needs of the moment for both ourselves and our community. 

We are grateful to be in relationship with people and spaces with whom we can create and change together.

Even at distance, we tried on new types partnerships: We worked with Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute to write a Guide to Emergent Strategy Immersions and with Urban Neighborhood Initiatives to support their youth development programs.  

In 2020, we’ve seen PIE change as an organization as well. We invested time and energy to effectively transition our programming online. Our mission both broadened and sharpened from humanizing schooling to humanizing learning. We set yet a new standard for putting out our media projects. With all of this pivoting, we wrap up this year reflecting on what guided us through:  

COMMUNITY AS CARE

In 2020, community care has been our north star. We felt this as a team, relying on weekly meetings to check-in and be together despite our [social] distance. Our journey with Rida Institute educators exemplified this over the year as well, as we created a slack community and moved to gathering online. Leaning on our relationships -- old and new -- we remembered that we were in this together. 

“I believe art is an important part of social justice because its a way to communicate a message without saying a word”

— Ely Vasquez, 482Forward Youth

IMAGINING ANEW

The past 9 months have required us to examine and rethink our work. We must be the change needed to humanize learning, but we must see the change first. We must dream possibilities into reality. Art and media making are key to inspiring the creative imagination needed to do so. Our work with 482Forward Youth Collective and Alternatives for Girls are prime examples of what imagining police-free, student-centered schools with nourishing resources for humans could look like. Return to some of our 2020 media below:

POSSIBILITY THROUGH COLLABORATION

2020 has reiterated our inherent need for connection and our sacred interdependence. It was through collaboration between PIE team members and with community partners that we experienced a profound sense of possibility in this moment of uncertainty. From working with our committed Artist-in-Residence partners to planting seeds at the Allied Media Conference, we found that our work was not only still possible, but vital to managing all that 2020 has brought to our lives. Without our partners reminding us that we are our own greatest resource, we could never evolve as we have thus far.  See some of our favorite (r)evolutionary moments from 2020 below:

TEAM CHANGES AND CELEBRATIONS

Our team continues to change and evolve in beautiful ways. This year, we welcomed Kiarra Ambrose as our first ever Rida Institute Facilitation Fellow. Kiarra supports Rida programming and participants in a role we hope will evolve and multiply as we seek to train and mentor more compassionate, purpose-driven educators. Cyrah Dardas, a teaching artist of 2 years at PIE, was promoted to Lead Teaching Artist with our Artist in Residence program. Check out some of the media projects she has led here. We also had the pleasure of sending PIE media intern, Tulani Pryor, off to begin a Master’s program in the University of Michigan School of Information! And it is with congratulations and sorrow that we say bye for now to Erin Allen, who will depart from her role as PIE Communications and Fundraising Coordinator at the end of the year. She will remain a close friend to PIE, as she continues to forge her way in the world of radio and podcasting as the producer of Stateside with Michigan Radio. We are overjoyed for Erin and can't wait to hear her creations on the radio waves.

forging ahead to 2021

This year has been unpredictable and flat out difficult. We’ve been reminded to stay human and tender, to lean into what makes us feel alive in order to stay alive, to create and evolve and to rest. As we look ahead to 2021, PIE’s 10-year anniversary, strangely it feels right that 2020 has been so packed. It’s set us up for reaching even further back to 2011, when Detroit Future Schools first began imagining the radical future of learning. 

Onward with love, 

People of PIE