March 15, 2011

It has been over a week since I began using this blog to reflect on the letter that I have now sent to the two pastors of First Presbyterian Church of Savannah – Stephen Williams and Will Shelburne. I sent the letter today. It had a few modifications from the text in the last four postings. I ended up concentrating more on invisibility and less on being an enemy.

In one sense I feel directionless and in another I feel quite the opposite. It is clear that the next five or six months will be focused on Laser Eagles, the ROM art exhibit, shifting my staff team and my physical realities in order to accommodate the upcoming trip to Oregon, Arizona and the Conference for Global Transformation in San Francisco. The purpose of much of this trip is to nail down an opportunity to research the BMX Model and to demonstrate the inclusive video game at the conference.

So the direction is set in that sense. It is not set in a more personal and specific sense. Questions such as “Do I need a different kind of staff person so I can travel more easily?” or “How do I make sure that I’m making enough money that I can let go of ODSP if/when I need to?” – these questions remain vague and uncertain. Of course, their vagueness will disappear as necessity demands I take action. For example, I currently only have three weeks of staff time scheduled and my staff will soon be questioning me about what shifts they will have and how many hours and when am I going away and all that sort of thing. In other words, life will give me a direction if I haven’t already chosen one myself.

I am battling with myself. The question looks something like “I thought you were going to retire?” My circle is meeting on Sunday and I can already hear them protesting the intensity of life which faces me from end of April until end of August.

It is not hard to see how this all emerged. A few months ago I was lying on my back in my comfy bed recovering from near-terminal illness. Two forces conspired to shift all that. First, I was intrigued by the gigantic toys playing blocks outside my window at night only to discover that a prison is being assembled in my neighbourhood. Secondly, a colleague from the Book of Judith play went to a party because we couldn’t go to Edinburgh in November because I was sick. This set off a chain of events leading to my having an Inclusion art exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Add to these main themes that I actually did recover and that Laser Eagles was revitalized this fall by the combined efforts of Kimberly Fu and the CAVE board, and rather suddenly I’m pushing to create THE art exhibit about the journey of Inclusion that will – one hopes – convict people with the desire to embrace diversity.

There are other factors such as Mike Skubic and the video game. It all runs together at this point. I am on the road again and compelled again.

I have a great sense of fatigue just thinking about it all. Of course, the thinking about it is way more tiring than the doing of it, but that’s where I’m at right now. I have been learning in many ways, and particularly through the course on achieving a lasting impact that a sense of fatigue and hopelessness is really no more than confronting the perception that “the tiger is not dead but asleep”. You can drag it out of the path but as soon as it wakes up it is going to walk right back to the road and lay back down on it again. Trying to bring about Inclusion has been like trying to drag this sleeping tiger out of the road.

The course has been very interesting and instructive. It has pulled up virtually every occasion where I have felt like I got close to making a powerful impact on building Inclusion only to be driven back into obscurity. Whether it was Al Etmanski firing me in 2000 or Tom Kohler crossing his arms and emphatically saying that people with disabilities are not invited to Citizen Advocate training or Jack Pearpoint or Marsha Forest not including me in Inclusion Press. No matter how great and inspiring my own journey has been or my ideas may be I am not seen as having the practicality that is required to put a real organizational strategy together and to bring it to fruition.

So now we (mainly Mike and I) envision a well resourced organization that will foster Inclusion. Now I am preparing to put my energy on the line to get the necessary steps in place. I cannot know of course if I am just dragging another sleeping tiger to the culvert from whence it will shortly return, wet and hungry.