"An Intimate Journey That Demanded Vulnerability": Reporting Back from Weaving Wellness

Our annual conference, Weaving Wellness: Empowering Creativity, Nurturing Artistic Practice, in partnership with the Vancouver Park Board and the Roundhouse Community Centre, ended over a week ago, and I’m still processing my experience. What started as an examination of the relationship between arts, creativity and wellness led to a much deeper conversation about self and our relationship to the land, to ideas and to our convictions. As several people commented during the two days, this was a conference for the heart.

I am extremely grateful to our fearless curator Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen for teaching me about the power of sharing and collective brainstorming from an Indigenous worldview. Along with my collaborators – Marie Lopes, Taylor Basso, Joyce Wan, and Beverly Edgecombe – she took us on an intimate journey that demanded vulnerability. There was more letting go than hanging on, more undoing than doing, more unwrapping than containment and more uncertainty than knowing. It was challenging and wonderful at the same time.

Weaving Wellness disrupted my colonized identity and posed more questions than answers. How did I get here, who has influenced me, what do I care about, where does my inspiration come for artistic practice, how am I embodying presence and resurgence, and what is my relationship to the land? It felt like I was letting go of what I knew without knowing what was coming next – like the space between trapezes, but with a net underneath.

What is emerging from my experience of Weaving Wellness is that I know I must return to the grounding and calming force that is creative practice. What I know now is that I am an unsettled settler in a relationship with the earth and standing on the bones of the ancestors who are buried here.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of this humbling and rejuvenating experience.

Brenda Leadlay
Executive Director
BC Alliance for Arts + Culture

(Images: Tim Matheson.)