How to be together

We sat together yesterday, our group of seven, on a Monday afternoon. And the curtains in the room were open to the afternoon sun, closed as the sun blinded us, and then open again to watch the beautiful dark frames of leafless trees against the pink and yellow and blue sky as the sun began to set. And, with the early evening news as a background, we noticed, for ourselves and with each other, our music was made of...

...sound and silence,

terror and safety,

change and consistency,

feeling frozen and being in motion,

comfort and discomfort,

certainty and uncertainty,

sleeping and awake,

light and dark,

presence and absence,

judgment and acceptance,

loud and quiet,

intensity and gentleness,

curiosity and detachment,

containment and freedom...

And then, this morning, I read and listened to this gorgeous conversation between Krista Tippett and Ann Hamilton. When Krista asked her what questions we should be asking, without hesitation, Ann responded:

"...how to be together. I mean, isn’t that — that seems like the biggest question. How to be together." (Ann Hamilton) 

Yes! And yes again!

There are so many who believe music therapy sessions with people who don't use speech as their first language are about "playing for your clients." In fact, it is about

listening, 

noticing, 

playing,

 experiencing,

 being

 and wondering 

together.

"...when you’re making something, you don’t know what it is for a really long time. So, you have to kind of cultivate the space around you, where you can trust the thing that you can’t name. And if you feel a little bit insecure, or somebody questions you, or you need to know what it is, then what happens is you give that thing that you’re trying to listen to away. And so, how do you kind of cultivate a space that allows you to dwell in that not knowing, really? That is actually really smart, and can become really articulate? But, you know, like the thread has to come out, and it comes out at its own pace." (Ann Hamilton)

The Act(ion) of Thinking

Image via WikipediaI've been thinking about RD of late (well, particularly today, because we had a session this morning). 


RD is a very sweet young man on the autism spectrum (he does not use speech to communicate), and he is very particular about things. And by this I mean that he seems to believe that all things should have a place (I think I can thank one of his family members for his excellent manners and his tidy nature.)


It so happens, that we work in a terrifically messy room in his cottage (oddly enough, it's the, um, "sensory room") (yes) (well). 


Anyway. 


No matter how much I try to clean up all the clutter in the place before I go and pick him up for his session, he still finds things to, er, tidy. 


He also likes checking out all kinds of objects. He has a collection of action figures with giant feet (I don't want to know!), and his staff people find him books and various things that have moving parts to them. He keeps them all in a big box with his picture on the front. Great! 


So. Back to the aforementioned "sensory room"...


Because this is, apparently, a full service sensory room, there are almost always broken battery-operated sorts of things lying around in varying states of function and dysfunction. This means that the batteries are lying around (lovely), and the little parts that keep the batteries quietly tucked inside the gadgets are also roaming about freely.


RD, being the tidying kind of guy he is, and being the kind of person who likes to bond with objects, has been picking up these little plastic parts that were supposed to hold in batteries. He just turns them over and over in his fingers and holds them close to his face so he can examine them.


While he's doing that, he sings. He hums little melodies (I've come to learn that he repeats specific melodies with small variations here and there). I either sing them back to him or play them on the guitar (with my own variations and chords). And while he's scurrying about the room arranging things, we sing and play back and forth with each other. 


The other thing you need to know is that, when he borrows an instrument from me (to check out as described) he often puts it back in the closet that's in the sensory room. As such, I have to go and retrieve the instrument quickly because otherwise it'll be there for all eternity (I have reached the official limit on my brain's memory card, and, let's face it: some things are just going to have to go!). 


Now, not only does he take my stuff and put it in the cottage closet, but he puts stuff he picks up in the cottage on my music cart or in my instrument bag. I am forever pulling things out of my bags (after his session) and putting them back in the room (back in circulation, as it were).


Okay.


So, as I mentioned above, I was thinking about RD, and I was wondering: why does he keep putting cottage things in my bags? And why does he keep putting my stuff in the sensory room closet? What's that about? Is there something he might want me to know? Or that I should be noticing about this?


And I thought, hm. So I mentioned to him during his session that maybe he needs to have me hold on to a small piece of him when I go (i.e., don't forget me, please). And maybe putting my stuff in the cottage closet is a way for him to keep a piece of me as well. 


When I gave it some more consideration, it occurred to me, again, that here's a guy who likes everything to have its own place- whether it's the "right" place or the "wrong" place. And I remembered that he himself grew up in a few different places, being sent around to various family members, because his mother died when he was an infant. 


And now here he is with us, in an institution.  


And it made me think about objects. And about having a place to be. And I wondered (out loud to him) if maybe it was important to him that he have a specific place to be. And what his thoughts are about being in the "right" place or the "wrong" place. And which one he feels the institution might be.


RD's response was to increase his singing. He and I sang back and forth for ten more minutes than usual today (we usually make it for 20 minutes, but today it was 30!) before he hopped up and began pulling the guitar off of me to indicate that we were finished.


So, I'm thinking this is veeeery cool. 


Definitely warrants some more thinking...

The big comfy couch incident

Image by SimplySchmoopie via FlickrWell! Work, this morning, was a bit crazy (to put it mildly). 


Both the 9 AM and 10:30 AM groups were either getting ready to take part in or getting ready to watch the big Halloween parade at our facility (which is actually pretty cool- a local high school marching band comes, there are costumes, people bring their dogs, their babies, etc.). 


There was all kinds of flurry and insanity, what with trying to get the guys/gals outfitted with their various costumes and such. There was annoyance, there was attitude, there was drama...well, you know how it goes.


Now, mind you, the guys in the second group weren't actually going to be in the parade. We were just working on getting chairs outside and guys assembled in heavy sweatshirts and caps (it was cold out there today!) so we could all watch before the parade, er, passed us by (as the saying goes). 


Mercifully, we got ourselves all out there in time, caught the all-too-brief parade, cheered loudly for the guys who had gone to boldly march in their costumes (the cottage had gone as race-cars, and they were all sporting their "cars" with frames draped over their shoulders- it was pretty nifty), and managed to get everyone safely back inside with only one incident report having to be filled out (um, that was me, because one of the guys who used to love watching parades and being in the middle of the action...well. He wasn't in that good of a mood to be moved around. My deepest apologies to R for my misunderstanding.)


To put it mildly, we were all shot!


I went to join E on a big, mushy couch, because he seemed to have been out of sorts all week, and I just wanted to check on him. We've known each other for 22 years. To not check on him would have been totally rude. 


So E and I were just sitting there, hanging out and decompressing from the morning's events, and T came over and decided to join us. 


Now, the reason this is news (and very cool) is that T's usual approach to sitting on couches is to shove whoever is on the couch off. This is usually accomplished by pressing his fingers firmly into the back of the person's head, but bopping people over the head has also been employed at various times. 


But he didn't do that. T came over, sat on the other side of me (I was in the middle), and he took my hand, carefully, and he held it for about five minutes. Then he smiled, got up, and continued walking around the room


Now, that's what I'm talking about!

Belonging

I was sitting with one of my clients yesterday afternoon, trying to remember what we had focused on the last time we saw each other.  He had refused to attend the previous session, and I had taken a few days off, so my brain was blanking a bit.  

I started to play the guitar (which, for some reason, always helps me think and hear more clearly and to remember what we’ve been doing), and I recalled that the song I had played recently was “Part of Your World” (yes, I know... it’s a Disney song from “The Little Mermaid”).  The focus was on what (I think) seems to be his longing to take part in what he perceives as the “world” outside of his cottage, his housemates, and his staff.  Only... yesterday, when I thought of the song, the word that came to my mind was “belonging”.

Belonging.  I was aware that that wasn’t the word we had used in his last session, but it seemed an interesting word to explore.  My mind immediately free-associated to the idea of belonging to someone, because that also seems to be an issue for him (okay, and maybe it’s an issue for me too).  

As my mind wandered I thought about the following:

*do we identify ourselves by the people and places we belong to? 

*And, when we don’t have any family (or don’t know whether our family remembers that we exist), do we lose a sense of belonging?  

*What does that do to our sense of identity?  

*If we have a severe disability, and we’ve listened to people’s opinions about who we are and what we are without being able to put in our own views, then what does that do to our sense of belonging (let along our sense of identity)?

*What does it mean to belong somewhere?  And, really, do we ever belong to anyone or anything? (I’m thinking here of our existential aloneness.) 

*When we feel as if we don’t fit in, and our way of being is so different that we never feel a sense of belonging, do we lose our sense of a “home base”?

*Does belonging to someone or to a place give us an experience of having a “home base”?

*From the other side of things, what does it mean to have someone “belong to” us?  Can someone actually belong to us?

I wondered yesterday whether it makes sense to say that, while we have music therapy together, we sort of belong to each other.  I couldn’t get my mind to move swiftly enough to clarify that thought, so I didn’t mention it in the session.  But I’m throwing it out here to look at it some more.  

It seems to me I’ve read about the idea of belonging a lot in the more recent person-centered literature concerned with expanding the social and emotional networks of people with developmental disabilities.  Heck, it’s enough of an issue for all of us, I imagine, but we may not necessarily be conscious of it all the time. 

I have to get along to work now, but I do want to revisit this idea of belonging to each other.  There seems to be a spiritual element to it that I like.  Yes.  I do believe that, one some level, we all belong to each other.  I suppose if we all thought about each other that way, we’d probably have a less frightening world.