Re-Creating Us

Making The Invisible Visible: Beth Mount

• Beth Mount • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Beth Mount lights the path toward recognizing the unsung brilliance of individuals with disabilities. Our episode welcomes this extraordinary social artist, who shares her transformative journey from working in the shadow of Milledgeville State School to the forefront of advocacy for inclusion and visibility. Beth unveils the hidden strengths of those often pushed to the edges of society, and how even the smallest acknowledgment can spark monumental change.

Inspired by the wisdom of Carl Jung, and the writing of James Hillman', Beth dives into the concept of the 'soul's code'—that inner beacon, and higher purpose, guiding each of us. Beth eloquently navigates the symbolism of the star in our lives, emphasizing the importance of every individual's purpose in constructing a more inclusive community. The exchanges within this episode are a powerful reminder that our collective contribution is key to overcoming systemic barriers and fostering environments where every person's potential can flourish.

Wrapping up, we explore the 'Garden of Soul'—a metaphor for the nurturing spaces that foster personal and communal growth, as shared by Beth during her tenure working with New York State's OPWDD and District 75. We delve into the nurturing power of love, the healing exchange of gifts, and the profound impact of community as a mosaic of support. Join us as we celebrate the intricate beauty of the quilting process, reflecting life's creative journey, and consider how we too might become attentive gardeners and artists, cultivating, weaving, creating our communities.

Beth recommends reading:

You can learn more about Beth's work at: 

David Hasbury:

Beth Mount is a social artist, a catalyst for co-creation, a writer and the creator of Personal Futures Planning, a person-centered planning practice developed more than 40 years ago. Beth has guided people who care in creating the organizational and social conditions that allow people to thrive.

Beth Mount:

To see people in a different light, to see people who are not usually seen for their gifts and their potentials and possibilities. Not only has that been important to the people and their families, but I also have operated from. Any group of people who are being left out has gifts to bring, has something that we need to know and learn from them. That is essential to our survival.

David Hasbury:

I'm Dave Hasbury, and in this conversation we explore the journey to embody the gifts and higher purpose in all of us.

David Hasbury:

We delve into Beth's practice of making the invisible visible, uncovering the power of attention and visualizing patterns of conditions that allow people to thrive or inhibit and diminish capacity. We examine the impact of a history of attentional violence, structural devaluation and structural violence, and we look at the co-creative change that comes through the weaving of relationships between a person, their support circle, service organizations and the neighborhood where they live. A while ago, when we were chatting and throughout different conversations that we've had, the phrase making me invisible visible has come up. I associated with a number of people, but I certainly associated with you in part because so much of what you've done for so long is about making things visible, and so I wonder if you could talk for a bit about both parts the making things visible, but then the other part about the invisible, the importance of making what is not seen. So I just wonder if you could talk for a bit about that in your work and how you process the world.

Beth Mount:

So why am I so passionate about making the invisible visible? So I think I can't address that question without going back 50 years ago, to when I first encountered people with disabilities in Millageville State School the largest institution in the world at the time, by the way who were so abandoned and so dehumanized and so discarded in just deplorable conditions 12, 15 people in a room with one staff person in a pole, barely clothed, drain in the floor, no sense that people are people. And there's no question that something inside me then clicked, that just felt the injustice of that, the wrongness of that, and that the challenge of discovering what would be involved in creating conditions where people could not only become visible in their humanity but actually thrive became really my journey of these last 50 years, and so I don't think I've ever let go of that question. Not only have I held that question about supporting us to see people in a different light, see people who are not usually seen for their gifts and their potentials and possibilities.

Beth Mount:

Not only has that been important to the people and their families, but I also have operated from an understanding and actually this is a reference point, for this comes also from Carl Jung, who has had a big influence on how I think about both the visible and the invisible, but one of Jung's teachings was related to this notion that every marginalized group of people in any society is actually bringing something to that society that it needs to evolve and to grow.

Beth Mount:

And so any group of people who are being left out and, in a sense, carrying the shadow of the dominant culture, has gifts to bring, has something that we need to know and learn from them that is essential to our survival. Yeah, so, having grown up during the civil rights era right and watching the impact of the African American black community in Atlanta, georgia, becoming visible and becoming lifted up, and the potential and the possibilities being seen by the wider culture and the incredible dynamic and power of that movement, of that social movement, to me what we've been doing in the disability world has a similar call to it, which is the world needs us. The world needs this reality in order to be a healthier society.

David Hasbury:

First of all, I love that notion of that which has been marginalized and rejected actually holds a gift for the wider communal life that we have, and I know that the Millageville experience actually again made naked the dehumanizing of people. But when you were there, what did you see, aside from the treatment of people, what did you see in the people themselves? In order to feel that somebody's been dehumanized, we actually have to see the humanity in somebody. So what did you see among these people that who were being treated awfully?

Beth Mount:

I think it's important to also pull the camera back and make note of the fact that I had grown up with people in my family who were living with a disability.

Beth Mount:

People in my family are my community In all the places we lived when I was a child, we always had a neighbor who had a child with a disability at home, and that was back in the day before 90, from 142, before kids with disabilities went to public schools.

Beth Mount:

So they were just at home and they were with their families, and my own brother had a very complicated existence. And there were other members of our family who had been living with disabilities and might have still been kind of hidden away or not very. Their lives had not been necessarily very developed in community, but they were not. That was back in the day when one really only had two choices to keep your loved one at home or to put them in an institution, and the system really encouraged families to institutionalize their loved ones right. So I think, on some level, what I was aware of at that moment was that the individuals in this room are no different from the people that I've grown up with. They're just living in conditions that are horrendous, and so if that's the case, then we, the collective, we could do something about this.

David Hasbury:

Well, one of the things that you've mentioned and thought about is this idea of making visible what goes missed by a lot of people because of the kind of global art overarching kind of view of people. But you have this thing about making visible pockets of possibility, so like experiences where small things happen that actually many people would miss, but for you there's something about actually lifting those up in some way so that they can be seen. Can you talk a little bit about both the process of noticing those pockets of possibilities and then the kind of what it takes to actually lift those up to be seen?

Beth Mount:

Well, another. This is a continuation of the theme of making visible, because the early formation of personal futures planning was, in fact, a pedagogy. It was a process of supporting people to tell their story and having it unfold literally, literally become visible on wall charts, across a wall, with a group of people who were invested in the individual and interested in change. And what we learned early on is that and this is one of my signature gifts, I believe was just this very simple color coding that I stuck with for almost 50 years, which is green was the color for when things were going well and people were alive and conditions and experiences were uplifting, and red was the color of things not going well, when people were stuck, when conditions were not good. And we learned early on and that, if we just stay true to a certain amount of color coding that what emerged on the paper were themes in people's lives, threads you know in retrospect I've come to call them the kind of the souls DNA that what we began to see is a pattern and who people are when they're at their best, and a pattern and in who people are when they're at their worst. And nine times out of 10 people were spending most of their lives locked into the pattern of when they were at their worst. Okay, the other color that I am famous for is yellow, is the yellow highlighter, because one of the things that we did rigorously in those early days and I still do this, if I'm involved in a plan is we start underlining in yellow. Where is this? Where is this key to this person's life? Where is this gift? Where is this pattern that, if we can redirect our attention to the green, we can strengthen?

Beth Mount:

Okay, it doesn't take long before a beautiful vision can unfold for the person. However, if we're not also taking on the organizational constraints, the what we now call the social body, the place that people live and belong, if we're not also opening up opportunities in that part of people's lives, then what we've identified as what's possible can't unfold. This brings us back to making visible what is the pattern in a person and what are the opportunities in a place, the place that they live in, and how do we strengthen the connection? One little experience at a time. I mean, I can't emphasize that enough, because in our practice, while we might generate a fairly large vision for what could be a more generative, fruitful life, oftentimes that's a 10-year vision that emerges. It's not a six-month vision, it's not a 12-month vision, it doesn't fit into any of our ideas about time. But what matters is that we find seeds from that big vision that we can start to plant.

Beth Mount:

Many of the stories I've told over the years they truly begin with two hours. People made a shift in Ken's life from a situation that was really not working to finding these two hours where he could start to really shine. Then, okay, that's a key. What can we do to enlarge that? What can we do to keep building people's engagement and the things that really nurture them?

Beth Mount:

The point is just that the personal center planning that I've practiced has never, has always had connected to it Planning with the person and their family, working with an organization to change and also being connected in the community, working at the level of local community to find assets and places where people can belong and contribute in the local community. If we disconnect those three things really it's four things, because I said I mentioned finding the gifts in the person with their support circle. That's actually number two Gifts in an individual, cultivating relationships with support circle, changing organizations and building communities. If you disconnect a plan from any of those things. You come back three or four years later and nothing's happened. People have been left with this sense of possibility and just stuck In the same old situation.

David Hasbury:

In the early and continues to be, but in the early part of making things visible for you, it was simply colors, like speak and record in colors. According to these criteria, it actually fosters growth and brings the best out, or it actually diminishes who somebody is. Colors was an important part of that, the sense of the parts being uncovered and engaged. So a person discovering what's, discovery of a person, discovery of the people who care about that person, discovery about the capacity of an organization and discovery about a community, all of those being important. I'm sitting in front of me. I have the quilt that you created called the Garden of Soul, which we're on a podcast. So it's people can't see what it is, but it's an absolutely gorgeous vision.

David Hasbury:

Your work over the years has had combinations of style. Some are actually collecting what people are creating and curating them into an image, and sometimes it's you actually working through your own understanding. I get the sense that the Garden of Soul is a little bit of that, that it's about you trying to make sense of the world, but it's. We'll make available in the description how people can see this and the companion article that goes with it, called we Are Companions on a Journey In it and the reason I'm coming here is because of what you said about these four parts and I wonder about the connection In it.

David Hasbury:

The top section of the image is a large star with a four-sectioned cross in the center of the star. You mentioned Carl Jung earlier. You mentioned color and I know from the little that I know Carl Jung that symbols is an important part of the power of symbols and this gets to the making visible part. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that star and what that's, because that stars show up in your artistic work Often. They're important pieces and I wonder if you could just talk about the star and what the importance of that as a symbol is to those four parts that you mentioned earlier the person, the circle, the organization and the community. Talk a little bit about the star and why is that important to you and can be to others?

Beth Mount:

Well, you're right, the star shows up in almost so much of what I do and there are many layers for why it feels important to me. So let's start with the universal understanding of the star. Throughout, all time and in all cultures the star represents and in all religions and all everything the star metaphorically represents, a guide, right that? And in the first peoples, for most of humanity, the stars have guided people right. So there's literally the stars that guide us, and then there's, metaphorically, the scrolls Higher purpose for us. So, once again, the star represents In my imagination, the, what Carl Jung calls this dam on, which is the call, right that we each are here with a purpose and a defining image. And James Hillman calls this both the understanding that every one of us has a star and the deciphering of that meaning, of that star as the soul's code. So we all, we have a soul, our soul has wisdom, our soul has has is like a companion, and it's our work and it's a lifetime right. We're all in this, we're all discovering what is the mark we make, what is the DNA that I cultivate, that I develop, and how do I live that, how do I live that out so that I'm living into my higher purpose and in our work we're supporting other people to live into their higher purpose Because, sadly, throughout history this notion of a higher purpose was sort of colonized for people who were privileged and the idea that everybody else who doesn't have a certain amount of privilege is sort of an underling to other people's Call to other people's star. So we live at a time thankfully as challenging as this moment is for other reasons where Almost all marginalized groups are calling, you know, are making a stronger case for their capacity to live into A higher purpose, to have conditions. I mean, um, often we call the limitations of living into a higher purpose that are structural, structural violence. That this notion of structural violence is not even necessarily a really aggressive thing. Of course it shows up that way. Structural violence limits People and limits the people who support people to see and imagine those possibilities and then To have a better shot at reaching for those possibilities. Okay, so that's sort of the big picture of why the star Is meaningful.

Beth Mount:

Then there is the Contribution that John O'Brien and Connie Lyle O'Brien have brought into our work, which is helping us interpret the meaning of inclusion, the possibility of inclusion, using 5 valued experiences, the 5 value experiences.

Beth Mount:

The star shows up in almost every artwork that I've ever done. The 5 value experiences show up in virtually anything that I've ever written, because it provides such a clear picture Of what we're reaching for In this work of supporting people to live into their highest possibility. And I, because I've known John and Connie and I've been connected with them almost 50 years and was a part of that early formation Of those ideas I can't imagine doing this work without the clarity that comes from those 5 value experiences. It's not that we ever even get there, necessarily, but that it just serves as a guide for Us in our work and in the Measure of how we're doing. You know how are we doing, how are we really doing? It's supporting each person to live into those 5 value experiences In a multitude of different ways. So there's, you know, this simple idea that there's 5 value experiences, and then there's this incredibly complex Actualization that varies Widely from life to life, right, but still it helps illuminate what we're what we're doing.

David Hasbury:

So the star is. You know and I would, because of what you mentioned about the historical Guide that stars have been it is very resonant for people, there's that kind of sense. It's one of those things. That's a simple symbol but it actually ties into something and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that, and you briefly mentioned it.

David Hasbury:

But just, you talked about structural violence and in many ways this is kind of the Contra to structural violence, because the structural violence is rooted in seeing people in a certain way as not being human, as not being whole, as not being valued, as all of that kind of stuff. And when we devalue people we can do terrible things to them. We see that now happening in broad strokes around the world, that as soon as we actually see others as less than, as, not even as inhuman as all these kinds of things, it unleashes a parade of structural violence in people's lives. And I wonder what your experience has been or how you see your experience of introducing these ideas of the star and higher purpose. What happens when you take those to places where people are kind of stuck in a lot of ways? What happens and how people shift when they're given the opportunity to just take a look at their situations differently than they've historically been handed them.

Beth Mount:

The other concept that's directly related to structural violence is attentional violence. So and this is an auto-sharmer term that suggests that and the two things that goes side by side that attentional violence is not to be seen in terms of your highest purpose and it hits hardest those who are at the margins. Attentional violence is frozen, is interlocked, I should say, with structural violence. So we have structures of society that are hardened in a way that diminish lots of people and keep them stuck, and attentional violence. So let's just take that back to even the color coding. When I look back now, I can see that what we were doing in our simple color coding was just shifting our attention right Together. We were becoming aware that here is this information in the green about what works for people and where life is for them, and here is this information in the red about what doesn't work and where people are hurting or stuck. Here is a pattern in the green, you know, like a DNA, of what's possible being revealed to us on these charts. And as we sit here and see this, we want to break the chain, right. We want to shift from attentional violence to attentional potential, right. So we want, as allies, we want to use everything we can to focus on potential, not, you know, the invisible sides. We want to bring ourselves to shift these patterns. The challenge is that the issues always much bigger than just the individual. So if we can't find ways to also shift the patterns in the way we show up in organizations, in our communities, in our families and our relationships, then it's extremely hard to hold on to the shifts that are possible for people.

Beth Mount:

It's very important, when you think about the star in the visual garden of soul, it's very important to appreciate that the star is only part of the whole big picture. The equally important focus of that image is what I call on the ground. Right, it's in the bottom of this image and the ground is where the real work happens. And one of the and that's what I call a garden of soul. Right, if you're not cultivating the garden, we can do all the pretty pictures in the world, we can do all the plans and they can be beautiful and we can bring in all kinds of art, but that's not the point of the art. The point of everything we're doing, the point of social art, is to get down, you know, to go deeper into the ground that people are living in, walking on, living with every day, the constraints the red, the possibilities, the blue and to dig deeper, to work harder at that part of the puzzle of the picture.

Beth Mount:

One reason I felt called to make that image is I had already been, I had been working in New York State with both OPWDD, the state and also young people coming out of District 75, and I had a special ed in New York City schools. I'd already been doing that work for 15 years. Okay, and the way that I construct my initiatives around person-centered work, they're always focused on a handful of people and I do everything I can to follow those people for years. So there are people that I've been a part of their journey, that I've been following what's happening for them for 40, 45 years. Now. That's important because, as time was passing then this was in 2008 when I started that image 25 years already of doing person-centered work it was just blindingly clear that when things were going well for people, they had a garden right, the real work was being done on the ground to cultivate the conditions for people to thrive, and where things had not taken off, that hadn't happened. Unfortunately, that was also at a time where person-centered planning was becoming more and more popular and from my point of view, it was becoming disembodied from this other half of the picture. Right, that everybody's all excited about the plan and, look, I'd be the first to say that's the most interesting. I mean, that's always where I would rather be. I would always rather be in a room with people and their families and allies creating a plan. It's thrilling to be a part of that. It's just that if we're not also paying attention to these other ways to shift, we're not doing the work.

Beth Mount:

The making of Garden of Soul was my way. Talk about making visible. You see, I could have told that story through a comparative analysis, right, much like I did in my dissertation where there's a group of people who are involved in this and there's a control group who are not having this experience, and we watch and follow what happens over time, right? What good does that kind of analysis do?

Beth Mount:

In the world that I inhabit, the artwork has the potential to really tell a bigger story, and so, in a way, in summary, in a way, what that one piece of art conveys, seeks to convey, is what I could see, having followed hundreds and hundreds of people over time that when we could align those conditions at the bottom of the image, life could become really interesting for people. When we could not, things didn't go anywhere and people would just stay stuck. And it's very important to emphasize that this had nothing to do with what the limits were that people individually faced. So people who were profoundly behaviorally challenged or cognitively labeled, with very severe cognitive impairments, they could thrive with the right garden, with the right conditions, and people who had much less challenging learning issues could stay completely and totally stuck in the absence of the cultivation of that social field, that garden of soul.

David Hasbury:

There's a lot in this and I want to come back to that garden part in just a second. But I want to step back for a bit because you referenced two phrases that had to do with violence. One was attentional violence, and I got the sense that in many ways that was about how our attention is shifted away from who somebody is and either makes them invisible or actually believes there's something that magnifies a part of them, that hides other parts of them, and so what happens when you're not seen is like a violence, like it's like who you are is violated by that, and I think that's a very common thing and I think it's something that we all have to be very aware of, how we participate in that. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what the structural violence part is. What you mentioned that Otto puts those two side by side attentional and structural violence. What's the structural part? What, what, what? How is that recognized? How do we see that?

Beth Mount:

So when I think about structural violence, I immediately go back to my early experience with normalization slash, social role valorization where, through the lens of the body of work that Wolf Wolfensberger brought us, we could go in as a team In a 5 day review of all kinds of human service settings and take Apart what we were seeing that organization doing across 50 different lenses ratings, 50 different ratings. It would become Rather astonishing to see how these organizations were structured Around devaluation and I actually prefer in our world, I prefer now the use of structural devaluation at almost over structural violence, because we use the worst structural violence. We all kind of go wait minute, you know we're not doing anything that's hurtful to people. But devaluation is much more subtle and much more pervasive and of course it cuts across all kinds of communities. Devaluation you know it's racism, it's homophobia, it's devaluation comes up Refugee crisis, you name it. But what this lens of Of normalization did is it helped us understand how Locked in these organizations were to devaluation without even really knowing this right.

Beth Mount:

Unfortunately, in the early years of person center planning the organizations that hosted person center planning they wanted to change and once they saw this In the same way, once we saw what was possible for people on a chart once we saw when we were stuck as organizations and what might be if we made really significant changes. Organizations made huge changes. They moved out of group programs, they moved out of, you know, they moved away from congregation to real individualized supports. And that was almost that was almost 50 years ago. Because they had Insight and they were activated to make these changes and they had a certain authority To make these changes because, partly because the Supports were so undeveloped. So you know people, in a way, people had more freedom then.

Beth Mount:

So there's no question, for example, in America, because the majority of our supports that are available to people with disabilities and their families are Our Medicaid supports that we have inherited a model, a medical model, what? Whether we like it or not, we live under the shadow of a framework for funding that is inherently medicalized and reinforces Practices that lock us in to not seeing whole people. We're obsessed with labels and 15 minute increments and Paperwork and so on and so forth, and that becomes really clear when you visit people in other countries. They may have way less funding for services, but it's, it's not A medical model. Now it doesn't mean to say that they don't have their own variation or version of devaluation Right, everybody does.

David Hasbury:

Well, I just think it's important and while I I certainly understand your the notion of structural devaluation, structural devaluation is what allows structural violence to actually Of course. I mean that's it's like the precursor to the actual. You know, you mentioned your first story of Millageville and the. You know, the one person in a room of 18 people with a pole at the door and a hole on the ground and prodding people to kind of stay away from each other or all that kind of stuff. Clearly those people were devalued, but the way they would be treated and I know my entry into this work was was in a whole behavioral thing, the things that were done to people that were literal violence and they were structurally enforced violence, like they were made legitimate by the structural devaluation. They kind of said there's a reason why we're doing this to people and we've done that historically. It certainly exists.

David Hasbury:

So so I want to talk a little bit about the little bit more about the garden and cultivation, because that is, as you mentioned, it's actually the bigger part of the quilt, is the cultivating part, the, and I want you to just pick some of those things that you feel we need to attend to in our cultivation. What are the kinds of things that we have the power to actually engage with. So take us on a journey into cultivating. Make us all gardeners.

Beth Mount:

So in the center of this piece between the star and the garden, is a hand, is a, is a hamster, it's. It's a hand that symbolizes once again in almost every culture. The handprint symbolizes the mark that we make and also the hamster represents a protective energy. That is is a guide for us, another, another source of guidance. So it's a powerful symbol and almost every culture. And so when you think about gardening, unless you're in, you know, some kind of agricultural Machine, like gigantic thing.

Beth Mount:

I'm talking about little gardens. Let's, let's use the image, let's not use the big agricultural industry, let's use the little gardens that are outside, in the backyard, and countless, whether they're vegetable gardens or flower gardens or gardens of creatures, but that the work of the hands is key, like we actually. And so the hands and work. First of all, they symbolize as many of us as possible, getting our hands Involved on the plow, if you will right, and in particular, valuing and bringing in the hands that intelligence, the wisdom of the people who provide the most support, which are usually parents, direct support, allies, teachers, right, the people who are with people every day. So we wouldn't even think or talk about this issue of cultivating the garden without lifting up the people who are actually providing Real care, real support on a day to day basis. So the hand means a lot of different things, but it's right there in the middle, so just want to emphasize that. And the hand is the connection, it's the link, it's the bridge to this garden space, and inside that garden space are different elements of what we pay attention to. So, all right, keep in mind that all of this work is about how we use our attention.

Beth Mount:

So 1 of the most important images is a circle of support. It's individual, with 4 or 5 people in their lives and with the support circle that dramatically increases the possibility that we're going to hold on to that star together and we're going to support each other to work towards it and we're going to be involved in the journey in a mutual, as equals and mutually. You know, we're all gardening, we're all living daily lives that are complicated, maybe the person with the disabilities at the center of a circle, but everyone, everyone's life matters in that circle. So that circle is sort of the 1st order of a space that's holding on to potential and and the and taking on the things that Need to be in place in order for life unfold.

Beth Mount:

There's another image, that is a neighborhood. So the neighborhood represents another aspect of what are we paying attention to? The neighborhoods that people lived in? And, of course, this is another Element of of of my Orientation to all of this work. I mean, you've heard me say people have heard me say, if you don't know what's in people's neighborhoods, I don't want to talk to you about a person's center plan, because what's in people's neighborhoods Oftentimes contains as much information about what might be possible for people as any of the planning and thinking about the individual.

Beth Mount:

So that's a whole other podcast how we discover what, the what the what the possibilities are, the wisdom in a neighborhood, the openings in a neighborhood and how, how we discover that and how we support people to make connections in in their local neighborhoods. And that doesn't take away from the possibility that you might learn to use a subway to go from Brooklyn to Staples in Manhattan to work on a job right. To talk about Knowing the neighborhood doesn't mean that we're limiting people's choices, but it does mean that we're tapping into a gold mine that we don't even know. We don't even know where the gold is until we spend more time in people's neighborhoods. Okay, there's another square in that, in that garden you think about. Each 1 of these things is a part of the garden that you're cultivating. The other square has to do with how are we finding a variety of ways for people to show up? How are we increasing the resources that people have, the opportunities? That's what I'm looking for. How do we increase opportunities? People have To live into a richer life and of course, there's infinite number of possibilities. But the 4 that we focus on the most in the work that I do all these, all these years is let's see what we can do to build more relationships. That's 1. Hopefully we. There's a support circle to start with, but there's more relationships to cultivate. 1 can't have too many, really, but it takes a lot of work to cultivate those relationships. There is the issue of neighborhood what's on your block? There is the issue of work and volunteerism. So supporting people to have real jobs in real communities has always been the heart, a personal futures planning, and so in every plan that I've ever been a part of, even with the most complicated people anywhere, we're asking the question About vocation what is the job that we can imagine people growing into? Where is the opportunity for economic development? So we're trying to increase the money that people have to live on and live with and, more importantly, or as importantly, a valued role with high expectations that comes with real work. Okay, then finally, in that 1 area of that of the garden, is this question of associational life. So how are we doing At discovering where associations are and helping people belong, be members, step in, have a role and cultivate relationships? Okay, so that's that part of the garden Right. And so, last but not least and then there's a middle point that's important to mention, the.

Beth Mount:

The 4th area is what I think of as a design team is slightly different group of people that are organized around the star, but they probably have an organizational role in all of this. So they are people in a person's life who are working administratively and an administrative Role to find funding right, to create more flexibility, to support people, to have good Personal support, to deal with the countless ways that bureaucracy interferes. And I think a bureaucracy is like a pest. You know, like anybody who keeps a garden is very alert to the past. They come in and eat your leads and it's not only bugs but also rabbits and deer. You know like who's going to eat this and who's going to devour that and no matter how beautiful those flowers are, if you haven't paid attention to kind of safeguarding the past, it's you're going to get eaten alive. Right, those, those new possibilities are going to be eaten Now.

Beth Mount:

So a design team one of the things a design team does is kind of firewall as best they can this garden from the past and find new ways to bring in more energy resources, good people and intelligence right Into the situation. So I will say just finish on this note that when we are getting all of those things, when we're attending to all of those things, so I would never say getting all of those things right, because I, I don't know. There's no such thing as getting all these things right. The challenge is attending as best we can. Then we have the not only a garden of soul, but also what I call a pocket of possibility. The pocket of possibility is a place where the conditions have been cultivated for people to live their best life Right and so so, yeah, that's, that's how I work.

David Hasbury:

Yeah, I really appreciate that and I love the. I don't even want to call it a metaphor, although it is a kind of external experience. The whole garden idea is anybody who spent any time in a garden with your hands dirty with and then watching something grow, you know, like going from the early spring season when the ground is gray and there's nothing growing Until, gradually, something happens, that things start to grow. It's a very powerful way of exploring this. What? What interests me a lot in this, though, is the notion of tending a garden is that's the language that you use. You tend to garden, right, and you talk about attending. You know you talk about attention.

David Hasbury:

I see that our ability to hold attention long enough for things to grow is pretty fragile, and so I wonder what you see?

David Hasbury:

I mean, obviously, all those things that you mentioned in that tending, including the design team kind of thing, but what makes it possible for people to hold their attention long enough for something to grow, and not only long enough for it to start to grow, but to sustain it? I know earlier you talked about, you know, watching relationships and people over 40 years, and I know if you're like the people, I know that it's a very like, every year in the garden is a different year, and if you're not paying attention, it can all not grow or the pest can take over, or so anyway, I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. What does it take to keep our attention, even if it's not perfect? It's like what I see so often is that people's attention is sucked out of them. They're they're actually not able to pay attention because of the structural things that are in place. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what it takes for us to hold our attention long enough for something to grow.

Beth Mount:

Well, I think what you're naming is the crisis of our time, right? So is there's a crisis in our, in humanity at the moment, where it's getting increasingly difficult for people to hold their attention on creating the conditions, cultivating the relationships between people and cultivating the quality of the relationships between people. And so it's a crisis, this capacity to cultivate and attend. And I think we, I can't address that question without talking about love. So, you know, the first thing that comes to my mind when you ask how we do that, well, the people who do that best in general are people's families, are the parents, right, starting with the parents. Now, not everybody has parents. I don't mean to grandma, the fit, the core, the place where one has grown up and belongs, for better, for worse, as challenging as every single family is. There's no such thing, as you know, this sort of at least I don't know if there is this sort of bubbling perfect family. Forget about that's ridiculous. But family is the place where, if we're fortunate, we have experiences of being cared for and about and we are potential, is nurtured, and so much of what unfolds for people happens through the commitment, the devotion that comes with love. So, that said, we know that families get beaten down to the ground, with all the complexities of getting through the day, and services and organizations that hurt more than help and all the other complexities of devaluation. So I'm not romanticizing families and I'm not suggesting that, and that's why we work so hard to create good supports that are other people who come in and bring everything they can, their best intention, bring their love into a person's development, into a sense of what's possible for people. And you know we don't talk about love enough, right? Because it's no such a mystery. And and yet I was. I I found a quote by one of my mentors, dinga McCannon, who is an amazing artist and but I think it. I think this quote really gets what we're talking about here. Dinga says an artist lives on faith, the kind of faith that the image comes. So imagine that what we're thinking about here. The image is that star of possibility. The potential comes, the new is born with love.

Beth Mount:

You fall in love with every creation and you want to see it through. If you don't fall in love, you will not stick with it, period. You won't stick with it. You have no idea how it will turn out, but you trust the process. You trust that what you do to create order out of what is generally very messy, chaotic reality will heal the world. I love that right, because here is a story, quilter Number one falling in love with every piece but imagining that her devotion to each creation has some small ripple, and healing the world.

Beth Mount:

I think that's hugely important for us in our work. Absolutely, maybe not even in your lifetime, but in some way you might never understand. So this might you know, these things we hold so dear. They truly might not be actualized in our lifetime, but things will happen that we don't understand. Something always comes from your commitment to the process. You will have no idea what that might be, but the new is revealed through the creative process.

Beth Mount:

So for me, dingus way of thinking about creativity ties together this quality of falling in love, ties together devotion, the commitment to sticking with it, no matter how confusing and difficult. So this is, and Truly imagining that devotion in some small way that you can't possibly fathom, is healing the world. Right, like, oh my gosh, okay, this is not a person's inner plan, this is, in some small way maybe healing the world, and that something new will be revealed. And I think that's a big part of what keeps us engaged is we anticipate. We want to be a part of the revelation right. We want to see what can come from our commitment and our puzzles and our struggle and our confusion and our challenges. We want to see what might come and then we want to celebrate that. We want to tell those stories, we want to lift those up and every time something surprising and generative happens in the life of one person, we want to imagine what it might take to do that on behalf of some more folks.

David Hasbury:

Well, it is interesting that we live in a very antiseptic world and so the notion of love doesn't get addressed nearly enough, because sustainability does require love. You must love something in order for you to sustain the journey, to kind of be with that which you love and the who that you love as they go through all this. And it relates to me, to another element which is gift. So any of the parents that I've known, and including myself, when a child comes into your life, when a child has come into their life, there is a sense of being gifted, there's this sense of receiving this awesome mystery in your life. And then as you watch that person grow, no matter what their capacities are, you watch how they navigate the world and it kind of just enhances that sense of gift that comes from them.

David Hasbury:

But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of uncovering, discovering, naming gifts and how we, how we attend to discovering what people's gifts are, because for me the falling in love is in the exchange of gifts, and when you actually bring something to someone else's life, consciously or unconsciously, it brings something out that in that person. So I wonder if you could just talk for a bit about your understanding of gifts and how we actually can uncover what gifts are, for. The thing that you talked about, dhinga, mentioning the kind of changing the world kind of element, comes from the exchange of gifts, the falling in love and the thing that comes from those things that you can't even predict what it would be. So, anyway, I just toss it out to you as something to think about, because it's been an important part of the language that many of us have shared for a long time the notion of everyone has a gift.

Beth Mount:

Well, I, the person who comes to mind who's spoken more wisely and and more eloquently than anybody I know about gifts is Judith Snow, right? So I think, if we want to understand giftedness, the discovery of gifts and what's involved in cultivating gifts, judith is an incredible philosopher and artist to learn from. And so, for people who don't know Judith, I think it's fair to say she was the first person who created a support circle in our world, right, the Joshua committee, which was created to support her to move out of a nursing home with all the challenges that she had. So Judith navigated her life for many years until she passed a few years ago in a kind of brilliant way, with in need of constant support and very complex support, and I have a. There's a quote from Judith that I think resonates for me in the question about gifts. She says sustained, vibrant relationship demands that the person with a disability be viewed with a different vision and listen to with a different ear, for most of all, the alternative possibilities is to see and hear the person as a welcome fellow traveler. We must see our shared journey, our shared life journey, as one of transforming human suffering by creating the supportive relationships we all need to sustain life and of celebrating together life's joys and victories and surprises.

Beth Mount:

And so I think of Judith when I think of the question of finding gifts, because that's one of those multi dimensional ideas. Giftedness, that, yes, there's the specific gift that each of us brings, that are being a good listener, or sense of humor, or care about other people, or creativity, whatever those things might be. But then there's this bigger sense of giftedness, which is that Judith was so insistent upon, which is that society needs me, it needs us, people with disabilities. It needs our giftedness, our presence, in order to strengthen itself, right, in order for society to evolve. And so that, to me, is such an important element of thinking about giftedness, because there's the individual giftedness that we hope to uncover and reveal and our journey with people. But then there's this other quality of healing. You know, healing a society that doesn't know how people might support each other, that doesn't appreciate vulnerability and dependency and the quality of relationships that can grow from that. When we treasure vulnerability right, when we treasure complexity and interdependence.

David Hasbury:

There were many things that you shared that were important, but I think the one of the things that I'm taking from this is the attention element and how we can pay attention, because out of 168 hours in a week, how much time are we devoting to the attention necessary to cultivate relationships, gifts, connectedness and to ultimately heal the society? It is probably one of those times when it feels like the things that we know are valuable to the lives of the people with disabilities that we've come to know they are as valuable to the rest. Only we can pretend like we can survive without them, and the people that we've come to know who are more vulnerable in some aspects of their life need these things in order to survive. You know, relationships are vital in order to survive. Being seen as an equal is vital in order to survive. Making a contribution is not just a good thing. It's actually going to keep you more likely to being able to participate and take care of your own life as well as the life of other people. So, anyway, the attention piece is really an important thing for me that I was grabbing from this, along with all the rest, which I'm glad is recorded, because I can always listen to it again For a future podcast.

David Hasbury:

I would love to have a conversation with you that is about so let me say, when people get a chance to take a look at the Garden of Soul quilt, they will be in awe of how beautiful it is. It's just full of color and richness. The beauty can be distracting because I know from other things that you've done and the way that you work and how you think the incredible process of making something is where the real, where things really lie, all the thinking, the imagining, the feeling, the kind of making sense, all of that stuff that's behind this beautiful image is important, and I'd love to have a conversation with you about that, and I'd love to have a conversation with you about how inviting other people into that process of making actually can unleash all of that as well in them. So anyway, we will do that on another time. Thanks a lot for spending the time with us now and all the best in what's going on for the rest of the week. Thank you.

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David Hasbury

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