Practice-Research: Learning Together
Notes to New Trustees
January 2019
Neurodiversity covers autistic spectrum, ADHD and dyslexia and can cover a wide range of experiences in communication and sensory processing. Some of its gifts include “thinking out the box”. Yet it can have mental health implications of sensory and/or emotional overload that to a greater or lesser extent can be incapacitating. My incentive for starting Memory Gardens was to figure out together, working models for thinking, learning, feeling in community, as layers of experience that evolve through shared practices over time. In this sense these practices do not cause overload because at a deep level of inner value, we experience them together- since we make them together- whether art-making, music-making, therapeutic touch as a practice of embodiment and movement/gesture. A lot of the project is about tuning our shared capacity to be present together- so as to be present to ourselves- whether we are verbal or non-verbal, or viewed by society as “High-functioning or “low-functioning. What can we learn from one another in company?
Ruth Solomon
