It was a Saturday in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland city centre, where the weekends often carry a spiky, tumble-weedy sense of vacancy. This particular Saturday, this sense was heightened in anticipation of Cyclone Vaianu. While nine-to-five workers had dispersed and were busy stockpiling and preparing to hunker down, in a Fine Arts studio in the depths of Whitecliffe, Symonds Street, a cohort of emerging CATs (creative arts therapists) had gathered from around the North Island for a master’s seminar. We were eager to not only learn, but to learn together, kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face).

A ‘kindle’, you might call our class – the collective noun for a group of kittens. But even as we pounced over each other to unravel theoretical balls of wool (labelled Research Methodologies, Intersubjectivity, Working with Children…) we were aware that our time together could be limited. The news updates, utter windlessness, strange light and our communal sixth sense were all loudly noising that the cyclone was imminent. The dogs in my neighbourhood had been barking, and during our check-in, Jay, from Northland, shared that her beehive had been behaving strangely before she’d left. You didn’t need to have your antennae up far or well-tuned to know that, collectively, we were hitting a disconcerting minor key.

On Saturday afternoon, lecturer Bailey Wiley was teaching us about intersubjectivity, which included a rich discussion on ‘le vā’. This concept is central to many Pacific worldviews and describes the space between people, objects and environments. It’s a fluid, ever-changing space that is meaningful and socially charged. As trainee therapists we knew our role was to have every sense pricked for what continually unfolds in this connective space “that holds relationships and responsibilities” (Wendt, 1999, p.402).

As an experiential, we stood together in a circle and took turns saying a number from one to 20. In this activity, no one knows who will voice the next number, or when, so it’s an exercise in attunement and intuition. If someone says the next number at the same time as someone else, you all have to start again at one. As if by magic, we got to 20 on the first attempt (resulting in whoops of triumph, as if we were a sports team huddled in a locker room after a convincing win on the field). But it wasn’t magic. Every one of us had been fully ‘listening’ with our eyes, noses and guts. We’d been training for this, and it felt phenomenal. Our kindling was on fire.

Next, we lay on our backs for an experiential where we hummed together, and in accordance with Bailey’s cues, experimented with different vowel sounds, volumes and pitches. Then we indulged our curiosities. “What do you feel?” she inquired. “Where do you feel it? What if there’s a strange noise? What if there’s a movement that goes with the hum? What if you make a noise with your body?” Once again, there was harmony (as well as laughter). We were splashing about together in le vā. 

Straight off the back off this came a creative writing prompt, where Bailey gave us a few minutes to independently answer the question, “What are we creating together that none of us are making on our own?” Still very much alive within the hum of communitas, we each picked up our journal and started writing.

What follows is the merging of two resulting poems by Rose Jackson and I. Sitting silently a few metres apart from each other, it was as if we’d been riding the same current of stream of consciousness. When invited to share our creative writing, Rose read hers aloud, then immediately, sensing the symmetry, I followed:

A jungle
A jangle
Of tangled bodiless baritones
A resonant field
Following on from
Forehead to fingers to a frisson in between
Making with
only possible
with making
with other
across the quantum fellowship
towards the fatherless family
of all things

A hive
A metropolitan city
Neapolitan ice-cream
The United Nations
A patchwork flag
A sponge cake
A lazy Susan
A flock
A gaggle
A fever
A rainbow
A spectrum
A splash
A new pronoun
To the power of
Exponential growth
An explosion
A sonic boom
A mushroom cloud
A colony of mushrooms
A Smurf village
A tribute
A crowd
A spontaneous applause
A standing ovation
A procession
A pilgrimage
A hallelujah

The merging of our poems was like a reverbing echo, or the endless reflection of two mirrors in front of each other. This is the privilege of knowing, intuiting and swimming within le vā, and residing within arts therapy’s community of communitas.

And then a third poem, called ‘The hum’, was read aloud by Sereca Friend:

Disruption, harmony, rupture, containment,
The polarities of a group.
What is comfort to one does not equal such to another.
How to remain contained within another’s chaos.
Only in a group can you learn and work with this.
Developing the skill to be okay within
While weathering the storm around oneself.

Communitas is not always an easy collaboration,
Sometimes confronting one’s unsettled core.
But together we create a community of Sound,
Beautifully disruptive,
While also working as one.
Individual in the collective.
Pieces to the puzzle, not one.[1]

Sereca had arrived at the seminar carrying a heavy load of grief and overwhelm. This fragility had understandably made it harder for her to access the intersubjective space, but once there, she felt less vulnerable amongst the plethora of various vibrations. This too is the privilege of knowing, intuiting and swimming within le vā.

Soon after we’d shared and explored the resonances and dissonances in our experiences and writing, our phones suddenly exploded into a violent chorus of emergency alerts. It was Civil Defence, warning us to prepare for Cyclone Vaianu. The tone was far from harmonious and it had the potential to trigger a communal fight/flight/freeze/fawn response.

Thankfully, our equilibrium remained. Our heightened awareness of le vā had a lasting regulatory effect, and we were able to calmly discuss what the alert meant for our seminar timetable, and the teachers could begin to create a new plan.[2] Sereca’s poem again felt profoundly apt, summing up our lesson in intersubjectivity: “Together we create a community of Sound.”

How to remain contained within another’s chaos.
Only in a group can you learn and work with this.
Developing the skill to be okay within
While weathering the storm around oneself.