Author’s Note: I created the following reflections during the Your Community Your Story Module 6 – Spiritual/Worldview workshop on 6th Sept 2026.

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I came here when I was eighteen months old — my parents were both artists. I grew up in a community that was, in a way, made by artists.

I stayed until I was thirteen and then came back when I was a young adult, and I’ve been back here now for twenty-seven years. I work in the local community, as a socially engaged creative practitioner, dance, movement and theatre are the vehicles that I create, teach and explore within. In any one week I work with babies all the way through to elders. I think of creativity as a life force, as energy, as a space to share joy
It is also a space of presence, a relational attention, that opens and generates a sense of being with, and being alive to, often the work is just that: being with, and being alive to. And then we make …

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As part of the Show-and-Tell-sharing I shared some memories, provocations and held a space to explore presencing together.

Spoken Word Sharing

I’m sitting in the Lollipop Shop, a small dark theatre, and my sister is on one stool and me on the other. I am 10 years old and my sister is eight. We’re eating crisps and drinking Coca-Cola out of bottles.

The lights come up and we have an audience sitting in rows in front of us. We ask questions of each other like:

“Who are they?”
“Why are they here?”
“Why are they looking at us?”

Performance.

A relation of attention.
A present-moment awareness of another.
A seeing. A feeling. A Connection.

My father sitting in a deck chair in shorts, making people laugh.

My mother dancing with candles set in a headdress, the sound of whales.

What if I lived my life as an artist in residence?
My whole life, every moment an invitation to wonder
What if we lived our lives as a creative residency every day?
What will we make of it?

What presence?
What is presence?
Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth
that presence is awareness without thought.

Bet you’re thinking about that now.

What if we were to give each other the gift of attention without thought.
With stillness?
With movement?
With an empathetic being-with?

This was followed by an invitation to participate in the presencing:

This is our space. This is a circle of witnesses, and inside, if we wish to step in, a circle of movers. And the invitation is a simple score. There are three choices:

      • To be still.
      • To be a source of movement.
      • To be an empathetic mirror with another

Stillness. Movement. Source.

Ruby's movement exercise photo Carolien Geurtsen

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Please go to my website to find out more about my work.

Photo Credits: image on top – Carolin Waldmann; image of the hands – Caroline Geurtsen