Thought Residencies

So this is a prayer to the Creator and to the Gods and to the Goddesses and to the Ancestors and to my Mother who has passed.

I ask that you continue to look after us and our friends and our families and those who have um the least or who are the most marginalized and I ask that you continue to guide us to peace and prosperity.

My thoughts for today is that I'm really thankful and I feel so blessed that I've been able to pursue being a full time artist and musician.

I grew up in the Bangladeshi community in Toronto where art and politics went hand in hand that we weren't...necessarily encouraged to become full time artists. But with...growing up with that community empowered me with such amazing people and arts practices that I just continued to do it. And being South Asian and Queer in an arts scene that doesn't always show the diversity of Toronto um but yet it's to be a part of it and to celebrate it is very humbling and I'm very appreciative and I'm tired.

Out the Window 2018.

A question came up in my thoughts today have been around how do we create collective memory.

We voted today in Ontario and Doug Ford still won. This is absolutely horrible and we gotta figure out how to get out of this provide.

God.

Working on a theatre production with diverse artists and theatre practitioners around issues around police violence and civilian casualties and the loss of lives of those who are deemed marginalized in our society has been really...has really been thought provoking and brings me some hope and some...some sort of...I don't know how to explain this but...makes me feel a little bit better considering all the shit that's happening in the world.

Out the Window 2018.

Endings are the hardest to write...or at least that is what I was taught once...it was a teaching passed on to me. And this is it everyone, this it it...the end of my ah thought residency so if you've listened in from the beginning how generous of you umm.. if you're just tuning in - til next time. Thank you umm, to Sarah Garton Stanley the SpiderWebShow team and umm...really thinking about writers today and their journeys and creators in general and the compassion and love and generosity we need to give them all and I'm sending out love to each and everyone of you. Sechanalyagh, limelet, Kim out haha!

I'm thinking about the life of a play...and it's stages and really trying to...relook at..what it means...to go on the journey of writing...and..producing and then the latter of how the play lives after that. Umm you know you have some playwrights who go on to their ya know draft 70 something and it's always alive...and I'm just wondering and I think its probably different with each work, how long a play still lives and when do you let it become still.

How do we help...our fellow...practitioners, when they feel like their voices haven't been heard? Or they feel like...kindness or generosity hasn't been extended to them. I know it's happened to me but I feel like I'm creating a career and positioning myself to have agency over the way I feel that I'm being treated. Especially when they are Elders, your Elders. How do we support them?

I'm thinking about the responsibility we have to serve, the public or the broader community umm as artists who are sometimes and or primarily and or um entirely funded by public dollars. How do we hold ourselves accountable to the public and what does that mean and what does that look like? As Indigenous artist I feel like knowledge sharing is embedded in my practice. I'm thinking about..I'm curious about um what others are doing.

The growth after a fire is really is really interesting me...ummm last summer in the Tsilhqot'in...there were really umm forceful and giant fires happening and a lot of my family helped and the community fought off the fires themselves and this is the first time that I've been back and I'm seeing the fires guards and the effects of what happened and I'm also seeing new growth and that's really interesting umm me in trying to understand the uh impact of when a fire blazes through a community and what that means.