Pathmaker in the Bronx

This October, Make Trybe will be heading to NYC for a new collaboration with the Staten Island-based artist Tattfoo Tan! We will be starting a new pilot project tailor-made for the Clairemont Neighborhood Center in the Bronx. 

Tattfoo has been on a nearly decade-long undertaking exploring design and visual art through sustainability, resiliency, and earth based skill sets with projects like the SOS Mobile Classroom and the New Earth Resiliency Training Module in which he meticulously researched and then mastered a vast and diverse group of traditional and modern practices to better connect artist, and therefore man (or woman) with the animate landscape on which we all depend. 

Taking this basic framework of hard skills, and weaving them into the Center's foundational principle of Transformative Design that underpins our Pathmaker program, we have created an experimental curriculum that will underly a foundation of cultural and identity work, mindfulness, rites of passage, and new ritual. Our aim is to both aid the Bronx-based youth in taking back their stories and therefore power through an unfolding  and collaboratively created 10 day experience.

Stay tuned for more info! 

A rock finds its way home.

When I began forming the curriculum that would become the Pathmaker quest, I of course had visions of what it might entail, who would benefit, what they might take away or with them from the time we would share together. Hoping that we would indeed make trybe. 

One of the most vital aspects of the process is the walk about, or derive, a time in which the seeker's inner emotional landscape directly impacts or directs their outer geographical one: In short to let the heart guide the feet. 

Over the course of the gatherings I gift each of the seekers an 'offering stone' which they hold on their walkabout and upon its completion, whereve the seeker may find themselves, they leave it in offering suffused with intention and reflection, so that whomever may happen upon it in the future might access a bit of that reflection and intention, not to mention, to honor the place in which it's rooted.

Kelly Phelan one of the powerful and fiercely passionate women who completed the most recent Pathmaker quest, in putting herself in new and at times deeply uncomfortable experiences decided that she would take her stone with her as she sought and then achieved her dream of a new role in a place she had her heart and mind set on [was there ever any doubt?]. 

This is an image she sent me of her stone finding a home on a beach in Seattle, where she is to eventually make her new home. 

I have rarely been as proud or grateful as I was in looking at this photo, reminded and affirmed in knowing why I do what I do: to meet and support phenomenal human beings as they come more fully into themselves.

Get it, Phelan, Get it.
#seekinvision
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