Sensing in Liminal Spaces: Words, Music and Dementia

Abstract

This chapter offers insight into a project which provokes alternative educational futures and imaginative ways of facing current challenging issues, in this case dementia, through adopting an approach which values emergence, creativity and care-ful responses. In our co-writing and making, we reflect on an improvisatory musical practice involving people with dementia, their family, carers and a team of professional musicians and facilitators, working together with voices, instruments, words and images. We consider this practice, melding the human, the sonic and the material, in dialogue with posthuman theory which we weave together with music, words and images creatively generated by the group and the authors in recent workshops both in person and online. Through a series of ‘diffractions’ of our data, we consider how those living with dementia may help us to focus on learning as a response-able encounter, a co-creative emergence in a liminal space that opens towards the unforeseeable future. There are a series of field recordings that accompany this text: you will find links to them next to headings and subheadings; we invite you to listen to them as you read.

Introduction

QR Code 6: Audio 1: Poised at the edge—Bass note D

Considering dementia as a site of learning raises some critical questions about the relationship between education and the future. Placing learning within a context of cognitive decline causes a ‘ruption’ (Chappell et al., 2024) in the prevalent Western logic that considers education to be a process in the present leading towards more knowledge or skills for the individual learner in the future. It leads us to question what is involved in the education-future relationship: if it is by necessity no longer a primarily cognitive matter, then how might we come to understand it differently? If the logic of centring the relationship on the individual is undermined, then how can we consider instead what a person (with dementia) might contribute collaboratively, communally or intra-actively (Barad, 2007) in their own becoming in a space of learning? And if we loosen the pull of the future on education, then what different possibilities may be released in the present? Drawing attention to these questions through a posthuman (Taylor, 2016) reading of a practice involving dialogues between music, words, images, voices and people, some of whom are living with dementia, we will argue that different possibilities emerge that are relevant both within and beyond this context: a ruption in our perception of education. Quinn and Blandon (2020, 2017) have articulated eloquently the potential for using posthuman theory with its questioning of binaries and boundaries, of hierarchies between different orders of people and things, to broaden our perspective on dementia, contesting a deficit understanding which places those of us with dementia solely within a context of loss. We build on their arguments for including people with dementia as essential participants in lifelong learning and extend this line of thought to focus on learning as a response-able encounter—in other words, an encounter in which we responsively and ethically open ourselves to change (Beausoleil, 2015). We invite you into our exploration of this learning as a co-creative emergence: a joint, collective or entangled (Barad, 2007) making of something new, in an in-between or liminal space that opens towards the unforeseeable future.

There is an emerging interest in posthuman ideas in relation to music education, which highlights embodied, affective and relational understandings of music-making and learning within musical ecologies (Cooke & Colucci-Gray, 2019; Woods, 2020; Crickmay & Ruck Keene 2022; de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). An engagement with the materiality of sound (Wilson, 2021; Powell & Somerville, 2020) also contributes to revealing hierarchies in knowledge and ways of knowing and being in music (Woods, 2020, 2019; Koopal et al., 2022). The understanding of posthumanism that we adopt in this chapter builds on a number of these themes.

Introducing the Posthuman Framework

Here we draw out some aspects of posthuman theory to provide a definition of posthumanism in relation to music and dementia, describing what we consider to be its potential to create ruptions, developing new understandings in this field. We present each part of our definition in response to a short description of musical practice in action, drawing on the moment recorded in the audio accompanying this section (Audio 1, https://on.soundcloud.com/jMMFK).

John (who has dementia) has an embodied engagement with a bass bar, the momentum of the beater drawing his arm up and down, ‘oooooo,’ the vibrational affect of the sound, his animation, his being alive to it, his immersion in the moment of making the music, of embodied becoming with the music as it emerges (See Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

Musician’s drawn response to this moment

Understanding music-making as a fundamentally embodied experience, one located in and contingent on the body, is by no means unique to posthuman theory, but posthumanism guides us firmly in this direction. Braidotti (2013) argues that it is the duality of mind and body in humanist thinking that leads us to equate subjectivity primarily with consciousness and universal rationality: a measure of subjectivity that may easily exclude people with dementia. If we allow posthumanism to lead us beyond humanist assumptions, then those with dementia can guide us in deconstructing this binary, body/mind, helping us to experience our musicking, our multiple participations as performer-listener-composer-dancer in music-making (Small, 1998), with attention refocused on ‘acts and bodies… materiality… and the agency of things’ (Quinn & Blandon, 2020, p. 25).

Space is made for the human participants of the group (both those with dementia, and their family members who are also participating) to respond to the material invitation of the instruments, to discover what might be interesting about them.

We are making explicit here the agency not just of the human participants, but also that of the instruments, highlighting how the instruments might themselves be a source of creative action. We are recognising what Bennett (2010) describes as the ‘vibrancy’ or ‘energetic vitality’ (p. 5) of diverse materials as active players in a creative endeavour—in other words, recognising their creative agency.

Within the music-making, the agency of the instruments comes together, entangles with that of the human participants and also with the emerging sounds and many other materialities to form a fluid emerging collective or ‘assemblage’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xvii)—a bit like an open-ended musical ensemble that is made up of all these things. This is significant in the practice we describe since it spreads the idea of creative agency further beyond the bounded, or impaired, cognition of the individual, and disperses it amongst a diverse material-musical ecology (to borrow the term from de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). In our ensemble, music emerges from our agentic assemblage, which may at different times include a variety of sounds, instruments, bodies, affective flows, musical journeys of becoming, spaces, the weather that day, dementia and much more.

The emerging harmonic framework exerts a pull on us, suggests that we might progress somewhere, we’re not quite sure where, it is thick with ambiguity and hard to put into words but in the moment we know that something special is starting to happen and we are care-ful in our sounded response, tending the potential.

Murris (2016) describes the limitations of a ‘dualist epistemology’ in which education is focused on knowledge about the external world, rather than a material engagement with it. In her critique, she highlights how a hierarchy is established in which representation, and in particular language, is given power over matter, which has a number of consequences. First, it puts other material engagements with the world—aural, oral, visual, affective—outside of the domain of knowledge. This might include our feeling of being pulled by the music, our collective awareness of ‘something special starting to happen’. Second, it positions those of us with fully functioning linguistic abilities above/ outside the material world and away from those without such skills. Murris (2016) places children in this latter group, but we could apply the same insight to highlight how those who have dementia might be disadvantaged by such power being given to language and representation. A third consequence, drawing now on Maclure’s (2013) argument, is that language, as a dominant tool of representation, has a ‘categorical and judgmental’ quality. She is commenting on the tendency of language to hold the material world still in order to label it, suggesting it is thus poorly equipped to deal with the flow of ‘difference, movement, change and the emergence of the new’ (p. 659) in the material world. In our discussion, we explore how dementia may help us to engage more broadly with the materiality of both sound and language. This creates a ruption, not only in disturbing traditional understandings of education, but also by making spaces for unanticipated further change as we choose to engage with the endless mutability of the present moment.

Bringing posthumanism, music and dementia together in our discussion of a musical/educational practice in this chapter, we are therefore describing an embodied practice that emerges within a musical ecology or assemblage and engages with a variety of different ways of knowing-with sound and dementia.

Introducing the Musical Practice

QR Code 7: Audio 2: Opening music

‘This is for you, our opening music… just to warm you in…’ (from fieldnotes). Each Music for Life workshop opens with music improvised by the professional instrumentalists in the group. Our introduction to this musical practice begins with the opening music from a recent session.

The specific practice that we are discussing has been developed through a music project that has been becoming-with people living with dementia since it began 30 years ago. The project is called Music for Life and discussion throughout the chapter draws on our own involvement in the work over an extended period: Ursula in developing the project between 2005–2014; Caroline as flute player in the team from its foundation to the present day. Innovative as a field of practice at its inception in 1993, Music for Life now sits in the context of a rich and varied flourishing of musical work involving people with dementia yet still retains its character of discovery and innovation (Clements-Cortés, 2019; Smilde et al., 2014). The following short account of the project describes something of this character, written from our own experiences as members of the collective Music for Life team.

The work of Music for Life is specifically situated amongst people living with dementia, their families, carers and supporters, with and in response-ability to whom we have been learning to become in music over many years. The project is managed by Wigmore Hall, a concert hall in London, and takes place in a range of care settings and community spaces; a long running partnership with social care organisation Jewish Care has been an intrinsic part of its development over the years. Through a range of improvisatory approaches, our practice comes alive in the quickening in-between of dialoguing, of emerging connection and exchange, amongst the multiple participants in words, music, voices, bodies, images, material encounters and ideas. In this practice, all participants, musicians and facilitators, people living with dementia and their family members and carers, are invited to contribute their voice, their presence, in their own way: we try to capture something of this spirit by describing participants collectively as ‘player-pieces’ in this chapter. At different times this includes playing instruments, singing, directing other musicians, sharing ideas, listening, making eye contact, being in a space together, contributing words, breathing, bringing images or objects, dancing.

Music for Life team members are improvisers of connection. Using musical skills, communication skills and deep attentive listening, we draw a group into a consciously uncertain space where we can hold each other in a care-ful, or ethical response-ability. We see this as an ‘ethic of encounter’ (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 2) exploring connection, acknowledgement and belonging, and allowing ordinary barriers of communication to fall away. Situating all such encounters in Beausoleil’s (2015) ‘delicacy of openness’ (p. 6), where the perspective of each player-piece can only ever be part of an unknowable and dynamic whole, gives the work a firm footing in what she calls ‘a dispositional ethics’ (p. 8).

We experience the practice of Music for Life as one of entangling (Barad, 2007), one with another, with all ‘others’ indebted to difference (Beausoleil, 2015); meeting in improvisation, staying with troubling uncertainties (Haraway, 2016) and holding open the possibility of transformation for everyone involved. The whole Music for Life programme seems to us to be poised on the live edge of continuous becoming, within each interaction as well as each project, each new strand of our programme of work, and each year of our story. There is an ongoing striving to stay on this edge, between knowing (shared trust and confidence in our skills, our experience of what has happened before) and conscious unknowing (choosing, in Beausoleil’s [2015] words ‘to remain receptive and responsive within the encounter, despite the challenges it might present to our worldview and implication of our role within it’ [p. 2]). There is a commitment both in the ethos of the practice and embedded in the structure of the work to questioning and reflecting. This supports our intention to stay in the vulnerable in-between places, questioning and inviting, without certainty and with the potential for all to be equally important in the making process. From the earliest days of this long-standing programme, it has always been the way of Music for Life to tease out questions from our reflection, individually and as a team; to enrich our awareness of the nuances of co-becoming and create a deepening reservoir of possibility from which to risk ourselves anew in every interaction.

Introduction to Diffractions

The discussion that follows takes the shape of a series of diffractions that cluster around different aspects of the practice. Following Mazzei’s (2014) description, we have understood ‘diffraction’ in our research to mean a reading of data through theory, a threading through or plugging in of ‘data into theory into data’ (p. 743). Each of our diffractions takes a different form, but within each you will find extracts from the data, fragments of creative work by participants and others, extracts from a series of readings which we have completed as part of our process of researching together, and echoes of a longer collaborative diffractive process of dialogue or making with (Ingold, 2013) the materials.

Our diffractions draw on data generated during one Music for Life programme in Autumn 2021 as part of a PhD research study. Ethical permission for this research was granted by the Health Research Authority Social Care Research Ethics Committee. All human participants gave their consent to be part of the research and pseudonyms are used throughout so that participants remain anonymous. Words from our participants are presented here not only as data, but also appear integrated, sometimes one at a time, into the more descriptive aspects of this chapter. It has not always been practical to credit the source of single words, so we therefore acknowledge their presence here, each one entangled with the practice, and travelling with us in our co-writing.

Diffraction 1: Words/ Sense

A Reflection on Diffraction 1

Diffraction 1 began with Rose’s reading of the poem Sing to me, Autumn by Patricia Cisco (2016), which took place during an online Music for Life workshop. The text is transformed by Rose’s reading, becomes something entirely new as the words form in her mouth, some words exchanged for others, Irish lilt emphasising their musical qualities, an unequal metre in the reading adding new sense to the moment, and an aptitude for telling a story drawing the rest of us into her telling of this story, now. But what is the meaning of this transformation? What does it tell us about Rose? About her dementia? We ask you to let go of these questions, to sit in not knowing, to rest alongside a while, to breathe (Cammock, 2021).

Now re-experience the wildness of this language: listen for it.

Back to the workshop, Elena, a musician, sets the same poem to music, singing above a rhythmic double stopping on her violin, a pulsing. Ursula’s sound assemblage ‘Sense’ Audio 3 (https://on.soundcloud.com/6ddiy) starts with this pulsing. Allow yourself to feel it through your own pulse. In the assemblage you will hear other words, a ‘word salad’ (Veselinova, 2014), magnified here through layering, whispering, and a stretching of Rose’s own words, ‘breathe, on, me’ which you can hear only as a distorted electronic backdrop—their meaning obscured, or perhaps released to become something new.

What we are invoking here is a different intra-action with language, a material-sensorial-communication-creation, playing with materials, as poets and musicians might do when expressing themselves. We are elucidating how, in this musical practice in which some participants have dementia, this same artistic and expressive process finds this a natural kind of happening, in response to circumstances, to the context, the situation of all the participants. We are wondering if it is perhaps a quality of their dementia that opens a certain kind of listening in those of us whose speedy cognitive capacities might propel us to unwittingly overlook the work of language on the world, jumping forward to interpretation and meaning before we have really listened to the experience of the words and their capacities in and on our own bodies.

We allow the propositional meaning of words to flow more freely in and around our dialogue, listening to each other with the intention of finding something to revel in, something to overlap with, a connection or co-becoming that can be found in the voice of the other when joined by ourselves. It provokes a listening ‘in the pulse and pause of attentiveness’ (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 2), alongside stillness and space, listening as an ongoing shape-shifting willingness to be reinvented, reimagined, renewed, remade, reoriented, repositioned, re-birthed.

Diffraction 2: Response-Ability

Shall We Dance in the Space Between Us?

The project of responsibility as responsiveness asks and offers insights regarding not what we do, but how: how can we be more receptive and responsive to that which challenges our worldview and implicates our place within it? (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 8)

In this diffraction, we return to the moment with which we started this chapter, John and his bass bar D. This time we put the moment back into its slow unfolding to respond to the question of how through the selection of three audio excerpts from a 15-minute section of a workshop. The writing here emerges in both description and response to these excerpts, drawing attention to the tide of response-ability that can be heard waxing at its own pace, moving softly between the skittering of everyday banter, into something deeply resonant and unmistakeably shared.

Invitation—Into ‘the radius of an invisible circle of belonging?’ (O’Donohue, 1998, p. xv)

QR Code 10: Audio 5: Starting out: White noise?

Navigating the nursery slopes can be hard; it can feel uncomfortable. Not everyone is ready to respond at the same moment. At the start, it is uncertain where we will go, and anxieties and scepticism are always hovering close by. The musicians in the clip converse, cajole, tease, suggest, beckon in numerous ways to draw all the player-pieces in. Care and attention must be given to each as an individual, as well as to the overarching musical potential for the piece we might make together. Response-ability on both micro and macro levels is enacted, ripples of care extended by each player-piece to the others as the encounter quickens. The music will create its flow more irresistibly if there are no by-standers, if everyone is willing to come in. Caroline, as a musician in this process, extends her attention as far as she can, listening with her body to other bodies, listening with her eyes for other eyes, attuning to material seduction by the instruments, scanning for the glowing moments of attraction upon which to lift our music into the flowing motion of something delighted in together (Maclure, 2013). Through the companionship of people living with dementia in this process over a long time we are awakened to a new and subtle language of emotion, of the senses. Through these trusting guides we are introduced to, and rendered more capable of (Haraway, 2016), distinguishing a plurality of experiences that exist alongside the sense we make ourselves of any interaction.

Becoming, Belonging

QR Code 11: Audio 6: Moving into making together: surfing the edge

In order to anonymise the sound recording ‘Moving into making together: Surfing the Edge,’ it has been necessary to make some tiny cuts where names are mentioned. Audio clips are otherwise direct field recordings and have not been processed or edited.

Even as we risk ourselves, we remain, though the terms of that self may change; we continue to form, ever indebted and in response to every encounter to which we open ourselves. (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 12)

Within the tenderest, fragile beginning of a new shoot is the blueprint of all its potential futures, a whole rich reservoir of all that may come, building on but not bound by all that has gone before. Tending to the emerging in our session can be heard in the audio. As the leader here Caroline is acting as a guide, stepping forward with practical musical direction to create a sense of safety, stepping back to give space for something to grow. She is cultivating, in the words of Haraway (2016, p. 127) ‘the wild virtue of curiosity’, listening intently, giving time, paying attention to the bass bar note that is leading the way, enacting an ethic of care-taking. She is indicating her willingness to take response-ability for what Beausoleil (2015) describes as the shifting dimensions of ‘safety, risk, curiosity and trust’ (p. 11) in an ethical responsiveness, all ingredients needed for something new to emerge in the space. By inviting everyone to wait before joining in, encouraging attention to cues, the intention is to protect the possibility of the material, to bring its language into the field of play for everyone, to keep it alive.

In the stillness and quiet of attention, John and the repeated sounding of the bass bar are in the spotlight together; all the other player-pieces wait in the wings. Once the space is cleared for the D to be heard, its call answered first by the hand pan, few cues are needed to know when to play. All player-pieces find their way into the assemblage.

For us, this process of becoming has an element of wonder to it, a commitment to resist the ‘stifling impotence’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 131) of only being able to recognise ourselves or another if we conform to all that we’ve been before. This is especially potent in the case of people living with dementia, who are often identified in relation to the loss of what has gone before. In this dance of response-ability, we are, ‘becoming what the other suggests to you, accepting a proposal of subjectivity, acting in the manner in which the other addresses you, actualising and verifying this proposal, in the sense of rendering it true’ (Despret, 2008, p. 135).

The Echo of Belonging

QR Code 12: Audio 7: Dropping in at the shared ending

‘Surrounded by silence, it takes on more shape’ (from field notes)

The time–space emerging moment is held open with attentiveness and loving listening in which we ‘render each other capable’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 8) of something else, something new, a change or ruption. We are enabled, through relationship across our different worlds to find new becomings, belongings and ways to move towards each other from our difference, to allow ourselves to learn.

The piece has taken almost 15 minutes from the white noise of exploration to the protected space where John and the bass bar make their presence known, to the gradual assembling of all player-pieces—the shimmering and jingling of tambourines creating a suggestion of whispers, threads woven into the music with voices rustling, murmuring, in the distance. At a moment, reached as a player-piece-assemblage, there’s a turn we take together to bring the music to a close. The approach of the ending is irresistible in the music, guided by paying close, deliberate attention, by listening deeply for the moment to suggest itself and responding, enacting a shared response-ability to each other and our music. There is a quality of vibrancy, a musical energy, that can be heard in the silence that surrounds us at the end of the music. This silence, extended and richly resonant, is alive, becoming a new player-piece in our assemblage.

In this practice, people living with dementia are leading, teaching deep and instinctive listening—in the music, in conversational exchange and in bodies and movement. They teach us to listen for resonance, for an answering wavelength in our communication, where some aspects of each other’s experience might be sensed alongside one another. Where the seductive richness of a low bass bar sounding D can be delighted in without the pressure of expectation or a predetermined direction. This practice teaches us that in this moment where something, in this case a bass bar with a single low pitch, can be allowed to be in stillness, complete in itself, in a space that resists being anything else, we can enter a world of possibility. There’s a reciprocal exchange, a parallel capacity between musicians, trained to hold time, to hold affect in music, and people living with dementia. As musician/researchers in this practice, we see the potential to meet in the encounter, the opportunity for people living with dementia to take their equal place in music-making. Anything might happen… if we can wait.

Diffraction 3: Liminality

Diffraction 3 freely extracts words and phrases from theory and data: full references to published texts are provided in the commentary that follows.

QR Code 13: Audio 8: Before a sound takes place

Reflection on Diffraction 3

This diffraction begins with a recording of a space: it is the space before an improvisation, the time-space into which the improvisation must discover itself. It is an open space, though neither silent nor empty, it is in the flow of time and sound already, and yet there is a feeling of pause, of expectation, of collective in-breath:Verse

Verse Shall we try another? Yes? Shall I start? Breath sounds into flute unvoiced, fingers sound lightly on strings.

We conceive of this as the liminal space; a betwixt and between (Conroy, 2004), the space that Turner and Hall (2021) have characterised as the ‘period during which transition can take place’ (p. 46) and from which there ‘is no going back’ (p. 47).

Within this musical practice, we see this transitional, liminal space as the space of learning—the space where change may happen. There is no knowing this space: as soon as it is fixed, knowable, named, it has slipped through our fingers, melted away. There is an inherent ambiguity to it, an ‘absence of certainties’ (Beausoleil, p. 2), ‘it isn’t made yet’ (from field notes). We’ve chosen here the moment before playing to highlight these qualities, but this ‘performance of ambiguity’ (as Tesar & Arndt [2020, p. 1102] describe liminality) might be chosen from any moment within this improvised workshop practice. We are spinning, in motion, moved from the centre of our individual experience into the liminal space between, into something individual together, a quickening happening between us and within us.

Deriving from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, liminality is often associated with being on a threshold or in a state of crossing one (Lorenzi & White, 2019). Within the music practice we have described this as finding the edge: an edginess, a barely comfortable tiptoeing along a boundary of discovery, the edge of a note, the edge between knowing and conscious unknowing, the edge of yourself and the instrument you hold or touch, the edge of your own sound and another person’s sound, the edge of the sound that is about to emerge, the edge that is never still (Cammock, 2021) Fig. 7.2. It is similar to MacLure’s (2013) concept of ‘surfing’ (p. 662) the glowing moments of energetic quickening—surfing as an energetic liveliness, a ‘new state of creative energy’ (Turner & Hall, 2021, p. 47), that emerges on a threshold, at a moving edge, keeping it alive.

Fig. 7.2

The edge is never still—Helen Cammock, 2021. Commissioned by Art on the Underground. Courtesy Kate MacGarry and the Artist. Photo: Thierry Bal, 2021

Choosing to make ourselves alive to this liminal space, to stay on this ambiguous edge, to be response-able to it in our attentive listening, asks for a kind of vulnerability from all those present. It is a deliberate resistance to the pull towards fixing meaning. The decision instead is to relinquish agency, to be an equal, affective, responsive participant in the assemblage: ‘you have to sort of block out all expectations of where you want it to go in order to give it enough chance to be something which might want to go somewhere’ (Caroline, musicians’ conversation in field notes). Participants with dementia might be seen at different times to be co-participants, player-pieces or teachers in this endeavour. The learning that may emerge is not situated exclusively within any one participant or group of participants (those with dementia for instance), but emerges on the surfed edge, the in-between, the liminal space, as a ‘rupture of previous thinking’ (Turner & Hall, 2021, p. 47).

Improvising with the Emerging Future

QR Code 14: Audio 9: Closing music

Amsler and Facer (2017) draw attention to how an instrumental education, geared towards a range of desirable outcomes for the individual or for society, could run the risk of limiting education to fulfilling ‘foreseeable futures’. They urge us to pay attention to the ‘new beginnings and unforeseen possibilities that emerge in the encounter between each human being and what has gone before’ (p. 1). Our posthuman reading of a co-creative music education practice expands our own understanding of the learning encounters that might be involved in this endeavour, considering material dialogues between human bodies, sound and other materialities, and listening for the contribution of music and of people who have dementia.

Here we have been sharing our own ongoing processes, considering this practice through a series of creative diffractions, entangling our understanding with theory and data, that draw us onwards differently, releasing playful ways of knowing that respond to the circumstances, that emerge from the assemblage in a fluid and flexible unfolding. This process has provoked for us an attentive, multidimensional listening containing the possibility of response-ability within the learning encounter: opening ourselves to change. Alongside Beausoleil (2015) we have considered anew how this might involve a care-ful attention to;

Verse

Verse re-birthing  recycling    reimagining       relationship         resonance           reinventing             responsiveness             risk            reaching out          rendering capable          renewing           resisting            reorienting             richness              receptivity                restlessness                  remaking                    repositioning                      ruption

Finally, through an attention to the energetic quickening of the in-between, the unfolding moment, we have been drawn into the liminal space, the emergent, lively edge which we consider as the space of learning, where change may happen, and the unexpected arise. We perceive this as a re-centred or alternative view of community that allows full presence in the moment to be a positive development of continual new beginnings, alongside the perception of continual loss in dementia.

Improvisation opens its arms in welcome to a future as yet unknown. An offer is made, smiling, encouraging, inviting dialogue, provoking a leap into something new, and we frame our discussion as improvisation. Here is our offer, come and dance with it yourself, arouse your awareness of what has gone unnoticed before and untether your thinking by extending your care-ful, loving attention. We leave you here in the space between, accompanied by questions, in an open dialogue that waits for you to join in. We hope that our invitation will quicken in your understanding, opening into the emerging unknown, creating ruptions—reimagining and transforming the future, one glowing moment at a time.