Author: Telling My Story

Working with rising leaders in the Northeast Kingdom to build community with an eye towards power.

From March 9^th to March 11^th, I ran Telling My Story: Listening and Speaking in Community- Race, Class and Gender in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.  I was profoundly moved to be there as it was an area where I lived for 12 years.  It was wonderful to be back there in such a different capacity.  At the time I lived there I was a mother, a performer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and I was starting the TMS program at the Newport Correctional Facility.  This time around I was a facilitator. We met at the Barton Municipal Building – the perfect place for our work.  I was met by a group of curious and intrigued participants composed mainly of leaders of organizations in the Northeast Kingdom that work hard on social issues, combating poverty and facilitating better realities for marginalized community members.

The program had an easy and exciting pace but certainly not without challenges.  Because of the remote reality of that area, the organizers and I opened the invitation for people that couldn’t come every day.  I ended up having a different group each day. In this reality, we worked with the concept of being present in the moment to produce a strong relay system to give continuity to the work.  There was such a strength in that effort because of the selfless nature of such a challenge.  It was not easy to do it but at the end we all felt very proud of our work.

And in this version, we talked the first day about the idea of more people coming to the group and the openness was limitless. There was so much courage and generosity from the very first moment.  During our first session the group was highly present, enthusiastic and engaged with every activity even if all of them felt they had never been part of such a set of activities.  What I respect the most is their courage and the trust they deposited in the work from the very beginning.  I was so grateful and excited.

During our second day a couple more people joined the group.  We were all happy because both participants were part of the arising leaders in their communities.  As we dug more into the idea of taking a leap of faith with others, people took that idea to heart and dove deeply into sharing and doing together.  The balancing activity captured that whole feeling as every participant committed to work in pairs to get that balance while in  silence as the instructions required.  Not an easy task but one that takes us to important places with others as we try to expand our experience with language that we all know is not limited to words.  It was humbling to see every single participant try hard to connect with others in body and mind.  But it took a toll on people as they felt their muscles complaining the following day.  Still, it felt good to put so much energy to the physical work of the workshop to balance the other aspect of the work, the sharing based on words and personal history.

The third day again we had newcomers while others couldn’t stay in the workshop.  This time around, the newcomers brought even more diversity to the group, which made us more excited.  The last day of the intensive program is a long one and in many ways it is when so much happens; the prior days are like a warm up for voice and for building trust and community in space.

We shared individual stories that made us different and closer at the same time, and we started to dare to be with one another more openly in our quest to find connections in our values, priorities and principles.  Giving space and time for ourselves and others showed us that differences are nutrients for community and that being together gave us strength to keep trying to create spaces for change.

The writing of the manifesto was a powerful process.  I told the participant that this was their time and that I was stepping away from it.  I was moved to witness how the group internally organized to do the writing in an organic and respectful way, and where all voices were included.  Laughter, enthusiasm and excitement walked together with disagreement, misunderstanding, and difficult moments. However, the unifying focus was the desire of the group to find new ways to be with one another and to reclaim the beauty and power of our humanity.

During our lunch time potluck I organized the group to start the building of the Talking Wall, which is a graffiti wall that is pasted with words, thoughts, images, questions and wonders of the participants, and in a beautiful way, people went back and forth between the building of the wall and the finishing of the manifesto.  At the end of the session, participants had an extra hour to review their testimonials and fine tune their voices.

For the final presentation we had a small audience, just the way the group wanted it to be. It was an intimate time where everyone attending was present and engaged.  There was always space for the participant to be present in a way that made them feel comfortable.  

The final conversation with the audience was filled up with the kind of curiosity that is intended to expose the self, to share, and to learn.  We were all moved to the core and valued the opportunity that is given when we decide to present the work in public. 

This program I also experimented with doing fewer activities each day.  I was humbled and happy to keep reassuring my belief that doing less can hold the power to create new spaces. I had decided to bring less activities to the workshops to give more time to just process, think, and be with others.  The truth is that those breathing spaces  are important spaces to build trust and community.  And individually and as a group, we got to where we wanted to go.  And it worked so beautifully with a community that is used to not being packed with tasks and agendas and that also  know how to be in nature- they know how to wonder…. Now I wonder how I can transfer this experience to other communities that are more influenced by the urban social structure.  I believe I just have to try.

Running our first three-day intensive program with adults.

This January, we ran the first new intensive version of the traditional TMS program with adults.  We met at the Kilton Library in West Lebanon over a period of 3 days.  The group was composed of 11 people from diverse backgrounds but with similar educational experiences. 

Our first session was full of smooth and fun moments.  There were many fast decisions on my part to cut activities from the original list of “what to do” for the day as I was, and still am, designing the intensive version of the program.  

This three-day version of the TMS program is intense and demanding to say the least, yet it better responds to the social availability people have from their working reality.  I did miss the time to process and to sit with the experiences as we moved forward with the experience.  Like any beginning, there is much space for improvement and important changes as we keep developing.  

I am extremely proud and profoundly moved by the presence of every participant as I saw how we grew in confidence, trust, self-agency in the expression of the personal and group voice. This session brought people together with fun and accessible activities that energized the space and developed confidence and curiosity in one another.  People were willing to dare and were present in mind and action throughout the session.  The sharing of personal stories was generous, courageous, and intentional; it felt like people were there to make something happen.  It was a time of lots of wondrous questions about what was happening as I tried to make the point that the focus of the experience was in the process of being with others and not in a predetermined agenda. The idea is always to write the agenda together as we go.  Participants laughed, got lost, expressed curiosity for one another in a responsible way, and were energized and motivated by one another with care and delicacy.  But most importantly, people gave the time and space to listen to one another while withholding judgment, which I believe opened doors for everybody to take the leaps of faith we need to build trust.  I was in awe and profoundly moved to witness such a process.

And we also had challenges as we listened and adapted to the needs of one another.  Social fear is sad to witness and experience, and it is also important to acknowledge and respect it.  From years of social isolation we have been experiencing, to trauma, to painful personal stories, to excitement for being in that space together we found ways to be with one another in acceptance, pain and joy. With that open and flexible attitude, people felt welcomed and accepted by one another, a very powerful and important achievement.

During the second session participants went deeper into the sharing and the practice of listening.  The gentleness and powerful presence of everyone was so clear that trust and easiness kept strengthening the sharing even when in difficult moments and when in pain.  We were able to take care of one another and to slow down when needed.  In this way people were able to feel the space belonged to them- that they were not trying to fit but to belong.  

I am profoundly moved by people’s ability and willingness to take a leap of faith and work as hard as they did dealing with the complexities of the themes we were addressing.  These sessions confirmed to me the hunger we all feel to create spaces for our practice of humanism to grow.  We are hungry for something different so we keep trying to create possibilities to nurture our hope and humanity.

The last day of work was a full day.  We were together for 10+ hours as we continued to dig deeper into the sharing.  We worked on making sense of the individual and group voices.  The group wrote a manifesto and created a Talking Wall, which is a graffiti wall made out of cardboard boxes that is used as the backdrop to the final presentation. Also, every participant had prepared ahead of time a testimonial to share with their peers and to the audience.  This moment has become profoundly special and  powerful as, literally, everybody in the room is in the same boat: nobody has heard anyone else’s testimonial.  

People brainstormed and wrote the manifesto while they were making the Talking Walls.  They organized themselves and made decisions about how they wanted to deliver their texts.  And they found the need to take breaks from sitting down, thinking and writing, to move and shake the body so they could keep going in this intense and demanding challenge.  And I saw them dancing, moving and smiling- a wonderful and refreshing moment.  

TMS has a structure for the final presentation that includes the main aspects of the process: an individual testimonial that each participant reads out loud, and a manifesto, which is read by all participants.  And there is a proposed sequence to it.  So we worked hard to organize the group to make it happen.  And it did happen, but there were difficult, confusing and unbalanced moments that now need attention.  And there are certainly many changes that need to happen to improve this version of the program.  

I believe that we learn through doing, but I want to express my profound gratitude for the presence and courage of all the participants as they took a leap of faith with this new version of the program.  They help me get to the place I am now where I can look at the necessary changes with excitement and hope.

The final presentation was moving and powerful.  We had an attentive  and supportive audience that was very motivated to engage in the after talk.  Questions, reflections, and comments between the audience and participants created a reflective and wondrous space.  My gratitude has no words to express it.  Onward together to learn and to change!

Working with teachers to advance equity and inclusion in classrooms.

During the month of September, I ran the program Telling My Story: Race, Class, Gender, Education and Community, a collaboration of teachers of the Hartford Public School District and community members of the Upper Valley with a variety of different social realities. We designed the program with the Hartford Public School District Equity Director as part of an ongoing effort for teachers to improve their ability to work with an increasingly diverse student population. 

These days, as I am able to run more in-person programs, I have been able to see the toll the last 2 ½ years has taken in our communities.  Clearly all participants in this program were hungry to do something different and be part of this communal process. They were also exhausted with the work-related demands they are facing on a daily basis.  I was humbled to experience such a generous presence in the context of so much exhaustion.  So, as we listened and learned with each other, we also shaped our space to bring the best we could to one another.  We all agree that “drumming with words” was the activity that could help us to generate the right starting mental and physical space for the day: with this activity we were able to let go of our charged reality and breath possibilities to create a common space for everyone. 

We were also faced with a challenging reality within the group: we were a pretty homogenous group.  Even though there were a few people from racial minorities, this reality was our most urgent challenge as we were addressing important topics regarding race, class, and gender with low representation inside the group.  The ultimate question was: what can we talk about and how?  And the challenge was taken seriously and intentionally.  That intention and acknowledgement gave us the courage to responsibly venture into this painful and joyful sharing.  People had the courage to respond to the process with openness and willingness to take a leap of faith with others.  And trust grew organically to the point where fear lost power, warmth, sharing and being with others became an easy practice.  Painful and intimate stories were shared with clear integrity and they were received with understanding, compassion and empathy.  A practice that took us to celebrate together what we were with all our limitations and possibilities.  Our agencies blossomed and we felt empowered by the experience. I was moved to the core.

The way we came together had a lot to do with the incredible ability these teachers had to build community.  They strongly believe in community and they have been working for decades building community inside the schools, so they know how to be there for the students and for one another- and they did just that throughout the workshop.  They built a strong community where everyone felt they didn’t have to try to “fit in” because everyone had a shared sense of “belonging.”  I see so much potential to keep strengthening communities with the tools that TMS has developed and can offer.  Talking and reflecting with participants we realized that they already had versions of the TMS tools in their activities; and we reflected on the little but important details that the TMS approach might just bring something extra and powerful to enrich and strengthen their practice.

In the final two sessions the group worked on their testimonials and on the group manifesto; what they wrote was powerful, intimate and urgent.  The group also built the backdrop for the final presentation: The Talking Wall, which is a graffiti wall made out of cardboard boxes that present statements, thoughts, and urgent sharings.  The way the group collaborated during that last week gave me great hopes for the ability to build community, and the power and possibilities this practice can bring.  

On September 28^th we had the final presentation at the Hartford School Auditorium.  An attentive audience of about 40 people came to support us, and they were moved.  We engaged in an honest conversation that took place after the presentation, and we could see that the message had been received with familiarity- people related to and felt motivated by the stories being shared.  We were all in the same boat: a profoundly meaningful and powerful moment.

There is one more final piece of this program that I have reflected on a lot both during and after the program. I never know what a program’s group is going to be, and this one had a surprise for me: I had 3 young mothers participating.  This was new to me.  Their participation and presence required a lot of flexibility as they were all working hard to balance caretaking responsibilities, jobs, and the TMS program.  And it was clear that to the world these challenges presented a “problem”.  But, to think that motherhood was a problem was shocking and problematic to say the least, and it was important for me to resist that idea and find ways to welcome everyone and make it accessible for all.  It became to me an effective and important practice of  inclusivity.  I saw this situation as a possibility for the TMS work to push itself beyond believing in and embracing the concept of inclusivity, but to work on the actual practice of it.  And it was fun, powerful, and incredibly rewarding.  At times we had the presence of a 3 years old wonderful little girl who delighted everyone with her presence.  She loved drumming and worked hard to collect the drum sticks and buckets at the end of the activity.  Her bright smile soothed our souls and brightened our space.  Tenderness was with us, even in the midst of sad and painful sharing.  We held together strongly and beautifully, and in pain and joy, were able to heal together.

It has been an honor and I am profoundly grateful to have collaborated with these members of our community.  Now, we are brainstorming together to find ways to keep TMS’s pedagogy in the school on a continual basis.  We strongly believe that it would be powerful for teachers, students, parents, and staff members to be exposed to the work so it stays in the community as something accessible and regular.  It is always good to dream and create together.

– Pati Hernandez

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Acknowledgements: We would like to thank our generous funders and collaborators. Thanks to the Byrne Foundation, the Couch Foundation, and an anonymous donor for making this program possible. Thanks also to Boloco for providing food for our final performance and celebration. We could not do the work we do without all of this generous and gracious support. 

Working with High School students on mental health and voice.

It was an absolute privilege to work with 10 students from Hopkins High School in CT.  And I had the pleasure to collaborate with Emily Eisner as my assistant for the first time.  My collaboration with her left me inspired and excited for what is coming for us as collaborators.  Thanks Emily!

As I reflect on this program, I have the most sincere respect to all the students with whom we worked.  From the inception of this project, I was moved and impressed by the clear commitment and vision they had.   The organizer found me on the Dartmouth website and was intrigued and interested in the work so she wrote to me and we connected.  Listening to her made me realize the urgency she felt to create spaces for communication, dialogue and community building in her school, addressing the delicate issues of race, class, gender and mental health.  

After a lot of back and forth in the organizing of the workshop, which showed the determination and power of this young woman, the group finally met over a period of two intensive days.  We spent our time listening to one another, connecting, playing, sharing personal stories and finding that powerful and profound place where we feel we are all in the same boat- we realized we were not alone.  We were empowered by the joy and pain and it felt good to be there together.  We built hopeful spaces where the voice of every single participant was important and courageous.  

Emily and I invited participants to be with one other in the effort to build community, and we invited them to listen and speak while withholding judgment.  We also invited the group to embrace difficult ideas and to practice challenging the status quo. For example, we asked the students to try not having an expectation or agenda, but to have the discipline and courage to build the agenda as we go and taking leaps of faith with one another, an incredibly challenging way to be at this moment in history and in their position as high-aptitude high school students. These ideas are almost contrary to the educational approach we implement these days as a way to be “successful” in the world.  And I was moved and humbled by their hunger I saw in all participants to try something different and the ability to embrace those ideas in such a way that the whole process felt it was moving forward by itself.  Mutual trust grew as we continued to  collaborate and embrace the idea of taking a leap of faith with each other.  We were all empowered by the experience.  

I personally felt the beauty and rewarding feeling of being able to lead from behind while I witnessed the group organizing itself to make sense of their voices- a moment I will never forget….

At the end, participants shared moving testimonials with each other in our enclosed group.  We held one another with grace, generosity and beauty- and we felt good.  I was left with the questions “why do these moments have to be extraordinary when we need them and want them so badly?”  “What really stops us?”   I keep thinking….. and I am left with the energy to keep pushing the TMS platform to be an effort that is extraordinary and ordinary at the same time.  That is when I see real and meaningful power and the possibility for change.  

Participants also shared with a tiny audience of their choice a short presentation that included a Talking Wall, which is a graffiti wall made of stacked up cardboard boxes. The wall had 40 big boxes and it was built in a two hour period.  Voices poured out and ideas were fluently  generated and celebrated by everyone.  There was an easiness that was created in that space; an easiness I am hoping the participants can recreate because they were the ones that created it in the first place.  

And together they wrote a powerful manifesto which they shared with the tiny audience and planned to share it with the rest of their school community.  I am honored and grateful to have been part of this effort; and I am excited to keep developing this different version of the program to be able to respond to different needs from the communities.  Onward together!

Us and Them: Seeing Each Other, Seeing Ourselves

Our latest program, “Us and Them: Seeing Each Other, Seeing Ourselves,” brought Telling My Story into a whole new domain, and challenged us to grow as we collaborated with CATV, the local public television station of the Upper Valley.  The program was run during the months of February, March, April, and May with a final presentation at the beginning of June.  We met every Tuesday and Thursday at the Briggs Opera House and shared a dinner at the end of the sessions.  Once again, we were generously supported by the Boloco restaurant.  They would deliver our dinners to the Briggs Opera House.  There are no words to thank their ongoing support of the work.

During the program, I had the privilege of working with 10 participants: 3 from CATV, and 6 community members from the UV, including 2 participants that came from vulnerable realities.  The effort to bring unlike community members together was very present in the outreach from CATV and TMS.  We were a rich group with very diverse backgrounds, ages and personal experiences.

We ran the TMS program in parallel to a series of workshops teaching us how to use filming equipment so people could make their own short recordings and documentaries from their daily lives.  Every Tuesday was the space for TMS and every Thursday was the time to get immersed into filming.  Together we prepared a final public presentation at the White River Junction Briggs Opera House where a solid audience heard the voices of the participants individually and as a community. 

The process itself was surrounded by the challenge of me being sick throughout the time, however, the incredible support, flexibility and generous attitude produced an incredible community effort to come together despite adversity.

TMS had never had this kind of collaboration where the final presentation was directed and guided by others. I can’t say it was easy for me to let go and give over control. It was a real exercise in some of the core philosophies of Telling My Story: letting go of expectations, letting the process guide the result, and embracing collaboration and the voices of others.  It is not easy to keep that discipline but necessary to find common grounds for self- empowerment and trust.  It corroborates my belief that every time TMS collaborates with another organization, the process and program in general is significantly better because we are all willing to go beyond our comfort zone, an experience that is full of surprises and that teaches me, gives me hope, informs me, and expands my vision.

A moment that sticks out to me is when people didn’t understand why I was asking them to work in small groups with something not necessarily personal but something that certainly started with the self.  People were motivated to think about it, but were not so excited about collaborating  with others in a group.  Still, everybody agreed to work in groups, and there was an incredible turning around of events when that room started to bubble with engaging conversations and sharing of personal experience in relationship with the world.  At the end people couldn’t stop and their smiles –  and  the energy was high and contagious.  This was the moment people understood why I was pushing to have a personal process being gently shared with others so, together, we could create a place where we all felt we belonged.  We found the meaning and power of taking a leap of faith with and for others.

During the first month of the program, due to my unforeseen health issues, I was not able to participate in the workshops of CATV and was profoundly moved by the way Samantha, the leader of CATV, was always trying to connect the two experiences.  Participants had the opportunity to take cameras to their homes to film moments, events, sights that were interesting to them.  And we had a great showing of those short films that became an open door to each person- quite a powerful sharing. 

Eventually people got divided into groups where they did recordings of their individual testimonials.  It was a wonderful small group collaboration that motivated individuals to give directions to others in the group to convey the vision for the delivery of their testimonial.  And we all saw the power of filming and the importance of speaking our own truth; of daring to speak up even when difficulties and miscommunications happen.  The value of being willing to keep trying to take a leap of faith for and with others became the engine to move us forward as a group.

And TMS kept running its workshops as it always has, focusing on the themes of Seeing Each Other’s, Seeing Ourselves, we went deep into the sharing and listening.  Going back and forth between the two workshop’s platforms was a delicate line to walk.  Connecting them to make sense of the collaboration was a fascinating challenge.  I have always said that TMS is an imperfect experience, meaning, we have always been able to build strong spaces for intimate and powerful sharing, and we build community.  As with many collaborations, the challenges offered us a powerful opportunity to grow into something we never would have been able to otherwise.

As usual, going our own ways at the end of the workshops is not easy because the larger community, society, the world, is not in connection with what we have created.  And we feel we are alone in relationship with the rest of the world.  This is not easy to process, but we always conclude that even though it is difficult to face that reality, it is worthwhile going through the process as it takes us individually and as a group to places where we want to be.  It is up to us individually to keep strengthening our inner voice and beliefs.  That is the ultimate action for self-empower.

With all of this, collaborating with CATV took TMS to a new space. During the final presentation, we had a combination of filmed materials from all the participants; and we had live performances interwoven with those short films.  The most memorable moment was at the very end when people of the audience were invited to participate in one of the main activities of the TMS practice.  The audience didn’t hesitate to participate and the space became one for all people present: performers and audience listening and speaking, listening and speaking….

The pride people had when they first were assigned to create a skit in small groups, the

pride when people first improvised a testimonial to be recorded.  The power of voice!

Saludos, health and much peace, Pati

We’re only four months into 2015, but TMS has already had a busy year! To read about the exciting programs and happenings of the past few months, check out the TMS Winter 2015 newsletter here! Also save the date for the Telling Stories for Social Change class performance: the TSSC performance will take place on Thursday, May 21 and Friday, May 22 at the Valley Vista Rehabilitation Facility in Bradford, VT. More information and RSVP link to come soon!

In the winter of 2012, Dartmouth College student Nell Pierce ’13 accompanied TMS Executive Director Pati Hernández to Talca, Chile to co-facilitate and implement a self-portraiture workshop of her own design. Nell was kind enough to reflect and share her thoughts on her experience with TMS.

In this particular project we expanded the collaboration to include a self-portraiture workshop that I developed a few years ago in Guatemala City. We focused half of the week on Pati’s TMS sessions, and the other half on self-portraiture, complemented with improvisation exercises led by our third collaborator, Katie Lindsay. The combination of the calm, introspective nature of self-portraiture with the energy of collaborative theater presented complementary challenges and nurtured different needs. Thirty-three women completed the self-portraiture workshop and half of them pushed through the entirety of Telling My Story to perform in the final shows. The women presented powerful perspectives and challenged their audience with questions and invitations to join in their struggle for a healthier society.

Unlike work I’ve done in NGOs that bring the people they serve into the organization’s own space, I soon learned that the prison was not our space, and it was not always an environment conducive to our needs. This was a great lesson in listening and improvisation; whatever agenda I entered with was immediately thrown out the window (I chased after it for a while, but the crazy winds won). While it wasn’t our space, I hesitate in deciding whose it really was. The social hierarchy, rules, and codes that the women create amongst themselves make the prison feel like their territory, yet it eerily becomes a puppet show when the guards exert their power. The women develop cheap power facades as survival mechanisms; when people laugh, side-talk, or leave in the middle of a workshop, it’s a pretty blatant way of expressing that the facilitators running the workshop don’t have power over them. It’s the same game we played with substitute teachers in my high school – a very human device. The difference is that inmates may harden these defenses because most of their real power to make decisions in their lives is taken from them. Telling My Story became a collaborative fight to revive and build an internal power in the midst of all the rubble.

Facing what I couldn’t fully comprehend and moving through it without an answer was both terrifying and empowering, and it helped to feel the group moving right alongside me. When I embraced the limitations of my perspective and trusted the arts as our vehicle, I was more in tune to little shifts – signs that something was moving and something was being reshaped, however slightly, through the creative process. It was expressed through crying and stubborn interrogation about the purpose of this work. It emanated through a glowing face or steadier eye contact.

When sensing shifts in the women, we were challenged to balance pushing with nurturing, which depended on the woman and the hour. When a woman was not meeting her commitment to the workshop (which happened a lot – we went from fifty women to thirteen), Pati listened for whether the woman’s justification was a façade for fear of participating or outside factors that she couldn’t control, such as mental and physical health or work obligations. Some feared confronting their life stories, others feared committing to a group and sharing power. Despite the social support the women offer each other, the deprivation of basic needs (namely love and trust) that many have lived with for years fosters survivalist selfishness, a tough habit to break because it works on many levels. Given that these fears were legitimate and widespread, the determining factor was always attitude – whether a woman was ready to challenge herself and open to collaborate. It was hard to see women with big personalities who I initially assumed would be key players drop or get kicked out mid-way through (and to put my own foot down in the self-portraiture workshops), though it was clear for everyone that it was not personal and that expectations of attitude were consistent – perhaps not being given a third chance was the greatest opportunity for self-reflection one could take from the workshop. For those who did participate, expectations of performance were personal because every woman began with a different level of sophistication and challenging themselves meant different things. For me, it was a great challenge to discern a bad attitude in a charismatic and talented woman that took on the main role while honoring the courage of a shy and inexperienced woman that would watch for hours before shaking to deliver a line.

Because I have only a salty taste from the rough currents of the deep, dark, ocean the people around me had beennavigating for most of their lives, my resistance to the disturbing dynamics of the prison was shallow and uninformed.Alternatively, I decided to embrace the chaos of what I didn’tunderstand and it allowed me to focus on and take ownership over what I knew I could contribute. It would be naïve to declare that art is the only or best way to change these women’s lives – or that it’s going to at all – but it did provide an opportunity to create something when we, the women and ourselves as facilitators, otherwise felt powerless to a situation. The act of creating, especially collaboratively, implies that something raw and new will emerge, so it involves trust and risk – a good practice for control-freaks, like myself, and many of the inmates who have lost trust in others and hope in change. And yet, the materials we start with are the materials with which we end. It isjust a reshaping of what’s right in front of us – or inside us. The ability to reshape what’s inside us is real power.