CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS
GRAPHIC HARVESTS
VIDEOS
MUSIC VIDEOS
AUDIO
POETRY
GATEWAY TO A NEW ZIMBABWE
It is wild
It is a gateway to the creative and generative
It is allowing the silenced a voice
It is peace and healing
It is called Gateway
You are igniting passion
You are our new language
You are the children and their laughter
You are our abundant Zimbabwe
I am dawn after a long dark night
I am an exploration of everything you are
I am helping you learn how to fly again
I am here - I am patient
My name is Gateway Zimbabwe
GENESIS OF THE POEM: In January 2018 we met as the convening organizations and along with key thought partners we did a shortened Pantoum Process (a longer poetic exercise) from which this poem was birthed collectively. And so we became Gateway Zimbabwe.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE - WITH: IS THAT EVEN A QUESTION COMMUNITY AS LEADER - COMMUNITY AS PROCESS
It takes time to sit with community as it meets itself and remembers.
It takes time to allow for the messiness to play out.
It takes time to follow the unpredictability of finding a rhythm.
It takes time to get to a place of authenticity with self and with other.
It takes time to walk alongside community in reclaiming dignity.
It takes time to fail forward and fail backward without a veil.
It takes time to track with what may seem like bushwhacking through processes for collective wellbeing.
It takes time to discern how to transform the irreconcilable.
It takes time to learn the dance and song which brings community to life.
It takes time to discern the parts and to see the whole.
No matter how you word it, the inquiry remains the same.
Do we have the time? Do we give the time?
Are we ready for time to pass?
When all the acronyms fade away and the jargon moves to the periphery, all that remains true are the strands we call community.
Decades of debate and research of the factors that enable communities to act.
And what do we know? Exactly what we repeatedly forget.
Community is the center of transformative process and social change.
Why do we shy away from the only truth that has withstood the test of time? Something to do with time…
