Report from an Odyssey
Report from an Odyssey
Photo by Kristen Witte
Ayden here, reporting back on our most recent Odyssey that happened at the end of May. I remember the feeling when I had my own Odyssey in 2016 of how impossible it was to put words to what I had experienced, and having led Master Classes before, I wasn’t quite prepared for how three weeks hasn’t felt sufficient to put shape to what our most recent Odyssey for Tiu de Haan in France was like.
Tiu, for those of you who haven’t yet encountered her work as a ritual designer and creative coach, is someone who injects effervescence everywhere she goes. She ignites inspiration in others. She is a master experience designer (who even worked on an Odyssey back in 2012), which was quite intimidating for all of us when we selected her as our next participant.
But there was an irresistible window, an incredibly potent frame already built around the timeline of Tiu’s Odyssey when we selected her. In April, she turned 50 and surpassed the age her mother was when she died. And the date of her Odyssey, May 26, landed right between the anniversaries of both her parents’ deaths. What would it be to help her begin to picture her life when she no longer had templates of what it might look like from her parents? How could we help her plant the seeds of the legacy she had been dreaming of for years, a creative residency for experience designers? How could someone in the world with no romantic or business partners, no living parents, no children, begin to feel how community was knitted around her?
It has felt hard to gather the right words about this Odyssey. We joke that every Master Class Fellow goes on their own Odyssey in the course of our week together. Each of us arrives with our own questions that are sticking to us or propelling us, about work, about love and family, about our creative practice, about collaboration, about meaning….
It had been five years since I taught a Master Class, due to the pandemic and my partner being in cancer treatment the last time we ran one, and one of the things that struck me was how much the language of Experience Design has evolved and percolated out into the world. The Fellows were working at a caliber and with a level of ease around the principles of experience design that astonished me. Sophie Larsmon, our European Associate, was incredibly charismatic and stepped forward with chutzpah into her role as Co-Director after having been a Fellow once upon a time back in 2019. I myself felt newly enlivened by teaching, inspired by how this particular way of working invites everyone in the room to bring those questions about themselves as relational material to make the Odyssey. For I truly did witness sixteen Odysseys in one week.
In many ways, I think that the success of this Odyssey was thanks to having a unified Phase Zero as a team. I watched thirteen strangers become collaborators, unified in their complete devotion, artistry, and attentiveness for Tiu. In one week we created our own community, with care and its own rituals and practices to uplift each of our offerings. I watched thirteen people wrestle with their own ways of working and how to collaborate. I watched us, as a team of fifteen, pull off nothing short of a miracle.
In the final scene of Tiu’s Odyssey, we created the residency she has dreamed of, celebrating its 20th anniversary, 25 years in the future. Tiu will be 75. I will be 60. (How old will you be?) We went around the dinner table and many shared how they were changed by Tiu’s vision, and by her openness and generosity in offering her life as material to our process. She kept batting away our gratitude like a fly, insisting that it was preposterous for us to thank her when we had all just spent weeks and months making a 36-hour-long experience just for her. But the truth is, this attentive way of making shifts something internally for us. So often it can be hard to find meaningful ways of living, of making, of being in community, but here it was.
There is so much conflict in the world today, from petty bickerings to dehumanizing catastrophes;it’s humbling and moving that in the face of this I have the honor of watching strangers unify so swiftly around a creative aim. I hope we can each bring a thread of this dedication and care to the pockets of world around us as each new day arrives.
What do you feel dedicated to recently and how do you make room for that in your days?
