Joyful Infrastructure • Max Mo Dailies
Day 422, the 9th of December in 2024.
I grew up near Pittsburgh, and near a highway called 422. There was an adjacent road called "Old William Penn," referring to the original William Penn Highway.
This morning, curious to remember more about when I lived in that little town near 422 — I started looking to try to understand better what the history of those roads were. Something about William Penn becoming Rt. 22 (and then being called "Old William Penn" instead?) and then Rt. 22 later being called 422 instead?
I found this page, and can barely make sense of it, but I'm intrigued by the whole thing: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/us22.cfm
It's just, I'm so interested in infrastructure.
I'm interested in how our bodies build... and rebuild... and rebuild material.
I'm interested in how our creative processes build... and rebuild... and rebuild...
I'm interested in how we collaborate with one another to establish useful systems of function, exchange, and information flow...
...and how we adapt when unexpected events occur, or when damage occurs...
...and how we rebuild together. What new pathways are added to supplement or improve or supercede the pathways that might not work so well for our purposes now?
In recent conversations with Johanna O’Tigham, we are spending a lot of time considering the “adjacent experiences” (her words) of disabled individuals and families in and around social spaces led and primarily coordinated by able-bodied community members.
And like in my previous post, there is this ever-present question — and with it the ever-present opportunity — of how we build bridges to connect with one another.
How we discover ways to language and activate respect, kindness, care, recognition, and belonging in community spaces.
It's amazing and impossible and at the same time, delightfully potentially transformatively probable — that I could even start to convey to you what it means for severely disabled community members to find and co-create bridges to fuller community collaboration. To being part of a community, to being part of any community.
What it's meant for me personally; and what it means for the people I spend the most time working with.
I have been reflecting a great deal in the past few months about the events of a little more than a year ago now... what led to me being able to participate more directly and consistently, at least for periods of time, in certain economically collaborative and creative community spaces... the significant challenges that nearly prevented that happening... and the significant challenges that nearly wiped out my ability to continue engaging once I'd begun.
It is the building of dearly-needed infrastructure that makes the difference between a community body's debilitating dissociative crisis and that same community body's wholeness, embraced diversity of creative expression and lived experience, and vital resilience.
But that infrastructure need not be so complicated as that whole page of history about Old William Penn Highway and 22 and 422.
That infrastructure can be as simple as me saying hello to you, and leaning in to learn from you, to know you better, and to find out what you feel moved by sharing in the world.