Welcome to this diffractive creative reflexion. This “rabbit story” [1] may resemble Alice’s plummet into a labyrinthine warren, but before you drop in, please remember to don your mask, use the hand sanitiser provided, and scan the tracer app. We’ve tried to reduce “graphic close encounters” and insist upon one-metre distancing between the characters, critters and creative-works within this rhizomatic warren, but they tend towards a mycelial “fragile sprawl”. We therefore ask you to assume response-ability for your own well-being. Once you’ve negotiated the safe-entry shenanigans, we (a gaggle of creative arts therapists/educators/supervisors using arts-based research through autoethnography [abr+a]) invite you on a tunnel-trawl. This jumbled journey “celebrates our? catastrophe”: we express experiences of Covid-cognitive-collapse and, by re-membering ways we’ve tried to make-sense of these, we each craft a “glowing rabbit story that [attempts to] lead… home”.

But first, some orienting history and cartography: My name is Deborah Green. My grapple with intermittent cognitive shut-down, as the world slid into a shadowy Covid-19 maze, was captured in a creative response. This winged its way to JoCAT in 2021. JoCAT batted it back, inviting amplification. I fuddled about, floundering like Alice crying, “How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual” (Carroll, 2022, p.11). Realising I needed companions to meaningfully embrace the queering of this inquiry, I cooed to my creative arts therapy (CAT) colleagues. They read and muddled over my scribblings, collages and scraps of found-word poetry. Five reverberated and crafted aesthetic vignettes feeling-into their own pandemic tussles. When I communed with these creations, things became ‘curiouser and curiouser!’ (Carroll, 2022, p.10). I was bamboozled by the alluring tangential passageways each opened. I tried to corral them this way and that, rearranging, seeking logically ordered sequences, harbouring visions of a neat London-Underground-esque map… But alas. A form of subterranean terra incognita it is. We are, as Burke (1941) suggests, offering ‘perspective by incongruity’, an entanglement of self-focused reflexivity [2] and collective, creative diffraction [3]. Each vignette burrows into richly-layered personal worlding and these won’t top-and-tail neatly. So, please be prepared for a coll-abr+a of meandering, fumbling and looping-back…

We’re not, however, completely without navigational aids. As the works cosied and clattered and crunched against each other (and I puzzled, found edges, tramped thoughts into the hills, and was showered by the queerness of it all), constellations of twinkling glow-worms appeared. Making-sense. The wandering burrows carved by our creative-contributions inter-connect via glittering sparkles of ways to make-sense. The collaborating-CATs weren’t prepped with this delicate coherence when I invited their participation. Its emergence thus seems deliciously serendipitous while simultaneously a bit ‘duh!’ They’d found their own variegated ways to make-sense. A sort-of ‘lose your mind and come to your senses’ [4] type of sense-making that’s not head-led. Within abr+a, making-sense disrupts and diffracts beyond cognition alone. Nascent knowing grows from and is created by appreciative attention to diverse senses. Attention is paid to embodiment – our five physical senses as well as our senses of interoception, exteroception, and proprioception. Awareness awakens regarding ensoulment – our heart-sense, the tacitly implicit sixth intuitive-sense, emotional and felt-sense, sense that we are more-than. The expressive-materiality of arts modalities/mediums/processes/products expands sense-making into the creative and aesthetic realms (Green, 2015; 2020). And now, in the wake of this collective escapade, sense tentacles further. I celebrate the presence of ethnographic-sym-sense. My use of ‘sym’ (a prefix meaning connected-to/together-with) seeks links between sympoiesis (making-with) (Haraway, 2016) and ethnographic curiosity around our connections with what has formed us, where we belong, what connects us to land, culture, other beings, stories, arts-making and such like. And reflexively attending to all these diffractive sense-making processes reveals our quest to restore our ‘life-forward’ ‘sens’ of direction (from the French word) (Levine, 2009; Rappaport, 2008). This (re)turn to a sense of life-vitality throbs through the bedrock of this jumbled account and, listening close, I hear the call to whatever “glowing” sense of “home” each of us yearns for.

I shan’t be too heavy handed in pointing to these glowing moments of nexus through making-sense, so bring your imagination along. This is a rumpty cluster of creative exhibits that embraces Alice’s suggestion that a book is of no use without pictures or conversations (Carroll, 2022). Therefore, our ‘book’ is thick with conversations, descriptions, and pictures. Welcome into our rhizomatic-maze of trauma and neurobiological research, layered lived-experience creative-writings and curated found-word poems, collaged artworks, mask-play, video clips, photographs, and fabric and natural-materials artworks.

Before we get to the personal pieces, however, let’s unearth some core strata regarding distress and trauma running through all. When we encounter and respond to stress, extra oxygen is sent to our brains, increasing the alertness of our physical senses (Harvard Health Publishing, 2020). If the stress is too extreme, ongoing, and/or activates past trauma, activity moves away from the pre-frontal cortex or cognitive-thinking-and-reasoning regions of the brain and into the more action-orientated/instinctual parts (van der Kolk, 2014). This colours the ‘alertness’ – it’s not located in sparky cognition but, as our experiences below will show and tell, is shadowed by brain-fog pierced through with flashes of heightened sensory activation and/or shut-down. 

Deborah and her quivery rabbit-heart

The incursion of Covid-19 into our world abrades scabs from old trauma, awakening my rabbit-heart. The work piles up as I’m called to respond with fleet-minded alacrity to emergent needs. Yet, I’m not fleet-anything-ed. Although compelled to read emergent texts to hop-scotch through sudden labyrinths of lockdown-induced curriculum redevelopment, I’m clumsy, frozen, internally aquiver. My capacity to read and retain dense texts has scarpered down into the dark recesses of my internal trauma-dug warren.

This isn’t new, this tumble into the dim tunnels of historical trauma. I know this place. It’s a now-familiar liminal twilight. I rustle up my PhD (Green, 2015), created to process my CAT experiences during the Christchurch earthquakes (2010 onwards). Here I find some useful reminders of how my quake-woundedness seemed to privilege my survival-orientated lizard brain regions over my so-called higher logical thought, problem-solving, reading and language processes (Godin, 2010; Kass & Trantham, 2014). This numbing of the pre-frontal cortex – that many of us quake survivors called ‘mental liquefaction’ – is well documented in those who feel trapped in their struggles with trauma (Kass & Trantham, 2014; Malchiodi, 2020; van der Kolk, 2014) (Figure 2).