Shared Air: Situated Waters
A Doubleness of Dreaming in Body and Psyche
Listening and Reading Sessions Rooted in Breath, Water, and Diasporic Memory
Facilitated by Marie Theresa Crick

Overview

This is a call to those who carry a doubleness of dreaming, who feel pulled between places, histories, or temporalities. To those whose bodies are grounded in one location while their psyches drift elsewhere. To those who dwell in thresholds; between here and there, past and future, shore and sea.

Shared Air: Situated Waters is a series of intimate, breath-led listening and reading sessions shaped by time spent on the UK’s southern coastline—Hastings, Brighton, and Margate—while grounded in place, awaiting surgery for endometriosis. Though the sea was near, my psyche was elsewhere: pulled constantly toward Ireland, to the ancestral shorelines my body could not reach.

In those coastal towns, I found myself inhabiting a line of departure; my grandmother, my mother, both of whom left Ireland for England. I walked where they might have walked, along different edges of the same sea. In the salt air and shifting tides, I felt their decisions, their silences, and their unspoken griefs. This series carries that psychic and physical inheritance; not as destination, but as residue.

These sessions do not take place by the sea, but bring the sea with them; as atmosphere, as trace, as emotional sediment. Breath and water become methods for reading and listening otherwise: across generations, through bodily memory, and in porous relation to land and language.

We read together not just from the page but from the textures of longing, exile, and return. We hold breath as a shared threshold between personal and collective experience. We gather to listen, not only to texts, but to what moves between us in silence, rhythm, and shared air.

This work carries a doubleness of dreaming: backward, into the psychic imprint of maternal and ancestral departure, and forward, toward what else might be possible through attention, relation, and breath. Though rooted in groundedness, pain, and waiting, the sessions are also buoyed by hope, drawn from the sea’s shimmer, from the poetry of return, from the breath that persists.

Guided by Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared air, these sessions explore breath as a method of co-witnessing: a way of attending to what has been lost, withheld, or carried forward through silence. Breath is approached not as metaphor, but as relational force; held between bodies, across time, and through the suspended moments where words falter and something else speaks.

Together, we invite a different kind of reading: slow, situated, and embodied. We hold space for rupture and resonance, for grief and imagination. Whether you come with a fragment, a poem, or simply your presence, you are welcome here. The invitation is not toward interpretation, but toward attunement.

We read with breath.
We listen with water.
We stay with the air we share.