The Movement of Moving

The dust has settled and it feels like there is so much of it, as if it were rising in drifts up to my knees.  I am tripping over boxes, bags filled with off season clothes, suitcases half emptied because I have not decided what to unpack into. 

I have always been about movement – when I have something to say, I gesture, move, pantomime. In crisis I seek ways to move the energy, release negative and overwhelming feelings that are coursing through my body, mind and spirit.  I hate being stuck and while most of the past seven years have demonstrated steady movement, there is a part of me that was glued in place. Now, prying and wrenching, discarding and tossing, gathering and grumbling, I have moved.

The old place was a cocoon, dark and embracing. Nestled into a hill and facing north, its eyes were hooded with shades to keep out the chill. Even when they were rolled up, only dim light came in to the family room, the place we spent a lot of time. The living room was brighter but for some reason we did not use this room as much.  The kitchen had big windows, looking out on the hill and the fern forest in spring and summer, shaded by a black walnut tree and desiccated cedars, one of which hosts a swarm of bees. The new tenants are city folk and are concerned: will their son run into the road? Will the bees chase him?  "Just don't throw things at the bee hive," I advise, in my best country girl, nonchalant manner. 

In contrast, this house floods with light from early dawn till dusk. It is quieter here. At the old place, there was constant lawn mowing as if the neighbors were members of a secret competitive club, with a prize for how often one could mow. Red tractors, green ones, stand on the back mowers, which the neighbor across the street used while wearing a black back brace around his plaid shirt. My own John Deere stopped working years ago and the new lawn guy wears an acid green tee shirt as he walks behind his orange mower, delivered in a horse trailer.  At the new place, I have yet to hear anything more than birdsong, frogs and the cicadas right now, signaling another searingly hot day. Maybe the lawns are mowed by pookahs silently in the middle of the night. I have to admit it is pretty here. The deck is bordered by a small pond with pink water lilies tucked under a straggly wild blackberry bush. The land in back includes more than 50 acres of forest, wetland, hill and glen, with lovely mossy paths and tenacious trees growing out of granite cracks.

I took the long road home last night, winding around an old country highway, over the Bear Mountain Bridge. I drove past the road I lived on growing up, past the park where we'd go to see the bear cubs. It took me through the town where my eldest went to nursery school, past the turn off to our first house. It was as if I were moving through remnants of the past as I drove to the present.  Along with the boxes, pots and pans, my collection of colored crackle glass, hundreds of books, records and cds, I have moved with memories, carrying them in my heart, into this place of light and hopefully, new possibilities.

Euphemistically Speaking

Dear readers (all twelve of you), I have been absent for a while as I adjust to the working world. In addition to building The Karuna Project's private practice, I am a Bereavement Counselor at Holy Name Hospice now, several days a week. It is wonderful, sometimes painful but very meaningful work. I hope to be more present on this blog in the future!

Words, words, words.  We all use them but they often mean subtly different things to each of us.  Words are affected by interpretation, culture, by the books we read or do not read. Choreographer Pina Bausch said that "words can't do more than just evoke things" adding that this was the purpose of art.

This is why I love poetry.  The literal words, distilled down to a minimal essence of expression, evoke more than inform. In poetry, there is a visceral resonance that speaks to the heart.  Reading a poem, a curious and literally minded colleague asked me, "but what does it MEAN?"  I dislike picking apart the meaning of poems. Listen, flow with them. FEEL what it means to you.  It's like staring at a Rothko painting; at first it is just a blue canvas, a pretty color. You think, what does it mean? Open your heart, your eyes, enter the color. Movement exits there, deep blue washes you. The painting becomes a meditation, awakening feelings, associations, stillness. This resonance cannot be described, even though I am attempting to do so.  It must be felt.

Grief is like that too. Someone said, "I cannot speak about this, it is too deep." Talking helps, but no words can really describe the dark abyss, the agitation, fear, the dissonance of life after a death. And we are hindered by a habit of using euphemisms that purposely obscure grief.  He "passed away."  This might be a good descriptor of a quiet, peaceful death but it doesn't work for a sudden one. She's "gone to a better place."  This is comforting to many people, but infuriating to some. I "lost" my husband.  A woman in one group asked testily, "why do we say he is lost?"  He's not a set of keys or one of my three pairs of glasses that have gone missing.

Good question.  "Loss" refers to what WE have lost – our partner, lover, friend, mother, sister, daughter. The loss of this relationship is what we mourn. The loss is of whom we are, our role, even our purpose. The hole in the middle of our lives where that person is not creates a place in which we wander, yearning, seeking a way to repair the chasm into which we plunged at the moment of death.

So why talk at all? Words are what we use to build a bridge.  Words are how we connect to each other, and when we speak, we also evoke. The position of our body, whether or not we are making eye contact, the tone of voice, our eyes welling up with tears,  color our words. These subtle clues create a responsive resonance. The listener, understanding and sympathizing, evokes a metaphorical buoy we can hold on to.

Maybe words have no literal truth at all. The Heart Sutra of Buddhism says form is emptiness, emptiness is form.  I use my words to reach you and perhaps they do.  Or maybe each word leaves my mouth and disappears into nothingness, flitting by you like a wisp of air, barely noticed. While I am no longer inside the chasm, I sometimes sit on its edge, dangling my feet down into the dark. If you want to know about it, maybe you could just sit next to me for a while. Sometimes I just can't speak about it.

Birds in the morning

Buttercup in the morning

This morning I ventured out to Buttercup, walking quietly, following the path, following my breath, listening to bird song and squirrel rustles in the trees. Two deer ran across the path; two beaver stood on islands of their own creation before slipping in to the water and gliding away. I tossed a pebble into the water and watched the ripples change the reflection of the bare trees standing above the beaver dam. The geese on the other side silently swam away.

Stillness has never been comfortable for me. I am so action oriented; I want to DO rather than just BE. I want to BE something – writer, dancer, mother, wife.

This is how I describe myself, by a list of activities. There is some trepidation to claim the fullness and wholeness of who I really am, a struggling, evolving human trying to BE the best I can be. And even that is an activity – I am always trying to do something with my Being. Birds, frogs, beavers do not worry about this - or do they? They are busy building, nesting, swimming in the swampy water. But I treat my life as if it were some lump of unformed clay that I am supposed to mold into a beautiful, useful shape. I treat my losses as if they are obstacles rather than gifts for discovering a deeper way of Being. The losses, the gains are part of the shape of my life. Why do I always want to make them into something else?

It doesn't matter, really. I followed the path and my breath. I squatted on the wooden bridge and smelled the algae in the water. Bugs buzzed around my hair; they touched the water creating tiny ripples. The beavers did not return but it did not matter. I filled my basket with ferns, daisies and flowering branches. I filled my body with the sound and smells of the woodland. I walked back home, quietly.

Mise en place

There are three guests coming.
I do not yet know who they are
But I have assembled the ingredients for the feast
My mise en place is set,
The chicken rests in a slick of olive oil,
Here, little bowls of chopped parsley,
Coriander, cumin,
Grey sea salt, cracked pepper
An orange will offer its aromatic zest to the mix
And the juice will blend with garlic and wine.
The guests will be pleased. They will offer
Some surprising words that will shift the world
As we know it.
We will sit and sip, savoring the feast before we leave
The past behind
Bones and drippings on the plate,
The napkin crumbled and the lees
Left in the bottom of the glass.

Contemplating Movement

I took a Contemplative Dance workshop with Alton Wasson last weekend. His work comes out of Authentic Movement, and he calls it "movement as spiritual practice, artistic resource and psychological narrative." For me, it felt like coming home. My body is my home, the shape in which I live, breathe, and have my being. My body is also the conduit for the expression of thoughts and feelings, not only in words but also in movement and space.

Ever since I could walk, I expressed how I felt in and through my body. As a little girl, I twirled with joy on the lawn; I waved my arms and leapt about, mimicking the movement of the trees and flowers. As I studied dance and learned a larger movement vocabulary, I began creating dances and performing them. The initial inspiration was always based on how an event or interaction felt and was expressed through the body.

We tend to forget this. We often are unaware of the coded messages, the subtle cues our bodies are sending when we are communicating. Arny Mindell calls these secondary messages – our voices might be saying "How nice to see you," to someone we don't care for, and our body tenses, our chin drops down and the person to whom we speak has a momentary confusion. They hear the words and believe them but they are also picking up the secondary "I don't like you" message. Mindell works with these secondary channels, asking clients to perceive them, to amplify them and clarify their meaning.

The clarification opens the possibility for transformation. If I notice that a difficult emotion is locked into a part of my body, I can work through the feeling with movement. By releasing the tension, the emotion is allowed to flow. By flowing with it, I transform it. If fear hunches me over, drawing my shoulders up and my arms tight around my chest, I can roll my shoulders back and open my arms. I can shift my stance and awaken some courage in the face of fear.

Moving through emotion and giving it free expression within the body is very healing. There was one session in the workshop that was hard for me because sorrow welled up, unwanted. I was resistant, yet it was real and I had to let it flow for a while. I also noticed that I seemed stuck in one spot a lot of the time, and took this for a metaphor of being afraid to move forward. In another movement session, I let myself travel all over the room, feeling the freedom of forward motion, and discovered that staying in one place was not necessarily being stuck. Being rooted could mean that I am growing.