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Friday, July 5, 2002
Chebeague Island, ME THE PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga
One companion joins.
Dance Circle.
Each person takes a turn leading movement that the others follow. We pass the leadership around in our group of four. Journal
Stephanie and I moved the furniture out of the living room and lay sticky mats diagonally side by side. There was plenty of room. It was good to see the room transformed from an antique crowded Victorian summer house to home for practice. I associate the house primarily with family and with the sort of conversational non-movingness that family gathering usually involves. I've sat in that room with every seat occupied and the air filled with undistinguished chat about events that have little significance in my life. To be in the room doing what is vital and involving for me with another person and, as it later turned out, with three other people, was wonderful. The clocks and vases of field flowers and old bookcase of glassed-in turn-of-the century novels in French were still there as guardians of family history which now includes me as I have become. Stephanie and I do an hour of Fluid Yoga. I felt how tight my quads have become from the fast walking around the island roads. The overall feeling in my tissues is stingy - the lushness outdoors is not seeping into me. As I work I feel the letting go. I feel my inner being striving towards the act of unfolding. My innermost reality wants to be doing this. To be stretching, to be pushing at the edge of my limits. To be breathing deeply, covered in the thin veneer of sweat. I glance over at Stephanie from time to time and notice how her face smoothes out, becomes almost like a porcelain doll. I imagine mine is as well. I often see, when I chance to open my eyes and look in the mirror that my eyes have gotten very large and my skin has smoothed and evened out. It is amazing to look suddenly ageless or even young. By contrast if I do actions from strain or anxiety I look old. I have never been so aware of my transparency, mutability. We invite Stephanie's Mom, Diana, and her boyfriend, Brian, to join us for a circle dance. They both do Chi Gong together and Brain also does Tai Chi. The circle is simple and wonderful. Diana very delicate, Brian full from the Tai Chi and even adventurous from time to time going outside his prescribed system into personal, creative movement choices - not the easiest thing first time around in a situation. Stephanie does fulfilling moving shapes and I find myself dying to play on the rhythm. I can feel how much I have missed dancing to music this past ten days. After this we all close out eyes and do our own thing for a half hour. Brian and Diana drop out and watch us. It feels like a witness dance environment. I enjoy it. Need to be seen. And I remember that this is part of my travelling project - to be seen in my practice. To get full into my practice I really prefer having a room with music. Having a sound source strapped to my body is cumbersome. This requirement presents travel challenges. Where, as I drive across country, will I find such spaces? The practice really sorted me out. I feel like a different person entirely. I'd like to continue to find practice companions as I cross the country. Body Weather Floods, droughts, blue days of perfection… My body drapes from my subtlest known truth
to the lumps of flesh slung over my bones.
It is that in which,
in another realm residing without a body,
I chose to adorn my everlasting presence.
A jewel box containing something
for most every occasion. I wear it and discover weather.
Floods, droughts, blue days of perfection… The field stretching up sprouts maple and coreopsis.
I grow hair, skin.
In all things my body is Earth,
the many worlds within One Truth. Wind comes over the hill crest
today hot as a dog's mouth
tomorrow cool, like a linen sheet
pulled taught over the bed in the dim room. The island breathes wind over the humpy hill,
slides down, stirring tiny grasses.
My hairs.
I swill the shroud,
take it melting onto my tongue. Floods, droughts, blue days of perfection… I no longer miss anyone. Am not hungry.
There is no absence. All presence.
All the time. Saturday, July 6, 2002
Chebeague Island, ME THE PRACTICE: Fluid Yoga. 60 minutes
Dance. 30 minutes
Journal
In my practice yesterday I did a full session of Fluid Yoga. It was a push. After I danced. Was weak, could barely move. I kept going for 30 minutes but always with a sense of gentle wan-ness. My body was tender, delicate. It moved in smallness, lightness. No energy. The best was laying on the couch at the end letting my arms wander in space with my eyes closed - the sensation of mixed temperatures swimming in the air. The smell of musty books, dog fur, bay bushes and old timber. Afterwards I felt quiet, spacious. In the kitchen I chopped green peppers into tiny bits for the tabouli. My Mom was there, talking non-stop, worrying about everyone and micromanaging every little detail. I found the pandemonium of her mind crushing. It hurt my head, ears - her inability to stop. I see where I have been much of my life. I am grateful to being doing this practice here which gives me peace and allows me to see the illusory patterns under which I've labored. So I wonder very much as I continue on my travelling practice what it means to 'feel at home'. Many definitions are going, falling away without resistance. They have always wanted to go but I've clung with varying levels of strenuous-ness. I have tried to construct worlds on top of specious foundations. Right now I am willing to say, I don't know. Divorce is giving me that sense of being lost but also being released. A large part of what I believed in dissolved. I wonder how I'll love again. Or how to be in partnership. I don't feel like going out of my way to speak or connect with others. I just sit and watch and for the first time in my life am content to be a watcher and listener. Comfort in my body is one way for me to try to understand what is truly key for me. What I have thought comforting is primarily habit - food that has dreary backlashes or eating in circumstances that have the appearance of conviviality but are really snarls of anxiety. When I move or dance in environments I feel what they are made up of. For my comfort I need a room at the right temperature and music. And time. It could be anywhere. Once I close my eyes the visual room disappears. But the sensation of it - the air, the quiet - are vital. It is simple and not so simple. Where are rooms that are quiet and uncluttered? Clean. Most rooms are full of stuff and dust and electrical gadgets and chemicals and off-gassing carpet and furniture and pet hairs. Things to fill the space. Things to make life 'comfortable' for the owner. But what is more comfortable than intimacy with Self? With the Divine? I slept extremely deeply. Woke and lingered in a deep state. My whole body floating and feeling. Many dreams had passed through. Monday, July 8, 2002
Chebeague Island, ME THE PRACTICE:
Continuous Flow
With level changes to encourage stretch and length.
Perpetual Motion Journal
Between two windows mullioned in rippled, aging glass looking out over Casco Bay in the parlor, a mirror hangs. The reflecting panel is a narrow strip flanked triptych-like by two side panels in faded needlepoint. I can see my reflection from the waist up. I watch myself in this narrow truncated space. Everything comes back to symmetry inside the frames. Behind me I see a series of doors open back and back at odd angles. Today as I did my Continuous Flow I lingered in the stretches. So many spots were brimming with loose tears. Not the explosions of months back. In particular the spaces between ribs, my breast tissue, and the front of my hip joints - all hungry for time in elongation. I felt comfortable crying. It wasn't cathartic. It was necessary, like peeing when your bladder is full. The air next to the floor was cool and damp. Then I did Perpetual Motion. It was an effort. The rug rough underfoot. Just made myself do it… I did get to a vigorous place by the end of the ten minute piece. I fulfilled an obligation and it felt good. But not wonderful. I have felt sluggish for several days now but also deeply connected. I want to do slow small tiny motion. I force myself to do vigorous work simply to prepare for the upcoming performances - to maintain endurance enough to get through a long bellydance set. But my inclination is to unravel. Unwind the past year's intensity. And all my life of overwork. It seems fitting that, in this beginning phase, I am here at my parents. I see the origins of my habits. Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Chebeague Island, ME
THE PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga. 45 minutes
Circular Movement. Rhythm Tasks. 45 minutes
Step on every beat with an arm movement on every beat. Intersperse this with stepping on one beat then a leg gesture on the next beat. Step one, leg gesture one. Then move onto double time stepping. I gave myself five minuets each with rhythm task before switching; the first and last picked up their own momentum after a while. Journal
Better today. I go deeper into my movement and flesh. Not so weary. I find stamina, liveliness, connection to intentional ideas. Not much is oozing out of me right now. Nothing automatic. I have to motivate things. But at least I can motivate. Clarifications: Exploration of Intimacy
I am starting to re-consider my original objective. The proposal to do a publicly witnessed practice is more difficult than I had imagined. This is in part because being the variability of outdoors conditions - terrain, temperature, bugs - makes inner focus spotty. I am attached to the proprioceptive aspect of my practice. Being able to feel my movement deeply is not difficult, but I recognize just how odd or disconcerting it can be for others to see/watch. For example, to feel my intercostals or my pelvic floor muscles or my deep layer abdominals I must have intent inner focus. This can easily recall a very private experience for an onlooker - as if they are watching someone deal with menstrual cramps. For me, feeling these muscles is not personal in that way, though it is a sensitive, attentive activity. I feel odd putting viewers in that position. The act of feeling one's movement is a cultural issue. Most people are comfortable doing/seeing action, sports. But to feel how they feel, or watch someone else feel how they feel as they do these activities, is a sensitive situation - one of boundaries. I question what in me suggests this challenge. Is it a need for recognition? A draw towards being the object of voyeurism? These are the shadow possibilities. Or is it a deep-seated notion that authentic self-experience is beautiful and, ideally, could be safe. The showing of real self only to those closest to you has been the definition of intimacy - something to share only with a very few. But I find myself defining authentic visibility as safety. The beauty of one's movement/one's pleasurable experience of body/self should not be relegated to obscurity. Certainly it can be discreet. But being able to consciously experience one's whole bodyself without fear of criticism, invasion or manipulation by the world within that world is the definition of safety. Perhaps inference safety means being intimate with one's world rather than estranged from it, or dependent on a few emissaries (such as lovers, friends or family) as conduits for this experience of vibrant belonging-ness. I want to be able to do a full deep stretch in a public place with a sense of my whole body being comfortable exploring and releasing into the stretch. This would allow me to feel that this world is my world. That I am alive here. That I belong.
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