Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Dec7

looking for patterns

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After working with Jacob today, I took a walk on the beach, and found myself seeing and then seeking patterns.  I realized that I had been doing that all day with him.  Looking for little chains of movement, sequences that made some sense of the collage that is his movement.

At night, I am reading, studying, trying to figure it out.  What am I seeing? How can I enter that world in a way that makes sense to him.

Tonight, I had a little breakthrough.  I mirrored him meticulously, in as much detail as I could.  The dynamics of his movement, the tension in specific body parts, the sounds, the sequencing of his gestures and the direction and shape of each movement, each stillness.  He felt the difference and guided me, sometimes taking me by the hand, through a series of about six little dances.  They were patterns! I felt like a visitor to his museum, his continent, with Jacob as the guide, helping me to navigate.  He seemed happy that I was finally getting it, and when I got it wrong, he showed me again.  I had to stop myself from crying.  At the end, he drifted away.  Perhaps the exertion, or maybe he had just found the end of the dance and I did not recognize it.

Jacob, looking.

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Dec6

pieces of the puzzle

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I spend a lot of each day with Jacob, my autistic godson, trying to sort the pieces, and construct a puzzle that makes any kind of sense.  The clues, all of them spoken in movement because he has no language, are fragmentary, random, slippery, unreliable.  He is speaking in a code made up of beginnings that do not so much end as evaporate, endings that are not final, and links that form no chain.

This is a dance for which I have no program.  I often feel that I have arrived well into the performance, and have no idea of the plot or the players.

Some pieces reappear.  Touch:  he loves pressure on his back and legs and just a second later the delicate glimmering flickers of his fingers with mine.  There are the repetitions:  little rituals too short to hang your hat on – pulling everything from the shelves in a clatter or diving into a corner like a seal into the sea.

Outside, there is climbing, hanging, swinging – his solitary pleasures as he is swift and agile – a sloth, a bird, a monkey.  We cannot follow except with eyes.  On the ground, he runs – with us, without us – it is the same to him.

And yet, we all – parents, caregivers, godmothers, therapists – continue to stare at the pieces, turn them over, move them around, trying to make a picture that we can read, a landscape of this boy.  We are improvising – first our answers, and then our questions too.  The first and only known is his great heart, and ours, and ours.

 

 

 

Dec4

ocean’s poems

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I left the house briefly today to walk to the beach.  I found this painting left by the tide.

and this bird.

and this shell.

Each of these felt to me like a little poem, a remnant of the day or last night, written in sand, stone, shell and feather.

The day with my autistic godson Jacob felt like a series of little poems too.  There were dance poems one and two, dog poem (helper Katrina brought her lovely little dog), swing poem, and many little climbing outside haiku.  Also many verses of touch – light as a feather touching, patting, stroking, and bouncing touch.  I know that I am feeling the traces of all of those, just as surely as the sand holds the tracings of the sea.

 

Dec4

island time

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This was the view leaving Wood’s Hole for Martha’s Vineyard yesterday around 4 pm.  The sun, sky, clouds and sea were creating an elegant, spare choreography of light.

Island time according to the Urban Dictionary is, “The time vacuum created by the ocean’s presence. Similar to stoner’s time, everything moves nice and slow. This carefree aura even has the ability to travel with islanders and can engulf you in their presence.”  Not this time.  I am here to help with my autistic godson, Jacob.  His time zone is uncharted water.

Last night, he was wild – climbing, banging, shrieking – his lanky prepubescent body a commotion. It is humbling to arrive with a somatic therapist’s bag of skills and perspectives and realize that none of it may apply.  To be with Jacob is both quintessential improvisation and unrelenting repetition.

Jacob’s parents have done, learned, implemented, studied, applied, conjured every possible treatment and approach for their child.  Time is moving inexorably toward the need for bigger answers as Jacob grows bigger, stronger, faster.   Adolescence looms.  Time – both the long stretch of each day in Jacob’s world, and the fast moving need for solutions is here.  And yet, what Jacob teaches is the need for consummate attention to each moment – excruciating and beautiful all at once.

For more ideas about time, check out Brain Picking’s 7 must-read books on time.