Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

May23

try this!

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Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs is weekly subscription writing.  Most of the writing is what I like to call “ragged memoirs:”  experiential pieces that dive deeper than I do in the blog posts.  Occasionally I write short fictions that are also based in my own experience.  The writing is physical, cinematic and experiential.   Here is an example:

Body Stories

The book of the body
The the scroll of the body
The etching of the body
The earth of the body
The sky of the body
The language of the body
The singing of the body
The sheaves of the body
The stalks of the body
The branches of the body
The vines of the body
The fields of the body
The cave of the body
The lessons of the body
The memories of the body

I look at my body and I wonder:  what has been lost and what needs to be lost?  What remains to be found? What can be recovered?  What am I learning in this exact moment from the body? I think it is to feel myself in the interstitial spaces – the places where life and sensation accumulate in invisible lines – like subtle, moving geologic strata beneath the crust of what we can see.  The earth of the body.

I want to feel what is being laid down even now as I write.  

I have art etched onto my body.  A collection of tattoos.  Cuttings of the flesh.  Etchings on skin.  I am an illustrated woman.  The images on my back are horses and magnolias.  Winding trunks and branches of pink blossoms and green leaves weaving around the dark, turbulent bodies of Chinese horses.  A wild mare flying down my left arm.  A stallion like Nelson on my left shoulder blade.  A second black spirit horse flying up the right side.  A small faint pony peering over the left shoulder.  Magnolias spilling over my right shoulder onto my chest.

The last tattoo was so excruciating that I felt the artist was cutting into my shoulder blade with a knife.  I wept as he finished the last scrolling Tibetan clouds.  The wide needles used for that work were worse than any of the small thin ones.  It felt as if I were being flayed.

 The horses are under my skin.  They were even before I put them there indelibly.  A woman of a certain age asking to be marked, to have her horses imprinted on her flesh.  Eternal horses.  And yet when I am consumed by flames, so will they be.  None of us will stay past our time.  I feel they have my back, that they hold a mythic story, a fairy tale, a cabalistic history that is playing out whether I am looking or not.  

When I see my hands in the mirror I am startled, momentarily horrified.  How did my mother’s veined and wiry hands come to be attached to the ends of my arms?  When I am dancing and using my hands, I know that I have earned all of those strange mappings.  They are brilliant, dancing their complicated mudra, their secret, febrile language.  The dances have always been stored in the hands, and then move like the feral tides of the bay of Fundy: pouring in thick waves up and through the channels of my body.

Now I dream of calligraphic birds flying up my right calf and thigh.  I collect the images:  birds of color, splayed wings, tumbling, spiraling.  I can feel them there even though they are not.  At the same time, I feel that I am finished.  I may not need to be marked again.  But there are other ways in which I am not finished.  Other ways in which I know that I am just beginning.   I am not talking about tattoos.  

I am talking about wisdom.  I am talking about joy.  I am talking about discovery and delight and appreciation.  Those are the things that it has taken me six decades to stumble upon, to uncover, to unearth, to carve open. These things – joy, appreciation, delight – are not just destinations, but the places toward which we are continually moving.  Not driving with our high beams shining down a known road, but dreaming ourselves forward using celestial navigation, an emotional sextant.  Charting a course to ravishment.  My friend, the playwright and actress Laurie Carlos, stood with me on a beach on Martha’s Vineyard, and said, “I do not think I can take in so much beauty.”  Her face was rapturous, looking out at the waving sea. I did not understand at the time that I had to give myself permission to be swallowed whole by the moment.    

The wonder of the body
The softening of the body
The dreaming of the body
The opening of the body
The kindness of the body
The sweetness of the body
The love of the body  

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May22

sea serpent

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My friend Suzanne sent me this video. I found it both disturbing and irresistible.   It immediately set off a storm of video surfing on YouTube for more about Continuum. What I found was exciting.

For no particular reason, I have avoided Continuum Movement for many, many years. The founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad  calls the movement a connection to our “spiritual bio-world.”  She says that the undulating wave movements that originate in the fluids of our bodies link us to each other and our environment. I think that it is time that I dive into those waters.

In the conversation about the text of the body, this has a place.  I wrote yesterday about Abraham Verghese’s experience of being massaged by a kalari practitioner in Kerala.  The post-massage state-of-body that he described feels like what I see in this video.

My appetite for movement has taken a big leap because I have started to prepare to perform solo for the first time in thirteen years.  I don’t know exactly why it has been so long.  But because it has been so long, I am voracious.  There is a ferocity and a clarity to this new work that I have not felt before.  You can see me next Tuesday evening, 8 pm at Club Helsinki in Hudson, NY.

 

 

May22

the text of the body

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Photo:  Pam White

There was a beautiful article this week in the New York Times Style Magazine.  It was written by Abraham Verghese about a journey to visit his birthplace in Kerala. The last part of the article was about his experience of having a therapeutic oil massage by a kalari masseur.  Verghese is a physician and a novelist.  His reflections on his body after the massage were wonderful to me:

I have been a physician since I was 24 and taught taught medical students the catechism of the body for over two decades, just as it was handed down to me by my teachers. Yet suddenly I was filled with uncertainty about the validity of everything I had been teaching. The kalari way of “seeing” the body was as foreign to me as Chinese meridians or a shaman’s way of seeing spirits or auras. And though the Western method in which I was trained is the anatomical way, the scientific way, it seemed to me that our way of “knowing” the body leaves the patient feeling that the visit is not about his body but instead is about the images and other surrogate markers of function that stand in for the body. At the level of doctor and patient, at the level of the handling of the body, and at the level of what transpires when we put our hands on patients to examine them, I wondered if we often fail our patients.

Standing there in my loincloth, it was as if I were a Talmudic scholar, or an exegete whose life was given to understanding “Finnegan’s Wake,” only to wake up decades later to find I had no deeper knowledge of God or of James Joyce. My text is the body, and at that moment I felt as if I knew so little about the body and even less about my own body, the specific collection of skin, bone and organs from which, by some alchemy of cognition, emotion, a beating heart and a functional larynx, my words, my text and these fears emerge.

But this was the surprise: the one thing I had felt fairly certain about, the Western craft of medicine, now seemed lacking and superficial. I had done some exploring of the soul, but the study of the body would have to begin again with new purpose and vigor. God give me mastery of the body, is what I prayed on the flight back. Give me body and soul. I took a vow.

My text is also the body.  I have taught dancers the catechism of the body, the holy book of movement for most of my life.  Looking back on the years of teaching, I also feel that at times I have failed my students.  In the beginning, what I transmitted to them was how to achieve a perfection of form, a physical ideal.  Ultimately, that did not work well for me.  I could not achieve that perfection myself.  What I am teaching now is how to push into the mystery, how to listen, how to wait, how to allow the body to reveal its delicate truths.  So Verghese’s revelations were precious to me – like meeting a fellow traveler on the path.

May21

sanne, the lily of holland

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This is Sanne, the beautiful Friesian belonging to Pam.   He was imported from Holland when he was three.  His name, Sanne, means Lily in Dutch.  When Pam saw him, she fell face first in love.  That was twelve years ago.

In this picture, he is performing in Scarlet and is ridden by Brandi Rivera.  Sanne is the great-hearted performer in all of my dances with horses.  He is the center, the soul, the horse that can handle it all  Dancers doing handstands on his side, yard of swirling fabric, crowds, choreography, changes in choreography, travel, loud music – he takes it ALL in stride.  Sanne is always in a good mood.  He is always happy to see whoever comes into his world.  He is a lover, a snuggle, a honey.

So when he suddenly started to drop muscle and weight and seem cranky, we all worried.  His back became stiff and sore, and he could not find it in himself to work.  As it turns out, he has Lyme.  He has been on Doxy for about ten days and already his back feels better, and he is back to being his sweet, affectionate self.

It was a scare.  I realized that I am completely vulnerable here.  Without him, my dancers and I cannot perform most of our dances.  More than that, HIS vulnerability came sharply into focus.  The vets get very nervous about muscle wasting.  It is often a symptom of catastrophic illness.  I got a lot of information about encysted parasites, muscle enzymes and equine polysaccharide storage myopathy.  I did not want to think about any of it.

Two days ago I heard from my former trainer.  She has been diagnosed with cancer.  She is facing six months of surgeries and treatment.  I do not want to think about that either.  What I want is for her to be fine, for Sanne to be fine, for my children to be safe forever and for all suffering to be at an end.

The temptation is to focus on suffering, on the lack of wellness.  I don’t think that helps my friend or my horse.  I know that it does not help me.  What does help me is this, from Abraham:  “Many around you want to point out “reality” to you. They say, “Face the facts. Look at what-is.” And we say to you, if you are able to see only what-is—then, by Law of Attraction, you will create only more of what-is… You must be able to put your thoughts beyond what-is in order to attract something different or something more.”

The way that I do that is this:  I keep looking for something to appreciate.  For something that makes me happy.  Lucky for me, I have seven cats, four dogs, three horses, two children, a beautiful wife and a wild and wonderful collection of friends.  And if all of that fails, today the peonies are blooming outside my window.