Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Sep28

the spaces between

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photos:  Jeffrey Anderson

dancers:  Ingrid Schatz & DeAnna Pelecchia

 

 

 

I love this sequence of photographs because of what it reveals about the spaces between.  The spaces between the bodies, and more important, the spaces of transition from one movement to another.

Recently I noticed in myself a tendency to not straighten my body, not lengthen into the vertical as I moved from one task to another.  Bending forward to pick up one thing then curving into another movement were blending.  I think it is the remnants of when my girls were small.  My whole body became a forward bending arc of love, protection, readiness to hold, to embrace, to dress, to bring my body around them. I can feel it in the barn too – bending forward to wrap the horses’s legs, to pick up a brush, and somehow the spaces between becomes part of that, rather than having a fullness of their own.

So now I am paying attention to the spaces between – consciously lengthening upward and reaching my legs downward between.  It brings breath in, broadens my perspective outward for a moment before I lean into the next thing.

The word for the space between the cells is interstitial. I love that word because it captures something of the secret hiddeness of those spaces, their subtlety.

How do you feel your transitions?  How do you pay attention to the spaces between?

 

 

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Sep26

today, or at least the beginning

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photo:  Pam White

I love reading about the shape of a person’s day. How they navigate the arc of it, the little parts, the details.  But I find myself shy to reveal those details about myself.  So here goes!

Today I got up at 6:15 and let the dogs out – Cho, the 16-year old Spanish Galgo is always the first to give us a shout.  Then a cascade of cats enter the bedroom, the ones that would keep us up all night investigating drawers, opening and closing doors, knocking over anything that isn’t attached.

I made tea – Harney’s Pu-erh for Pam, and CTC, a zesty black Assam for me.  Finished the Sunday Times magazine section.

It has been warm, so I am still swimming. This morning I noticed that I was doing that old style “figuring out”  kind of thinking.  While swimming!!!  Grinding into a thought, a situation, something troubling, usually.   Feeling that, I shifted.  First, I just looked at the ripples on the water (side stroke) and then watched the color of the water, the sky, looked at the mist lifting off the mountain (back stroke).

I could feel my mind release – it feels like “molecular thought” – a way of experiencing the mind that is more about sensing the whole and feeling in a general, indirect way around the edges of things, looking though things in a transparent way – wafting instead of piercing. Free flowing instead of gripping, manipulating, trudging, pushing.  Dissolving instead of calcifying.  Opening instead of contracting.

How do you experience your mind?  And what does your body tell you about your mind?

 

Sep25

cross dressing

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Marion Laval-Jeantet is a performance artist who is experimenting with the meaning of “trans-species” art.  In her piece, Que le cheval vive en moi (the horse lives in me), over a period of several months, she was injected with horse blood plasma containing a spectrum of equine immunoglobulins.  Her goal was to experience the body-mind of another species, which she described as a heightened sensibility and nervousness. After the final injection she performed a communication ritual with the horse, pictured above.

Marion’s work connects to the body art experiments of Carol Schneeman, Marina Abramović, one of who’s works involved dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion, among others.

I am interested in this work because it seems to be an effort to dissolve the prey/predator distinction between horse and human.  There are horse whisperers and trainers who claim to “speak horse,” and yet when I watch, there is always that divide.  The man/woman is still a meat eater.

The closest thing I have experienced in dissolving that divide is the work of Linda Tellington-Jones. TTouch, her radical work with touch goes “under the skin” – creating a borderless place of attunement where horse (or dog, cat, snake, bird, elephant) and human meet.  I have been TTouching for about seven years, and I wonder if Marion would find that using touch in this way can carry her as deeply into the blood and bone of the human-horse bond.

How do you cross dress?

Sep19

order/chaos

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photo:  Pam White

Today I am interested in the intersection between order and chaos,  and in the way one spills into the other.  With horses and children we do not want chaos.  We want things to be ordered, for safety – theirs and ours.  When things tip into chaos, suddenly we are falling forward, trying to stay one step ahead of disaster. We make plans about how to keep chaos at bay, how to protect ourselves from its ravages.

Several years I ago moved my horse Deo to a new farm.  I took him for a walk, wanting him to see the new place.  I could feel him sparking and getting very fired up and “on the muscle” at the end of my lead rope.  I could feel chaos blooming at the other end of a short rope.  Suddenly he startled, spun and kicked out – leg fully extending for maximum impact, his steel shoe catching me on the thigh.  I went down, still holding the rope.  Somehow I stood up and staggered into the barn, where someone took him and I collapsed.  Miraculously, nothing broken, but a big horseshoe shaped bruise and a softball sized swelling laid me up for days.

That was lightening bolt chaos – sudden, unexpected, disastrous.  Another chaos is like the tattered webs, an order falling into chaos – gradual disintegration, a loosening of the form.

How do you experience chaos in your day?  How do you dance with it?