Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Sep9

this moment

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Photo:  Pam White

Nikita is a cat of the moment.  He is a cat who savors, who to my eye is completely, deeply a part of everything.  I was going to say that he is fully immersed, but that feels wrong because it implies that there is a body of water and another body.  Watching Niki does not feel like there is any separation.  He sleeps outside the garage, which makes me nervous, but also gives me many opportunities to see him during the day as my study is just outside of the garage.  He is a seamless part of the space and the time, and his breathing feels to me like the breathing of the moment.

Yesterday he slept almost all day on the horse blanket that I had washed and laid over the chairs outside to dry.  It was windy, and each time I walked by the blanket had changed shape, wrapping and folding Niki – who did not move –  in different ways.  He was not disturbed.

Maybe that is the lesson from this lovely, steady being who has lived with us for sixteen years.  Do not be disturbed.  The wind will blow and your sleeping place may not always be peaceful, but be still.  Settle, breathe, rest.  All is well.

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Sep5

dive, fly

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Today I mailed my manuscript to a publisher that I believe to be the perfect fit for my book.  I toiled over the cover letter, and then wrapped it – swaddled it really – in its packaging.  I want it to be safe. Sending it is both a dive and a flight.  Preparing it took months.  It felt important to say exactly what I want to say; to read it and revise it until the simplicity and fullness of that shone through. I stopped writing anything that felt like selling and wrote only what felt authentic and embodied.  Like these blog posts, where I write and then shake it out and see what remains, what is essential, necessary.

So it’s off, flying to California, diving into the river of manuscripts, all leaving hopeful hands, sailing onto anonymous desks.  Actually, I think that it is important to dive and fly in some way everyday.  Today’s other dive is about love.  Love of that work that I have been nurturing.  Love of myself – or finding a way to feel that better and more reliably.  Because I think that loving will open me to the places where love is harder, where betrayal and abandonment have dried me like a husk, where hopeful rains no longer fall.  Am I being to abstruse?  That’s ok.  In Authentic Movement, the mover moves, and the witness, watching, takes their own journey of feeling and imagination.  Their experiences may be utterly different – connected by the mover’s moving, but perhaps journeying to opposite poles.

So I wonder, when I speak of hard love, or harder loving, what comes to mind?

Sep4

more turtles (everywhere)

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This poem was in The Writer’s Almanac on Tuesday. . .see my post on baby turtles yesterday.

An Interruption

by Robert S. Foote

A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth—

This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.

I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he’d stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.

“An Interruption” by Robert S. Foote. © Robert S. Foote. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Sep1

babies

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Earlier this week we headed from Aquinnah to Menemsha to have dinner with our friend Lisa Randall.  On our way, we came across a HUGE snapper walking right down the middle of  Moshup Trail.  We pulled over, followed by another car, and then about five more.  The turtle was tall on its legs, a beautiful primeval being with a magnificent head.  He (or she) moved over to the side of the rode and strode  along toward the marsh ignoring all its admirers and would-be saviors and finally slid into the deep weeds.  I don’t think I have ever wanted to use the words “self-possessed” or “self-contained” about a turtle, including the big tortoises in the Galapagos. This one was.

Back in early June, we had six big mama snappers wade up to our house from the pond below and lay eggs in our lawn and gardens.  In the seven years we have been here, this was a first.  We checked online and found that in 55 days they would hatch – roughly around the end of July.  The end of July came and went, and we saw no babies.  When we came back from our trip to the Vineyard I checked the pool filters.  In the baskets were twenty-five dead baby snappers.  I was inconsolable, devastated.

After last night’s big, wild rain, I had a strong urge to check, and sure enough, there were seven babies – all alive!  I released them into the pond, and watched them swim away.  Then just as we were about to sit down for breakfast, I felt called to check again and sure enough and there were six more!  All alive and ready to go.  It rained and we checked again.  This time just one, still in the grass.

I don’t understand why these mamas would lay their eggs above a saltwater pool.  Never mind.  We looked up turtle medicine, both positive and contrary.  I figured that so many dead babies meant there was some contrary turtle medicine at work.  Here is what it said:  “Mother Earth is calling you to reconnect in some way.” Turtles and tortoises are symbols of the great goddess, the great mother, of primordial waters, descent into the underworld, fertility and creativity.  I think that with the excruciating situation with my daughter, I have been feeling maternally unhinged, scorched, shattered.  These turtles are calling me back to my own waters, to the depths. The big guy on the Vineyard spoke about steadfastness, persistence and unflappability.  The mamas are about love (and miscalculation).  Actually, it is all about love, every time.