ROLL ON THE FLOOR
re-membering the knowledge of the body
Sometimes we have to let go to realize how much we’re capable of giving, how much we have been giving.
Sometimes we have to close our eyes and will our optic nerve to stretch further, further back into our skulls, into our spinal cords, and down into the furthest reaches or our feet to remember all the ways we can see.
I’ve been writing things on the bottoms of the cups I’ve been making. Random things that I’m thinking about right in that moment. Sometimes while I’m drinking my coffee, I lift my mug up and see what I wrote before, because I’m always forgetting. Today my cup said the knowledge of the body and I went ah yes, that feels familiar, my body does know things. It’s funny how we constantly remember and forget the things we know.
The last two weeks, I’ve been working in the gardens at my job full time and the thing it’s doing is making me want to talk less. Unless I’m telling a new friend something true as an accompaniment to our rhythmic shoveling. In these silences I’ve been catching myself doing things I forgot feel good to do, like noticing the sounds of birds and smiling. Like closing my eyes and tilting my chin towards the sun. Like feeling peace and telling no one. Like feeling peace and telling everyone. I do still like to talk after all.
Lately, I’ve been feeling saved. Just today I asked myself how did I get to this place? Why don’t the hard things feel that hard? A few answers surfaced immediately. 1. stability. I have been craving a base to build on for years and in these last few months, I trudged through a lot of doubt to start building that base. I’m starting to see the fruits of my labor. I come home to a house that only gets more cozy. I go to a ceramics studio for other my ‘job’ and I think about things like taking off of work to go to an art school in the North Carolina mountains. In the past I would’ve just thought about going, not about taking off work, and that may sound luxurious, but the taking off work part, right now, feels like progress. 2. making things. I have no doubt that making things, clay things, fabric things, paper things, things made of words, dances, space; has been a crucial part of my saving.
I feel like a poser all the time. Probably pretty relatable. I read good books by my favorite authors Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong, Bell Hooks, and my chest grows tight with a desire to be a part of the conversation and a fear that I’ll live my whole life holding it all in. In the past year though, there’s been moments of relief (relieving), or externalizing, of being seen. There have been almost equal moments of validation and recognition every time I put something personal out into the world. This validation did not always come from another person.
The other thing I noticed, and this is me getting to my point, is that almost none of these moments of revelation or creation came about solely by seeing (looking) or ‘talking t through’. Meaning it came from moving, listening, touching. It came from sounds and tastes and feeling the outside world come in contact with the body. Doing things with my body puts me in my body, puts me in the present, and makes it easier to deal with the hard and unresolved things that aren’t actually asking for my attention, that aren’t actually in my body.
I just started doing contact improv. a definition of contact improv if you’ve never heard of it is “Contact improvisation is a form of improvised partner dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness.” I got it from the internet because I’m still figuring it out and don’t feel like pretending I can define what it is. Thanks Wikipedia.
All I know is that it’s challenging me to cultivate my attention. My embodied attention. When I’m moving, either alone or with others, there is a night and day difference between focused and distracted movement. One is able to convey truths.
I sat back to back with my therapist a few weeks ago. I didn’t think I’d tell you this but it feels important. I won’t get into it, but at the end when she asked me how it felt, all I could say was I feel seen. Our eyes were closed.
Okay I lied, I said one more thing. I kept thinking about all the people in my life I’d like to connect with this way. This way being, through touch, through intentional, tuned in, slow moments of physically sharing space and breath and sometimes skin. Through play without words. I’m not talking about sex.
I was specifically thinking about one person. One person who I told, a week after sitting back to back with my therapist, a week after dancing with them, that I can’t keep doing this thing where I give so much and don’t feel seen. This thing where I hold so much space with their name on it and spend so much time waiting for them to reach towards me, telling me something I want to hear. Making me feel something I want to feel. I thought I’d be left with a cavern of longing and loss when I hung up the phone with that scary paths-are-diverging feeling. First, I held all this love that needed to find a new home and cried. My mind kept trying to put this uncertain goodbye in the category of ‘hard things’ and my body said ‘hold on.’
A re-membering. A literal putting together of body parts lost. A noticing of space. I don’t know how to talk about the body except as a landscape or a thing with doors. When I use language, I talk about the body in parts and pieces because we all hold so many contradictions within us. This week I started feeling, in glimpses as first, these spaces, like open fields amongst my organs. I cried. Then I stopped crying. I started being proud. I surprised myself with how much I could laugh while holding a goodbye inside me. I noticed how I could accept hugs from other friends and remember where I am. I noticed how I played around on a keyboard while my friend played guitar and for the first time, right at the end, it felt like a conversation. I noticed myself sitting in my studio without deciding to and carving images on cups that looked the way I felt. I went to contact improv and put my weight on another person even though I wasn’t sure. I rolled around on the floor with enough momentum to lose control. My knee is bruised and I made a sound of bone meeting wood that echoed through the gym and felt no shame for falling. I slid and rolled and touched until I became lost in space but found in my body.
Those moments of found-ness amongst the disorientation were fleeting. They always are. But they were there. I explained it to the group as that feeling when the part of yourself that floats outside of your body, watching yourself move, judging the way you move, goes away and it’s just you. Moving and telling the truth.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how I could’ve told my truth better, how I could’ve said it different so someone else could really understand (whatever metric this would be measured by I have no idea). But the complexity of our experiences that carry us even to the moments of attempt at truth telling often get lost under words that simplify or leave things out. Sometimes all that matter, I’m realizing, is that somewhere in my body is a feeling of knowing and no one else needs to know.
For the Record:
My reference to a re-membering came from (yet another) On Being episode about biomimicry with Janine Benyus. One thing that stuck with me was that any average person, if shown pictures of a healthy forest and a slightly diseased forest, would be able to tell you which one was sick. The ailments of our world are in our bodies.
If you’ve never gone down a google search (or wormhole, if you will) about worms, it’s a great source of entertainment for all ages. here’s some inspiration for getting started. You can get pretty existential with it if you go deep. Also, worm poop (or castings) are toxic to worms so if they run out of food and start eating their own poop, they get poisoned.
This all started on my birthday last year when I came up with the question can worms move backwards for some reason I don’t remember. Knowledge, even when it’s silly, maybe especially when it’s silly, is so exciting. A stack of ‘simple’ questions can end you up somewhere that feels profound.
If you’re curious what contact improv is or can’t picture it at all, this video touches on some good points. At one point he says “it’s hard to hide how you’re feeling when you’re in contact with another person” and that’s exactly how I felt sitting back to back with in therapy. If you just wanna watch a short contact improv example, skip to the end.
Lingering from last week, here’s one short short essay from Ross Gay’s book of delights. Feels cozy and relevant and like contentment in the face of remembering.
I think that’s all for this week. Again, thanks for reading.