Mary and Mrs. Claus

I woke up this morning in the dark, a deep, deepening dark. For a fraction of an instant I wondered. Will this darkness end? Will it ever be light again? Is it true that I (along with the rest of the hemisphere) am poised to swing back on a grand arc of time toward the sun? Or might this darkness engulf me in an eternal night?

The dark is pregnant with possibilities.
*
Many tell the Christmas story, and many of those tellings focus on the Christ child. He was conceived. He was carried. He is born. He lives, a divine Presence, with us.

Nevertheless, hidden within all those passive verbal constructions following his name is the one without whom he wouldn’t have happened: Mary.

For me, the Christmas story is about Mary.

Mary conceives. Whether you translate virgin as “young maiden” or “without sex,” the thrust of the story is the same. Young Mary needed no other human person to begin her journey into motherhood. The mother matter was between her and god, a purely personal relationship: god is with her, in her full bodily self, and she opens to say yes. Yes to desire. Yes to her self. My soul doth magnify the lord. Her innermost sensory self is where god will be grown.

Mary carries. In saying yes to her god-self, she says yes to entering the darkness. She is pregnant for the first time. She is not wed. The outcomes are far from clear. Will she live? Will her bodily self know what to do? Will her baby live? Will she be shunned into eternal night? Or embraced by the arms of welcoming kin? How could her sparkling yes not be shrouded with fear, doubt, despair, and loneliness?

Only Joseph is with her as they set out together for Bethlehem, leaving behind hearth and home, riding for miles, for hours, for days, nine months pregnant, on the back of a donkey. What sustains her through the taxing physical, emotional, spiritual ordeal?

Jesus, of course, moves in the darkness too, but his is a warm uterine wrap. He is along for a rhythmic ride, waiting for the waves of her contractions to wash him onto the sands of an air-born world. In her dark night, it is his movement within her that comforts her. He is alive. She can feel it. She has reason to believe.

Mary gives birth. She is waiting in a stable, dark and cold. Joseph is there, but what does he know about birth? What does she know? A sweet smell of coarse hay mixes with animal breath.

There, Mary labors. Wave after wave, she slowly opens to release the life in her. She gives birth to a curled infant, unbelievably small, who, however cry-free he may be, is helpless. He is completely dependent on her. She is the one who holds him, warms him, wipes him, and feeds him rich milk from her body.

He is present with her—and with us—because of what her body knows. She creates patterns of sensing and responding in relation to him that let him live, with her, with us.
*
The birth we celebrate at Christmas is more than a beginning. It is the end of a long journey in which Mary gives birth to herself as a birth-giver. She is the one who opens in the darkness, to the darkness, willing to conceive (of) a light that would not appear for months to come. She is the one who carries it as it quickens, and brings it forth, as a new life beginning. She is the one whose bodily movements enable him to live.

The movements she makes in conceiving, carrying, and birthing make her into someone who can and does participate consciously in the rhythms of her bodily becoming.

He is with us because of what her body knows.
*
There are times in all of our lives when darkness threatens to engulf us. Whether it is fear or anxiety, depression or despair, we wonder whether the light will ever return, or whether indeed, we will be dwell forever in eternal night.

It is to such moments that the Christmas story speaks. For we remember Mary. We remember her, in her bodily self, opening to sense and receive the quickening of new life in her.

With Mary, we affirm the creative power of our own bodily selves—a power to open to the movement of the divine in us, that is continuing to create and become, despite the darkness that overwhelms. When we open to this power, we will find the arms that embrace us, the relationships that sustain us, the Presence of light with us.

For our bodily selves were pulled into existence by the rhythm of light and dark, day and night, that enables all things to grow. As long as we breathe and beat and wake, that rhythm is alive in us. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of it, opening to receive the movements that are making us. We so participate in bringing into being a world we love that loves us.

The American dancer, Ruth St. Denis, wrote a poem called “Eternal Mary.” The last stanza is this: “We are all Mary/ Waiting to conceive/ And bear the Christ Child.”

This, for me, is the meaning of Christmas.
*
How did the story of a young woman delivering Presence morph into a tale about an old man delivering presents? It is a topic for another day.

Still, I wonder. Whose sack is it from which he pulls his gifts? Who remembers which child got which gift from year to year? Who gave him directions?

I suspect that if we want the full story, we will have to ask Mrs. Claus.

Selfish vs. Unselfish: Who Wins?

Are humans naturally selfish or altruistic? Have they evolved to value their personal survival above all else? Or to form cooperative social relations with others?

The questions are perennial ones, raised anew by a recently released roster of books. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists all weigh in, for there is much at stake.

How should we parent, educate, and legislate? What values should we hold, what social norms should we advance, and what means are necessary for helping people adopt them? Must we punish or can we merely entice? What are the resources of nature and the limits of nurture? What can we create ourselves to be?
*
I grew up believing that there is a difference, a big one, between selfish and unselfish. Selfish is doing what you want when you want for yourself, following your desires and pursuing pleasure, often at others’ expense. Unselfish is generous, loving and kind, doing with others in heart and mind. Selfish is bad. Unselfish is good. Period.

I no longer believe it.

Scene 1. A girl attends summer camp with 350 other girls, ages 6 to 17. The camp counselors admonish the girls to value unselfishness, to put others first before themselves, and to compete for the coveted honor of being tapped as a model for all the rest. The campers scramble to be the most unselfish of all, missing the irony.

Wouldn’t the most unselfish act be to act selfishly and so let another girl win?

Scene 2. Leif, my five-month-old son, wants to nurse. Now. Writhing and wailing, he refuses any attempt to divert, distract, or entertain. I stop what I am doing and sit down to give him some milk. Is he being selfish and me not?

If he didn’t ask me for what he needed, he wouldn’t be giving me what I want: I want him to thrive.

Scene 3. A man is in a long-term relationship, afraid to ask his partner for what he needs. He keeps quiet, wanting to preserve the peace, and finds himself less and less able to feel the love for her he knew he once had. For the sake of the relationship, he has silenced his sensory spaces. She feels his distance, and is unhappy.

Before it is too late, he comes to the realization: if he asks for what he needs, he will have more to give. If he asks for what he needs, he will be giving her what she needs to succeed in what she wants to do: love him as he wants to be loved.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give another is the gift of receiving he or she is giving us.

Sometimes our greatest pleasure lies in giving a gift that requires us to exercise an ability in ourselves that we didn’t know we had.

Scene 4. I tell my kids all the time: I am here to help you get what you want. Am I raising spoiled, self-righteous egotists who feel entitled to whatever they desire?

I don’t tell them that I will give them what they want. I tell them that I will help them get what they want. I will help them figure out what they want, and then help them test the idea, research it, plan for it, experiment with it, and try it out over time. For I have no idea what seeds my kids carry; I have no idea what genetic potentials for thinking and feeling and acting that passed dormant through me have been sparked to life by my partner’s chromosomal pairs.

What I do know is that I want whatever seeds are there in them to grow. I want the world to benefit from what they have to give. And I know that such seeds sprout in unprompted desires to spend time learning and creating in one realm or another. These desires can signal the presence of talents and skills, and the reserves of energy, interest, patience, and attention needed to help them develop. Their bodies know.

If I don’t help my kids move towards what they want, they will not learn what it is they have to give.
*
Are humans selfish or unselfish?

It’s the wrong question to ask. There is no such dichotomy. The belief that there is rests on an illusion of ourselves as individual minds-in-bodies that we continue to rehearse as if it were true. It’s not.

Despite what we have learned to believe, and as I have noted before, we are not individuals first. We become humans who are able to think and feel and act as individuals by virtue of the relationships with others who have supported us in becoming who we are.

We are wired from the first inklings of our lives to create relationships with others as the condition for our own maximal health and well being. Who we are is nothing more or less than this impulse to connect with whatever and whomever will enable us to unfold what it is we have to give.

As a result, there is never a moment in which the “self” that acts is only and simply a “self,” and it is impossible to disentangle selfish from un. Every act we make is necessarily both. Our health and well being depends on the balance.

If we only act “for the other” we will soon have nothing to give. It we only act “for ourselves” we will miss out on the pleasure of connecting with those who will support us in our becoming.

The most “selfish” actions we undertake are those that create mutually life-enabling relationships with other persons. The most “unselfish” actions are those that nourish in us in the ability to give whatever it is we have to give.

Fruitful questions to ask, then, are these. What must we do to nourish our ability to keep giving the very best of what we have to give? How do we create mutually life-enabling relationships that will support us in exploring, improving, and becoming who we are?

The we-in-me wants to know.

An Idea That Is Hazardous to Your Health

At the end of last week an article on breastfeeding caught my eye. Apparently, some celebrities have recently boasted about breastfeeding’s bulge-burning benefits. The article offered a response, amassing anecdotes from Every Woman for and against, asking: Is it true?

On the one hand, as someone who might qualify for professional nurser status, I warmed to the article’s positive pose. Mother of five, I have nursed for a total of over ten years—nearly a quarter of my life—and haven’t stopped yet. It works for me, for my kids, for our family.

On the other hand, however, the article made me shudder, and not (just) because it appeared in a fashion segment focused on fat. Left intact and even reinforced by the discussion was the greatest obstacle there is to any women figuring out for herself what strategies for nurturing her child will work for her: the idea that her body is a thing. This idea is hazardous to our health.

While no one came out and said, my body is a thing, the discussion assumed that a maternal body is a material entity subject to rules that apply in most cases. Is breastfeeding-to-lose such a rule? Women interviewed in the article and those who responded to it lined up for and against the rule based on their experiences. Those for whom it was true expressed delight that their bodies worked as they should. Those for whom it wasn’t were resigned or resentful or rebellious, blaming their bodies, or citing variables that interfered with the rule's effect (like metabolism, not enough sleep, or inadequate exercise).

However, the point to take home is not the truism that every woman is unique. The unsung point concerns the nature of health itself. Health is whole. What is healthy for us is something we must work out for ourselves in the context of the relationships that sustain us. Health is not given to us, it is created by us, as we use the information at our disposal to discover and grow the seeds of what our own bodily selves know.

Health, in this sense, is both the ability to know what is good for us, and the willingness to align our thoughts and actions with that knowledge. To have it, we need to cultivate it in our sensory selves and for our sensory selves every day—even and especially when figuring out how best to nurture a child.
*
This “health” is absent from current “healthcare” debates as well. Health is not what we get when we secure cheap drugs, insurance policies, or the right diet and exercise plan.

Even so-called “preventative medicine” is not about health. It is about monitoring a few variables that scientists know how to measure, marking them as “indicators,” and then prescribing drugs or behavior modifications designed to keep our numbers within a specified range. It is about identifying and managing risks based on statistics gathered over other times, places, and persons.

Little in our contemporary approach to healthcare is about helping us learn for ourselves how to discern for ourselves what is good for us. We are told what is good for us and advised to implement it, for our own good. The assumption is that we don’t know.

Yet, the fact is that no stack of statistics can deliver the most important piece of information you need for your ongoing health: which dot on the curve is you? No one can tell you what you most need to know: what works to enhance your health?
*
Our bodies are not things. Our bodies are movement—movement that is constantly registering sensations of pain and pleasure designed to guide us in making choices that align with our best health.

Yet this capacity for knowing what is best for us remains a mere potential unless we develop it. Specifically, we need to learn to welcome, work with, and refine our sensations of pain and pleasure, so that our sensory selves can become surer guides.

Support in doing this kind of work is what mothers—as well as those concerned with health—need.
*
You must like nursing, people say. Well yes and no. It’s not really about liking it. It’s about making the movements that allow me to be the mother, dancer, and philosopher I am and want to be. It’s about making the movements that will enable me to keep working, keep sleeping, keep the child napping, stay sane. It’s about managing the flow of thoughts and feelings, laundry and lunching. It’s about convenience and challenge, pleasure and well-being, time saved and spent. It’s about investing in an immune system and trusting in touch. It’s about figuring out what works, and having the faith and fortitude to honor it. It's about health.

There is no way to measure the complexity of variables that make breastfeeding right for me, and thus no way for me to assume its rightness for anyone else.

Our health is something we cultivate through practices of attention to our own bodily selves. But we cannot begin to do so until we stop looking outside of ourselves for the rule that applies to our bodies, and start welcoming whatever information and stories come to us, not as grounds for judging ourselves, but as vital resources for helping us explore the movements we can make towards our own health. It's what our bodies know.

Thoreau's "Tonic of Wildness"

“Can I go for my walk?” Jessica asks the question halfway through our home-school day. The arc of her interest in geometry has waned; her eyes wander outside already. I let the rest of her go.

This will to walk is recent and new. One day she simply announced that she would. Even then she wasn’t interested in a walk, or walking per se, but in her walk, something done by her, for her, with her.

Since then she has owned her walks. And when she returns from the fields and forest, the glow in her eye and the ray on her cheek tell stories her words sometimes match. She shares tales of the chipmunk she saw nibbling nuts, the stick that took shape beneath her whittling knife, or the dreams of the garden she plans to plant that formed in her mind.

Is this how Jessica should be spending her home-school time?
*
I am rereading Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s account of his two-year “experiment in living” simply and deliberately on the shores of Walden Pond. Though I read him many years ago, I am startled this time by how familiar the work seems: he launched his experiment for reasons that resound through our family's move here to the farm. He wanted to establish a perspective on contemporary society that would allow him to evaluate its values and practices, with an eye to making improvements. He wanted to wake up his senses, free his thoughts from their ruts, and live a life he loved to live. We do too.

For his part Thoreau was concerned that the obsessive-consumptive habits of society were dulling people’s senses and enslaving them to a quantity and quality of labor that failed to nourish their best selves. As he laments, “The better part of man is soon plowed into the soil for compost,” with predictable results. While the production of goods and services and the technological mechanisms for making and marketing them all flourish, individual humans don’t. Depressed by the sense-numbing pace of life, people crave distraction from expensive entertainment that ties them ever more tightly to their treadmills.

In Thoreau’s memorable words: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation… concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind… There is no play in them.”

Here on the farm, we share his concern, especially when it comes to kids. Teen persons in our culture have no purpose but to be educated for enterprises they will not be able to accomplish for another ten years. They scramble to compete for grades, awards, and victories that have no immediate bearing on their daily lives. Otherwise, they exist to be entertained. So separated from their bodily selves, they are easily seduced by virtual visions of pleasure, and quickly addicted to the rush they get by plugging in and pulling away from their connectedness with natural world. Is it surprising that so many teens feel alienated and depressed? Is it so surprising that they too, like the rest of us, cast about for the quick fix?

Addressing his contemporaries with prophetic wit, Thoreau asks: “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?” Thoreau’s response expresses the same intuition that guided us here: the only possible pill comes from grandmother Nature’s medicinal chest. The tonic of wildness.

Why Nature? Nature, according to Thoreau, awakens his senses in ways that feed his thoughts; Nature thus entices him participate in the ongoing work of creation—his own included.

For sure, Thoreau is interested in natural phenomena in general. An avid observer of plants and animals, earth, pond, and sky, his book chronicles changes of seasons and the cycles of a day. Yet he doesn’t go to Walden to observe nature per se. He seeks a time, space, and experience that will help him to a true account of life in all its manifestations. Human life included. He wants to sink beneath the surfaces of social doing and find a rocky real on which to stand.

What does he find? What a body knows. He finds endless movement—an ongoing movement of universal creation creating itself in him, around him, and through him. The rhythms of the natural world train his senses to see and smell and hear and taste the waves and trajectories of life’s becoming.

Further, once trained by Nature to notice Her movement, he sees and senses his own participation in it. He too is part of Nature’s ongoing work; Nature lives through his currents of feeling, his arcs of sensations, and the meandering of his own daily walks. Most importantly, for Thoreau, Nature lives in and through the rooting and unfolding of his thoughts. To live like Nature, then, is to find the freedom to think the thoughts that make of the day what it can be. As he writes: The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions... let us spend our lives in conceiving them.”

Nature, then, for Thoreau, is much more than a beautiful context or convenient set of metaphors for human pursuits. Nature is teacher and guide. Nature offers him the sensory education that he needs in order to be able to think about anything—whether railroad or woodchuck—with the same careful attention to its value relative to the “necessaries” of human life.

Our family moved for this same enabling proximity to the natural world so that we might bring our senses to life, find our freedom, and learn to live in love. Our mission: CliffsNotes to Walden.
*
Jessica comes back from her walk with tales of being stuck in a tree. She ventured out on a branch that led her onto another tree, and then found that the path was one way only.

“How did you get down?” I ask.

“I slid like a sloth down the branch and then dropped.” She smiles as she sits down to write. I smile too. I’m grateful. She is in good Hands.

In this home-schooling venture, I’ll take all the help I can get.

The Home-Work My Son Loves

My fourteen-year-old son hates homework. It’s not the work per se. During school hours, Jordan is happy to learn and will lecture at length on fine points of modern history or the properties of an equilateral triangle. Give him the same assignments at home, however, and he perceives them as an intrusion of his time and space. An injustice.

Home, he reasons, is for other kinds of work. Home is for milking his cow, Daisy, and planting potatoes. It is for chopping down a tree with an ax whose handle he carved, and then using Bright and Blaze, his team of young steer, trained to a yoke he shaped and shaved, to pull the log into the barn, where he and his sisters will hack it into firewood. Home is for churning cream he skims, from milk he squeezed, into butter and ice cream (though not both at once).

While school is for schoolwork, home is for home-work.
*
The question of education is in the news, running alongside concerns about the United States’ ability to sustain its place in the evolving global economy. We are familiar with the refrain: innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship will secure us jobs. Schools must teach the next generation these essential survival skills.

So far so good. The next question, of course, is how? Can you even teach creativity? The oxymoron is evident. Some deny that it is possible. But what does it take to be a creative, innovative entrepreneur?

For one, it takes the perspective required to see a problem as a problem in the first place, independent of what others think. It takes the passion of wanting to do it better. It takes the patience to wait for ideas to come and mature, and the persistence to brook the resistance new ways inevitably elicit.

In short, if we want to nurture creative problem-solvers, we need to help kids develop an intrinsic desire to unfold what they have to give in making the world a better place to be.

Did I say it would be easy?
*
I recently read NutureShock, a book about parenting practices that unmasks our common sense ideas as not so sensible after all. One chapter focuses on theories about how to develop the “executive functions” of the prefrontal cortex that aid us in planning for the future, carrying out strategies, and harnessing our impulses to them. These executive functions are almost always described as a top-down kind of self-control: mind over body. Until recently, the road to such skills has been paved with training that focuses primarily on the intellect.

However, as NutureShock relates, the balance is shifting, for researchers are discovering more effective means of developing these skills. Project-based, case-driven, collaborative learning opportunities are being proposed in which students design, carry out, and even assess their own work. When students learn what they need in order to solve a problem, they know that what they are learning matters. They know why. They care, and so invest more of themselves in learning.

In the preschool years, such learning is called imaginative play. Ask a four-year-old to sit still and you may get thirty seconds. Tell him that he is a dragon guarding a precious jewel and you might get four minutes. Involve a jewel thief, a dragon family who loves the jewel, and the magic rainbow it opens, and he may sit for twenty.

The same logic works for a twenty-year-old. Put her in a life-like situation, and see how learning disciplines improve. Why? Those so-called executive functions are fueled and funded by our emotional, sensory selves. It’s not so mind over body after all.

If our aim, then, is to nurture passionate, patient, persistent problem-solvers, the plot thickens: how do we teach our kids to play?
*
I am learning with Leif again. Master of rolling that he has become, he no longer needs to pull his knees to his chest to initiate the move. He simply twists his torso, belly button first, and rolls to the side, hauling his legs behind him. He learned this torso twist because the leg-lifting, jack-knife move he practiced so many times arranged his body in this pattern, pulling it into his sensory awareness as a possibility. He learned it, he perfected it. Now, this corkscrew is his move of choice as soon as you lie him down, for example, when attempting to change his clothes or a diaper.

Once on his belly, however, he finds himself again at the horizon of his abilities. Stuck. He tries arching his back and lifting his arms and legs off the floor, waving and kicking, while making the sound of a strangled cat.

Then, after several moments of ear-scratching screech, he resorts to that same knees-up pattern of movement that taught him how to roll in the first place: he pulls his knobby knees up under his body. Lo and behold he finds his toes. They connect with the floor. Executing his usual downward push, something unusual happens: he finds himself launched forward in space, at the edge of his blanket, forehead to the floor. Wow!

What’s happening? Faced with a new challenge (belly down), Leif mobilizes a pattern of sensation and response he already knows how to make (knees up). When he does, the familiar pattern takes a different shape in relation to gravity and weight (toes connect). He learns about him self and his world based on what happens when he makes it (face to floor). The pattern evolves (a bit more up). He repeats the experiment again and again, playing with the possibilities, and hones in on those patterns of movement that unfold his potential to move some more (he's almost crawling!). The movement Leif is making is his making him.

While the spinal movements Leif is making are basic to human health--at the core of yoga, dance, and other physical disciplines, overlooked to our detriment in our sedentary lives--what's even more important about Leif's adventures is the process he is engaging. He's playing in the most fundamental way we humans can: discovering and creating the patterns of sensation and response that make him who he is. He is not just moving, he is exploring and unfolding his potential to make new moves. He is playing at his own horizons and doing so because it is fun. He is participating in the rhythms of his bodily becoming.
*
To survive in this century, we are going to need to learn to make new moves in relation to the most basic elements of our ongoing existence--food, water, air, earth, and its human and animal creatures. We need to be able to play--to envision, plan, and carry out scenarios that anticipate the impacts of our actions on the health and well being of the earth in us and around us. What are we creating?

We might think that once we learn the basics of rolling, sitting, crawling and walking, it is time to restrict the focus of learning to our intellects. However, for our thinking to remain free, flexible, and responsive to our time, we need exercises that challenge our intellects as well as bodily practices that call our attention to how our movements are making us. To respond to the challenges we face, we have to care. We have to know why it matters to our bodily lives, and to do either, we need to move in ways that bring our senses to life.

It’s our home-work.
*
Bright and Blaze may not know it. They are not just pulling a log. They are pulling into existence a passionate, patient, persistent problem-solver.

Parenting, Writing, Blogging, and other Radical Acts

I just can’t do this!! The thought blasts through my brain at least once each day in those hours before Geoff comes home. It’s my fault, for sure. There is so much I want to do, so much I have to do, and so much being asked of me moment to moment by the four of our kids I agreed to home school this year that I go through the day feeling like I have one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. I lurch and buck and careen, and yes, sometimes crash.

This arrangement seemed like a good idea at first. I have an infant. My 12 and 8 year-old daughters, Jessica and Kyra, were begging to learn at their own home-spun pace. I would do my work in the cracks, around the edges, and after Geoff and our 14 year-old arrive home; 4 year old Kai would come along for the ride.

As for the reality: I’ll be discussing the "Declaration of Independence" with Jessica, interjecting asides to Kyra on short cuts for multiplying nines, while trying to nurse and nap infant Leif, when Kai demands, with every amp of his ample wattage: SOMEBODY PLAY WITH ME NOW! At least I am sitting down.

If all the pieces of the mighty puzzle line up and I manage to write down a thought, it is highly unlikely that I will succeed in placing a second before someone wakes up, gets hungry, has a question, or needs a wipe. By our 3:30 hand-off, my work is curdled into an icky pit in my stomach. It wants out. I want out, now!

It is confusing. All of our best decisions have landed me here. How come it is so hard?
*
Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are in the news again, this time with his contribution to the burgeoning genre of Parenting Lit. In twin memoirs (hers appeared in the spring), this team of mom and pop writers tell tales of what they are learning from life with their four children, ages 14, 12, 8, and 6. At back to back desks, they weave the personal and the public, family and work, coupling and parenting into vibrant texts, written and lived.

Reading about their life, a pang of recognition hits: Geoff and I are making similar moves. We aim to co-parent and co-create, side by side reinventing family life, though in rural New York rather than Berkeley, California. We moved here to create a way of living, of being family, that works for us, for our kids, for him, for me, where each person receives what he or she needs to become who he or she is. So why does their situation sound so idyllic?

The stories of Michael and Ayelet remind me: though I may feel like I am alone in the trenches, I am not. A veritable rash of writers, male and female, are sharing their kid-funded knowledge in books and blogs to a chorus of critics and congratulators. So what of it?
*
I ponder the question as I spread peanut butter on home-made bread for a hungry Kai. Last week’s news offers a key. In addition to reviews of Chabon’s book, we have been feasting on reports about how much has changed in family life since the 1970s. Marriage is at an all time low; single moms and stay at home dads at all time highs. More parents cross the chasm between workplace and home than ever before, while childhood stretches towards twenty and beyond.

While the realities are shifting dramatically, however, it is also evident that the ideals shading family life are not so quick to turn. We are still contending with visions of the good mother and providing father, as well as those of passionate life-long love and a happy childhood, that loom over us as critic and judge.

Wiping the counter for the third time in an hour, I think back to Tuesday's article on toxic parents as a case in point. As the author writes, “whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed.” In the deluge of responses the article produced, a pattern emerged of kids protesting narcissistic parents and parents complaining about ungrateful kids. Lurking in the shadows was an ideal of parenting that hardly anyone seems able to attain. Why?

In the light of these reports, the significance of Parent Lit appears. We, as a culture, are in the process of reinventing family life. That reinventing is happening household by household, and reading and writing about such experiments is helpful and necessary, though not without its dangers.

Hearing stories about how other parents tackle inherited expectations of rearing and raising reminds us that there are options. We have options, and we are not alone in wanting to find them. Ways of being family that worked for someone at sometime in some context may not work now for me or for you. I write to find my freedom.

Sharing stories is also necessary, given the nature of the change. We are exiting an era in which cultural authorities did not pay much attention to children as having anything to offer discussions of who they should be and become. Such reflections were the provenance of experts wielding scientific tools over and against nubile bodies. Stories remind us that we have something to learn from (our) children about how best to relate to them. I write to remember the creativity involved in creating relationships.

Writing about experiences is also dangerous for we run the risk of suggesting that one size fits all. There is a temptation to celebrate sentimentally our kids’ eternal cuteness, and another to wax nostalgic for childhoods lost. When changes breed fear and doubt, we tend to cling to the way things were. Sides polarize and we forget what anyone who cares enough to engage in these discussions shares: desire. We share a desire to do the best for our children, for each other, for ourselves, and, for the worlds in which we live. I write to find the wisdom in my desire.

Reading and writing, we learn to trust our dissatisfaction as teaching us how to move in ways that will not recreate the pain we feel. I write to discern what it is my body knows.
*
Yesterday morning I lost it. I was shredded to a pulp by competing pulls on my attention. During precious writing time, I return to the scene. What do I find? It’s the ghost of the good mother, haunting me: It is your job to meet your children’s needs. This all-too familiar noose of a notion strangles me. I erupt in anger when I can’t, furious with myself. Furious with them.

Of course, I know theoretically that I cannot meet my children’s needs. Even if I had only one child, I would not be able to meet his or her every need. But still, I want to. Why? Because I want to be a good mother! But is that what being a good mother means? It’s what I have learned to believe.

The tip of my pen draws out the hook. If I am to slip free of this need to meet my children’s needs, I have to let go of a lingering expectation that my parents should meet mine. They can’t. They don't exist to meet my needs.

I reflect back again on the blog complaints of narcissistic parents and ungrateful kids and see two sides of the same ideal that is haunting me. To the parent caught up in needing to meet needs, the frustrated child appears as a living, breathing reminder that the parent has failed. To the kid encouraged to believe in this ideal, the defensive parent appears as an obstacle to happiness. When the frustrated parent (inevitably) lashes out at the (unhappy) child, the child complains (rightfully) of abuse. A cycle of escalating disappointment (and sometimes horrific violence) sinks its teeth into the relationship and shakes. What do we want to create?

I return to the place of my pain and affirm the desire at its core. I want to meet my children’s needs. A new move appears. I want to meet their needs because I want them to have what they need to become who they are. The pain releases; another impulse appears. I write it down. I want to help my children learn to meet their own needs, and to do so, in part, it is my job to demonstrate to them how I meet my own.
*
Today is different. I make new moves. Leif falls asleep in my lap. I lay him on the couch and turn to the older three. Recess everyone! They run outside into the bright fall air to invent some game involving horses, harnesses, and humans.

I sit at my desk and begin to write. My heart fills with gratitude. I adore my kids. They are teaching me how.

Movement Manifesto, Part 2 of 2

Cats of all kinds are famous for it, after their notable naps. Cows do it too, after hours curled cud-chewing. I see human babies doing it, and know I can’t live without it. Even so, I was somehow surprised to realize that chicks do it too. Chicks stretch.

Our twenty-six fluff balls are now three weeks old and sprouting tufts of feathers from all sides. One by one, while otherwise peeping, pecking, and pooping, a chick pauses. A ripple of movement begins in its shoulder, fans through its feathering wing, leaps to a lengthening leg on the same side, and spills out through a perfectly pointed toe with such intensity that its wingtips tremble. Chicks stretch.

It makes me think. For these birds, each stretch spreads through a range of motion that the bird needs to fly. The stretches bubble up spontaneously, improvised yet patterned. The moves are obviously pleasurable (or perhaps I project). If birds could smile…

It makes me think. Why stretch?
*
Cultural conversations about stretching reflect our attitude towards bodily movement in general. As noted in the last post, discussions about movement are dominated by the language of exercise and fitness. Stretching, in this regard, is something you do to your muscles in order to have a better workout or race result. Stretching is a physical means to a physical end.

From there fierce debates ensue over how, when, whether, and why. Does stretching weaken our muscles or prevent injury? Does stretching disperse lactic acid for a speedier recovery or put undue strain on fragile tissues? Does stretching increase flexibility or merely preserve it? Should it hurt or not? Should you bounce or hold or resist? What seems to count most are the measurements—how fast, how far, how much. Can you touch your head to your knees? Your hands to the ground? Hey, how’s your split?

Haunting these debates is an assumption that a muscle is a mechanical piece prone to harden over time like a rubber band or an old shoe. Keeping “it” toned and tuned is the responsibility of some one called “I”—someone armed with science’s best results. Yet according to science, the verdict is out. No one knows. Or do we?
*
Leif wakes up from his nap with a big smile. It was a good one. I watch as his fists ball, his elbows bend, his knees tuck up, and his back bends in an arc of intensity that shudders through his small self. His body is yawning, opening, releasing his limbs to move. He smiles again, waving his legs, extending his joy through the tips of his toes. No span of sensation escapes the awakening. All here and now he is.
*
We are missing the point about stretching because we have lost a sense of our bodies as the movement that is making us. Even while neuroscientists plot body maps in the brain, most people remain convinced that movement, aside from a few involuntary processes and reflexes, is from the top down. Brain drives; Body follows.

However, our brains are bodies too, and the bodies we are are not ours. If anything, we are theirs. The muscles we move move us, and they are alive, ceaselessly recycling, replenishing, and regenerating energy that exists to empty itself along a string of similar cells. Like a plant wants the sun, our bodily muscles want to move.

Moreover, this muscle movement that we are is not simply physical. Muscles don’t just move bones. They move our senses—the eye that scans, the ear that cocks, the nose that nears, the digit that fingers. How we move determines what we perceive, what we feel, and what responses we can imagine. The movement of our muscles also orients us in space and time: time is how long a movement takes; space is where it gets us.

It is the action of our muscles, grunting or groaning, that draws into sensory awareness a lived experience of ourselves as agent “I.” Approach or withdraw? Tangle or resist? Grab or release? My “I” is the one who did and can and will again make that move.

How we move our bodily selves, then, provides the basis for everything that our brains have to do in the realm of the executive “I.” Organizing, abstracting, calculating, reasoning, conceiving, planning, and carrying through are all mental movements predicated on and predicted by the earliest contraction and release of our bodily selves.

Stretching is an impulse to move. Stretching we bring our senses to life, animating the planes and surfaces of our sensory awareness so that we have at our fingertips what we need to participate consciously in making the movements that make us who we are.
*
I lie down on the floor. The congestion in my brain, the tension in my shoulders, the stiffness in my limbs are all letting me know: it is time to move. I breathe down into the ground and lift one knee towards my chest. Holding it with laced fingers, I exhale down into my bent hip and out through the leg lying along the floor. I do it once and then again. Suddenly a hamstring releases, seemingly of its own accord. My lower back sinks into the ground. Ribs lengthen, and ripples reorganize the bones of my spine. The front of my forehead eases and thoughts begin to flow.

Ah yes, that is what I was forgetting while sitting at my desk. While it is true that I begin the stretch, soon enough the stretching is stretching me past patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, and into a present place where I am free to respond anew, in the moment and for the moment.

More is being stretched than muscles here--I'm stretching my sense of self. It is my "I" that is in danger of becoming hard and rigid, unyielding in its beliefs. It is my sense of who I am that must remain elastic, flexible, and free, not identified with the past patterns of movement that I have become, but rather with the process of making those patterns that "I" am. That's the point.

It's all about love.
*
Stretching I find ground, or ground finds me. A sensing center of self emerges where I can discern what will keep me moving and loving based on how I have moved and where I am now. My bodily self knows.

It is this finding and feeling that feels so good I want to do it again. I want to be this awake, this resourceful in every moment of my life, regardless of how restricted my reach may be. If I am beating and breathing, my movement is making me, and there is an infinite range of increasingly subtle sensations to discover.

Let's.

Movement Manifesto, Part 1 of 2

I am surrounded by babies—bovine, human, and avian--a bull calf named Dutch, my four month old Leif, and twenty-six two-week old chicks. I am watching them all closely for signs. Who are we animals anyway?

What do I notice? How they move. Babies move. They move constantly. Even when they suddenly collapse into a heap, fast asleep, their bodies balloon in and out with the beats of their breathing.

Take the chicks. From the moment we opened the peeping package we picked up at the post office, these fluff balls on toothpicks have been moving constantly—pecking, preening, poking, scratching, scooping water and tipping up their chins so that the drink runs down their throats.

Then one by one, they crash. Heads loll, legs splay, and wings curl as the chicks flop over, between, and through one another in a mound of pulsing puff. In the next instant, a sound startles. One head lifts, and the mass comes alive, peeping and pecking again, stronger, louder, and bigger. You can see them grow.

Leif is the same—a veritable whirligig of wriggling and waving until the moment when all he wants to do is suck himself into sleep. Tucked in my arms he falls over some unseen edge into a rest so deep you can feel his cells inhale. No anxieties about the day rev his small self; no anticipation or regret props his eyelids open. He pulses, present to his rhythms of bodily becoming.

Movement is who he is. His movement is making him.
*
In our contemporary age, movement has been co-opted by the language of exercise and fitness, and moralized into a task we should perform. We congratulate ourselves when we succeed in spurring our seemingly sluggish bodies into action, and then measure the minutes spent, the miles clocked, and calories counted. We treat our bodies like pets we must put through their paces, so they will continue to obey our commands. We earn our just reward of fitting in to clothes, cliques, or the conceptions of beauty that barrage us.

Our view of movement is reinforced in our experience by our sedentary values. We prize the ability to sit still as a measure of our success in thinking and learning. To sit is the goal of a day's work. When our energy pools in our toes, and we don’t feel like moving, we assume it’s because our body blocks don’t want to. We forget that we are no longer feeling through our bodily selves.

Mind over body is what we have become. Our movements are making us.
*
Leif found his foot. Or, his foot found him. Or rather, his foot and his fingers found each other. Grasping and grasped, he found himself, but it’s not a matter of agency. He didn’t decide to link upper and lower digits. His parts found each other, as they moved.

He found himself by moving.

How could this be? The movements that we make are neither fully conscious, nor fully planned, but neither are they arbitrary or accidental to our evolving sense of self.

The beating and breathing that we are pulls nutrients and elements into places where they burn. Energy emerges, wanting its own expenditure. Cells act, muscles contract, nerves fire, and movements happen along the trajectories of our physiological form. As these movements pass through us, they create sensations of their happening—patterns of coordination the movement requires.

The movements also invite effects—a smile evokes another, a cry calls for arms, a sucking warms the belly. The impress of these effects remains. So overtime, as we move, we gather patterns of sensing and responding that guide us in discerning what we need and how to get it. A sense of agency forms, as an after-thought. Suck, reach, cry, can I.

I is an afterthought. It is a thought we can think based on the bodily movements we have made. It is a word that gives unity to the splash of sensations we gather as we move through space and time, toward and away, with and against, up and down, in and out and around.

I is an afterthought that becomes a forethought. Once it emerges, it serves as a powerful hook on which to hang further patterns of sensing and responding. It becomes a sense of ourselves we want to protect, so we learn new movements that do—avoiding, deflecting, attacking, retreating, and repressing all those aspects of ourselves that don’t conform to who we want our "I" to be. We want to believe that "I" comes first.

It is when we identify too strongly with our I-protecting patterns of sensation and response that we stop moving. We forget that our bodily movement is making us, and we lose the sensory awareness that would allow us to discern new patterns of sensing and responding. We lose degrees of freedom. Faced with the challenges of our lives, we rearrange the furniture in our minds, unable to find a way out.
*
Watching the babes, I remember. It is time to move.

Movement is our birthright. We are born moving. We are born to move, and when we are not too tired or stressed or hungry or preoccupied, movement is what we want to do. When we move we breathe, when we breathe we feel, and when we feel we have available to us resources for greeting every challenge in our lives as a potential for pleasure we have yet to unfold.

When we move, we bring sense to life.

Who’s In Charge of Me: You or Me?

“What does everyone want for lunch?” I turn to my kids one by one, making sure to ask Kai last. Kai is four. We all joke that his middle name is “I want what you’re having.”

If Jordan is having pasta, Jessica a grilled cheese, and Kyra oatmeal, Kai will want some of each. All together. Sometimes mixed. If there are five cereal boxes in the cabinet, he will want some of each, in the same bowl. If there are four cartons of ice cream in the freezer (our record is eight), he will want some of each. And if you refuse, you will regret it. It takes longer to quiet his response than to honor his obviously reasonable request.

Options on the table, I focus on Kai: “OK Kai, what will it be?”
*
There is much discussion these days about social influences on human behavior. Spurred by the publication of the book Connected, we are being asked to consider whether happiness is contagious and whether our friends make us fat (as in this NYTimes Magazine article). Books on the food industry by David Kessler, Michael Pollan, and others are teaching us how food is manufactured (with high levels of salt, sugar, and saturated fats), marketed (as the ultimate pleasure), and sold (in packages with promises placed at eye level) in ways that cause us to buy and eat more than we should of foods we think we want that are not good for us.

The message reverberates: you are being deceived, manipulated, or otherwise adversely influenced by others.

We greet the words with a measure of relief. It is not just me. For too long we have been led to believe that whatever is wrong is our individual fault. If I am fat, I should eat less. If my relationships don’t last, I should commit more. If I am depressed, I should pull myself up and decide to be happy. Yet, as the record reveals, in all of these cases will power doesn’t seem to work.

Now, however, given the new evidence, we can blame someone else. Perhaps more to the point, we can now turn to someone else to help us achieve the results we want. So we rely on the city council to ban soda machines from schools, or a pharmaceutical company to pop us a mood-altering pill. Someone else will take care of me.

Is it true?

No, but the answer is not to swing back to blame the individual either. For these strategies for curing a problem—whether targeting will power or external influences—are flip sides of the same coin. Both perpetuate the same way of thinking about our human selves that lies at the roots of the problems themselves.

How so? Both approaches assume that our minds—our thinking, judging, executive selves—are the strongest resource we have for getting what we want. Both assume that our minds are in charge, or at least should be. Both assume that our minds work by exercising a power over our bodies, mastering or controlling our desires for food, for sex, or for happiness. If our individual mind is not up to the task, then we can rely on a collective mind to limit our choices.

Whether we place our faith in the individual mind or the collective mind, the logic is the same: mind over body. Yet this logic itself is part of the problem. We have learned to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against bodies. In the process, we have learned to ignore what our bodies know. We have cut ourselves off from the sources of wisdom in our desires--wisdom capable of guiding us to make decisions that will enable our health and well being.
*
Kai looks at me. He pauses, feeling my question hanging in the air. He looks around at his siblings and back at me. “I want a grilled cheese with tomato.”

“Please,” I reply.

“Please,” he repeats. I smile. No one else asked for a grilled cheese with tomato. Kai is finally making his own request. He is learning to discern for himself what he wants: he remembers having it on a day when Geoff had one too. Now the desire is his.

I start making the sandwich and decide to make half. Even though he was quite clear in his request, it is likely that he will begin to eat the sandwich and then see something around him that he wants even more. I will have to remind him that this is what he wanted; and he will reply, "But Mommy, it isn’t what I want!"
*
Kai is teaching me about our desires—about how malleable, teachable, and ultimately creative they are. For the fact that we can be and are influenced by what surrounds us—however frustrating it might be for a meal maker—is precisely what enables us as individuals to discover and become our singular selves.

We are connected, and we are singular. We are singular because we are connected. For what defines our singularity is the unique mesh of bodily relationships we are and create with the people, places, and things that are supporting us in becoming who we are.

How then are we to find our way?

It is not by blaming ourselves, nor blaming the social influences upon us for our actions. It is not by revving up our mental will to master our bodies, nor seeking external solutions.

Rather, we need, as best we can, to open up the sensory awareness that the unique matrix of relationships that we are has enabled us to develop. We need to feel what we are feeling so that we can learn over time to make decisions that align with the trajectories of our health and well being.

We need options. We need information, and we need to be willing to participate consciously in the process of finding the wisdom in our desires. It is the process of doing so that yields the greatest possible pleasure.

In following posts, I will describe how.

The Limits of Listening (to Your Body)

Leif is on the move, sideways. At three months and a day, the urge in my infant son crested and broke, releasing him to roll. Back to front, front to back, within hours he mastered the move.
He begins with a pulse, pulling in his knees, clasping his hands above them, and rounding his back into a ball. Tilting slowly to one side, he hovers just shy of the tipping point, holding, holding, until finally, the balance shifts. In one move, sturdy legs thrust out, arms jackknife up, and he unfolds from his center in a graceful, belly-landing surge.

A huge smile cracks his face. I fall in.

How did he learn to make this move? Not by watching me. Yet he knows, with precision, how to navigate the pull and push of gravity and ground. He knows the physics of levering his small self into position, and he knows the pleasure of doing so. How?
*
Listen to your body. The phrase has lately acquired mantra-like status. We hear it everywhere, calling us to dial down our busy lives and tune in to what we are feeling; to relax and rejuvenate, to eat sensibly, exercise thoughtfully, and live well.

As far as it goes, the imperative offers an important corrective in a culture where we are otherwise trained to perceive our bodies as material objects which “we,” as rational minds, are responsible for making fit and fit in. Too often we are encouraged to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against these bodies, destined to master and control.

Even so, does the call to listen to your body go far enough?

Listening has its limits. For one, “listening” is a metaphor: it is not sound that our bodies are making but sensation. Where are our inner ears? And when we use this metaphor to describe a desirable relationship to our bodily selves, we smuggle in assumptions that limit the imperative’s radical reach.

Listening implies that there is a distance between the “I” who listens and “the body” that speaks. It implies that this “I” can choose to listen or not, and then to respond or not, given whatever criteria “I” hold dear. It implies that what “the body” or “my body” has to “say” is simply there for the hearing. All I have to do is tune in. Further, as frequently used, the metaphor implies that what “the body” has to say to “me” is simple: go or stop. All wisdom and discernment remains with my “I,” the one who knows.

The call to “listen,” in other words, reinforces the very mind over body ways of relating to ourselves that it aims to correct.

So what are we to do? Not listen?
*
Leif is lying next to me. I’m on my belly. He is on his back. I’m writing. He’s wriggling. We are each, in our own way, waving our limbs—channeling energy, tracing shapes, and expressing ourselves in time and space.

I marvel at Leif. He is so present in his movement. I wish the same for my words. Every ounce of his small self is alive. Every patch of skin, inside and out, is raw radar, moving, sensing, responding. He is all ears, one great ear drum, resonating with the forces in him and around him. With fingers and toes flared, legs and arms pumping, he is collecting impressions. With every movement, he senses; to every sensation, he responds; with every response, he makes himself into the one who moved and sensed and responded. With every movement he has been making himself who he is—ready to roll.

I see now—what seemed a spontaneous move wasn’t. He has been practicing his whole life for this moment. His gyrating arms and legs pull blood and breath and nutrients into his muscles, growing tiny abs of steel. The contracting and releasing action creates a sense of center in him. As he plays with the forces working through him, on him, and around him, he discovers who he is and what he can do.

And why does he do so? Because it feels good. He is following the paths of his pleasure, the arcs of energy that open for him as he moves. Dancing, he pulls into his awareness a sensation of self, ready to roll.
*
The autonomy we claim from our bodily selves in so many aspects of our lives is an illusion. It is a powerful one, and effective too, but an illusion nonetheless. For the mind that can think “I” would not exist without the beating and breathing, the firing and wiring, the sheer movement of the bodily self it claims to control.

The movement I am is making me.

We are born bodies, born to move, and because this is so, we need to do more than learn to listen to our bodies. We need to learn to be the bodily selves that we are. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of ourselves as movement—as the movement that is making us able to think and feel and act at all. And we need to practice, for if we don’t, we will unknowingly practice the mind over body ways of living that dominate our cultural moment.

As we practice, we begin to find wisdom where we have least come to expect—in the bodily sensations we are collecting and expressing, moment by moment, as we move through our lives.

We find in ourselves the sources of our creativity and our freedom, and the impulses guiding us to create the relationships that will support us in becoming who we are.
*
Our culture is at a tipping point. In so many realms of life, from health and fitness to agriculture and architecture, we are poised to shift the balance towards earth-friendly values, practices, and ideals. We are on the verge, leaning towards a new way of being. We’ve been exercising the patterns of awareness that we need to make it happen. What we need now to help us along is a shift in how we think about, feel through, and experience our bodily selves.

I’m ready to roll! Are you?

What do you think—is there wisdom we have learned to ignore that is unique to our bodily selves?

*
For a related article, see Gina Kolata in the New York Times, "That Little Voice Inside Your Twinge."

Birth of B.B. (Baby Bull)!

I am trying to draft this week’s blog entry while playing legos with Kai when I hear the cry. Jessica has just returned from her garden where she went to thin the plant-threatening weeds. “Daisy! She’s up in the field, licking something small and brown on the grass!”

I leap into action. We have been waiting for this moment. I slip Leif into the sling, grab Kai’s hand, and with Kyra and Jessica, stride up the hill. Of course, Daisy picked the farthest and most remote corner of our hillside pasture.

I see them from a far, mother and babe! It is here! I had checked a couple of hours earlier. Daisy is fast! Lucky her.

We draw near. Daisy hovers protectively. Our other cows circle with interest. The steers graze calmly further down the hill. While Daisy is usually as sweet as her name, we don’t want to risk a charging cow. We stop yards away and gaze. You know how new mothers can be. Dasiy doesn’t need us, obviously. However, we do want to make sure the young one gets Daisy's colostrum during those first vital hours when its stomachs (yes, plural) are extra able to absorb the early milk’s rich nutrients.

I send Jessica close. Bull or heifer? Can you tell? We want to know.

It’s a bull. A pang shoots through my heart. Ah well. Who knows what will happen to him. Breeder, ox, or meat? At this point we focus on his cuteness. He is so cute!

We watch as he struggles to his legs. Daisy circles him, placing her head between him and the electrified wires that bound their pasture. Good mom. Then, just as the calf starts heading for her udder, Auntie Precious comes along to give him a friendly nudge, and the calf goes sprawling to the ground.

Daisy steps daintily and firmly between her calf and Precious. A few minutes later, he is up again, and this time an eager Dandelion, Daisy’s first child, swoops in from the side to see, and again he is tumbling, legs like tossed pick up sticks. The steers are now approaching, sniffing with curiosity. Daisy moos persistently. Her udder is so full that her teats are sticking out sideways. I am sure she can’t wait for him to nurse.

I decide that we have to help. Jessica hikes back to the barn for a lead rope, bucket and bottle. We loop the rope over Precious and tie her to a nearby tree. I hand the Leif-laden sling to Jessica and take the bucket. Daisy is sensitive at first. Every time I touch her udder she swats me with her hind leg. I finally hold her leg back with my left shoulder while pulling on one front teat with my right hand. Slowly slowly the stream begins, so golden that it is practically orange! (Someone has to explain to me how the beta carotene in bright green grass makes milk peach-y.)

Daisy settles down and lets me pull. She obviously feels the relief. Meanwhile the calf is nibbling at my side. Not me, little one! I want to be the missing link.

The bucket begins to fill. When I have more than I want to lose, I stop, grab the bottle, and begin pouring from bucket to bottle. Colostrum spills over the edges and every which way, thick and sticky.

Finally the bottle is half full—a quart. I begin feeding the calf as Daisy noses the empty bucket. He is sucking! I hand the bottle to Kyra, take the sling from Jessica, who then takes the bottle from Kyra, to feed the (still unnamed) baby bull (hereafter "B.B.") the last few drops. Bottle empty, we begin again. I give the Leif-filled sling to Jessica, take the bucket and start milking.

I laugh. How is it I am here?

We give B.B. a second quart. He is getting the hang of the bottle.

We hear a car in the driveway. Geoff and Jordan are finally home from school (the rest of us are home schooling this year). Jordan! Daisy is his cow. I stride down to greet them. Daisy needs water; she is thirsty. Jordan fills two large buckets and we walk together back up the hill. He is walking with those heavy buckets as quickly as I am. “It’s what you call love,” he says.

A moment later I watch as Jordan's face explodes into a smile at the sight of his calf. He scratches B.B. under the chin, and then goes to work. He is the milking expert. Minutes later he has another bottle going. Lucky calf!

I return to the house, smiling. Time to finish my blog.

Today B.B. is steady on those peg legs. His large brown eyes gaze expectantly, waiting for all the sticky sweet things life has in store for him. We are waiting too!

By next week, we'll be "in the milk" again, and I'll post what I was writing earlier.

Making Connections

A crispy edge cuts the air. Red hues creep across the leaves. School begins today. The seasons are changing, and so is this blog.

Over the summer I have done interviews about my book What a Body Knows with radio personalities around the country—men and women, Christian and new age, conservative and liberal, credentialed and not. Many times I have been heartened by the words: People need to hear this. Some people. Some where. I am starting to listen.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear some report or read some news piece and think about how my work could offer a different perspective and enrich the discussion.

Hence the new focus of this blog: I plan to make connections with articles and authors, books and blogs that are concerned with issues raised in What a Body Knows. It is time to map the range and reach of my emerging philosophy of bodily becoming, and provide a place for others to do the same. Chime in! Here goes.
*
On August 18, Natalie Angier, one of my favorite science writers, published a fascinating column in the New York Times about how the “Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop.” In its August 17th issue, Time magazine weighed in with a cover story by John Cloud on "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."

Both stories miss what links them together and what What a Body Knows teaches: that bodily movement is the key to helping us find wisdom in our desires.

Take the stress loop. As Angier reports, researchers have discovered among deliberately-stressed (i.e., shocked, bullied, and nearly-drowned) rats, that the rodents were “cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over.” The centers of the brain governing habit formation bloomed. Provided with a bar they could press for a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, the stressed rats “had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar,” even when they no longer wanted to eat.

Angier links these findings back to the allostasis of our dynamic stress response system, which is designed to maintain control by causing marked changes in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle activity, and the like. As she says, we “dance to the beat.”

Meanwhile, Cloud reports that exercise does not lead to weight loss. The reasons are many, but one rises above the rest. Most exercise does not burn enough calories to make a difference. Even when we burn some calories, we tend to overcompensate for whatever we have burned, rewarding ourselves for our efforts and eating more than we otherwise would have done.

Angier characterizes the stress loop as “vicious” and “sinister,” though she admits it might be helpful in a crisis for shunting as many behaviors as possible to “automatic pilot.” Cloud laments that exercise is of little value in the fight against obesity, though reminding us that it is still good for our general health.

What is missing from these discussions, and what links them together, is what our bodies know.

In the case of Angier, for example, heightened habit formation is not the problem. Nor is stress itself. The problem is that we get stuck in stress because the habits we form are ones that reinforce the causes of the stress. In What a Body Knows, I call it cereal box logic. In responding to our sense of frustration or dissatisfaction, we resort to the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place.

The fact, then, that our stress responses are making us more stressed is a sign of our bodily wisdom not stupidity. For this finding indicts the mind-over-body thinking, feeling, and acting that most people raised in American culture rely upon to cope. As I have described in earlier posts, this mind-over-body sense of ourselves is what we are taught, what we master, who we believe we are. It is one way of sensing ourselves, but not the only one.

If we were to adopt a stress response that shifted our experience of ourselves away from a mind-over-body sense, then the repetition of it would work to release us from the self-reinforcing stress cycle.

Doing so, however, is not a matter of willpower. Nor is it simply a matter of "relaxing." It involves cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodily selves regardless of what we are doing. It involves moving to breathe and breathing to move (see posts in Jan-Feb 2008), engaging in the kinds of bodily movement that draw our attention down and out and through our sensory selves.

Here is where exercise comes in, and its crucial role in our relationship to food. The value of exercise in this relationship has little or nothing to do with burning calories. More important is the bodily movement itself. Bodily movement has the potential for drawing our awareness out of our minds and into our bodies, and so that the loops of our mind-over-body stress responses loosen and fall. When they do, we stop pushing the bar for that extra squirt of sugar water. We don't have to--we don't want to--for we know a deeper pleasure, the pleasure of feeling and finding our own sense of enough.
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I spent last week at the Washington County Fair. My three older children were there for the week, showing their Jersey cows. The fair overloads the senses. Barn fans whirr with an incessant, fly-chasing drone. Milk-machine-powering generators hum. The screams of truck and tractor engines pulling harder than they should punctuate the afternoon. Voices crest and collide. Dust and dirt swirl and stick. It is a stressful situation for a new mother, namely me, with infant in tow. I empathize with Angier's rats.

After a few hours, a feeling of disease slides over me. I start retreating from my sensory self. I start thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. I can’t stop thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. And the butterscotches. The coffee treats. Then I know. It is time for a walk.

I leave the fair grounds, striding hard through the surrounding fields packed with parked cars. The attendants look at me strangely, wondering where I am going. No where. Just around—around the largest perimeter I can make. Striding. Breathing. Releasing. Being. Becoming. Feeling. Knowing. Dropping into my bodily self.

Suddenly my thoughts shift. I am the movement that is making me. Visions of caramels fade into pictures of what I really want. To write that article. To connect with this friend. To make plans for the school year. Back in myself, I head back to the fair, reconnected, ready to begin again.
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What connections can you make?