Shaking Medicine

A song flew into my ear this morning, slipping through the window I had cracked hours before. I opened my eyes to find a room still dark, and a first-blush of dawn sliding across the sky. I heard the bird sing again. Perhaps it was that first-of-the-season, spring-signaling red wing blackbird that Kyra spied the other day. Or maybe it was one of the many starlings making nests under our eaves. The song floated through once more. I smiled. You can’t stop spring.
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The tomato plants we planted in the paper cups left over from our Genesis concert are popping their heads up to take a peek around. It has been just over a week since Jessica, Kyra, Kai and I filled those cups on a sunny stoop, lined them in shoe boxes, and began our watering routine. Tiny weed heads sprouted first, but now furry fronds are finally poking out and lifting their chins to the world. They are so fragile, so indomitable--the force of life breaking out, breaking forth, breaking free.
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Everyone seems to be doing it—the birds, the cows, the rooster and the duck. The rooster and the duck? We haven’t decided whether the rooster thinks he is a drake, or whether the duck imagines herself a hen, but whichever way it is, these two feathered friends flock together. The ardent force of their lonely loins seems to overcome any differences, except for yesterday. When our duck decided to go for a swim with a couple of wild mallards in the pond across the street, our rooster paced the shore crowing with concern. He did not appreciate the competition.
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We are waiting for Precious’ calf to come. While Precious was due on the 24th (we think), she is not yet showing signs of being ready to pop. She has not yet "bagged out": her udder is small and slack. Nor are the muscles around her tail soft and sunken. We know, however, the birth is going to happen. It will.

Meanwhile my small traveler is thrusting about with a life of its own. I can barely imagine the choreography it is taking to make such tattoos on my belly. The lumps and bumps, pressing and receding, fill me with delight in anticipation of what is coming: a new being, happening now, happening every day, happening soon.
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I went to a terrific conference this weekend at Duke University on the healing powers of music and dance. The keynote speaker was Bradford Keeney, a scholar and shaman who has traveled the world studying bodily movement in healing traditions from Africa and South America, through North America to Japan.

Keeney applauds western cultures for how well we have appropriated the meditative strands of non-western religions. As he notes, the Relaxation Response, made handy by Herbert Bensen and others, is now a ready cure relied on for many ills: migraines to mental illness, cancers to colds.

However, Keeney insists, we have missed the other arc in the rhythm of healing. In addition to relaxing deeply, we also need to wake ourselves up, arouse our senses, and raise and release the creative energy stuck in our bodies by engaging in vigorous bodily movement. Shaking medicine he calls it.

Shaking medicine, as he defines and practices it, is all about (what I have described as) cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodies as the movement that is making us. Shaking we learn what our bodies know about how to participate in the rhythms of our own becoming. We tap our healing energy, and let it happen through us.
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Shaking, healing, springing forth. Healing happens, spring happens, with a force that cannot be stopped. It is what our bodies do; it is what the earth does. It is our very life, constantly being born, constantly recreating itself, until the day we die.

Is it a coincidence that I heard Keeney speak on the eve of spring?

In every moment, the thrust of life is charging through us, breathing, beating, breaking forth. With every movement we are creating ourselves, singing and dancing ourselves into existence, creating the relationships with others that will support us in becoming who we are. As we do, we heal. We find ourselves moving in ways that do not recreate the patterns of pain and hurt in which we are stuck. It is what our bodies know.

Spring is here, and we remember the regenerative power lodged in our lungs and limbs. Catching songs in our ears, we hear new life. Stretching in the sun, we dance.
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When I was gone, Jordan decided it was time to plant potatoes. He hoed six furrows, twenty feet long. He marshaled Jessica to help him cut potatoes into two-eyed chunks, and urged Geoff to buy another bag. Kyra counted the 100 pieces they made. Then, followed by Kai, all four kids went out to push their potato promises into the softened earth. The thoughts of nourishing their bodies nourished their souls. Aligning their energies with the growing, thrusting force of spring, their enthusiasm was contagious. The movements they were making were making them.

What should we plant? How should we move? What shall we sing?
What will grow if we do?

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For more information about Keeney, see this article or this interview.