Looking Into the Future

I am looking into Leif’s newly eye-locking five-week-old eyes these days, and wondering. What does he see? Does he see me? Or just beady black circles ringed with blue, white, peach, and brown?

Does he see a Face that goes with the Taste and the Voice? Or just shadowy, shifting shapes? Is he looking at my eyes because it is there that he sees me looking at him? I have no idea. All I know is that he likes this play of images on his visual field. He smiles.

So why do I look into his eyes? I am looking for the future—for his future. What will he look like? Who will he be?

In some moments, he resembles each of my other four children so much that I blurt out the wrong name, and run to the family albums, desperate to find something to distinguish him from the others besides blankets, backgrounds, and the length of my bangs. I want to see him.

I look at the other children again, trying to see who they were, what they looked like in their past. Somehow the process doesn’t work in reverse. I can’t see who they were, only who they are—as if they have always been. I can recall photographs, but only rarely can I remember moments of sheer presence that imprinted themselves on me. So where was I in my children’s past? What was I seeing? And where will I be in their future?
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On July 10 and 11 Geoff and I participate in an annual Vermont happening: a three-day conference for renewable energy, sustainable living, and great music called SolarFest. We go as a family to join those who gather outside, in large tents and barns, to share new developments in earth-friendly living. We are looking to learn about new technologies for building, motoring, and powering that promise greater responsiveness to the life-enabling rhythms of the natural world. It is Leif’s first big outing in the world and he spends most of it curled like a bean inside a slinky black sling that hangs from Geoff’s shoulders.

We are looking for the future in the present. Leif is the future in the present. He will see it, make it, live in it. What will it be?

Through much of modern western history, humans have pursued technological invention for the purpose of protecting ourselves from the vicissitudes of nature. Our ideal has been to erect hermetically sealed buildings, impervious to earthquake or hurricane, lit day and night with incandescent rays, whose filtered air circulates at the same temperature year round. We have idealized a freedom from the rhythms of the natural world, going so far as to separate ourselves from the nature in our needs and desires. We have convinced ourselves that we have a right not to want—a right to have everything we want, easily and effortlessly. Now.

Change is coming, for we realize that our labor-saving, time-saving, life-protecting technologies are killing us. We have forgotten that we are earth too. We have forgotten what a body knows. Immured from the rhythms of the natural world, we are more likely to manufacture toxic thoughts, feelings, and actions. Our bodily selves are increasingly weak, sick, static, and depressed. Our relationships wither. The world warms.

Even so, the solution is not to reject technology, but rather to align our uses of it with the life-enabling rhythms of the earth in us and around us. And an important step in doing so is to cultivate a sense of what those rhythms are—a sensory awareness of our bodily selves that will enable us to find the wisdom in our desires.

Or so I try to convey in the workshop I teach on Friday to those who assemble in the large white tent pitched among tall growing grasses beyond a stonewall with forest and fields in view.

Later in the afternoon Geoff appears on stage, making music with piano and plectrum sounds. Shiny flat solar panels arrayed alongside the stage transform sunrays into electrical currents that push waves of sound through amplifiers and speakers into the open air. Energy to art.

Halfway through his set he calls me up on stage. While he plays, I read a few pages from What a Body Knows where I describe how an impulse to dance arises in me after months of careful, sustained attention to the sights, sounds, and rhythms of our land. It was a mystical moment—as I danced, the land came alive in me as what was enabling me to move at all. I close with a song I wrote, Dance Your Life.

Leif sleeps through it all, doing his part to conserve energy and enable art. There will be much work for him to do soon enough.
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His gaze focuses on mine. I ask him again. What will your future be? How do I let the life-enabling future in you live?

He is wearing one of his eco-onesies. Whether due to his name or our farm life or the changing times, many of the gifts people have given us feature eco-themes—think green, free range, save the planet, hug a tree. Or the onesies are made of organic fibers, natural dyes, packed in recycled and reused containers. They come in earth tones, decorated with plant and animal themes. Leif is a nursing, napping beacon of change, blazoned with emblems of life.

Our eyes lock. Something happens. A current passes between, igniting a burst in my heart. Does he feel the same thing? I smile. He smiles. I smile again. The energy within me rises and crests, inspired to care, ready and willing to act, wanting the best that can be. For him.

I want to let Leif live. I want to let nature live in him and around him, enabling him. For he is enabling me to be someone who cares about the future with an intensity that funds radical action. For his sake, for my sake, I want to learn new ways to move that remain faithful to the earth within and without. I want to bring my senses to life, through music and art, and so bring sense to life, appreciating the wisdom of my body and his, of the ecosystem we are, as our guide.

Dance Your Life, Leif!

Learning with Leif

Lately I’ve been empathizing with small Leif.

We often hear about how challenging the first few weeks of life are for the parents. We hear about sleepless nights, inexplicable bouts of crying, a learning curve requiring crampons, and tidal waves of love and longing. Meanwhile, the mother’s body is putting itself through an extreme makeover as the uterus balls back into a fist, and breasts swell beyond recognizable bounds. Challenging indeed.

Rarely, however, do we ask about how challenging those first weeks are for an infant.

What about Leif? What are the first few weeks of life like for him?

I have been watching Leif closely. Not only does the mere sight of him hug my heart and leave me drenched in milk, I also have a secret agenda. I wrote What a Body Knows since my last birth in 2005. In the book, I draw upon my experience with my children to advance theories of human development and, in particular, theories about the role of desire in guiding us towards the health and well being we seek.

I can’t help but wonder: will Leif prove me wrong?

Watching him in this past week, I have been struck by an idea both ancient and newborn: it is so difficult to be a body!!

We imagine that infants have it made. Everything they want is done for them. They are fed, dressed, rocked, and pampered, worry-free. They need not provide for themselves; caregivers are at their beck and call. A couple of cries and helpers come running. They eat and sleep, snuggle and coo, while making a transition from a watery world to this earth of air and sky.

Is it true? Look.

Leif is lying there on the bed, calm and quiet, staring at patterns of light on the ceiling. Suddenly out of nowhere a small fist smacks him in the face, opens up and scratches. His eyes scrunch shut, his head shakes left and right. He has no idea that the invader is attached to his arm, or that he moved it, or where exactly the missile hits. He has no idea he is responding. The sharp sensation surprises. It comes out of nowhere, registering in a proximate space of nowhere, with a difference that marks his distance from the womb where resistance was constant and impact dulled by fluid.

The beating stops and his face scrunches pink. His small self is overcome by pushing. Grunts he doesn’t know he is making erupt with the efforts he doesn’t know he is enacting. It sounds as if he is giving birth. The push releases in an explosive burst, filling subterranean spaces. The noise triggers his startle reflex; his eyes widen and his arms flail in open air. What was that?

A blast of cold air shocks the explosion site. Warm wetness turns cold and a colder wetness wipes. His cry plows through air, an expression of pure presence. Then the even temperature returns with a wrap, snap, and crackle. Warm again.

Moments later a pang of discomfort follows, occurring in some region between where the missile hit and the explosion erupted. Something feels trapped. Impulses to move ripple through his body, causing limbs to piston open and shut and his lips to tremble. He utters a small “whaa!” and hears the cry. Huge arcs of energy coming from nowhere scoop him up and rest him on his belly. With several whacks from a surface the size of his entire back, a large bubble emerges, releases. The discomfort, wherever it was, eases.

Suddenly a sensation of want opens up in the space that the bubble left behind. He already knows: there is a particular taste he desires, a shape, a smell, a belly-warming stream, a beating-breathing softness. Yet, he has no idea of where it comes from, why, when, or how. He has no name for the one who gives, or for his bodily self that receives; no sense of his own agency in making it happen. But it does.

The sensory shapes he is shift. A large orb mysteriously appears, and the mere flicker of knowledge he has flames into consciousness as his consciousness. Opening his mouth, latching on, sucking, he does the only thing he knows how to do: draw sweet nourishment into his bodily self.

At first the taste guides him. It touches his desire. Then consciousness expands to include other sensations. With the touch comes a voice. It comes before the taste, during the taste, after the taste, and only sometimes without the taste.

He is now realizing too that the taste and the voice go along with a face—a pattern of colors and shapes that keeps returning. The face moves; it moves him to move. He moves, and it moves back. Smiles cross through space, linking felt sensations of pleasure with the visions of another.

I am watching his consciousness take shape in the form of movements—patterns of coordinated action that change his sensations from cold to warm, stinging to smooth, empty to full, falling to snug. It is what his body knows.

Leif is the rhythms of his bodily becoming. He is born moving, and as he moves his movements register a seamless sensory flow. He is how he moves; sense and response are one. By moving, he is giving rise to a sense of body and self, of desire and will, of person, place and thing. It's all in the book.

Talk about a learning curve! Talk about endless days and nights! Talk about unexplained sounds and smells and touches and tastes! I see the bewilderment and wonder in his riveting eyes, his vibrating hands, and his antenna toes as he creates and becomes himself.


Parents have it made during those first few weeks. They already know how to eat, poop, burp, and move their limbs. It’s easy for us! Or maybe not. For we are bodies too, also on the frontier of our own becoming, generating new patterns of sensation and response that guide us in finding the pleasure we seek in caring for bodies newly born.

Maybe the most challenging parental task, then, is one we have never stopped facing, and one we barely recognize: how to do what our infants are already doing in being the moving bodies they are.

Can I become your mom?