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.

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."

The Land of the Super Smiles

The baby chicks we hatched a few years ago were born pecking with a ferocity that left them panting. Minutes tucked into the warmth under mother’s wing and the fluffed-out fledglings were pecking again, this time adapting their freedom-finding moves in pursuit of food and water.

When Dandi, our Jersey heifer, first landed on the barn floor, she rested in a calf curl while her mother, Daisy, licked her free of her birth sac, stimulating her spinal chord and nerve networks to fire and wire. Within an hour, Dandi was struggling to stand on wobbly legs made for walking, ready to reach for the all-nourishing colostrum raining down from above.

Leif is now nine weeks. He can’t feed himself. He can’t stand and walk. But he can smile. Could his smiling be as essential for his survival?
*
Yesterday morning, as usual, Kai woke up and ran into our room. He used to beg to snuggle between Geoff and me. Now he only has eyes for Leif. He wiggles in next to “the baby” and watches. I am aware, but dozing.

Moments later I hear: “Mom! Mom! Wake up! You’re missing tons of cuteness!”

I smile. Perhaps.

I look at Kai looking at Leif. Leif is smiling at him with a wide gummy grin. Kai is smiling back, lured into the land of the super smiles by his little brother. Kai glows. Cuteness indeed.
*
I have been trying to catch those super smiles on film. Leif’s features run so quickly through a range of emotional expressions that it is largely a question of luck whether or not I succeed. His smiles explode across his face and disappear, only to return a fraction of a second later, launched in a new direction, at a different angle, with a different color. It would help if I had a faster lens, but the surprises are fun too. I just keep clicking.

I ponder what the camera catches. Leif seems to have a complete set of feeling states, each tuned with dazzling detail. So too, this collection of muscular patterns not only fashion his face, each one arranges his every cell, every limb. No moment of his bodily self is left out. Smiling, for Leif, is a full-bodied activity. His arms wave, his legs pump, his torso curls in a “C” that begs to be snuggled.

Of course, his first smiles were simply ways to register his internal state of being. He wasn’t trying to communicate or respond to anyone. His smile was who he was in that moment; the relaxing and spreading of facial muscles, the pulling outward from the corners of his mouth was his existential condition. It was what his world was doing and feeling, and doing in order to feel. Often his eyes were tightly shut and still he smiled. His smiling extended and amplified his sensation, enabling him to know what he was feeling and who he is.

A first principle of philosophy: know thyself.
*
Now his smiles are different. He smiles in response to external stimuli—visual sensations—most notably, the appearing of a face. Somehow he is now connecting the appearance of a Face with an anticipated change to his world that that smiling is for him. He will be cradled, burped, fed. The Face will smile at him. So he waits, already patient. Smiling, he is making time exist for himself.

His smile is a sign, a first abstraction, but its meaning is not conceptual. It is kinetic. The smile and the sensation it represents are linked by the movement they share—the movement of pleasure-becoming. The movement of smiling itself releases the discomfort of discomfort, allowing us to believe in a world that exists for our pleasure.

Moreover, his smile not only signals his anticipation of what will happen. It is an effective move in making sure that what might happen happens. His smile is a call—a call to connect with him, to care about him, to want more of his smiles for ourselves. For his smile is contagious. Delight delivered. We smile back, unable not to reflect the pure joy beaming back at us. Smiling he works to create the relationships he needs to ensure that someone will respond to him.

That someone will hear his cry.

Smiling, he participates in the rhythms of his own bodily becoming, creating patterns of sensation and response that will help him secure what he needs to thrive.

Smiling, he moves his whole bodily self in ways that align with the trajectories of his best becoming, creating relationships that will support him in unfolding what he has to give.

So do we.