When an Infant is Dying

A friend of mine, the writer Emily Rapp, has a one-year-old son named Ronan, which means "little seal."

In January, at age 9 months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay Sachs disease, a progressive, genetic disease with no cure. Over the next couple of years, Ronan will slowly die. Emily was tested for Tay Sachs while pregnant, but the standard test only checks for nine primary varieties. There are hundreds of mutations.

Emily is keeping a blog of her experience, and asked me to contribute. Here is what I offered. For more about Ronan, please visit: Our Little Seal.
*
Today, as I write my way into the ring of voices drawing together around Ronan, I marvel at what I hear. Throughout these pages sounds a sustained, tenacious refusal to grant any meaning, purpose, or reason to Ronan’s diagnosis. There can be none. There is no stroke of luck, no will of god, no hand of fate at work. There is only Ronan, sitting and smiling and dying and shattering our expectations of what would, could, and should be; only Ronan, as his squeezable self, reaching with pleasure for toys, ears, lips, fingers, and hearts. Only Ronan, slowly stilling, as the chorus around him swells.

What do we make of this?

We cannot not try to make something. It’s human. It’s what we do. We make things. Sometimes what we make is meaning, but not because we need meaning per se. We make things because we feel pain; we feel a feeling we don’t want to feel. We feel a feeling that impels us to find new ways to move—new ways to think, feel, and act that will not recreate, in this case at least, the despair at living in a world where beloved infants die. We make things because we can and want to move our bodily selves in ways that feel good—in ways that stir in us an affirmation of life.

So what do we make, what can we make, of this?

I am a philosopher and a dancer, on a mission to affirm bodily movement as a source of knowledge and even wisdom. I ask: what can a body know? Emily asks me: what does Ronan’s body know?

What does Ronan’s body know?

What every body is and knows: he knows how to move. He knows how to make the movements that make him who he is. Heart beating, lungs pulsing, nerves crackling, muscles firing, Ronan is making patterns of sensation and response that align his bodily self with the resources, the pleasures, the arms at hand. He is remembering these patterns (reaching, smiling, sucking, kicking), playing with them, and using them to explore his world (what happens when I suck toy, finger, bottle, block?). His sensory realm is open, not yet cluttered and confined by the culturally-inherited patterns of sensation and response encoded in objects, language, values, and ideas. He is in touch with freedom and a creativity that we too easily forget in our mind-over-body world.

So too, with every move that Ronan makes, he calls to those around him, inviting us to respond, such that we create and become our own patterns of sensing and responding that relate us back to him. We make new moves, consciously or not, opening up new spaces of sensation that are us that we would not have discovered were it not for him. We do so for our own pleasure—for more of the smile that lights our bellies, for the clasp of his squeezable self.

Yet as Ronan grows, he will stop remembering the patterns he has made. He will never extend his play to shapes or words or numbers. Moving less, he will sense less and respond less.

Even as patterns fade and his sensory span thins, however, Ronan will not stop making movements in the moment, for the moment, with whatever sensations he has and is. Ronan will keep exploring and playing with whatever appears, until there are no sensations left. Until he dissolves into light. It is what his body knows.

We, on the other hand, will not stop remembering the patterns we have made in response to him. Because of him, we have discovered stretches of sensation that we had not before. Our thoughts and feelings and arms will reach out for him and find that there is nothing there.

What are we to make of this?

Ronan is showing us the way. In making the movements that he is making—at the most basic levels of sensory creativity—Ronan invites us to do the same in response: to feel what we are feeling, and find in our pain an impulse to move.

So, we howl, weep, and flail; walk, dance, and sing; write, counsel, and agitate for change. And as we do, we know in our bodily selves what Ronan also knows—what he, is reminding us—that our primary pleasure as human beings lies in making new moves. Doing so, we bind ourselves back to life in an affirmation of what is.

Must we accept that nature toys with our hopes and dreams, indifferent to our desires? Must we believe that we are out of control, at the mercy of forces of creation and destruction beyond our imaging?

No, for as we experience the power of our own movement, we know viscerally and palpably that we too are part of nature. Life is very much for us, actively creating the world through us, at least in the scope and scale of our moving, making bodily selves and the rings of relationships we create to sustain them.

Nevertheless, in becoming parents, we open ourselves to a conundrum faced in some degree by every person who cares to create in whatever medium they prefer. What comes through us and into the world is both wholly and thoroughly ours, and a complete mystery.

In becoming parents, we open ourselves to a combined stream of genetic material, reaching back 400 generations, that pools in our cells, waiting to (pro)create. We open in this way because we want more in our lives. We want to know more, experience more, give more, become more than we are and have been. We open because, at some level, we know there is more to love.

Yet we never know what will emerge. We open to welcome as a very cause of our being something or someone we do not know. Something that in its ultimate mystery is still us, extending our sensory surfaces. Our vulnerability in the world. Our hopes and dreams and desires. We feel with and for and through our children because we are them and they are us.

Here then lies the ultimate parenting challenge: how can you affirm the life of what is (also) you to such a degree that you are willing to let it live, on its own terms, in its own way, according to its own logic, even when that law and logic baffles?

It is tempting to think that Ronan can be separated from his Tay-Sachs gene, but I do not believe that this is true. Ronan is who he is—his sweet and magical self—because of that gene. He would not be who he is without it. The movements he is making invite responses in us.

Ronan is perfect as he is. He is unfolding in time as the nature in him desires. Our hearts break, our minds protest, our limbs flail through empty space, but Ronan is perfect. And once we affirm this, we are free to move with him, to be the movements with him and for him that will allow him to complete the arc of his life as fully and richly as possible. We let go. We let live. It is what we can do. It is love.

Tales of a Moose Mother

The fire storm unleashed by Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” (besides being a publicist's dream) swirls around a hot-button question that has dominated discussions of parenting and education since the 1960s: how do you help kids develop a strong self-esteem? 

While Chua, a self-named “Tiger Mother,” doesn’t herself claim to have a “superior” method that would work for everyone, she does accuse “American” parents of coddling their children’s egos by protecting them from overly-harsh criticism or demands, in the belief that self-esteem produces achievement. “Chinese” parents, she counters, convinced of their children’s inherent strength, hold high demands and lavish pointed criticism, in the belief that achievement produces self-esteem.

Many of Chua's critics, however, share a common assumption that self-esteem rides on a perception of ourselves as being the best at something—whether it is schoolwork, music prowess, or parenting.

We all want to be the best. Why else would the WSJ choose the provocative “superior” in its title for Chua’s piece? Why else would so many readers lunge for the bait and disagree?

Even those respondents who claim that there is no formula for parenting, that every child is different, and that every relationship must find its own logic, do so from a place of wanting to be the best parent, or the better parent, for their own children at least.

So, what is wrong with wanting to be the best? Nothing. It is as “American” as it is “Chinese” as it is human.

However, there is a problem when we tie our self-esteem to a perception of ourselves as being better than someone else. For when we do, we bind ourselves—and our children—to an obsessive practice of comparing our accomplishments with those of others, ever suspicious and resentful of anyone who appears to be better than we are. We train ourselves and our children to perceive such individuals as threats to our well-being. So cramped and bound, our competitive spirits generate insecurity, fear, and bitterness in us.

Is that what we want for our children? Or for ourselves? 

I remember the day that I learned: there are other moves to make.

*

I am about to dive into the pool for my regular workout. I am looking for a lane in which the swimmers are swimming more slowly than I do. I know that I always feel better and more energetic when I am passing others, rather than being passed.

Then I see her—the lone swimmer in her lane—swimming undoubtedly faster than I can. I stand there, mesmerized by the smooth rhythms of her churning limbs and split-staccato of her dashing flip-turns. An inner cry erupts: I want to swim like that!

Ordinarily I would avoid her lane. She is faster than I am. But this time I jump in eagerly, knowing she will lap me many times, and secretly glad. I will have more chances to watch her, and to learn from her how to move with such a graceful, easy flow.

My workout that day was one of my best ever. I hopped out of the pool, suffused with joy and celebrating with gratitude the strength of the woman who was a better swimmer than I was. I was free to affirm my self, and thus, free to learn how to become more.   

*

Wanting to be the best is not a problem. This desire to be the best is what motivates us to learn from other people how to do what we want to do better than we are doing it. It is a vital energy that opens us to the benefits of being the social creatures that we are. 

At the same time, in order to take full advantage of this energy, we must detach our sense of self-esteem from a perception of ourselves as better than others. 

In this process, it helps to remember several crucial facts. First, any measure of “best” is arbitrary. There can be no absolute best—only various sets of hurdles and obstacles designed to pull out aspects of an infinite human potential at a certain time and place. Second, on any measure you choose, there will always be people who do what you do better than you do, and others who don’t. Third, as a result, it makes no sense to tie your self-esteem to being better than anyone at anything. It is simply impossible to be the best at anything other than being yourself.

Once you detach your self-esteem from the idea of being the best, then the path to making the best possible use of your competitive energies lurches into view: celebrate the accomplishments of others, especially, those who seem to be better than you at doing whatever you want to do. Acknowledge them. Applaud them. Open to them. And when you do, you will be free to learn from them all they have to teach you about how to be the best... at who you have the potential to be. 

The same holds for our children, and we can help them learn so by being and becoming the best that we can be.

Call it Moose Mothering.

*

I wake in the morning, surrounded by mist. Crawling out of my sleeping bag, I perch on the edge of the lean-to, looking out into the wilderness I know surrounds me. I can see for twenty feet before my vision disappears into shrouds of gray. Geoff and I are here camping, at the foot of Mount Katahdin, in Baxter State Park, hoping to summit today. I am five months pregnant with my first child, wondering at the changes this small being will bring to our lives, wondering what kind of parent I will be.

A rustling to my right turns my head. A moose cow lumbers into view, calmly nosing about in the underbrush, paying no attention to me. I pay attention to her.

As she passes into the clearing in front of the lean-to, a calf prances out of the bush behind her, quickly catching up. He gazes around, meets my eye, glances at his mother, and then sinks his nose into the underbrush too. Two steps behind, three feet below, he is doing exactly what she is doing, making her moves. He lifts his head again, peers around, and returns to his nibbling.

 I watch her some more. She is not looking at him. She doesn’t react to his antics. She stays the course of her own nourishment. Yet as I watch her, I know: her every cell is alert and alive to his presence. She smells, hears, and feels where her calf is with every sensory surface. If her calf strayed too far or fell in the way of harm, she would be there in an instant, all heft and hooves.

The thought flares through my mind: it’s perfect parenting. This moose mother is making the movements she would ordinarily do, with an expanded, heightened sense of self. Everything she does is more important than it ever was, for the little one is learning from her how.

At that moment, I vowed to be a Moose Mother, making the moves in my own life that I want my children to make in their own.

*

So, I applaud Amy Chua for having such accomplished daughters! I congratulate her for staging such a stunning book release! (My family memoir won’t be out until June.)

Arguing for Peace

At this time of year, many citizens of the western world celebrate the winter solstice, with its returning light, as the coming of peace. The prince of peace is born.

Tell that to my five year old, Kai. He loves to argue. I know, because he told me. A few months ago, when, in response to my “no,” he spun an elaborate argument for why he should be allowed to watch a video, I exclaimed, “You should be a lawyer!” (deftly changing the subject). “You are really good at making arguments!”

I watched as his face softened into a beatific grin. “I love arguing!” In a flash he screwed his smile into a mock grimace and pointed his finger at me: “It’s all your fault!” Indeed, I thought, I’m sure it is.

Still, I wasn’t ready to begin my solstice celebration with an argument. It wasn’t even 7:30 AM when Kai found me in my room. “Kyra’s not being nice!” he complained. He was upset. “She and Jordan are keeping secrets! She whispered something in his ear and she is not telling me what!”

I checked in with Kyra. Sure enough, she had been asking Jordan for help in making Kai’s Christmas gift. I turned to Kai to talk about it, calmly and quietly. “They want to give you something.”

“They are not being nice!”

“Would it be nice if they didn’t want to give you something?”

“They aren’t telling me what they said!”

“They want it to be a surprise!”

“They don’t like me!” And so it continued. Kai was insistent and furious: not telling equals not liking. There was no other equation that made any sense to him. I sighed and sent him along to talk with his dad. I was supposed to be working anyway. 

In the kitchen Geoff ran through the same reasonable logic I did with similar results. Suddenly I heard Kai make a new move: “If they tell me, it won’t ruin the surprise, because I won’t know what package it is in!”

The boy is five and he won’t give up. He will argue with a passionate and precise fury for what seems, to an outside observer, to be right there in front of him. He wants to be included, and he is!

Is his passion so hard to understand?

*

I think back to what I have been learning since I realized that he “loves” to argue. One thing is that “arguing” means something different to Kai than it does for me. I don’t like to argue. I prefer peace. I see the two as mutually exclusive. If someone argues with me, I assume that they don’t like me. For Kai, it is nearly the reverse.

Before I understood this about Kai, we had been periodically getting stuck in the same conversation that went something like this:

Kai: “I love you, Mom.”

Mom: “I love you too, Kai.”

“But I love you more than you love me.”

“I love you so so much, Kai!”

“You don’t like me.”

“I love you, Kai!”

“No you hate me.”

And so it would go, with Kai insisting that I hated him, until I would finally resort to something like: “Kai, when you say that it hurts my feelings!” At which point he would be convinced that he was right. I didn’t like him at all. Not one bit. He would start crying. I would then give up, change the subject, and try to get him interested in something else. 

It was so confusing to me. How could my best efforts to tell him how much I love him backfire so profoundly? Why, when I was telling him something, was he arguing with me saying that I wasn’t?

But after realizing how he loves to argue, I began to get it. One day, when he told me that he loved me, a new move arose in me. I went with it.

“Oh no, no, no, Kai. I love you!” Instantly his face lit up. It was a game and I was playing.

He came back: “No, no, no, no! I love you!”

“No,” I said, carefully and with great, exaggerated emphasis, “you just don’t understand. I love you!!”

And there we are, “arguing” back and forth for several minutes, our large loud mouths smiling at one another.

It worked. I was so incredibly relieved to have found a way in. We kept having the same conversation, with the same warm feeling of a result. Then it occurred to me. Kai argues with me because he loves me. More to the point: he argues with me because he wants me to argue back with him—or at least, to argue with that part of him that might doubt my love for him or fear his worthiness in receiving it. He doesn’t want to feel that doubt or fear. He wants to be in—in-cluded, in the loop, in the light.

By arguing with me, he is sounding out this darkness inside himself; in wanting me to argue back, he is asking me to help him dissolve it, defuse it, and find his way to more presence, more intention, more love. To help him find his way into the light, I need to move with him into the dark, into his dark.

*

A few days ago, we were having our “No, no I love you” dialogue when suddenly, he stopped. He looked at me intently: “Mom, we don’t have to play this game anymore.”

I peered back at him. “You mean, I can just say, Kai, I love you too!”

He smiled at me, “Yes.”

I saw the light. Or rather, Kai and I saw it together.

Perhaps that is what the morning’s argument is reminding me to celebrate. 

Movement = Play = Love

Every time I turn around these days, Leif is standing on top of a table, grinning broadly. At sixteen months old, my son is a stealth mover, quick and quiet. If I simply look away for an instant, he pulls out a chair whose seat is as high as his chest and levers himself onto its flat expanse, using a dip of his shoulders and head to haul up his legs. He then lifts one leg to the side to bridge the span from chair seat to table top, and pulls up to standing.

Why? He's not usually after any object in particular--he is not even tall enough to see what is up there--though once there he inevitable notices his brother's glass of milk or an uncapped marker. He climbs spontaneously, almost instinctively, whenever a chair enters his field of perception. Or a couch; the toy box; a flight of stairs. A parental leg, or a sister's back.

What motivates him, it seems, is less any retrievable object than the doing of the movement itself--the sheer joy of its accomplishment. He is in a phase where this urge to climb is his movement pattern of choice for connecting with his world and discovering what it has to offer him: what new sights and sensations will this chair-climbing, table-scaling move generate in me?

Leif's play reminds me: movement matters. Moving our bodily selves is not just about strengthening our muscles so that we can hold up our heads. How we move is about how we play. How we play is about how we learn. And what we are born to learn is how to love.
*
I have been watching Leif move since before he was born, and seen a progression not only in the kinds of movements he has made, but in the focus of his play with those movements. At each stage, he is learning and making new movements, for sure, but he is also exploring different qualities of bodily movement itself, motivated, in every case, by an impulse to discover and connect with whatever will provide him with the nourishing nurture he needs to thrive.

At first, Leif's movements seemed random and purposeless. His arms and legs fluttered and flailed. Any patterns were as chaotic as any current, with his physiological makeup banking the flow. The one exception was the movement he made to connect with the stream of sustenance coming from me. That move had purpose.

Yet it was soon evident that Leif's seemingly random movements were giving him all kinds of information about himself and his world. Every movement was a hook, pulling in impressions about how it felt to move that way and what happened when he did. Every movement yielded some new sensation of weight, force, and gravity; space, time, and causality; temperature, pressure, pleasure, and pain. His random movement was both pure play and systematic research at a sensory level about his self and world.

Some of the movements he was making connected him with a range of sensory pleasures that felt good--a nourishing flow, a warm embrace, a facial grin. These movements began to make him. He learned from them, repeated them, and as he did, the locus of his play began to shift. No longer was he playing with movement simply at the level of sensation, he began playing with movement patterns themselves. Aware of the pleasure that mouthing for milk provided, he was soon experimenting with what else he could put in his mouth. Would sucking on it yield the same nourishing connection?

There were other preferred patterns too. The same movement pattern that pulled his knees to his chest could curl him into his dad's arms, roll him over, and help him hold himself up.

His play with these movement patterns, again, began to open new registers of knowledge and new dimensions of play. Suddenly he was using his movement to play with objects, but not because the objects themselves were interesting. What he wanted to know was what his preferred movement patterns could do with whatever new item he could hold in his hand. If I bend my arm at the elbow and hurl my hand forward, what will happen to this ball? Or a sock, a piece of toast, or my brother's truck?

Soon enough, Leif was honing in on particular objects and exploring the different movement patterns he could make and with what results. That spoon could get apple sauce to his mouth. It could also leave a broad smear of it across his chest, make a clanging sound when hit against his cup, and when dropped from the high chair, verify that gravity indeed works.

Suddenly a ball was really exciting, because of all of the different movement patterns it enabled him to make. He could throw it, kick it, sit on it, play toss with it, and put it into his wagon.

This object-oriented play is what we typically mean by the term "play." When we think of play, we think of toys--objects specifically designed to elicit developmentally appropriate patterns of movement.

Even then, however, as most parents know, the best "toys" are found and not made. Leif can spend long minutes with a plain cardboard box, climbing into it and back out again, putting on the lid and taking it off, turning it upside down and sideways, loading it up with other toys, and taking them out again. The box is so exciting precisely because it doesn't preprogram his play. It requires, or enables, him to play at the levels of sensation, movement patterns, and patterns of relating. The possibilities are infinite.

The same is true for table tops. What can't you do on them?

*
The play with the sensory and patterning potentials of movement that I see in Leif is never over. We humans are ever and again mobilizing the movement patterns we know in relation to new contexts, objects, and persons, looking for connections that will yield the sensations of pleasure we associate with nourish and nurture. The sensations of pleasure we associate with love.

The objects with which we play, of course, evolve. As we grow, we move to emotions and sounds, words and imaginary realms, books and songs and dances and cultural forms of all kinds, in an increasingly complicated network of movement patterns. Yet in every realm, we play--making movements we know in order to open us to what we do not. We move to connect in life-enabling ways with what our movement is constantly revealing to us.

Yet, this observation also yields a withering critique of our culture's chronic and characteristic ills. Our realms of play have dwindled to such an extent that we rarely if ever play at a sensory level, or even the level of pattern making. We no longer know what to do with boxes or spoons, a blank sheet of paper or a blank hour. We prefer toys that will tell us which moves to make, and games that remove us to a finite world of someone else's making. We play with objects designed to exercise and reinforce particular sensory and kinetic options--not open new ones. We play with ideas, with information, and with plans for the future, but not with our sensory, movement-making selves. Even when we move, we want to learn someone else's forms, to "play" by someone else's rules.

We claim that we have no time for play, but time is not the issue. The issue is that we have forgotten why movement matters. We no longer value the ability to make new movements, to find our own movements, from within the infinite range of our sensory potential--movements that will connect us in life-enabling ways to the places and persons who matter most.

We have forgotten that the ability and the willingness to discover new sensory moves is very skill that enables us to learn to move with another, dance with another, in a word, learn to love.

When was the last time you climbed onto a table?

What a Body Knows, 1

How do you celebrate the first birthday of a book? Share it!

In this month of May, I will post excerpts from my latest book, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire. I begin at the beginning, with a sketch from chapter 1 that describes the kind of movement-enabled "experience shift" that can open us to discern wisdom in desire.

“I am having a lovely morning. Our son Jordan, home sick from school, is not too sick, and I am enjoying my time with him. I allow him to watch a movie. Kai falls asleep. I sit down to write. Reading back over the previous day’s catch, I make corrections, clarify some rough passages, and print out the pages. I draft some new ideas. Kai wakes up. Jordan returns from screen land. I feel play in the moment, loving work, loving family, in a mutually enabling spiral.

A few hours later, everything starts to feel less fun. I am no longer moved as I had been just an hour before by the intricate web of vessels visible beneath my infant’s tender skin, or by the half-smile of a child finding comfort in my embrace. My senses are withering. My ideas stop flowing. I want sugar, caffeine — something sharp. I want adult company, some spark or spur. I want some vital touch. Life weighs heavily.

I have been here before. I know what I need. To move. I need to feed my body, stir up my sensory awareness, replenish love. A walk, the easiest thing. Of course, I do not want to go for a walk. I want to stuff myself into forgetful oblivion and lose consciousness of this dragging dullness. But I must. My desires, tousled, knotted, and confused, are pointing the way.

Geoff comes home and takes over. I bundle up. My mind is complaining bitterly. It is cold and snowy. Kai will need to nurse. The kitchen is a mess. There are other things I should be doing. Carrying my screaming mind out through the door, my body propels me forward.

I walk vigorously, pumping my arms and legs, sending blood rushing through my limbs, feeling the pull of air into my lungs. My head lightens and begins to clear. I feel brightness opening. I walk hard and start to feel again. Hunger stabs. I want to turn back and eat. But then the hunger slips sideways. I know that the energy I want is not of the caloric kind. I feel a deep gnawing ache for the return of my senses, for what my body knows. This hunger is the first sign that it is beginning to return.

I trudge up the mountain. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Each step plunges through a crusty surface into powdery fluff. I follow tracks I left earlier in the week, sometimes sticking my foot into an old hole and sometimes stepping sideways, taking cues from the past and honoring my new gait. My hands start to warm up.

I begin to notice things. There are prints in the tracks I made two days ago. Deer hooves. I follow the deer, who followed me. Perhaps I saved the deer some wear and tear on its shins. A thrill passes lightly through me at the thought of our meeting this way.

I keep walking, puffing, crunching up the hill, up and around the field. Ten then twenty minutes pass, half an hour. Gold and silver sparks of snow catch my eye. The rhythmic breaking of the snow echoes in my chest. A pale sun peeps through the soft splotchy clouds. Down by the pond I find the tracks of a snow mobile. An intruder. Anger and dismay rush through. I place a branch across the tracks. Keep out. Will they even notice?

Keep walking. My body propels me along, beside the pond and up to the crest of the hill where we first stood in awe of this beautiful land. I feel an impulse to run, to empty myself into space. A surge of energy wells, lifting my arms to the horizons, breathing me deeply. I want, I want, I want… to play. I run down the hill on the other side, pulling my legs straight out of each crusty hole so as not to fall. I laugh with my awkward strides. My left leg plunges thigh-deep into a gulley and I tumble to the ground. Without hesitating, I start to get up. Time to move. Then I lie back. Wait. What can I see from here? What is it that this fall is enabling me to see?

I watch the clouds, drifting wisps of white and blue and gray. Their mottled layers pass through one another, thinning into translucent floss. I feel the icy cold of the snow seeping through my jacket and snow pants, cooling my lower back where an echo of an old back pain lingers, offering a healing touch. What do I look like splayed out here on the snow. Would someone find me if I couldn’t move?

I see the stalks of dead flowers and grasses poking up around me. I want to make something. An ornament. An angel from Hebron Hollow. A beating sound interrupts the thought. A crow. Will he see me and think I am food?A pressure squeezes my heart. Sadness seeps out. My friend. Her baby girl. It was Downs. She ended the pregnancy. The pain, a month later, is palpable. Breathing empties the sensation into the colors of the clouds, the cold of the snow, the still silence of the land. I see the beauty unfolding around me.

I sit up. My body sits up, stands, moves forward. I feel softened, revived. I breathe and plunge on.

Before me is Moon Rock. Around the shoulder and up the face I hike. I want to feel alive. An impulse to run surges again — something pressing forward and in and out and through me, a desire to touch what is. I run. Blood screams through my limbs. The horizon, the edge, opens before me. I rise to meet it, wider than before. It occurs to me: I need this place, this walk, to walk in this place. I need this land to open me to my self, my life, again and again and again. I see dry plants for my ornament. I pick them. Buttons. Milkweed. Thistles.

I plow my way back to Moon Rock and lean into its arc. I feel its weight, and my weight on it. In the meeting of the two, I sink into myself where I am alive, becoming more body. Tremors of love vibrate through me. It is time to go. The sun, a soft yellow ball, sits atop the tree tufts. The snow glitters blue and gold. Sparkles of light beckon. Again I follow the deer who followed me. Thoughts skitter through. I will need to write about this walk. To reflect on it, remember it, press it through my thinking so that it rearranges my ideas and holds them accountable to this experience of moving, to what is, here and now.

My movements, walking, breathing, feeling, thinking, are making me. My movements are opening me to sense and respond, making me into someone who witnesses this beauty. Someone who is sensing, who can sense, who wants to sense this wakeful vitality. This is who I am.

I enter the house. My dead bouquet is large. I lay it on a newspaper. Needs press in. I am hungry and tired. I need to eat, to write, to make something, to connect with Geoff, to nurse Kai. The kids are home from school. It is dinnertime. I breathe into the sensory spaces opened by my walking. Happy and elastic, I find play in the moment. Grabbing a snack, I nurse my son, hear stories of the day, and then dump my thoughts onto the page. After dinner I help Jessica and Kyra make milkweed angels. They are beautiful. Bits of Hebron Hollow come to life. Like me.
**
A simple walk, but as I write it down, as I know I must, I find it has all the elements of the experience shift that enables us to find wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and spirit. If we can name such an experience shift, recognize it in ourselves, and cultivate it in our thinking and feeling and acting, then we can develop a powerful resource for participating consciously in becoming the people we are and want to be.”

Excerpted from chapter 1, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire (O Books 2009).

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.

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.

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.