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.

Breathing to Move 2: Air

It was a grey chill of a day here on the farm. A dull sky leaked icy drips. Grey stubble pecked through chunks of snow stubbornly bunched against the rain. The forest brown seemed spiky and unkempt. A creeping cold seeped into bones where it pooled in cooling reservoirs.

I went for a walk. With the right wrapping, there is never a reason not to, short of a blinding blizzard or hail by the handful. Then again, it wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t just want to go for a walk. I had to. In the open air. Several times a week at least. Why?

It is not about firing up muscle tissue and burning calories (as if my body were a machine to maintain). It is not about putting my body through its paces (as if it were a large pet). Nor is it about seeing the scenery, though I have had memorable viewing moments on such days (as when a grey shroud focused my attention down to a Queen Anne’s lace shriveled tightly around a gleaming tear drop, or when ashen trunks appeared before me, tracking skyward, their vertical rails receding into the mist).

The need to walk comes from somewhere else—from what walking awakens in me. The movement of walking, legs and arms, fingers to toes, shifts my experience. It releases me from the rooms of my mind, and into the sensory reaches of my bodily being. Something wakes up, and I know: I am not a mind living over and against a body. I am the movement that is making me.


How does this happen?

Walking I must breathe, more deeply than before. Oxygen rich pulses prod my senses to life. I start feeling what I am feeling. I notice the pain in my back. The ache in my shoulder. The cramp in my heart. As I notice, my breath follows my gaze, finding in that discomfort a span of awareness whose potential for enabling my walking I am about to discover. It is a call to move.

Breathing down into the earth (see last week’s Action), I feel the press of the ground on the soles of my feet, up through my legs, resisting me, releasing whatever discomfort I am feeling into the waves of my walking.

Swinging, landing, rolling through, with each step I breathe again. Into the earth and then, from that grounded place, I open up to the world around me. I breathe myself wide, out beyond the surfaces of skin, filling and spilling over the outline of my bodily self. I pass through my senses, uncurling them into a world rich with possibility. I come to life. Life comes to me. I smile.

What do I see and hear and smell and taste and touch?

I live in a rural place, known for its rolling meadows, forested hills, quiet ponds, and gurgling brooks. We moved here two years ago to live farther from the clamor of consumer culture, in closer contact with the rhythms of the natural world. Yet it soon became clear. Nature is far from the pastoral balm we imagine it to be. The natural world is brutally alive, hurling itself moment by moment into the future. It is constant birth and death and becoming. Unrelenting creativity.

This is what I sense as I walk: movement. The self-creating movement of all that is. There is no one sense for it—but it is all I sense, in every sense. Every day here is different. The very same spots and sights look, smell, taste, sound different than before. I am struck by these changes, and as my senses come to life, I notice more of them. The tracks in the snow, the matted clouds, the trees thinning day by day against the arc of hillside, preparing for the instant they will shade into auburn tones then explode in color.

I am shocked by this great green growing, even when locked in the grip of winter. And shocked once again by the blast of recognition that soon follows. I am a part of this great green growing. It is alive in me, in the movement of my senses, in the movement of my walking. My movement, walking-breathing-beating-attending, is making me.

Walking, awake to my movement, I find that I am no longer rearranging old ideas. New thoughts shoot up from below, from within. Every surface, organ, and limb is creating images, patterns of sensation and response--possibilities for thinking and feeling, understanding and acting that I did not have before my walk. Knotty problems loosen, threads unwind. I learn from them what that have to teach me about how to untie them. My movement is making me.

This is why I walk. I walk to know that I am part of this great growing green—and to know it not only in the sense of thinking that I am, but to know it in my sensory awareness, as I participate in it, thinking new thoughts, feeling new feelings, following the impulse to move in song or dance. I walk to find my freedom—to cultivate a sensory awareness of my ability to respond to the challenges in my life. I walk for this shift in experience. To know I am, becoming.

Without such movement, what we can imagine shrinks to an imitation of what we have already thought.

We cannot will such a shift; only invite it. And one way to do so, whatever we are doing, is by moving through the cycle of breaths. 

Action:
What kinds of activities do you do that bring your senses to life?
What kinds of movements awaken you to a heightened sense of your own possibility?

Whatever they are, experiment with the following breaths as a way to enrich your experience. 

Where the earth breath (last week) grounds you in the present, helps you drop your sensory wraps, and allows you to feel what you are feeling, the air breath opens up the sensory dimensions of yourself so that you have space to unfold what you are feeling and thinking, turn it over, examine it from different angles, allow it to grow into new shapes.

Try it. (Are you breathing?) Begin with an earth breath. When you breathe in, follow your breath in through your heart, flooding it with white light. As you exhale, let all tension, hope, fear, and effort you that are holding drop onto the ground. Release your sense of weight. Allow your limbs to hang loosely. You are plumbing for a deeper strength.

Breathe again. This time, sense air streaming into the nose and mouth, throat and chest, and rippling through your bodily core. As you exhale, imagine that air expanding to fill every cell of your bodily self. Every organ, fiber and fold is filling and spilling over with clear, clean, cleansing air. Feel how light you are. How empty. How full.

Breathing in, follow your breath into your heart, and out through your body to its edges. Allow an image to form of this length of skin, the surfaces where the air filling you spills over into space.

As you breathe out, imagine this skin as porous mesh, a translucent web of tissue connecting inner and outer, self and other, sense and world. As you breathe in and out again, allow this sense of skin to dissolve in currents of air passing through you. Sense how open and light you are. Free. All that exists are the soles of your feet, pressing down against the ground, and up against this light. Trust that ground to support the vulnerable expanse of skin. Watch what unfolds within.

Move back and forth between the breaths. What do you discover?

Next week: fire breath