Conversations with the Sorceress

A Body Speaks

The Sorceress, John William Waterhouse, 1911

Let’s create some space, shall we? Go on, dear.

Does anybody care? Will this amount to anything? Am I going to make a fool of myself? Have I already? Very well, then. What happens next? Where will this take me? Is my message not enough? Am I not enough? Who am I, anyway? What does it matter? Of COURSE it matters! Are you insane? More than ever, it matters, dear one. That’s why all the neuroses. That’s why the questions. Uncertainty is excruciating sometimes. Mostly when you care. There’s nothing wrong, though.

•••••••••

New ink in the pen. So BRIGHT! Surprisingly bright. How does it feel to be so bright? It feels good, but not quite deep enough. I like the deep gold better. Add some purple to the barrel? This is ORANGE! Orange like your hair, which you love. You also love him. And polka dots. And those birds have all piped up suddenly, as if in a rowdy town hall meeting. I will keep the orange. It is like the center of the daffodils which I also love, though they have all been cut now. Every last one. How stupid to take them all from the ground.

•••••••••

What I can’t stand about so many people, you know the “spiritual” types — the ones who have to tell you they’re spiritual in so many words — is the strange smoothness of them. The robotic unemotionality. Like that fake glittered leaf lying in the garden.

Where is the drama?!

Maybe I should start writing fiction. Maybe you already are.

•••••••••

I wonder when I stopped sharing opinions. That is quite boring, isn’t it? I want to be like this bird at the top of the lush blanket of pine calling out the day’s happenings. EXTRA! EXTRA! HEAR ALL ABOUT IT!!

Being agreeable is worse than death.

•••••••••

Daffodils drooping in sudden heat. Wild orchids threatening. Where are the poppies? Still a tangle of leaves and ground covering and now, more toxic yellow caution signs on neighbors’ lawns. Don’t they know it kills things? Don’t they know the worms, beetles, dandelions, everything is necessary in the family of things? I love a lawn full of dandelions. Wouldn’t yards of wildflowers be more charming than everything perfectly trimmed? I want to live in a fairytale.

Now a crow calls seven times, then six. What does it mean? Six more. What is it saying? And now eight. 7, 6, 6, 8 crow calls from the edge of a roof. The others listen. One returns five calls, another six, some, far off in the distance, entwine with each other like the ground covering. Where does sound begin? Where does it end?

•••••••••

Lawnmowers are horrible things. Their constant shrieking rattling my brain for the next seven months. I want to live where I can’t hear the lawnmowers. I want to live with the wildflowers.

•••••••••

Had a great chat with my therapist, who mostly listens to me having revelations about my work every other week and sometimes cry when I miss Luke. Today I told her about my frustrations with teaching movement. How it feels funny to do it with words since what I really want you to do is stop reading and move. Because that’s the only way you’ll actually learn to stop thinking.

I spent most of my life afraid to ruffle feathers. And now I need to ruffle yours. First, by saying, my words are not the most important thing about the message. And second, I want you to start playing more.

Playing is more important than almost anything in the world, I think. I’m having trouble thinking of anything more important. I’d say feeding yourself is more important, but I think that should be playful, too. Play is nourishment.

•••••••••

Contrary to what we might think, embodied expression —we can also call this authentic movement,¹ or just… being who we are  — is some thing that can only be communicated to you through your own experience of you. And this takes time.

I think a lot of us end up reverting to putting rules on our movement and our lives because to really “get the point” of movement for movement’s sake — being ourselves because we are who we are and nobody else — takes time. And we are used to having things happen so quickly. 

Why are we willing to read 500 page books about trauma, which certainly cannot happen quickly, but we are not willing to take 15 minutes to find the sweetness of being in our bodies? Is a new concept really sweeter than the honey in your hips? Why are we afraid of simplicity?

This is important: what you practice, you become.

You can be the most intellectually versed person in the universe and know absolutely nothing and become nothing but empty words.

Talk is cheap, you know? Convincing, but cheap. Nothing happens from just reading, all we get is new concepts. 

We only need one good concept. Be who you are. We can breathe life into that one idea in infinite ways and into eternity. Our minds don’t know the half of it. Not even a quarter, not even a 16th. 

Awareness is far more than mental. Our bodies know things our minds are entirely unaware of.

Do we actually do the things we think we’ll do?

What about what we want to do?

Do we even know how that feels?

•••••••••

Do you know, the mind is in the whole of the body, not just neck up? The mind is everywhere. Really. And the body — which is to say, You — learns by moving. Words are just to put the mind at ease with the unknown of things.

Here is good news: to move is to know.

What we do and how we do it are the greatest illuminators of our psyches. Our beliefs and understandings are held in our muscles. In our breath. In the way we speak, or don’t speak. In the way we kiss. It’s all right in front of us if we let ourselves see.

People speak of bodymind connection as if they are two separate things. They’re not. It’s just a matter of how we direct our attention.

Ask your hips what they think about that. I’ve heard they don’t lie.

1. I’m starting to resent the overuse of both the words embodied and authentic. Lately they seem to have become marketing tactics which is unfortunate. We should be able to say the words expression and movement and have them mean what they mean. Which would mean they were unmarred by societal conditioning and capitalist culture. But alas.