What a Body Knows

New Blog!

2011-10-04T11:02:00.000-04:00

Hello!

I am now blogging at Family Planting!

Please find me here: www.familyplanting.com.

I also publish my posts at Psychology Today, where I host a blog called "What a Body Knows," in the Health section.

See you there!

What is Mental Health?

2011-05-20T11:08:00.001-04:00

I am lying on the floor, knees held gently against my chest. My heart hurts. Thoughts flail and screech in ear-splitting rings around my head. Why did she say that? Doesn’t she understand? Who does she think I am? Why can’t she see me?

The pain sticks under my ribs, sucking vital energy in and down. I don’t want to move. I can’t. My stomach is locked shut. I just want to curl up in the palm of this gripping pain and dissolve into nothingness.

I breathe again (I can’t help it) and exhale sharply. I cling to my knees, drawing them in tight. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to open my body, my self. I don’t want to be this vulnerable. I want to be safe, protected, enclosed like a small hard ball.
*
What is mental health?

I take my cue from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. “Great health” is an ability to digest our experiences. To digest or metabolize experiences is to take whatever is given in any moment—any thought, feeling, or sensation, any cruel word, kind act, or humiliating fall—and transform it—by chewing, mashing, churning, breaking it down—into a sweet stream of energy capable of nourishing our ongoing bodily becoming.

We humans are essentially creative at a sensory level. Our bodily selves are always sensing, always moving, always creating the patterns of sensation and response that make us who we are. Some of that bodily movement—firing and wiring—gives rise to a thinking mind as an inward extension of our bodily self. Our minds are tools that our bodily selves create in order to help us live well. Minds look forward and back. They predict what will happen on the basis of what has been. They calculate options and risks, and all in the service of keeping our bodily selves moving, creating, thriving, becoming who we are.

A healthy mind, then, is one that helps us embrace our experiences as occasions to discover the range and reach of what our bodies know. A healthy mind is one that finds in whatever fear, anger, sadness, despair, irritation, confusion, or frustration we feel, a potential for pleasure that has yet to unfold—an energy and guidance impelling us to move in relation to ourselves and others in ways that align our well-being with the challenge at hand. A healthy mind helps us move in life-enabling, experience-metabolizing ways.

Sometimes, however, our minds get sick: they can’t help us move. Nearly half of all adults, at some point in our lives, will endure times of acute mental, physical, and emotional suffering, and find ourselves unable to work, play, eat, sleep, or open deeply to others—times when we are arrested by anxiety or depression, anger or fear, compulsions or addictions, and unable to digest our experiences.

Why sick? Why stuck? We live in a culture that teaches us to ignore the movement of our bodily selves. From the earliest age, we learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. We learn to identify our “self” with our mental power; we learn to perceive our “body” as material thing for which “we” are responsible. Then, when faced with the stress of a life-altering change, a critical decision, or draining fatigue, we tend to mobilize the resource we think is best: mind over body. We try to control our bodies: we impose diets, schedules, and plans, or rely on drugs and surgery to exact a will we lack. We distract and numb, starve and indulge our sensory selves. We rehearse a separation from our bodily selves that prevents us from feeling what we are feeling. Our emotions remain lodged in our throats and bellies and hearts and limbs, undigested, causing so much depression and despair.
*
As I breathe again, unable to help it, I feel it. In spite of myself, I feel something new—a sensation of the earth pushing up from below me. I am not falling into a black hole. I am resting on a presence that is larger than me that is pressing up through me and holding me up.

Instinctively, I let go. I can’t help it. I breathe again and drop into the earth, holding on to nothing. Emptying my mind. The plug in my heart releases and sensations of disappointment and despair run through me, along me, out of me, into the earth.

In spite of myself, impulses to move arise within me—I feel them—expressions of the irrepressible, undeniable flow of life that will not stop beating and breathing, growing and healing, searching for new ways to move through me. My mind resists, holding on to fear, but my bodily self knows more.
*
Our hungers are prophetic. The scope and kinds of mental illnesses that we as individuals and as a culture are suffering are calling us to reconnect the activity of our minds with the movement of our bodily selves. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of the movements that are making us.

The truth is that at the heart of any and every pain is a desire—a desire to move, to love, to heal, to give, to receive. We would not even feel the pain of not caring if we did not care. And within every desire is in turn an impulse to connect—an impulse to create the relationships with whatever and whomever we need to support us in becoming who we are, and giving what we have to give.

When we move, we breathe. When we breathe, we feel. When we feel we open the floodgates to all of our searing sensations, past, present and future. But we also open ourselves to the possibility of sensing what is always true: that our bodily selves, in every moment of our lives, are providing us with vital information about how to move in ways that will not recreate the pain.

When we breathe to move and move to breathe we open to the possibility of sensing the wisdom in our desires. Whether we are wrestling with issues of food, intimacy, and purpose (see What a Body Knows) or with our parents, partners, and progeny (see Family Planting), how we move matters.
*
I breathe down again, along the stream of my spine, feeling the bed of earth cupping its flow. My experience shifts and I am suddenly aware of the desire at the heart of my pain.

I hurt. I hurt because I want. I want because I am alive. This desire, this life, is a power in me that is stronger than the fear. Stronger than the hurt. It is the point of the pain—to wake me up to the power of this desire. To my need to move.

A resolve appears. I take a small step. I can act out of my love and not my fear or anger. I can meet her where she too is hurt and coming toward me—in the heart of her desire for more. The knot of pain softens and unfolds in affirmation. I am OK. Healing happens.

When an Infant is Dying

2011-04-11T09:24:00.005-04:00

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.

Spinoza and the Steers

2011-03-16T15:09:00.009-04:00

I spent last week reading Spinoza, rounding up steers, and reveling in the early spring.

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) was a Dutch philosopher whose masterwork, Ethics, presents arguments for the nature of God and human using the form of geometric proofs—axioms, propositions, definitions, explanations, and all. I decided to spend some time with him after coming upon his name, yet again, in another work of environmental philosophy. Contemporary writers, like Jane Bennett and David Abram, are appealing to Spinoza for help in anchoring concepts of the natural, material world that will encourage human compassion for the earth as a whole.

Two of Spinoza’s claims in particular are in constant rotation. For one, he uses the phrase “God, or Nature,” maintaining that God and Nature share one, infinite "substance." Second, he insists that every body, human and otherwise, insofar as it exists in God/Nature, is animated by its own “striving to persevere.” Every body, animal, vegetable or mineral, at every scope and scale, acts so as to increase its power of action.

Citing these two ideas, philosophers conclude that humans ought to honor other earth bodies as having agency and intelligence, and so desist from acting as if only humans matter.

As I am pondering Spinoza’s proofs, Bright and Blaze, the two-year-old Milking Shorthorn steers that my son is training, decide that they are tired of their pen. They have plentiful hay and cool water, in a sun-filled shelter ringed by seemingly redundant ropes of barbed wire—all of which they ignore. Slipping into the barnyard, the 1500-pound, red-brown and speckled pair make their way to the front door of our house. They tip over the wooden bucket in which we crank ice cream, and begin licking the briny dregs.

Coming into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I see a huge head through the window. Then another. Rather than return to Spinoza, I pull on boots, coat, gloves, and hat, and begrudgingly blink my way into the sunshine. I approach Bright, the largest of the two, with halter in hand. He cavorts away, kicking his heels in the air like a newborn lamb. With large horns. I have to laugh. Is he the intelligent, animate, striving to persevere that Spinoza has in mind?
*
Spinoza’s Ethics is different than I imagined. Rather than the environmental treatise that its contemporary uses imply, the Ethics is an extended apology for “a life of the mind.” God and Nature, mind and body, are what they are such that humans find their greatest happiness when reading and writing, preferably in the company of like-minded friends. According to Spinoza, it is knowledge of God—not chasing steers—that yields the highest human joy. As he writes, “In life… it is especially useful to perfect, as far as we can, our intellect, or reason. In this one thing consists man’s highest happiness, or blessedness.”

Why? The argument goes like this. God is infinite substance, the cause of itself, freely operating according to the laws of its nature—which, for Spinoza, are the eternal laws of nature. God is a thinking being, whose substance also appears in the mode of extension. God’s intellect is thus the immanent cause of every finite and fleeting thing.

Given this scene, humans too exist in God as a part of nature, as one kind of body among many others, constantly affecting and being affected by other bodies. However, humans are the part of nature that is capable of understanding all bodies, including their own, as equally modes of God, that is, “under the species of the eternal.” And understanding bodies in this way, according to Spinoza, yields utmost joy.

Why? For two reasons. First, even though mind and body share in one substance (God, or Nature), Spinoza insists that the knowledge our minds receive about the world through our bodily senses is “mutilated and confused.” It is distorted by our bodily location and our sensory limits. Second, for Spinoza, all of the so-called pleasures associated with the material world are not. Sensory pleasures come and go, leaving in their wake a sadness that confuses and dulls the mind.

Reason, however, can address both sources of discomfort. Using reason, we can “purify” and “heal” our sensory knowledge by forming “adequate ideas.” Using reason, we can also cultivate an ability not to be affected by external, material, or natural causes that might distract us from such understanding. In both cases, then, using our reason answers our own striving to persevere, and thus yields the promised joy.

Not exactly what the environmentalists are after. Where is the care and compassion for the welfare of the natural world?

I contemplate the issue while contemplating my next move with the steers. They are truly huge. Standing beside them, I feel small and weak. I know that they would not intentionally hurt me—my son has trained them well—but there is simply no reason that they need to do what I want them to do. They could overpower me with a twist of the head. They don’t.

I watch as they tussle with one another, roam among the spare bales stacked in the barnyard, and trot away each time I approach. The steers want to be out. It is as if they smell spring. They sense something new and want to participate in it by making new moves of their own. They want to let loose the capacities for cavorting that lie dormant beneath their winter shag. I don’t blame them.

I decide to ditch the halters and try a thin stick. Gently tapping from behind, I steer the steers towards their pen. At the gate, they veer away and go back across the road to the spare hay bales. I move with them and tap them back towards the pen. Back and forth we go. I move with them some more, until finally, they move with me, back into their pen, where they circle their own waiting bale.

I return to Spinoza, and the steers pull my thoughts in a direction that is both new and familiar. Spinoza too could make another move. When confronting the selectivity of our senses and the short-lived duration of sensory pleasures, Spinoza doesn’t have to yoke his reason to an intellectual love of an eternal God.

What if, instead of seeking refuge in an idea of eternal truth, we chose to cultivate a capacity to move with the rhythms of the material world? And with the rhythms of our own desires?

As Spinoza admits, human bodies are acutely impressionable, affected at all levels in myriad ways by a vast array of human, nonhuman, and elemental others. This sensitivity, I would add, is not simply passive. As our bodies are moved by people, places, and things, we learn how to move for ourselves. We learn about the power of our own bodily movement to connect us with other bodies and forces that sustain our ongoing life. That power consists of an ability to create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that align our well being with the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

What if our distinctive humanity lies in this ability to learn from other earth bodies, from the rhythms, cycles, and seasons of bodily nature, about our own capacity for making the movements that make us who we are--able to connect, able to love?

Humans do need an idea of Nature as divine, whole, and worthy of devotion, but we need more as well. We need to submit ourselves to forces and movements larger than ourselves, to which we must respond, and so catalyze a sensory awareness of our own bodily movement and how it is making us able to think and feel and act as we do.

When we do, we will have what we need to recreate our relationship with the "more than human" world (Abram). We will have the capacity to feel the pain and sadness of the natural world as a call to move differently—to find ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that connect us in mutually-enabling ways with the body of earth and bodies of earth, including our own.

It is what a body knows.

It is what my time with Spinoza and the steers is teaching me.
*
Later in the day I walk into the kitchen, and find Blaze peering at me through the window. Again?!

This time, the steers do not let me close enough to tap. Kyra volunteers to help. She is nine, all of four feet tall and seventy pounds. She approaches Blaze gently, the halter behind her back. She scratches him under the chin, and while I blink, slips the halter over his hooked horns. She does the same with Bright. Mesmerized, I help her lead them into their pen. I follow. They follow. This time, we tie them up.

It will be best for them, I reason. They will be safe from passing cars, in easy reach of food and water. They depend on me to take care of them. Yet, my heart quails. They are tied up, against their will. I feel their pain. So moved, the thought forms. I vow to build a new fence as soon as the ground thaws—a solid wooden fence that will be strong enough to keep them in and large enough to give them room to frolic.

I need it.

Eat Less? Pass the chips!

2011-02-04T14:05:00.005-05:00

Responses to the government’s recently-released recommendations for healthy eating, while varied, are circling around what observers see as a remarkable message. For the first time the report’s writers, withstanding the immense pressure of the food industry, actually recommend that Americans eat less. Why? The report begins with statistics chronicling the heavy toll of diet-related chronic illnesses, primarily those associated with obesity.

Is this difference remarkable? The difference can be deceiving. What might seem like a radical move is couched in a familiar philosophy. The writers assume that a human body is an input-output device, a simple machine, for which “we” as minds can and should make good, meaning “healthy,” choices.

On this mind-over-body understanding of the human self, the report stages its primary recommendation: balance calories to manage weight. It bears repeating. According to this report, the goal of eating is weight management. And the means to that goal: information for the mind given by the report in pie charts, bar graphs, and tables.

In this way the report is typical of our cultural responses to the obesity epidemic: it reinforces a way of thinking about a human self that is itself a contributing factor to the problems it purports to address.

Bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Eating is not about energy intake. Physical exercise is not just about energy expenditure. When we act as if they are, we systematically override the cues that our own bodily selves are giving us about what and when and how to eat.

Our relation to food is a matter of desire. This desire for food arises as a movement in our bodily selves that impels us towards what we believe will grant us the pleasure we seek. And that pleasure is not a function of calories or quantity or even quality. Rather, what we move towards is the experience of being nourished, the experience of being nurtured, and as we mature, the experience of nourishing and nurturing ourselves.

Of course, as the report implies, our desire for food is a problem. It is a force that “we” must control.

Yet, what the government and many of us have learned to forget is that our desire for the pleasure of being nourished is actually the most subtle and sophisticated ally we have for determining what eating patterns will benefit our health. This desire is our very own in-built instrument of discernment, guiding our thinking selves to work with our environmental options to secure what we need to thrive.

In order to liberate this ally, however, we do have some work to do. We need to dislodge the mind-over-body habits that cause us to ignore and even malign our bodily selves, and learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for food.

In short, to make a really remarkable move, we need to ask a question that the report does not dare: how can we get more pleasure from what we are eating?

1. Move.

If we want to feel more pleasure, then we have to be willing to feel. If we want to feel, we have to breathe. In order to breathe, we need to move—move our bodily selves—not for exercise, not to expend calories, but to bring to life a sensory awareness of what it is we really want from food.

For what do we hunger?

2. Look for the signs.

When we open to feel what we are feeling, then we are bound to learn what we don’t want to admit. What we are eating is not giving us the pleasure we want.

Our food selections, while initially pleasing to the eye and even the mouth, too often produce unwanted effects in our bodily selves. Yet, we ignore the signs and keep eating. We take a pill to deal with the “side” effects. We distract our attention, or simply eat more to prove to ourselves that we can. We want so much the pleasure we know can come from eating that we override our sensations of displeasure in pursuit of it.

Yet these sensations of discomfort are allies and friends, guiding us to move in ways that will not recreate those sensations, just as the pain of touching the stove tells us to move our hand higher up the handle.

Every twinge of discomfort is a sign of a potential pleasure we have yet to discover.

3. Open to the arc.

Once we allow ourselves to feel our desires and our displeasures, then our sensory understanding of eating expands. We find that there are multiple pleasures waiting to be enjoyed in every moment of our lives, along an endless, oscillating arc of anticipation and fulfillment.

There is potential pleasure in the imagining, growing, gathering, and preparation of food. There is potential pleasure in the act of welcoming food into our bodily selves. There is immense pleasure as well in arriving at that sweet moment when you know you have had enough.

At every point along this arc, we have some sensory relearning to do, for we have so privileged the moment of sticking something in our mouths over all the other moments of our eating arc that we don’t even notice what we are missing.

Our sense of enough has been particularly hammered. The idea that we can and should manage our calorie intake or go on a diet operates by the same logic that impels us to eat more than our bodily selves are telling us we want. Ignore your own sense of enough. Distrust it. It has nothing to teach you about what is best for you.

The opposite is true.

4. Play.

It is not enough to practice mindfulness of what and how and when we eat. It is not enough either to welcome displeasures or know that our pleasure has an arc. We must also play with different food combinations. We need to try new things, learn as much as we can about what works for us, and experiment with eating patterns and habits and traditions and recipes to discover which ones allow us to feel and find that arc of our desire.

It is to this end that the guidelines like those offered by the government are helpful—as fuel for our imaginations. The report offers us ideas and information that can help us experiment with a range of possibilities, and find the freedom to sense and respond to the movements of our own desiring, discerning selves.
*
While the eating patterns of Americans are not etched in stone, neither are they easily malleable at the level of rational choice.

If we are to eat less, we must want to eat less. And the only way we are going to want to eat less--as every marketer of a diet plan knows--is to know that we are getting more of the pleasure we desire from the act of eating.

Sure, there is pleasure to be gained from feeling healthy and lean, but when under pressure, pummeled by advertisements, and surrounded by colorfully-packaged delivery mechanisms for sugar and salt, we will inevitably and understandably move with our much more fundamental desire for an experience of being nourished and nurtured. It is this desire, then, that we must free from our mind-over-body control, and cultivate as the best resource we have along the path of health and well-being.

The goal of weight management will not fire our imaginations, free us from our self-destructing habits, or galvanize our desire in new directions. What we need is a vision of a greater pleasure whose side effect happens to be greater health and well being. And we need to trust in the wisdom of our bodily selves and desires as our best guides to it.

Tales of a Moose Mother

2011-01-21T11:13:00.007-05:00

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

2010-12-22T15:04:00.005-05:00

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.

Give Thanks for Pain? You're Kidding

2010-11-23T10:09:00.011-05:00

A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: What if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that?

While I have addressed the issue indirectly in other blogs (see below), it is time to address it head on. At the heart of the matter is the question of pain: what it is, how we sense it, and how we respond to it.

Pain, together with pleasure, comprise the primary feedback available to our thinking selves about how well the movements we are making in the world are making us.

My aim (or one of them) in writing What a Body Knows was to shift our experience of pain along (at least) four registers, in each case, moving from a mind over body perspective to one that affirms our sensations of pain as resources guiding us along the path of our own unique bodily becoming.

1) Part/ Whole: When we hurt, our mind over body tendency is to identify the pain with one part of ourselves, isolate that part from the rest, and work to make "it" go away. Whether our head hurts, our stomach cramps, our back aches, our hips creak, our heart pines, or our energies flag, we either try to ignore our sensations, or we become obsessed with fixing them. Pain is the problem. "I" must fix "it."

However, when we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement--the movement of creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response (as described in What a Body Knows)--we realize that any manifestation of pain in one part of ourselves always expresses a movement pattern that engages every moment of ourselves, physical to spiritual. A part is part of a whole, and that whole is what is hurting.

The implications are several. Because any pain involves a whole person, any healing must also engage the whole person. Any effective response will involve integrating the part into the whole, understanding the connections among person parts, and discerning as best we can how the movements we are making are creating this pain as a guide to move differently than we are now.

2) New/ Old: When something begins to bother us, we also tend to think of the pain or illness or injury as new--that is, as a departure from our otherwise usual or normal healthy state. Most pain feels accidental. It comes upon us as a surprise that we were not expecting. We experience it as an obstacle to our forward motion.

However, once we understand our bodily selves as movement, we realize that by the time we feel a part of ourselves as pain, the whole-body patterns that that pain is expressing have already been in play for a while and at many levels of our existence. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others, the movements we make as we go about our usual activities, our hopes and fears, as well as our general outlook on the world, are all, to greater and lesser extents, bound up in the pain.

The implication here is that healing involves recreating patterns of sensation and response that have been at work for a long time, slowly creating a situation where we feel a particular point of pain. Healing takes time.

3) Read/ Felt: Further, when people acknowledge the importance of "listening" to their feelings of discomfort, they often talk about reading "the" body or listening to "the" body, as if there is an "I" that exists above and apart from the body who can see it, know it, and fix it.

However, the kind of wisdom that our bodily selves have is not a formula or a schema that "we" can read and then impose upon our bodies, so as to make them do what we want to do, and stop hurting.

The kind of wisdom our bodily selves are is an ability to sense impulses guiding us to move in ways that will coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our well being. This is who we humans are--this impulse to connect with whatever will support us in becoming who we are. We can and must connect with other people, with elements, with our own bodily selves, with ideas, activities, and cultural forms in order to unfold our skills and abilities.

In every case, as we connect in life-enabling ways, we learn something more about how to move in ways that will connect us more effectively with what nourishes our well-being. This is what pain teaches us: not how to deal with it, and not to obsess over it, but how to discern and move with whatever impulse to connect it represents.

Pain is a desire to be free from it. Yet unless we allow ourselves to welcome it as offering us vital information about our selves and situation, we will not fully grasp that desire.

Pain is not holding us back. It is calling us to be free from whatever is holding us back.

4) Responsible/ Participating: Where I am moving with this line of thought is far from the all-too-common self-help theme: you can heal yourself. People seem to think that once they acknowledge their pain and admit that their sensations have something to teach them, then any pain they feel is their fault. They are responsible for healing themselves. When the pain persists, self-judgment can weigh heavily.

Once we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement, however, we realize that pain is not our fault, that "we" are not responsible for our pain, and that "we" cannot heal ourselves. Rather, healing is who we are: it is an ever-ongoing process in which our bodily selves are ever and forever active. In this process, our pain is helping us appreciate how and where our healing energies have more potential for creating us anew. What that "we" can do is learn how to align our mental energies with the trajectories of healing already at work in our bodily selves.

The question then is this: how can we participate in our healing as consciously as possible?

What a Body Knows offers a response: if we cultivate a sensory awareness of how our movements are making us, we have what we need to begin to discern the wisdom in feelings of disease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.

It is not just a matter of allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, though such mindfulness is an important first step. Nor is it a matter of identifying the patterns of mental, emotional, and physical movement that are knotting us. What is most important is being able to open a space in ourselves where we can find in our sensations our core desires, our impulses to connect, and begin to move with them, in ways that do not recreate the pain that troubles us.

Every pain is a potential for pleasure that is yet to unfold.

For more blogs on this topic:
1. about the seemingly pointless pain of the flue: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201008/what-do-you-do-the-flu
2. about the limits of "listening" to your body
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200909/the-limits-listening-your-body

Hit by a Hammer: Are you lucky?

2010-11-15T11:08:00.002-05:00

On Saturday, a hammer hit me. In the face.

It fell from the top of the ladder, where I had hooked it, about three feet above my head. I was standing at the bottom of the ladder, trying to move it, and wondering why the ladder seemed so heavy. I looked up to investigate. I didn’t see the hammer coming, I felt it.

As the hammer rammed my left cheek bone, I knew exactly what it was. It grazed my lip and clattered to the ground. The whole side of my face was instantly numb, hot, and swelling. I stomped and staggered into the house and went straight to the freezer.

Within twenty seconds, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, ice packed from temple to lip, sobbing at my stupidity. Why this? I was just trying to get something done! I should have been working with someone else. I should have been doing something else. I should have had help… I should have been wearing a tool belt… I should have...I should have...

Within a few minutes, I quieted down and looked up at the circle of my kids’ concerned faces. Leif, at 17 months, angled himself into my lap, wanting to nurse, wanting comfort from the distress of seeing mom cry. I obliged. Comforting him, comforted me. Geoff sat with us.

The ice melted. The swelling slowed. A half hour passed. My lip was enlarged; cheekbone too, but I was OK. I was OK. We all ate lunch, and then Geoff and I together tackled the curled and tattered pieces of clapboard I had been trying to replace on the side of our house. Every time I approached the ladder, I would involuntarily cringe, as a shadow of fear flickered through me.

The afternoon eased, and a warm November wind washed the sky with pastel hues. As I painted the new boards blue, a realization slowly seeped its way into my sensory awareness.

I am so lucky. The thought streamed through the sensory channels chiseled open by pain and self-judgment and fear, and spilled over, spreading through all realms of life. I am so lucky.

In the wake of this thought, came others as well. I was hit in the face with a hammer. With a hammer! In the face! I didn’t lose an eye or a tooth. My skin held fast. I have a small cheek-bone bump and a lovely swath of violet under my eye, but I am OK.

I had been hit in the face with a hammer and all I could feel was this boundless, leaping joy. I felt deeply, deliriously giddy. Life was beautiful--all of it, and not just our house. The weekend just kept getting better. The joy kept multiplying, as I kept seeing and appreciating more in my life of what could have been so much worse.

It got me thinking. I felt lucky because I know: it could have been so much worse. So much of what happens in life that doesn’t go as we planned could have been so much worse.

Perhaps we are lucky, even when we don’t think we are. Perhaps we are. And what if? What if we allowed ourselves to feel lucky, whatever happens? To feel that joy and gratitude every minute—not just when hit by hammers? Through the rosy glow of such emotions, life seems so much better. So good. And it is. Our movements of gratitude make it so, for they open us up to see and sense more of what is endlessly being given. They empower us as well, to act in ways that move us along the paths of what we desire most.

I smiled wryly. Perhaps the hammer knocked some sense into me after all. Or rather, it knocked me along my path of bodily becoming into a newly strengthened pattern of sensation and response—one of appreciation for how lucky I am.

I know this gratitude. I can know this gratitude. And I will. I’ll remember. One hit is enough.

Movement = Play = Love

2010-11-08T11:29:00.004-05:00

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?

When the Dish Breaks: An Internet Time Out

2010-09-29T10:25:00.007-04:00

I think of myself as a technomoderate. While I sit at a computer for some time nearly every day, I do so selectively. I email regularly, blog periodically, and update my website from time to time. I surf the New York Times daily, and Facebook weekly. While writing, I invariably call upon google or amazon to help me find a source or research an idea. In all, I use the web in moderation, to get the job done, while living most of my life in the real world—or so I thought. Then we spent two weeks at the end of the summer without an internet connection. Two weeks?

One day in August, the satellite dish stopped working. It simply refused to send our signals or receive those from afar. Was it clouds? The skies were clear. Over-grown trees? We trimmed. A shift in dish position? The technicians tried several before concluding that we needed a new transponder. Time required to order, deliver, and install: two weeks.

Two weeks. I wasn’t on vacation, or on the road. I was home, where all of the farmwork, artwork, and bookwork happens. I had proofs in hand for my next book that needed to be done and delivered, electronically. Two weeks?

Immediately, I felt disoriented. How was I to proceed? I routinely rely on my computer connection, I realized, to organize me. It sets my tasks to do, with its in box, out box, and drop box; its pop ups and sidebars; downloads and documents, blog feeds and posts. It is more than a list; it is a desktop with depth, a room in itself. And as I enter my computer’s room, that room enters me, recreates itself inside of me, as my world.

Yet my computer was strangely quiet. It no longer beeped and blinked at me with news of incoming messages. It was as flat as it looked, no longer a portal into realms peopled with friends and family, experts and strangers; and no longer offering a daily array of thickets to explore. To be plugged in to a virtual world is to be oriented by it, and I hadn’t known to what degree.

As I sat there working on my proofs, I began to notice other web-induced dependencies as well. Even though I knew we had no connection, my eyes would still invariably drift over to the mail icon checking for that rousing red dot that signals a waiting note. Nothing.

The drift followed a pattern. It happened when I felt stuck, unsure, bored, overwhelmed, dismayed, or in need of a break. It happened when I was worried by a thought, or by the absence of thoughts. When my brain felt too full or too empty, I looked for the dot, for a quick fix, a quick fill. I couldn’t tolerate a moment of blank space or a moment of unknowing.

I also began to notice that this attention-drift extended beyond my time spent sitting with a screen. When moving about the house, thoughts of that red dot would flash in my brain and body. I would feel a gravitational pull towards the computer. My feet would move, my torso turn, and my head tilt, as expectation welled within. So many of my preferred pathways through the house, I realized, took me within arms length of those computer keys.

I noticed too how the times I thought to tap were similar in their emotional makeup to those I had identified while sitting. It was when I was tired or bored, overexcited or overwhelmed, needing a buzz or needing a break. The patterns of sensing and responding to my own emotions were the same. Only rarely was I impelled to the computer, for example, by an impulse to communicate with a specific person about a particular topic. More often I just wanted a blast of something from somewhere or someone. Anything. Anywhere. Anyone.

As the days wore on, the pings and pangs softened, and it was clear. I had been relying on my computer connection for more than mere orientation. I had been using it to manage my energy and emotions. I relied on those beeps and blinks for comfort and consolation; for a jolt awake or a calming touch. I activated that connection to get myself moving, prop myself up, and keep myself going; to stimulate, placate, and regulate, so I could deliver a steady stream of attention and effort to where it was needed most. It was an unconscious habit and a conscious practice; a reflex and a choice. I did it, because I wanted to, or so I thought. Until I couldn’t.

Within a week of our internet blackout, the sense of disorientation gave way to a sense of profound relief. I was free. No longer preoccupied with the latest thread and flame, I was more mine than before, more connected in a robust sensory way. I was moving inside myself in a sensory space that seemed bigger, spacious, as if cleared of an unwelcome horde. I was more willing to receive and follow my own impulses to move, because I couldn’t not.

I began to wonder: does the internet give me what I so often want from it?

Most of the time, what I most want is presence—I want more energy, more vitality, more fun. I want to feel connected with myself, my work, and with those I love. I want to feel that rush of being in the flow of creating something that has value in a larger world. Wanting so to move and feel myself moving, I move my eyes across a dazzling array of sights (and sounds), looking for something that will move me.

More often than not, what I find exhausts me further. For what I need is not more sitting and staring. I need to bring my senses to life and stir my own physio-spiritual energies, so that I can feel feelings, think thoughts, and be a place where life is at work, creating. I would be better served by dropping to the floor for pushups or a downward dog, rather than trailing another political intrigue.
*
We humans crave movement. We crave sensations of life moving through us, moving as us, creating because of us. It is why we climb mountains and run marathons, plan projects and set goals, dream dreams and make love, have kids and travel the world. We want to live.

Yet we are also cautious and risk-averse. We don’t want to lose the sources of comfort we have in accomplishments past, friends counted, or games won. So we prefer to be moved, pursuing life as a spectator sport. We move virtually, vicariously, forgetting what it feels like to move ourselves. The more we forget, the harder it gets to do otherwise. Until the dish breaks.
*
The technician returned. The dish is fixed. I am connected, but differently. For now I know, once again, that what I most want is to move.

Hanging a clothesline and other movement matters

2010-09-13T21:16:00.006-04:00

It has been three weeks since I did it: I hung a clothesline.

In the end, it was easy. I took the cotton cord Geoff bought at the local hardware store, walked into the backyard, and strung the line between two obliging birch trees. Five minutes later, the deed was done.

I had been waiting to hang the line, however, for months. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t manage to get out the door. On the one hand, I was so tired of the queasy disease that erupted in my belly every time I pushed the “on” button of our electric dryer. I know too much about how much electricity my dryer consumes (up to 12% of the household tally), in order to do the work that sun and wind can do for free, without cost to the environment, just steps beyond the wall.

On the other hand, I was hemmed in by habit, and by lingering doubts as to whether or not line drying would be as cool or as convenient as plug, press, and spin. Finally, the resistance overrode the ruts, and pushed me out the door with cord, clothespins, and hamper in hand. My kids came along, cheering me on, eager to participate. I wondered how long this festive air would last.
*
To hang my first shirts, I reach into a bag for wooden pins that look exactly like ones my grandparents must have used. Generations collapse. I lift the clothes to the line, and place the clip, then another. Piece by piece, I lift and stretch and smooth.

As the line fills with clothes, niggling doubts flood my mind. I should be using a dryer. I smile at my cultural conditioning. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone hung clothes to dry. Then came the marketing campaigns of the 1950s, urging people to Live Better Electrically. The meaning of a clothesline shifted. No longer a useful implement for drying laundry, it became a waving flag alerting all who could see that those living here were poor, behind the times, and unable to keep up.

Since then, the clothesline has been a social stigma, legally banned in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the United States for being aesthetically unappealing, a drain on property values, a blight to the neighborhood. It is most often a question of class.

Since 2007, Susan Taylor has been fighting her homeowner's association for the right to hang a line. On July 26, 2008, a man died in Verona, Mississippi when his neighbor, tired of asking him not to hang his clothes, shot him.

Yet, as I make my way down the line to the second birch tree, I remind myself. Times are changing, and so is the meaning of the clothesline. Increasingly, the clothesline is a sign of freedom—the freedom to resist patterns of consumption that are fueling our ecological crisis. It is a sign of a commitment to reduce the energy we use to wear and wash, and its attendant costs. I want to stay in touch with my freedom.

Recently, Colorado joined Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, Florida, and Utah in passing a right-to-dry act; other states are following suit. In March 2010, British filmmaker Steven Lake released a documentary, Drying for Freedom, based on the Verona murder and more. Susan Taylor has received national and international media coverage for her three-year battle.

A recent survey from the Pew Foundation found that the percentage of Americans who believe that a clothes dryer is a necessity (rather than a luxury) declined by 17%, a drop in status second only to the microwave.

Once a sign of being unable to afford a dryer, a clothesline is a sign that we can no longer afford the environmental cost of operating one.
*
I empty the laundry basket and step back to survey the array. Shirts of assorted sizes hang shoulder to shoulder; pants jog in the breeze. Sheets flutter, socks flap, and towels hang heavy. There is pleasure in the patterns of shape and color, and in the movement that reveals the movement of the breeze I now sense blowing against my cheeks. The sun is warm. The grass soft beneath my feet.

As the day passes, I peek out the window. The clothes are still there, waving away, like so many Tibetan prayer flags, honoring the earth. They are drying, all by themselves, without the sound of an electric motor. Without chemical odor. So much work is being done for so little. I love it.

Later in the afternoon I go outside again, take a breath, and take down the clothes. They are slightly stiff. Sun-baked and wind-swept. They fold crisply into piles like so many leaves.

I like this. I am surprised at how much I do. It is the relief of not hearing the noise. It is the occasion to go outside. It is the smell of the fresh clothes. It is the money and energy and earth I am saving. But more than any of these, what makes the experience remarkable to me is the reminder it yields about movement.

Now, as I do laundry, I can move. I reach and twist, bend over, sink down, and rise again, folding and unfolding a bodily self that has spent more than enough of the day sitting at a computer. It is the movement of walking outside, of responding to the whims and whorls of nature, of being present to this place. It is the movement of aligning my efforts with the rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, heat and cold, in ways that pace my efforts and nourish my sensory self.
*
This clothesline and my unexpectedly enthusiastic response to it have got me thinking. So many of our labor and time saving devices work to save us labor and time by reducing our opportunities for moving our bodily selves. Yet in the name of granting us pleasure, they deprive us of a primary source of it—moving our bodily selves. In the name of protecting us from the inconveniences of the natural world, they separate us from its nourishing effects.

When we move we breathe; when we breathe we feel; when we feel we have resources for thinking and feeling in new ways. We bring our senses to life. We bring sense to life.

Of course, we want to believe that our labor and time saving devices are giving us the freedom to move however we want to, whenever we want, to get that pleasure pure and unhampered by practical concerns.

However, the reality is that once we separate our immense capacity to move our bodily selves from our requirements for living, our bodily movement no longer carries the same significance it once had. Movement is then about entertainment or recreation or physical health; we no longer perceive it or value it as essential to our mental and spiritual well being, or as a key to creating a mutually enabling relationship with the natural world. Movement drops as a priority in our lives, falling in rank below the “necessary” tasks of school and work, screen time and the effort of maintaining all of our time and labor saving devices. We find it difficult to motivate ourselves to move, and cannot figure out why.
*
I have been looking over my blog entries for the past two and a half years. I see a pattern. Every fall, I have made a new move, reinventing my blog to focus on a different aspect of my project. I spent the first nine months laying out the structure of What a Body Knows, before devoting a year to telling Farm Stories, and another to Making Connections between my work in What a Body Knows and cultural conversations in the news.

It is time to string a new line. The sense of needing to make a change is overriding my habitual approach. In the next few months, I will be focusing more specifically on movement—human movement, bodily movement.

I want to explore how we are moving and what we are creating when we do. I want to investigate what movements we evolved to make and why we can; what movements we have the potential to make and why we should. I want to explore how vital our practices of movement are for creating a mutually enabling relationship to the natural world. I want to write about dance.

It’s time to hang some new thoughts, air them out, and give them time to flap in the breeze.

What Do You Do with the Flu?

2010-08-11T07:58:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, what our bodily selves know is not obvious. So it was with the case of the flu I contracted two weeks ago. It was a Monday evening. The symptoms began as soon as I pressed “publish” on my last blog entry. My skin felt hot and prickly. It hurt to move. I felt generally strange, askew in myself. I rushed to get everything and everyone washed and put to bed as soon as possible, so I could be too.

Tuesday morning was worse. I stood up and nearly passed out. Nausea churned my stomach; I broke into a cold, clammy sweat. Not good. I felt as if I were turned inside out. My skin ached and pulled when I moved. My head reverberated with a glistening pain. I set my sights on bed, wondering. Why this? Why now? The blog had been the last of several assignments I needed to complete before diving in to a major project I was hungry to do. Does my bodily self know anything? My mind was blank.

As I crawled into bed, a wave of relief washed through me. I don’t have to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. I don’t have to fight. I can rest. The flash of relief was soon swallowed by a fierce discomfort. I don’t want to be here. My bodily self was a hostile environment, and I wanted out. Now.

I doubled back and set out to heal myself. I tried the cycle of breaths. I tried circular breathing. I tried colors and lights and flooding myself with feelings of love. I couldn’t move the pain. None of my methods, tried and true, were working. The pain would ebb ever so slightly, only to crash back at the slightest break of concentration. I couldn’t find a way to sink inside it and through it to a deeper wellspring of health, as I so often do. Something else was going on.

Meanwhile, my mind clamored relentlessly. Hopelessly obsessed with the unanswered emails in my inbox, my mind kept composing “I’m sick!” messages I was too ill to send.

I kept asking myself: what does my body know? What am I supposed to do with this pain? I had no ideas. No insights. Just empty pointless rambling. It was as if the pain were a wall separating my chattering mind from the silent knowing of my sensory self. Bereft of its sensory ground, my mind was mindless, lost, in exile. It was running in circles, unable to connect with any insight, unable to move my bodily self in any way.

One thought broke through: maybe my mind is always this dependent, always this unable to function without its sensory ground.

As the morning progressed, so did the dis-ease. Wrapped in fleece, piled under two down comforters, on a balmy summer day, I convulsed with cold. I tried to eat. I am still nursing. Two bites and I couldn’t swallow another. It was strange. I had no congestion or altered digestion; no sore throat, cough or other tubal ailment. I had never known that this layer of my sensory self could register so much pain without involving the rest. What was going on?

I checked in with a nurse to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. She recommended Tylenol. I never take Tylenol. The bottle at the bottom of our bathroom drawer sported an expiration date of 2003. I took two. Within twenty minutes I felt the numbing effects. My body fell silent and I fell asleep, hoping my bodily self would heal without me.

That night I was too hungry to sleep, too nauseous to eat. I lay awake, too hot and too cold, head pounding, perched on my side, trying to make room for a restless toddler who couldn’t understand why the milk wouldn’t come.

One stream kept me going. Water. I could drink. I wanted to drink. I had to drink. Bottle after bottle of clear, cool, cleansing water. Usually it makes me sick to drink water on an empty stomach. It didn’t.

On Thursday morning, the pain finally, suddenly, let go. A large metallic sheet dropped from the back of my head, and slid away. The sky opened up above me. My bodily self began to reappear. I sunk in and began to reconnect with my sensory self.

I felt weak; echoes of the pain trembled at the edges my awareness. Yet joy steadily gathered. Food was revolting, but I cast about, trying to imagine something I would want. Saltines and ginger ale? Geoff went to the corner store and bought the only box of saltines on the shelf. It was dusty; the crackers stale. I popped them into the oven, nibbled a few and stopped, wanting to want to eat.

Hours later, a first breath of hunger returned. It was the sweetest sensation I have ever felt. Oh to be hungry! To want to nourish myself! To be able to give myself the pleasure of nourishing myself! To be able to feel and move with the sensations of meeting this life-enabling desire!

This sweet hunger—it is what my body knows.

I was careful. The hunger was fragile. I paid attention, wanting always to pay such attention.

Then, as I began to eat, small amounts, crackers and cheese, I felt the hum. My bodily self was humming. Humming. I lay down and closed my eyes to investigate. There was a glow, a vibrating halo, emanating from the shape of my bodily self. Currents of energy crossed and swirled, in shimmering colors and complex textures. My bodily self was humming in response to the food, in celebration of its own healthy hunger, in its return to consciousness. My mind rested in its embrace.

Thoughts welled—the sweet insights for which I had been yearning. This hum is me. It is the movement that is making me. It is not just a hum that I hear; it is the hum through which I hear—the medium in which any awareness that “I” have, any ideas or imaginings, appear as ripples and waves, patterns of possibility. Any thought that I have and am is a vibrational echo of this bodily hum.

Soon I was swimming in gratitude at this inexplicable gift. The fever had ignited a new sensory awareness—a register of possible experience I would mine again and again for insights. Already I knew: it was what I needed to complete the project I had been so hungry to begin.

What does a body know? How to hum. How to heal. How to transform pain into understanding. How to dance.

Radical Homemaking: A revolution in progress?

2010-07-26T16:07:00.007-04:00

Forty-five minutes from now my cultured milk will be ready for the next stage in the cheddaring process. It’s time to write, for I’ve been stirring thoughts while stirring this foamy white elixir that my son and daughter pulled a couple of hours ago from the teats of our three cows.

I am thinking about an excellent book I just read by Shannon Hayes called Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. At the heart of the book are a set of home visits Hayes made to twenty families and individuals whom she describes as radical homemakers. These are people who are—how can I say it—like us. It has been five years since Geoff and I packed our belongings, sold our house, and left work, friends, and family to make art on a deserted farm in upstate New York.

Indeed, Hayes’ critique of contemporary culture lands close to home. In pursuit of affluence, she writes, we Americans of the western world have created an economic system that is ravaging the health of our selves, our communities, and the planet. In this “extractive economy,” women and men leave home to work for wages they spend to fill their emptied homes with food and domestic goods they no longer know how to make. These goods are generally produced in bulk, far away, by strangers working under exploitative conditions, as part of a production and distribution process that extracts resources from the earth, and leaves polluted air, soil, and water in its wake.

Page after page Hayes shells out the statistics: despite our relative affluence, we are not happier, healthier, or richer. We are depressed, stressed, and restless. Our local communities are weak; our planet is dying. Many of the jobs available to us are not what we consider meaningful work, and yet, because of those jobs, we don’t have time in our lives to do what matters most to us. “The extractive economy,” she insists, “is terminal” (58).

There must be a better way—or many better ways—and Hayes sets out to document what some intrepid explorers are discovering. These radical homemakers, as she describes, are transforming home from a place of consumption to a place where women, men, and children work together to grow, make, and create what is vital to their living.

I get up from my computer and check on my cheese, where it waits on the stove. The milk is still warm, a balmy 90 degrees. I add a half-teaspoon of rennet and stir for a minute, slowly, as not to slosh. I set the timer again. Another forty-five minutes and I should have a nice firm curd.

None of the radical homemakers Hayes describes milk a cow, but in the end, Hayes’s concern is not with the practical activities of homemaking themselves. She maps the phenomenon in general terms, describing three overlapping, cyclical phases: radical homemakers redefine wealth in terms of family, community, good food, pleasure, and health. They reclaim skills lost in the increasing dependence on corporations for our livelihood, including nurturing relationships, setting realistic goals, redefining pleasure, and cultivating courage. They work to rebuild society, engaging in civic, artistic, and entrepreneurial activities often in their communities. In these ways, Hayes insists, radical homemakers are building a bridge from an extractive economy to one that is “life-serving,” where the goal (she cites David Korten) is “to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few” (13).

As I reflect on this book, I am struck by how dangerous it is. Isn’t Hayes promoting a nostalgic escape to a romanticized home life that never existed? Isn’t she advocating poverty and deprivation for all? Doesn’t she risk perpetuating gender stereotypes that have trapped women in domestic drudgery, denying them the opportunity to share their talents with a larger public?

I chew on the thought as check on my cheese. The curd should be forming now, firm to the touch, floating in a halo of whey. I am making this recipe with three gallons of milk—a bit more than half of this morning’s catch. The rest we will skim and drink, churning its cream into butter and ice cream, making cottage cheese, yogurt, and mozzarella too. Later.

I turn back to Hayes, a radical homemaker herself. She is well aware of the dangers. A Ph.D. from Cornell who graduated with fistfuls of ambition, she is wrestling with these issues herself. It is why she is writing the book. It is why she lays out the historic, economic, and cultural contexts that enable her readers to appreciate how radical the work of homemakers is. As she explains, the history of the United States is a history of a shifting balance of power from homes to corporate institutions, spurred by industrialization, the rise of advertising, and the shift to a consumer culture. By embracing home as central to their living, then, radical homemakers are saying no to corporate dominance, and yes to good old American values of democracy, self-reliance, family, local community, and quality of life. Ambitious indeed.

Nevertheless, the question lingers: is it enough for homemakers to know that what they are doing is radical in these ways? Hayes admits, the radical homemakers who are “truly fulfilled” expand their “creative energies outward,” beyond their homes, in that third phase of rebuilding society. Home becomes the philosophical and practical base for “deeper social accomplishments”; “the fertile ground” that feeds a “deeper fulfillment” (250). As important as this rebuilding phase of homemaking is to her thesis, Hayes spends five pages on it, versus sixty plus pages on the phases of redefining wealth and reclaiming skills.

What is it, then, about radical homemaking that allows us to feel this “deeper fulfillment” more than we would in any other way of living? Is it really about working in the home—or about moving beyond it?

The timer goes off. I stroll to the stove. The curd is done. I smile as it pushes back against my finger. I take out a long knife and cut the curd, back and forth. The knife clicks on the edge of the pan, tapping out a rhythm I consciously repeat. I finish the checkerboard, make some diagonal moves, turn the stove to low, give a good firm stir to the mass, and go back to my desk. It’s coming. So is my blog.

I think about my latest book, What A Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire. In it I talk about the cultural epidemic of depression (that Hayes also describes) as evidence of a dissatisfied desire for spirit. Humans, I argue, have a need for a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that allows us to affirm that our lives are worth living. In the west we undergo a mind over body sensory education that leads us to believe that we will secure the affirmation we seek when we find the right belief, the right practice, or the right community—the right something outside of ourselves to fill our inner lack. We aren’t finding it.

What we need instead, I counter, it to cultivate a sensory awareness of the movements that are making us. When we do, we learn to participate consciously in the process of naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us. It is this participation, I argue, in our own bodily becoming, that will yield the sense of affirmation we seek.

I trot back to the stove and give the cut curd another stir. So, then, is it helpful to think about radical homemaking as a way to express a desire for spirit? How are the movements of radical homemaking making the people who make them?

From the stories Hayes tells, it is clear: the movements that these people are making in their lives, as they redefine, reclaim, and rebuild, are making them into the people they want to be. The movements they are making in every case are addressing acute sensations of discomfort that these people have had. In most of the stories, there is some catalyst—a lost job, a sick child, a divorce, an illness—that breaks them open so that they are able to feel discomfort with their lives, and feel that discomfort as an indictment of corporate dominated forms of work, health care, food production, education, or government.

Further, not only were all of these persons able to feel their discomfort as an indictment of corporate culture, they were also able to find in that discomfort impulses to move differently—they were able to discern what I would call the wisdom in that (frustrated) desire. Instead of wishing the pain away, they were able to feel and receive the impulse to re-center their lives around home-making as a way to name and make real a world in which they want to live.

In this sense, these acts of homemaking are not a nostalgic escape nor a retrenchment in gender roles; they represent creative responses to untenable situations that align with the life conditions that the failure of those situations have enabled them to appreciate as having value. Here Hayes’ analysis is brilliant, for she demonstrates time and again how the move to radical homemaking is what the overwhelming success of corporate power is itself producing in many of us—its own overcoming.

What is it then, about radical homemaking that yields the “ecstasy” that Hayes’ recounts? It is not necessarily the activities of homemaking itself—even at the level of general skills. Rather, the pleasures of gardening or canning, home schooling or baking bread, nurturing relationships or redefining pleasure emerge as a result of how well those movements address the discomfort that the people who are making them have felt: the sense of alienation and isolation; the frustration with work, health, and educational options; the plastic glaze of industrialized food; the stifled creativity.

It is true: in so far as these feelings of discomfort are characteristic of contemporary society and even epidemic in proportion, then the activities of homemaking may prove radical as well to others feeling the same frustrations. Given the kind of challenges we as a society face, the tasks of home making can indeed provide us with opportunities for discovering patterns of relating to ourselves, one another, and the planet that are life-affirming.

However, the power that home has as a site of resistance—and pleasure—is rooted elsewhere: in how the acts of home making encourage people to cultivate the kind of sensory awareness that enables them to participate more and more consciously in the process of sensing and responding to their feelings of discomfort, frustration, and despair as impulses to move differently than cultural norms prescribe. It is this kind of sensory awareness that our dependence on corporate powers discourages us from cultivating.

Here lies the ecstasy Hayes identifies. When people are present in their lives, engaged in actions that require them to cultivate a keener awareness of what their bodily selves know, they will feel that sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that makes life worth living.

I pop back in to check on the cheese. The curds are cooked, wrinkled and squeaky, adrift in a growing sea of golden whey. I pour the curds into cheesecloth, wrap the ends around a wooden spoon and let them hang from the pot. The whey will go to the chickens, or the tomatoes. Then one more hour until salting and pressing, and two months at least before eating. It’s a process, for sure. It takes time.

Is this cheesemaking a radical act? I ponder its pleasures. Sure, I love the sensory dimensions of the seemingly miraculous transformation from liquid to solid. I appreciate the variations and complexities, the possibilities for error and discovery. I also appreciate how I am securing our dairy independence from forms of industrial farming that leave cows to stand all day on concrete, in their own manure, shot through with antibiotics to keep them from getting sick. Milk is a resource we have, in abundance. It makes sense to use it. I appreciate the ability to nourish myself and my children with untreated, local milk products, that come from healthy cows. Our family of seven (mostly) vegetarians saves over a hundred dollars a week by making from milk all that we do.

Then again, I know that in making this cheese I am enabling my kids to do what they want to do--milk their cows--and thus realizing a vision of family where we all work to ensure that each one of us gets what we need to become who we are. I know too, in making these moves, I am making myself into the philosopher and dancer I want to be—ever growing in my understanding how the movements we make in every moment of our lives make us who we are. It’s why we’re here.

Besides--or because--of all these reasons, the cheese is simply, incredibly delicious. Let the revolution continue.

When Social Brains Meet Screen Media

2010-06-23T07:23:00.007-04:00

In her thoughtful and lively book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist Karen Dill deftly moves beyond the question of whether or not our use of screen media affects us. That debate, she confirms, is essentially over: it does.

The more interesting question she asks is why we are so quick to deny such influence. As Dill argues, such denial renders us even more vulnerable to “media effects.” Her task is to help us understand how our media use affects us (without our realizing it), so that we can begin to participate more proactively in the evolution of its form and content, and live healthier lives.

To this end, Dill shakes our glazed gaze free, reminding us that, “The primary reason people produce media is to make money” (47), and not to entertain, educate, or inform, as we might like to believe. Using tools of social psychology, Dill examines how they do: media producers provide eye-catching images and emotion-wringing scripts that stir our primal desires for food, sex, and social belonging. They attract our attention by shocking our sensory selves. We are soon addicted to the charge.

Why are we so vulnerable?

As Dill explains, the form and content of today’s screen media—and she examines television shows, movies, rap music, music videos, video games, advertising, and political coverage—play right into our strengths as the socially-wired creatures we humans are.

Face to face with desire-grabbing images and sense-assaulting scripts, we cannot help comparing ourselves to what we see. We cannot help imitating at a neuro-chemical level the actions that we see. Nor can we help repeating stereotypes about race and gender, or absorbing the persistent, implicit message of many video games, rap songs, and popular films that violence is an acceptable and useful response to life’s conflicts.

In short it is our nature as social creatures to learn from what we see about what is real, what matters, how we should act, and where we should, or do not, fit in. We do so without thinking. Even though we know that what we are seeing is fiction, it registers in our brains as real.

Thus, where our social brains meet screen media, Dill reports, we are apt to grow both increasingly anxious and insecure about our selves (as compared to the media’s ideal forms), and addicted to the virtual and vicarious bursts of pleasure that those same images provide. In such a state we are more vulnerable than ever to promises about what products will fill the gaps that our use of media has opened. Advertisers take note.

To protect ourselves, Dill advises us to assume that we are being manipulated, and then think critically, consume wisely, unplug frequently, vary our intake, and seek out non-screen activities that engage us in a state of flow.
*
As a philosopher and scholar of religion, I warm to many aspects of this book—its wealth of information, its colorful descriptions of psychological experiments, and its illuminating anecdotes. I also appreciate how well Dill’s analysis illustrates the dynamic I describe in What a Body Knows. When it comes to media use, the movements we are making are making us.

As I discuss in WBK, our consumption of media images provides an important part of the sensory education we receive in learning to perceive and respond to our desires for food, sex, and spirit or a sense of direction and belonging. Training our attention to the information coming to us through our screens encourages us to believe that the answers to our most basic questions—what to eat, how to love, who to be—lie outside of ourselves. We come to believe that we will find the nourishment, the intimacy, and the sense of belonging we seek by using our mental powers to form our bodily selves in accord with some (media-mediated) ideal of the perfect body, the most passionate love, or the best belief. If I were only thin, rich, successful, married, or member of the right community, then I would be happy. Yet, as I document at length, as we pursue these externally-oriented, mind-over-body paths to pleasure, we are not getting what we want.

What Dill reminds me is that this capacity to tune in and attune to our environments is not the problem. It is highly adaptive. It is perhaps our greatest strength as the humans we are. It is the source of our ability to empathize with others, to create stable relationships, to act on the basis of compassion and love.

Rather, the problem is that our current quotient of screen time is exercising this social skill at the expanse of its enabling complement: the capacity to attune to our own sensory selves, and find in the movements of our pain and pleasure the guidance we need to know what will support our thriving.

In order to navigate our social worlds effectively, it is not enough to be able to coordinate our movements with what lies around us, we must also be able to register the impact of the movements we make on us. We need to cultivate the sensory awareness of how the movements we make are making us.

Doing so allows us to stay in touch with our freedom. Doing so provides us with a ground in ourselves for discernment. Doing so allows us to perceive the images mediated to us from external sources as catalysts to our creativity, learning, and greater freedom, rather than as proof of our own inadequacy.

My conclusion here aligns with Dill’s: we do need to unplug, and when we do, we need to engage in activities that exercise our attention differently than screen time does. We need to drop in to our bodily selves, and allow our mental machinations to find their roots in the health and well being of our bodily selves. (See how: Come to Your Senses)

As the bodily selves we are, we can’t stop perceiving, feeling, and understanding; we can’t help creating patterns of sensation and response as we do. We can’t stop the rhythms of our bodily becoming, even as we stare into a screen. We can only ask ourselves: what is it that we want to create?

What a Body Knows 4: Why Do We Believe?

2010-06-01T09:20:00.002-04:00

On this first day of June, I offer a final birthday-celebration selection from What a Body Knows!

This one concerns our desire for spirit...... what is it that we really want?

"When surfing for answers to the questions of life’s meaning and purpose, the options dazzle and overwhelm. Every worldview tells a story about what is real and true. Every human tells a story about what a given religion or philosophy means and why it is right. Amidst a weave of stories, personal and communal, shapes of culture emerge, a religion, a philosophy, a way of life.

Yet the differences among the options are less significant than what they share. When we breathe to move and move to breathe, we realize that every symbol, teaching, belief, or practice, philosophy, religion, or treatment plan, itself represents a pattern of movement — multiple patterns of mind, heart, body coordination. Each one is offering us an opportunity to discover inside ourselves the capacity to make the movements it represents, whether those movements involve cultivating a mind over body sense of ourselves, engaging a daily meditation practice, or believing in a vision of the promised land.

As we stretch to consider an idea, bend into a demonstrated posture, or organize our senses around a ritual, we exercise capacities for thinking and feeling and acting in ways other than we had previously experienced. We create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that unfold our talents and gifts.

With this perspective, we arrive at a new understanding of what it means to believe. If the effort of moving with a particular belief or practice ignites a blast of pleasure or joy or healing within us, then our immediate impression is that this symbol or teaching or practice is true, and it is. It is real and true for us because it has allowed us to discover something about ourselves that strikes us as who we are and want to be. Our movements are creating the network of relationships that is actually enabling our unfolding. We believe.

When we believe, then, we are exercising our power to name and bring into being a world we love that loves us. And by exercising this capacity, we stir in ourselves the feelings of vitality, direction, and belonging that our desire for spirit seeks as the condition for our ongoing well being. It is intoxicating.

At first this observation may trouble us. Isn’t there anything to believe or trust that is once and for all true? Are our beliefs and practices mere figments of imagination that we concoct for our own pleasure? Why believe or practice at all?

Breathing to move and moving to breathe, we know why we do. It is not to guarantee ourselves a certain ground or a safe delivery from pain. When we believe and when we practice, we provide ourselves with a sensory trainingthat we cannot get anywhere else. As we learn to make the movements prescribed to us by a given religious platform or program, we wake up to the creative power of our bodily becoming. As we bear witness to the changes in us that our believing and practicing effect, we know our capacity to change. We become aware, as nowhere else, of a basic fact of human bodily life: we are always bodies becoming. We are never not engaged in this process of creating and becoming new patterns of sensation and response. We are never not creating our values, our ideals, our gods, and the relationships by which we live.

We find ourselves believing, and believing in whatever we perceive as enabling us to thrive. God is true because God lives in me enabling me to be who I am.

Once we make this shift in how we experience our will to believe, we have the best criteria available to us for navigating the dizzying array of religious and spiritual options surrounding us. For if, in making the movements we are led to make by a given authority or text or context, we find ourselves separating from the very sensory awareness that is guiding us to seek them out, then we know: the relationship is not one that will support me in giving birth to myself. This is not true for me. I can’t believe.

On the other hand, if, in making the movements, we find ourselves enlivened, unfolded, and brimming with the pleasure of it, then we are inclined to name what is enabling us to become who we are as our religion, our faith, our practice. We make a commitment to let live what is ever enabling us to be. We join the community of those who are similarly moved. We proclaim its truth to all. And as we do, we make that matrix of relationships real: it is enabling us to give birth to ourselves. It is real because it lives in us. We are different.

People with different sets of talents and gifts will find their self-creating powers exercised by different approaches. Those with a large capacity to reason will find more pleasure and truth when engaging perspectives that offer rational arguments for their program. Those with a strong emotional life will warm to dimensions of religious life that emphasize devotion and love. Those with a vibrant kinetic, sensory orientation will gravitate towards forms of belief and practice that allow and encourage them to exercise this capacity for movement as an instrument of discernment.

In any case, a path will be true for me when the movements I am making as I learn to move with it are allowing me to name and make real the relationships that support me in giving birth to myself.

We are complicated. Our bodies are full of mystery. There are capacities for sensation and movement in us that we never even imagine possible. We may discover whole ranges of experience by accident. We may be led to explore other regions by the example of someone else’s account. We may experiment for years without uncovering that trigger that releases the desired responses within us. We may exert all of our efforts in one direction only to be swept sideways into novelty or bliss.

The patterns of movement we must make to unfold who we are are more complex than any rational account can delineate. The imagination of the Universe is far greater than ours. All along the way no one else can ever know or tell us how to awaken the unique patterns of creativity that we each are. It is our desire for spirit, our sensations of pleasure and pain, that provide us with the surest guides we have.

Discerning the wisdom of our desires is a life’s work. The work of a life. The work that a life is. The work that takes a life and more to complete. Yet at any moment along the way, if we are bending the power of our minds to the ongoing rhythms of our bodily becoming, we will find the vitality, the sense of direction, and the deep connection with life that satisfies our desire for spirit."

--What a Body Knows, chapter 23

What a Body Knows 3: Giving the Gift of Yourself

2010-05-26T11:42:00.004-04:00

Ask for what you need, and you will have more to give.

"Lifelong passion may be about learning to love, yet it is not about learning to love in general, as honorable an activity as that may be. It is about learning to love and be loved by a particular person and doing it well.

It is about learning to express love in ways that allow the other to feel that love as a force releasing him or her into freedom and creativity, pleasure and joy. It is about learning to give and receive a touch that is, in this sense, life enabling.

For this journey, there is no formula, map, or destination, only an ever-unfolding process of tuning in to what we and our partners need in order to be released into the flow of the love we share—the flow of our own becoming.

Most of us, however, are not mind readers, or body readers. We don’t know how our partners want and need to be touched. We barely know how we want to be touched. And rather than find out for ourselves, our tendency, given our cultural mind over body training, is to rely on the images of love and sex plied to us. We imagine that touching and being touched is a matter of identifying the right spots and applying pressure as needed. It is a technical matter.

For our part, we want to think of touch as merely physical, for if it is then we can be sure that we will get the satisfaction we desire, even if we are not on the best of terms with our partners. Better yet, we know that we will be able to give it to the other whether or not we feel like it. Satisfaction guaranteed.

However, in attaching to such images, we are not only training ourselves not to ask for what we need, we are training ourselves not to be able to ask for what we need. We cannot imagine that there is work to be done in bringing our sensory awareness to life. We cannot imagine that our tenacious sensations of physical yearning might be pointing towards kinds of touching that are not physical — the gentle question, the inquiring glance, the encouraging comment. Even if we have a small inkling of the need for such work, we are likely to ignore it. For it is easier not to ask than to risk opening ourselves to the disappointment that we, or our partners, will not or cannot touch us as we need to be touched.

No asking, no friction, no fear. So we lose registers of discernment, and the sensory cues that would help us recognize in ourselves what would release us into pleasure. It remains a mystery.

When we don’t know what we need and don’t ask for what we need, even when we think we are doing so for the sake of holding the relationship together, we create pockets of silence in ourselves and in the relationship. Dead spaces. The relationship shrinks; the sensory space it occupies in us shrinks. We are less satisfied with the relationship as it grows less able to provide us with cell opening blasts of life enabling touch. And so is our partner.

When I ask for what I need, I have more to give.

It is a paradox.

When I ask for the touch I need, just ask, without expectation, as a way of being present to myself and with you, I give you the greatest gift. I give you what you need to succeed in doing what you want to do: love me. I give you the pleasure of releasing me into ever-greater love for you.

Intimacy deepens. Love grows, and I find in myself more capacities for responding to you when you ask of me.
This logic cuts across conventional wisdom and bears repeating. When we do not ask for what we need in order to rekindle our experience of cell-opening passion, we prevent our partner from getting what he or she desires. When we ask for the kind of touch that will enable us, and when we open to explore what that might be, we give the gift that is most desired: the gift of ourselves."

A birthday celebration excerpt from What a Body Knows, chapter 14

What a Body Knows 2: The pleasures of eating

2010-05-15T07:01:00.005-04:00

We are biologically hardwired, aren’t we, to want more food, always more? The failures of our massive efforts in dieting away the pounds or designing an effective drug are proof. Aren’t they? Look again. If anything, the human digestive system is designed to maximize our ability to move, not our ability to take in food.

Think about it. Humans stand upright. As a result of our upright posture, we have a mobility that is rare among animals. We do not hibernate. Our transformation from infant to adult does not involve a cocoon or chrysalis stage. We are constantly moving. We are not the fastest or strongest. We are not the most agile or deft. What characterizes our movement is its novelty: we are constantly learning to make new movements, new patterns of sensing and responding that guide us in thinking, feeling, and acting. As a result of this ability, we have proven ourselves capable of finding food and making ourselves at home in nearly every climate on earth.

At every point, our digestive system enables us in making these movements. Our manner of processing what we consume provides us with a steady stream of energy so that we can keep moving. We do not eat one meal a week and sleep it off like other carnivores. Nor do we spend a third of every day grazing like the large herbivores. Instead we move through recurring cycles of hunger and fullness over a 24-hour period. We stomach small, dense meals, mostly cooked, preferably several a day. These rhythms of digestion allow us time between meals to hunt, gather, and grow food, while still providing us with the steady stream of nourishment we need in order to do so. Even when we are in a position to eat more energy than we are burning, we store it all over the body, in patterns that, until we are extremely obese, maximize our ability to keep moving. We eat to keep moving so that we can eat to keep moving from environment to environment, season to season, continent to continent, meal to meal. And in order to move, we must stop eating.

Further, in making the food-finding movements that our digestive system enables and requires, we have evolved to rely on our sensory awareness as a primary guide. Unlike many of our animal siblings, we can catch and cook, chew and digest almost anything. Our food needs are not determined by instinct or climate. We have to make choices about what to eat, how to acquire it, and when and how to eat it. We have no choice but to choose. While culture and tradition and habit do constrain these choices, the surest guide we ever have is our senses. We are creatures who can and must use all of our senses — taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing — to guide us in identifying, pursuing, and securing what will nourish us and rejecting what will not. The foods we are primed to sense as pleasurable, then, are those that support us in the ongoing project of moving, sensing, and responding to food. Our survival depends upon it.

Gathering the pieces together, this picture is suggestive. The pleasure we derive from food does not come from the quantities of vitamins and minerals, or the salts or sugars present in a chemical substance. The pleasure we seek comes from participating in the process of learning how, when, what, and why to eat so that we can keep moving. The pleasure we seek comes from the experience of finding our way to a sense of enough so that we can stop eating, as we must, and keep moving.

The problem is not that our desires run rampant in the field of abundance; the problem is that we have lost touch with the desires that are and remain our best guide wherever we are. Our dissatisfaction is calling us to tune into our sensory awareness, and to find our way to a sense of enough.

Excerpted from What a Body Knows, chapter 5, "A Sense of Enough"

What a Body Knows, 1

2010-05-06T16:38:00.007-04:00

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).

Do What You Can--For the Earth

2010-03-31T09:55:00.010-04:00

The air on my cheek is cool and moist. The room is silent. My opening eyes greet gray. It is 6:16 AM. My partner sleeps to one side; our infant the other. How can I move? I am sure to disturb someone.

Carefully, slowly, I wriggle out into the morning. I get dressed, go downstairs, eat a banana, lace up my shoes, and head out the door.

A rush of spring warmth hits my face and I breathe deeply. It is good to get out, be out, feel freely out. I need this walk. Why?

Is it my ecological unconscious? The ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak is convinced that we have one. Humans, he writes, have evolved with a fundamental biological need to be in nature, surrounded by nature, subject to its winding winds, its rhythms and rains. Doing so nourishes us, relaxes us, and stimulates our health. When we ignore this need, he claims, in avid pursuit of money and material goods, we make ourselves sick. We act in ways that make our earth sick. The pain of our psychological neuroses, he continues, are providing us with the impetus to move differently in relation to the natural world.

I walk along the road under a low white sky, wrapped with feelings of expectation. The earth looks silent, but I hear the birds singing of a soon-to-be springing, calling it forth. In days, every surface around me will ripple and hum with emerging shapes of life.

As I move my arms in large circles, the energy rises in me, pulling my legs into a jog. A cramp wrinkles my right hip. As I breathe down into the pain to explore its source, my right toe turns in, and the hip grip releases. How did my bodily self know what it needed?

I think back to Roszak. Our only hope, he claims, in addressing our mutually entwined psychological and ecological crises, is to learn to discern, trust, and move with our intimate, unending connection with the natural world. He writes: “What the Earth requires will have to make itself felt within us as if it were our most private desire” (47).

A flash of white by the side of the road catches my eye—a McDonald’s bag. Here, miles from any store, I find someone’s litter. If not a fast food wrapper, then cigarette boxes and butts, or beer cans or bottles. The people who put trash into their own bodies hurl their wrappers onto the earth’s body. Why are we so careless with our bodily selves? I pass by for now, vowing to pick it up on the way back.

Small trash. Big trash. I swallow a surge of righteous indignation. I pollute too. I know that the gas fueling my car spews toxic fumes; that the cheese wrappers and cereal-box bags we buy filled at the grocery store land in someone’s backyard; that at least some of the electricity fueling our lights, well-pump, water heater, and my computer is produced by processes that leach some burning byproduct into the atmosphere. Sure, I can pick up the bag, but who will remove my waste from the air, water, and soil?

Author Bill McKibben reminds us: there is no longer any place on earth where the atmosphere does not contain traces of human pollutants. For Roszak, any animal that soils its habitat as we are doing is by definition, crazy.

What am I to do? I can recycle and reuse, but the pile of trash keeps growing.

I turn the corner onto a dirt road. It is soft beneath my feet. The snowmelt has eroded the edges. Soon the mighty town Tonkas, running on my tax dollars, will pass through to rebuild the road, moving the earth so it can and will support our transportation habits.

A blast of stinging drops bounces off my cheeks. For a second I pause, surprised, then tuck my chin and keep going. But the shock has woken me up. I shake out my fingers and hand, rotate my shoulders, wiggle my hips, happy to be alone on this deserted stretch of dirt. I can make new moves, silly moves, playful moves, and feel the pleasure of doing so. I can take in the elements, and ride them. There is no one watching. Joy swells.

What new moves can we make to ensure the health and wellbeing of the elements that not only surround us but are us?

Yesterday I read a recent and rare interview with biologist James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, now 90. He is not so sure we can learn to make new moves. As he says: “I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.” We have too much inertia. Our patterns are too entrenched.

I know what he means—we aren’t clever enough. But it is not because the problem is too big and complex. The sign that we are not clever enough is that we keep trying to address the problem by relying on the same patterns of sensation and response that got us here in the first place. We keep approaching the problem as a mind-over-body problem, sure that if we can just find the right argument, the right data, the right technological fix, we will have what we need to reign in the forces we have unleashed that are destroying our habitat.

But world pollution is not a problem that is amenable to mind-over-body solutions. Its roots wind way down into the very substratum of nearly every individual life that participates in western civilization at all. Simply by living in this country, we are complicit in economies, politics, policies, and patterns of consumption that are depleting our earth's ability to sustain life to an unfathomable, immeasurable degree.

As Lovelock admits, only some catastrophic event has the capacity to dislodge us from our inertia. As Roszak insists, it is a matter of desire.

To change our current course, we have to shed the selves that our participation in these economies have enabled us to become, and the expectations, hopes, values, and ways of being we have developed in response. It’s not just that we have to stop throwing trash out the window. We need to stop making it, buying it, and consuming it. There is no window. We are the earth and the earth is us.

The task sounds impossible. Is it? Can we grow into people who can and will and want to tackle the issues of how we humans are impacting the planet? What would it mean to be clever enough? What would it mean to be sane?

I reach the half way mark and turn around. I will be needed at home. It’s down hill for a while now. I ride on the gravity lift; my stride lengthens. My movement reminds me.

Do what you can.

It is not an all or nothing proposition. We can only begin where we are, and move towards where we want to go. And the first step is, literally, to be where we are. The first is to cultivate the kinds of sensory awareness that will allow us to discern the desire of the earth sprouting in us—a sensory awareness of our own absolute dependence upon the natural world. It is to discern the desire of the earth taking shape in our desires for food, for intimacy, and for spiritual fulfillment. It is to learn to find the wisdom in these desires, impelling us to ask questions, demand alternatives, and one by one, create the matrix of relationships that support us in becoming who people who can and will and want to honor the earth in us and around us.

It is time to move.

I pick up the bag, a candy wrapper, and beer bottle, and make it home. The rubbish in my hands reminds me: do what you can. I turn off a few lights. Brush crumbs off some not-so-dirty plates. Fold the clothes that have only been worn once. Toss bottles and boxes and cans and white paper into the recycling bins. So little, never enough. But the actions remind me: Do what you can.

Later in the day, sitting at my computer, I follow a news trail to a People's Petition to cap greenhouse gases that is being circulated by 350.org. I remember to sign it. You can too.

Obesity Is Inevitable, Or Is It?

2010-03-05T11:06:00.011-05:00

When it comes to obesity, our solutions are perpetuating the problem.

Take the welter of posts in response to a NYTimes article this week. The range of comments was typical. The article could have been any one of a number of articles reporting on obesity facts or findings, causes or cures.

There is always some disagreement regarding: the name (is it an epidemic?), the definition of obese (how much is too much?), and the relationship between weight and health (too thin isn’t good either). In general, however, researchers have tracked trajectories of obesity-related diseases well enough to establish cause for concern.

Beyond that, suggestions for what to do fan out along a familiar spectrum.

At one end, commentators argue over which “lifestyle” factors are the most relevant. We read stories of how, when, what, and why people should eat, exercise, and sleep; we learn what he cut out and what she added; what she lost and what he gained. One refrain repeats with a rhythmic drone: eat less, exercise more.

At the other end of the spectrum, commentators blame the biological parameters of our bodily selves, citing genes, metabolisms and, as the Times article describes, the ever wily wiggles of our energy-storage systems. For those at this end, hope for a “cure” lies in finding the right drug or surgical procedure, in public policy changes or simply in a greater social acceptance of what are now the fat facts.

Despite the apparent range of these responses, however, all points on the spectrum share a common value that both drives modern western culture and renders obesity an inevitable component of contemporary life.

What is that value?

It is one that equates goodness with mental control over material bodies of various kinds, whether earthen, animal, and human. We want bodies to fit into whatever measurements and expectations “we” set for them. Whether we aim for health or wealth, achievement or invention, work or relaxation, art, entertainment or climate optimization, “we” want bodies to do what they are told. We value anything that serves, supports, or expresses such control as good. Mind over body is who we want to be, who we practice being, and who we come to believe we are.

Given this value that our culture places on mind over body control, obesity is inevitable. Why? When we practice ignoring and overriding our bodily sensations, we are “free” to develop patterns of eating that bear little or no relation to what our bodily selves actually need to function.

We come to believe that we can eat whatever we want regardless of how it affects our bodies. We want it to be true; we act as if it were. If the food we eat makes us sick, we take drugs to hide the symptoms—drugs that lower cholesterol, adjust blood pressure, speed digestion, or tamp down indigestion (a weight-loss pill still eludes).

In short, we want to be "free" to eat whatever we want to eat and have the results of our eating conform to whatever we want our bodies to look like. We equate this mind over body freedom with pleasure to such a degree that we can’t even acknowledge our own pain or discomfort until it is too late: the problem seems beyond our control.

I am not blaming people of any size. Nor am I blaming bodies or genes or desires or cultural habits for eluding our control. There is a deeper logic at work in which we all participate that is addictive and self-sustaining. When we think that we can think our way to health and wellbeing, whether through individual will power or scientific research, we perpetuate an ignorance of our bodily selves that finds expression in a disconnect between what we eat and what will give us the pleasure of being nourished. Whether we overeat or undereat, the logic is the same.

However, once we can recognize how embedded in our ways of living the problem is, we can also find seeds of hope. For we begin to remember how hard we practice to make our mind over body beliefs seem true. We discern how the movements that we make as we eat (or not) are making us into people who think and feel and act as if they are minds over bodies. We see the contradictions:

--Diets “work” to addict us to the idea that a diet will work.
--Biological determinism calls on the power of our minds to assert the powerlessness of our minds.
--Lifestyle changes appeal by promising that our sense of ourselves need not change: we can retain the same mind over body control we want to believe we are.

In each case, we may alleviate some of the symptoms, but not address the source.

However, because we see the power of our own movement in making us, we can begin to acknowledge the sources of our strength.

We are not who we think we are. If we are really interested in addressing eating practices and attendant health problems, we need a change that is both subtle and huge. We need to practice sensing and discerning what our bodily selves know. We need to engage in movement practices that help us do so (as I have been describing in recent posts 1 and 2). In relation to food, we need to learn to give ourselves an experience of being nourished, by following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough. It is a life time practice.

This is not a question of “reconnecting” with our bodies, or being “mindful” of what we are eating, or even of “listening” to our bodies. All of these models leave intact the privilege of mind over (a now closer) body. Rather, we need movement practices that help us shift our experience of who we are and where our wisdom lies. We need to learn to find, trust, and discern the wisdom in our desires—and not just our desire for food. As I demonstrate in What a Body Knows, our desire for food is thoroughly entwined with our desires for sex and spirit.

From this shifted way of being, we will be able to create new values that express the care and attention to our bodily selves that we are practicing.
*
The obesity epidemic is a recent social phenomenon, but that does not mean that its proximate causes are new. We have arrived at a point in history where values that have guided human enterprise and invention for centuries have generated a critical mass of technologies, habits, and practices that are tipping us into an untenable situation.

Where the physical actions of a day’s labor, the lived experience of art and entertainment, and the personal contact with family and friends used to provide a counterbalance to mind over body practices, now many of us are “free” to sit in front of screens all day. We are making movements that are making us. Again, it is not just a matter of a sedentary life, it is a matter of the values that our arrival at this sedentary moment in history is expressing.

Until we are free to do what we must for our health and wellbeing, we won’t be free.

It's Not (Just) About Food

2010-02-15T09:05:00.004-05:00

I just read a book by a colleague of mine, Michelle Lelwica. Her book, Religion of Thinness, is brimming with insights on the sources and supports of eating disorders, including one I want to highlight here.

You can’t (just) think your way out of an eating disorder.

Lelwica explains why. By using categories drawn from the study of religion (myth, icon, ritual, morality, community, and salvation), she is able to document a set of phenomena in contemporary culture that function as a self-reinforcing system, what she calls a “religion.” People with eating disorders believe that by engaging in rituals of food manipulation (whether dieting, binging, purging, obsessing, calorie counting, or some combination of all), they will find the happiness and acceptance they desire.

The system works because the practices have real physiological effects that provide those who perform them with immediate feedback and concrete measures of success. People lose (or gain) weight; experience all manner of chemical rushes, sugars to endorphins, and in the process, cultivate a sensory awareness of these effects as proof that they are OK. The effects of the practices make the beliefs seem true.

Moreover, this net of beliefs and practices is not only self-reinforcing, but as Lelwica suggests, the needs it serves are real. Her discussion about what human “spirits” need resonates with what I describe in What a Body Knows as a “desire for spirit”: humans desire a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that allows them to affirm their lives as worth living.

Manipulating food is one way to pursue the sense of satisfaction, and it is particularly powerful because it enlists another primal desire—a desire for an experience of nourishing ourselves. As I discuss in WBK, nourish and nurture are forever entwined. Eating disorders extend a mind-over-body diet mentality to life as a whole: if I were thin, if I could attain perfect control of my body, I could get the life I want.

For these reasons, then, you can’t think your way out of an eating disorder. It is not enough to develop a critical immunity to cultural images of thinness. It is not enough to modify behaviors. Nor is it enough to deal with whatever fear, pain, and stress might prompt you to buy into the “religion of thinness.” While all of these interventions are helpful to some extent, none work at the level at which an eating disorder functions as a(n unhealthy) religion. Its patterns of belief and practice, icons and values hook into a set of basic physical and emotional needs and provide tangible, if deadly, life-depleting results.

Healing from an eating disorder requires that you lose your religion. Losing your religion means finding a new one.

The path to doing so is challenging, for it requires shifting your most basic experience of being in the world at the level where you sense and respond to your own bodily self as well as the bodily selves of others; and from this shifted place, embracing or creating the beliefs, images, practices, values, and human communities that will support you in that care-full attention to your bodily self. It’s risky. Scary. The results aren’t guaranteed.

So how do you do it?
*
Leif, 8 months yesterday, is standing. For the past month he has been pulling and pushing himself up onto his tiny feet at every turn and resting there for ten or twenty seconds at a time. His smile curls his cheeks into ruddy mounds; he waves his hands joyfully. Yet he has absolutely no interest in moving his feet. He will reach forward to the floor, sit backward on his rear, and even twist sideways to land on his hands, but his feet, rooted to the earth, won’t budge. It’s as if he is living up to his name, and trying to be a tree.

He reminds me: if you want to walk, you have to be willing to fall. Every time you take a step, for a fraction of an instant, you are aloft and moving through space. In that moment you must trust that the ground is going to be there for you, that your spine will connect to it through your legs, and that your center will hold you up.

How do we ever venture to take such a risk? There comes a moment when we are able to feel a pulse of energy that rises in ourselves and takes shape in our muscles as a desire to move. There comes a moment when we are willing to trust our bodily selves and allow new patterns of sensing and responding to walk us into a new world--a world of walking and walkers.
*
In counseling her readers to lose the religion of thinness, Lelwica identifies alternative resources across a range of religious traditions, and guides readers through specific practices of mindfulness for heightening awareness of their sensations, and promoting inner peace.

All good. I would add as well that we need to engage in bodily practices that help us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. We need to remember what it takes to walk.

Sometimes practices of sitting and stillness can serve to reinforce the sensory education we receive in perceiving our bodies as material objects, there for us to control. To shift this experience at its root, we need practices that provide us with an experience of our bodily selves as something other than the mind over body self that the religion of thinness itself exemplifies. We need practices that help us learn how to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom of our own bodily selves—such as those I described in my last entry.

Such movement practices yield a network of energizing, vitalizing pleasures that are capable of holding their own against the immediacy of eating practices. They put us back into our bodily selves, so we are more able to feel and follow the arc of our eating pleasure. They provide us with a lived experience of discerning, trusting, and moving with impulses that arise in us. They thus provide us with an experiential ground that can support a matrix of beliefs, icons, and values that affirm this rhythm of bodily becoming.

As I explore in WBK, humans look to religion for the opportunity to exercise their ability to name and make real the world in which they want to live. It is by participating consciously in this process that we find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we need in order to affirm our lives as worthwhile. It is not so much about identifying the right belief or the right practice or the right vision of life as much as it is about the willingness to take the risk of finding ways of being that support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. It's not just about food.

We can learn to launch ourselves forward into space, willing and able to inhabit space, take up space, and move through it, because we are alive. Step by step, we walk into a new world.

See my 5-star amazon review of Religion of Thinness!

Come to Your Senses

2010-02-01T16:14:00.004-05:00

It is one of the first lessons that any dancer learns: if you want to go up, you have to go down. If you want to soar with the greatest of ease, first you must bend your knees.

It is a lesson rich with implications. For example, the movement down might seem to lead in the opposite direction of where you want to go. I want to go up! It might seem to delay gratification. It might even seem to pose an obstacle to what you desire. The reverse is true: going down is the movement that enables a dancer to go up.

Further, since it is impossible to stay up forever, going down is also the movement that enables a dancer to land without falling. It is her ability to complete the arc of a jump that gives that jump its dynamism and punch.

This logic characterizes all natural processes. It is not just a question of balance, but of a rhythmic oscillation that involves moving in two opposing directions in order to move at all. We must exhale to inhale, sleep to wake, eat to run, and so on.

It is a logic that our mind over body training teaches us to ignore.
*
I ended last blog asking about the kind of movement practice that would provide us with the sensory education we need in order to ensure that our use of electronic devices in particular and technology in general serves the ongoing health and well being of our selves and the planet.

Short answer: we need movement practices that encourage us to bend our knees.

Longer Answer: The driving force in our technological development, one with long roots in western civilization, is to resist the downward pull of nature. We aspire to transcend our sensory selves and go to god, or at least into rarified realms of objective reason. We want to protect ourselves from the shocks and uncontrollable wildness of the natural world, while harnessing its power for our own ends. The latest gear promises to save us time and energy, to save us from manual labor, pain and death, to save us from ourselves. Following this path, we use our screen devices to move up and out of our bodies into vibrating virtual realms of imagination, abstraction, and ease.

We take it as a sign of advancement that, in the middle of a cold winter night, we can be wide awake, texting on a blackberry in a warm, well lit room, drinking coffee and eating bananas.

Yet our insulation has become isolation. Living in contemporary times, we hardly even feel the downward pull of nature in us and around us. The technologies that connect us with people and places and knowledge around the world lure us away from a sensory awareness of the nature of ourselves and the oscillating movement that sustains our existence. We stand on tiptoe, trying to reach higher and higher.

To balance this upward flight, then, we need to engage in practices that draw our attention back down into our bodies and out through our senses. Given this aim, it doesn’t really matter what kind of movement you make. What matters is whether you open to sense and appreciate how the movements you are making are making you.

I offer four guidelines.

1. Move in ways that require you to breathe. Of course, every movement we make requires us to breathe, and breathing itself is a movement we make that makes us. However, when we engage in movements that require us to breathe more and other than we do when sitting or standing, several shifts happen. We become more aware of the fact that we are breathing and that we need to breathe. We also shake off the patterns of compressed breathing that we have mastered in our quest for moving up into our minds. Most of us never breathe to our full capacity. We have forgotten what it feels like. We don’t even know that we are not breathing with our bodily selves. We have lost the ability to sense what we aren't sensing. So move in a way that demands that you breathe big.

2. Move in ways that require (some) coordination. When we engage in movements that require the repetition of specific patterns of coordinating our limbs and lobes, several shifts happen. First, we become aware of the fact that we are always making patterns, and that we have the capacity to learn to make new patterns. Second, in so far as we are moving in ways that are requiring us to breathe, we will also find that our differences in our breathing generate new experiences of the movements we are making. Our experience of the movement pattern changes, depending on whether we are inhaling or exhaling, winded or full. We find our running stride lengthens, our yoga stretch deepens, or our swimming stroke quickens. So move in a way that requires you to execute patterns of sensation and response.

3. Move to invite your attention into your breathing, moving bodily self. When we are moving to breathe and breathing to move, the breathing movement exerts a downward pull on our attention, drawing us to notice what we are feeling as we move. Let it. Feel the twinge of a muscle ache, the pinch of a stitch, the ease of a released cramp. When you do, you are feeling how the movements you are making are making you. Your movements are producing those sensations and your responses to them. And once you realize this fact, you can also begin to sense that you have the ability to make movements that will not produce whatever feelings of discomfort you may be feeling. You begin to appreciate the wisdom of your bodily self. You open to the rushes of energy and vitality that strengthen your sense of who you are.

4. Move, if you can, near nature. The nature in us responds to the nature around us in ways that help us come to our senses. Nature offers experience in the round, engaging all of our senses in ways that extend beyond their ranges. Move in ways that place you in infinity.

Run, walk, bike, swim, dance, ski, do yoga, stretch, mow, play tennis, fold laundry, clean the house.

If we move to breathe and breathe to move in patterns of rhythmic, coordinated action, with a willingness to have our attention drawn into our sensory selves, preferably in a natural setting, we will develop the internal criteria we need in order to discern when it is time to unplug from our virtual worlds and reconnect with the lived experience of our sensory selves. We will know when we start to suffer from an isolation from our sensory selves. We will feel the discomfort of it and seek to move differently.

We will also have the internal sense we need to make sure that the thoughts we are thinking and the dreams we are dreaming while soaring in our virtual realms will support us in replenishing our sensory sources, so we can jump again. We will be more likely to generate ideals and pursue values that honor the earth in us and around us as the condition for our thinking and dreaming at all.

Going up is great, ecstatic even. But to do it well, we need to be able to bend our knees and land on our feet.

Plugged in, Turned on, Tuned Out

2010-01-22T17:12:00.007-05:00

Findings published from the third installment of the Kaiser Foundation’s research project on children and their use of media shocked technophobes and -philes alike. According to the report, kids ages 8-18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day plugged into an electronic device (such as an ipod, smart phone, computer, or television). This figure does not include an extra hour and a half spent texting or talking on cell phones; time devoted to homework, or an extra three and a half hours of media exposure accrued by multitasking.

As one commentator concedes: it no longer makes sense to debate whether such technological use is good or bad. We need to “accept it” as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Must we equate ipods with oxygen? Debates over the morals and merits of technology are as old as human civilization. There are questions to ask that move us beyond good and evil.

1. Are we using our tools in ways that weaken the sensory capacities they extend?

Every human invention extends a set of basic bodily capacities in a direction farther than it could otherwise go, and in effect, reduces our need for developing those skills and sensations.

Recall Socrates’ debate, for example, over the act of writing, as an extension of our capacity to remember. When we write something down in order to remember it, aren’t we giving ourselves permission to forget?

2. Who is using whom?

The tools we use organize our patterns of physical and mental movement; shape our thoughts; space and time our tasks, and map our sensory awareness. Using tools grants us a sense of ourselves, and what we can do. It structures our relationships to other people, places, and elements. Whether pencil or plow, book or boat, ipod or iphone, the tools we use use us to make them work. We learn, in using the tool, what turns us on.

The issue these questions share concerns our participation in the rhythms of our bodily becoming. The movements we make are making us. But how? As we invest ourselves in this technology, are we cultivating a range of skills and sensibilities that aligns with our ongoing health and well being?

Answers are trickling in for kids who are plugged in. Regarding the sensory education such technology use provides, evidence is emerging of a correlation (at least) between hours spent consuming media and pounds added consuming calories. However, the causal factor between childhood obesity and screen use, believe it or not, does not seem to be sitting.

While researchers point to food advertisements as encouraging excess intake, the issue may have more to do with how screen use educates our senses. While watching a screen, regardless of whether we are in a chair or on an exercise bike, we train our attention away from what our bodily selves are doing and towards what is coming to us through the monitor. Tuned in we tune out. We reinforce the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies that causes us to override the wisdom of our bodily selves in all realms of our lives--including in our ability to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough.

Moreover, in using these devices we not only train ourselves to think and feel and act as if we were minds in bodies, we train ourselves to desire this sense of ourselves as itself a primary source of pleasure, accomplishment, and even health. Our dopamine level surges when we override our bodily discomfort to check email, harvest soybeans in Farmville, or receive the latest tweet from our favorite star.

As for how our tools are using us, commentators regularly comment on the enhanced multitasking ability of the techno-savy. However, it isn’t the multi in this formula that is new. Humans have been manipulating complex maps of parallel and entinwed processes for millennia in order to survive. What is new is the sensory and kinetic range of the tasks: since media use occupies a smaller swath of bodily selves than the tasks of, for example, making all our own food and clothing, we can indeed train ourselves to tolerate more of them.

So what difference does it make if our kids use these technologies in ways that reinforce their sense of themselves as minds over bodies, and reduce their sensory range?

I offer three points, knowing there are more.

First, Rodolfo Llinas' recent book argues that how bodies move influences how brains develop. One implication, anticipated by Nietzsche in Human All Too Human, is that when we train ourselves to still our bodily selves in order to think and read and write, we cut ourselves off from a primary realm of our creativity—our senses—and the source of materials through which we think at all. It is not an accident that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a dancer.

A related vein of inquiry concerns empathy. As the Blakeslees document, people with a greater visceral awareness—that is, a heightened awareness of their own feelings and sensations—demonstrate a greater capacity to empathize with other humans. Such empathic qualities correlate regularly with the ability to create and maintain mutually life-enabling relationships. One implication is that bodily practices that train our attention away from our sensory selves—even in the name of networking—may diminish our capacity to form strong, mutually beneficial relationships with other humans. (In what sense are fellow Facebookers friends?)

A third line of concern is one Richard Louv raises in his book, Last Child in the Woods. Louv diagnoses a nature-deficit disorder among our children, precipitated in part by an increased use in technological devices. As kids train their senses away from the natural world, they don’t learn how to be in the natural world—how to open to receive it. They think that “nature” is what they see in their wildlife videos, and get bored with the real thing.

Louv asks: where is the next generation of environmentalists and natural scientists who will be able to notice and care about the destructive impact humans are having on the very web of life that enables them to be?

Whether we are talking about the relationship to our bodily selves, to other humans, or to the natural world, then, the logic is the same. We may be losing our ability to sense and enact what we need in order to be able to create relationships that will support us in our ongoing sensing and enacting. Nietzsche called such a state decadence.

We do know that the question of how to cultivate relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world is a primary challenge we confront in the 21st century. It is also clear that electronic devices are not about to disappear.

The question that arises then is this: what kind of practices can or must we engage alongside our electronic device use, so that we can be sure to develop the sensory awareness we need to engage and use this technology in ways that enhance our ability to thrive?

Next week: what kind of movement matters?

Only 51 weeks left!

2010-01-08T16:37:00.005-05:00

How are those resolutions?

Around this time of year, emotions are complex. You may feel unhappy that the home holidays are over, as well as relieved that the rounds of rituals and relatives are done. Pleased to be back with a familiar routine, yet bored by the grind. Eager for what is yet to come, and burdened by what has not yet been done. Glad and sad to leave 2009; both poised and unprepared to greet 2010. Energized and exhausted, elated and depressed; ready to go, ready to rest. Ending and beginning again.

It is hard to know what to do with all of the ambivalence. The reigning rubric for this passage in time is resolution. There is a tendency is to want to resolve the welter of emotions into a set of resolutions that you plan to enforce with new resolve. So you compress the chaos into a numbered list, and forge the tensions to an iron will. You vow to stick to some species of diet, asserting control over something that flows through your bodily self, whether calories, actions, or words. This year I will succeed!

Or perhaps you are disillusioned by all this resolving and respond to the mayhem by rejecting the ritual as a set-up for disappointment. Too often, as you know, resolving is simply a matter of re-solving, applying the same old solutions to the same old problems year after year without success. For what significance does a calendar count carry anyway? Life continues, regardless.

Why celebrate the slipping of time at all?
*
The kids are milling about, waiting for our ritual. Every New Year’s Eve, we create one. For the past couple of years we have sailed milkweed pod boats loaded with sticky burrs and other symbolic bits into the fire of our wood stove, delighting in the firecrackling bursts. This year, however, we haven’t collected any boats or burrs. It’s cold and dark. Kyra is already asleep on the couch.

I am out of ideas. Will our ritual fail? At least I can gather some pens and paper, surely we will write something. I select a rainbow of ink colors so each person can have his or her own. What else do we have lying around? I find a can of mixed nuts that Geoff bought for the holidays. A chocolate bar house gift. Sprigs of sage from a local farm. Branches of evergreen cut from our Christmas tree. A candle and matches. I make a pile. Something will come of this.

We wake up Kyra, sit in a circle by the stove, and light the candle. An idea pops into my mind: A book! Our neighbor recently taught us how to make a six-page book out of one piece of paper. Let’s do it! I show the kids how: fold and bend, one small cut, and fold again. Soon we are each holding small books in the palms of our hands. They feel magic.

Words flow from my mouth. For each open fold, pick a realm of your life, three in all, and write down the qualities and character you want that realm to have in the year to come. We’ll try it.

Kyra wants help. She shows me her book. She has named her themes: Family. Life. Love. What else to say? I am scribbling madly, reaching deep into myself, wanting it all. I make a book for small Leif. We are writing our lives.

After filling our books we cradle them gently. I pass around the can of nuts. There are seven kinds. Pick one. We all have different hopes and needs and wishes and wants. Go for it. Be yourself. Be nutty! (Afterwards we realized that we each picked a different nut.)

The kids crunch their choices. I pass the chocolate. The no-fail cure for those times when dementors steal all your happy memories. Remember the sweetness we share. Our family will nourish you.

As the chocolate finishes its round, I pass the evergreen branch tips: keep your dreams evergreen. Then I pass the sage: a fragrant spice to carry your prayers to the heavens.

We bundle the sage and evergreen into our books (we’ll keep the chocolate and nuts, thank you), and line up to toss our wads into the fire—the books of our lives, leaves of our loves. We let them go. We blow out the candle and talk softly. We realize how much our ritual embodied the community that supports us--friends, family, neighbors are all enabling us to write our own stories. We go to bed.
*
Why do it? It is not to resolve what roils. Rather, we celebrate in order to stir it all up—all of our competing desires and hopes, our conflicting wants and wishes, all the sheer, raw energy of our bodily selves.

For when we stir the embers of our bodily selves, releasing the emotions we have and hold, we open ourselves up to currents of creativity streaming through us. We crack open our small minds to the imagination of the universe, far greater than ours, that lives in our bodily selves and through our bodily selves, in the form of impulses to move that we can open to receive. What do you want? What can you want? What is there to want?

Think back ten years, five or even one—did you imagine then that you would be where you are now? Could you have even imagined it? How is it that you think you can imagine now what the best path for you will be?

Our capacity to predict and plan, to rationalize and hold in line, is a vital resource for sure. We need goals and projects, schedules and schemas. But we also need moments when we break ourselves open to insights coursing through our singular selves that no one else can know but us. And we need moments where we affirm that our ability to carry through our plans and projects depends on a web of relationships that extends beyond us, supporting us in being and becoming the singular selves we are.

Here is where ritual has power. For its actions grab our minds and direct our attention to what we are sensing, to the movements we are making, so that we can discern the impulses to connect that are stirring in us. We want to connect with what our bodily selves know. We want to connect with each other. We affirm the mystery in which we are always already participating as we bring into being a world we love that loves us.

So what is there to resolve? Perhaps it’s better to consider what we want to dis-solve—any well-intended mental constructs that pit us against our bodily selves in the name of ideals that aren’t really ours.

Perhaps it’s time to shake out our re-solving and learn to discern what our bodies know. Call it my new year’s dissolution.

* Photos taken in ice storm on December 25

Mary and Mrs. Claus

2009-12-24T14:14:00.004-05:00

I woke up this morning in the dark, a deep, deepening dark. For a fraction of an instant I wondered. Will this darkness end? Will it ever be light again? Is it true that I (along with the rest of the hemisphere) am poised to swing back on a grand arc of time toward the sun? Or might this darkness engulf me in an eternal night?

The dark is pregnant with possibilities.
*
Many tell the Christmas story, and many of those tellings focus on the Christ child. He was conceived. He was carried. He is born. He lives, a divine Presence, with us.

Nevertheless, hidden within all those passive verbal constructions following his name is the one without whom he wouldn’t have happened: Mary.

For me, the Christmas story is about Mary.

Mary conceives. Whether you translate virgin as “young maiden” or “without sex,” the thrust of the story is the same. Young Mary needed no other human person to begin her journey into motherhood. The mother matter was between her and god, a purely personal relationship: god is with her, in her full bodily self, and she opens to say yes. Yes to desire. Yes to her self. My soul doth magnify the lord. Her innermost sensory self is where god will be grown.

Mary carries. In saying yes to her god-self, she says yes to entering the darkness. She is pregnant for the first time. She is not wed. The outcomes are far from clear. Will she live? Will her bodily self know what to do? Will her baby live? Will she be shunned into eternal night? Or embraced by the arms of welcoming kin? How could her sparkling yes not be shrouded with fear, doubt, despair, and loneliness?

Only Joseph is with her as they set out together for Bethlehem, leaving behind hearth and home, riding for miles, for hours, for days, nine months pregnant, on the back of a donkey. What sustains her through the taxing physical, emotional, spiritual ordeal?

Jesus, of course, moves in the darkness too, but his is a warm uterine wrap. He is along for a rhythmic ride, waiting for the waves of her contractions to wash him onto the sands of an air-born world. In her dark night, it is his movement within her that comforts her. He is alive. She can feel it. She has reason to believe.

Mary gives birth. She is waiting in a stable, dark and cold. Joseph is there, but what does he know about birth? What does she know? A sweet smell of coarse hay mixes with animal breath.

There, Mary labors. Wave after wave, she slowly opens to release the life in her. She gives birth to a curled infant, unbelievably small, who, however cry-free he may be, is helpless. He is completely dependent on her. She is the one who holds him, warms him, wipes him, and feeds him rich milk from her body.

He is present with her—and with us—because of what her body knows. She creates patterns of sensing and responding in relation to him that let him live, with her, with us.
*
The birth we celebrate at Christmas is more than a beginning. It is the end of a long journey in which Mary gives birth to herself as a birth-giver. She is the one who opens in the darkness, to the darkness, willing to conceive (of) a light that would not appear for months to come. She is the one who carries it as it quickens, and brings it forth, as a new life beginning. She is the one whose bodily movements enable him to live.

The movements she makes in conceiving, carrying, and birthing make her into someone who can and does participate consciously in the rhythms of her bodily becoming.

He is with us because of what her body knows.
*
There are times in all of our lives when darkness threatens to engulf us. Whether it is fear or anxiety, depression or despair, we wonder whether the light will ever return, or whether indeed, we will be dwell forever in eternal night.

It is to such moments that the Christmas story speaks. For we remember Mary. We remember her, in her bodily self, opening to sense and receive the quickening of new life in her.

With Mary, we affirm the creative power of our own bodily selves—a power to open to the movement of the divine in us, that is continuing to create and become, despite the darkness that overwhelms. When we open to this power, we will find the arms that embrace us, the relationships that sustain us, the Presence of light with us.

For our bodily selves were pulled into existence by the rhythm of light and dark, day and night, that enables all things to grow. As long as we breathe and beat and wake, that rhythm is alive in us. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of it, opening to receive the movements that are making us. We so participate in bringing into being a world we love that loves us.

The American dancer, Ruth St. Denis, wrote a poem called “Eternal Mary.” The last stanza is this: “We are all Mary/ Waiting to conceive/ And bear the Christ Child.”

This, for me, is the meaning of Christmas.
*
How did the story of a young woman delivering Presence morph into a tale about an old man delivering presents? It is a topic for another day.

Still, I wonder. Whose sack is it from which he pulls his gifts? Who remembers which child got which gift from year to year? Who gave him directions?

I suspect that if we want the full story, we will have to ask Mrs. Claus.

Selfish vs. Unselfish: Who Wins?

2009-12-04T06:39:00.007-05:00

Are humans naturally selfish or altruistic? Have they evolved to value their personal survival above all else? Or to form cooperative social relations with others?

The questions are perennial ones, raised anew by a recently released roster of books. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists all weigh in, for there is much at stake.

How should we parent, educate, and legislate? What values should we hold, what social norms should we advance, and what means are necessary for helping people adopt them? Must we punish or can we merely entice? What are the resources of nature and the limits of nurture? What can we create ourselves to be?
*
I grew up believing that there is a difference, a big one, between selfish and unselfish. Selfish is doing what you want when you want for yourself, following your desires and pursuing pleasure, often at others’ expense. Unselfish is generous, loving and kind, doing with others in heart and mind. Selfish is bad. Unselfish is good. Period.

I no longer believe it.

Scene 1. A girl attends summer camp with 350 other girls, ages 6 to 17. The camp counselors admonish the girls to value unselfishness, to put others first before themselves, and to compete for the coveted honor of being tapped as a model for all the rest. The campers scramble to be the most unselfish of all, missing the irony.

Wouldn’t the most unselfish act be to act selfishly and so let another girl win?

Scene 2. Leif, my five-month-old son, wants to nurse. Now. Writhing and wailing, he refuses any attempt to divert, distract, or entertain. I stop what I am doing and sit down to give him some milk. Is he being selfish and me not?

If he didn’t ask me for what he needed, he wouldn’t be giving me what I want: I want him to thrive.

Scene 3. A man is in a long-term relationship, afraid to ask his partner for what he needs. He keeps quiet, wanting to preserve the peace, and finds himself less and less able to feel the love for her he knew he once had. For the sake of the relationship, he has silenced his sensory spaces. She feels his distance, and is unhappy.

Before it is too late, he comes to the realization: if he asks for what he needs, he will have more to give. If he asks for what he needs, he will be giving her what she needs to succeed in what she wants to do: love him as he wants to be loved.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give another is the gift of receiving he or she is giving us.

Sometimes our greatest pleasure lies in giving a gift that requires us to exercise an ability in ourselves that we didn’t know we had.

Scene 4. I tell my kids all the time: I am here to help you get what you want. Am I raising spoiled, self-righteous egotists who feel entitled to whatever they desire?

I don’t tell them that I will give them what they want. I tell them that I will help them get what they want. I will help them figure out what they want, and then help them test the idea, research it, plan for it, experiment with it, and try it out over time. For I have no idea what seeds my kids carry; I have no idea what genetic potentials for thinking and feeling and acting that passed dormant through me have been sparked to life by my partner’s chromosomal pairs.

What I do know is that I want whatever seeds are there in them to grow. I want the world to benefit from what they have to give. And I know that such seeds sprout in unprompted desires to spend time learning and creating in one realm or another. These desires can signal the presence of talents and skills, and the reserves of energy, interest, patience, and attention needed to help them develop. Their bodies know.

If I don’t help my kids move towards what they want, they will not learn what it is they have to give.
*
Are humans selfish or unselfish?

It’s the wrong question to ask. There is no such dichotomy. The belief that there is rests on an illusion of ourselves as individual minds-in-bodies that we continue to rehearse as if it were true. It’s not.

Despite what we have learned to believe, and as I have noted before, we are not individuals first. We become humans who are able to think and feel and act as individuals by virtue of the relationships with others who have supported us in becoming who we are.

We are wired from the first inklings of our lives to create relationships with others as the condition for our own maximal health and well being. Who we are is nothing more or less than this impulse to connect with whatever and whomever will enable us to unfold what it is we have to give.

As a result, there is never a moment in which the “self” that acts is only and simply a “self,” and it is impossible to disentangle selfish from un. Every act we make is necessarily both. Our health and well being depends on the balance.

If we only act “for the other” we will soon have nothing to give. It we only act “for ourselves” we will miss out on the pleasure of connecting with those who will support us in our becoming.

The most “selfish” actions we undertake are those that create mutually life-enabling relationships with other persons. The most “unselfish” actions are those that nourish in us in the ability to give whatever it is we have to give.

Fruitful questions to ask, then, are these. What must we do to nourish our ability to keep giving the very best of what we have to give? How do we create mutually life-enabling relationships that will support us in exploring, improving, and becoming who we are?

The we-in-me wants to know.

An Idea That Is Hazardous to Your Health

2009-11-19T12:57:00.009-05:00

At the end of last week an article on breastfeeding caught my eye. Apparently, some celebrities have recently boasted about breastfeeding’s bulge-burning benefits. The article offered a response, amassing anecdotes from Every Woman for and against, asking: Is it true?

On the one hand, as someone who might qualify for professional nurser status, I warmed to the article’s positive pose. Mother of five, I have nursed for a total of over ten years—nearly a quarter of my life—and haven’t stopped yet. It works for me, for my kids, for our family.

On the other hand, however, the article made me shudder, and not (just) because it appeared in a fashion segment focused on fat. Left intact and even reinforced by the discussion was the greatest obstacle there is to any women figuring out for herself what strategies for nurturing her child will work for her: the idea that her body is a thing. This idea is hazardous to our health.

While no one came out and said, my body is a thing, the discussion assumed that a maternal body is a material entity subject to rules that apply in most cases. Is breastfeeding-to-lose such a rule? Women interviewed in the article and those who responded to it lined up for and against the rule based on their experiences. Those for whom it was true expressed delight that their bodies worked as they should. Those for whom it wasn’t were resigned or resentful or rebellious, blaming their bodies, or citing variables that interfered with the rule's effect (like metabolism, not enough sleep, or inadequate exercise).

However, the point to take home is not the truism that every woman is unique. The unsung point concerns the nature of health itself. Health is whole. What is healthy for us is something we must work out for ourselves in the context of the relationships that sustain us. Health is not given to us, it is created by us, as we use the information at our disposal to discover and grow the seeds of what our own bodily selves know.

Health, in this sense, is both the ability to know what is good for us, and the willingness to align our thoughts and actions with that knowledge. To have it, we need to cultivate it in our sensory selves and for our sensory selves every day—even and especially when figuring out how best to nurture a child.
*
This “health” is absent from current “healthcare” debates as well. Health is not what we get when we secure cheap drugs, insurance policies, or the right diet and exercise plan.

Even so-called “preventative medicine” is not about health. It is about monitoring a few variables that scientists know how to measure, marking them as “indicators,” and then prescribing drugs or behavior modifications designed to keep our numbers within a specified range. It is about identifying and managing risks based on statistics gathered over other times, places, and persons.

Little in our contemporary approach to healthcare is about helping us learn for ourselves how to discern for ourselves what is good for us. We are told what is good for us and advised to implement it, for our own good. The assumption is that we don’t know.

Yet, the fact is that no stack of statistics can deliver the most important piece of information you need for your ongoing health: which dot on the curve is you? No one can tell you what you most need to know: what works to enhance your health?
*
Our bodies are not things. Our bodies are movement—movement that is constantly registering sensations of pain and pleasure designed to guide us in making choices that align with our best health.

Yet this capacity for knowing what is best for us remains a mere potential unless we develop it. Specifically, we need to learn to welcome, work with, and refine our sensations of pain and pleasure, so that our sensory selves can become surer guides.

Support in doing this kind of work is what mothers—as well as those concerned with health—need.
*
You must like nursing, people say. Well yes and no. It’s not really about liking it. It’s about making the movements that allow me to be the mother, dancer, and philosopher I am and want to be. It’s about making the movements that will enable me to keep working, keep sleeping, keep the child napping, stay sane. It’s about managing the flow of thoughts and feelings, laundry and lunching. It’s about convenience and challenge, pleasure and well-being, time saved and spent. It’s about investing in an immune system and trusting in touch. It’s about figuring out what works, and having the faith and fortitude to honor it. It's about health.

There is no way to measure the complexity of variables that make breastfeeding right for me, and thus no way for me to assume its rightness for anyone else.

Our health is something we cultivate through practices of attention to our own bodily selves. But we cannot begin to do so until we stop looking outside of ourselves for the rule that applies to our bodies, and start welcoming whatever information and stories come to us, not as grounds for judging ourselves, but as vital resources for helping us explore the movements we can make towards our own health. It's what our bodies know.

Thoreau's "Tonic of Wildness"

2009-11-10T10:26:00.012-05:00

“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.

The Home-Work My Son Loves

2009-10-30T17:27:00.012-04:00

My fourteen-year-old son hates homework. It’s not the work per se. During school hours, Jordan is happy to learn and will lecture at length on fine points of modern history or the properties of an equilateral triangle. Give him the same assignments at home, however, and he perceives them as an intrusion of his time and space. An injustice.

Home, he reasons, is for other kinds of work. Home is for milking his cow, Daisy, and planting potatoes. It is for chopping down a tree with an ax whose handle he carved, and then using Bright and Blaze, his team of young steer, trained to a yoke he shaped and shaved, to pull the log into the barn, where he and his sisters will hack it into firewood. Home is for churning cream he skims, from milk he squeezed, into butter and ice cream (though not both at once).

While school is for schoolwork, home is for home-work.
*
The question of education is in the news, running alongside concerns about the United States’ ability to sustain its place in the evolving global economy. We are familiar with the refrain: innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship will secure us jobs. Schools must teach the next generation these essential survival skills.

So far so good. The next question, of course, is how? Can you even teach creativity? The oxymoron is evident. Some deny that it is possible. But what does it take to be a creative, innovative entrepreneur?

For one, it takes the perspective required to see a problem as a problem in the first place, independent of what others think. It takes the passion of wanting to do it better. It takes the patience to wait for ideas to come and mature, and the persistence to brook the resistance new ways inevitably elicit.

In short, if we want to nurture creative problem-solvers, we need to help kids develop an intrinsic desire to unfold what they have to give in making the world a better place to be.

Did I say it would be easy?
*
I recently read NutureShock, a book about parenting practices that unmasks our common sense ideas as not so sensible after all. One chapter focuses on theories about how to develop the “executive functions” of the prefrontal cortex that aid us in planning for the future, carrying out strategies, and harnessing our impulses to them. These executive functions are almost always described as a top-down kind of self-control: mind over body. Until recently, the road to such skills has been paved with training that focuses primarily on the intellect.

However, as NutureShock relates, the balance is shifting, for researchers are discovering more effective means of developing these skills. Project-based, case-driven, collaborative learning opportunities are being proposed in which students design, carry out, and even assess their own work. When students learn what they need in order to solve a problem, they know that what they are learning matters. They know why. They care, and so invest more of themselves in learning.

In the preschool years, such learning is called imaginative play. Ask a four-year-old to sit still and you may get thirty seconds. Tell him that he is a dragon guarding a precious jewel and you might get four minutes. Involve a jewel thief, a dragon family who loves the jewel, and the magic rainbow it opens, and he may sit for twenty.

The same logic works for a twenty-year-old. Put her in a life-like situation, and see how learning disciplines improve. Why? Those so-called executive functions are fueled and funded by our emotional, sensory selves. It’s not so mind over body after all.

If our aim, then, is to nurture passionate, patient, persistent problem-solvers, the plot thickens: how do we teach our kids to play?
*
I am learning with Leif again. Master of rolling that he has become, he no longer needs to pull his knees to his chest to initiate the move. He simply twists his torso, belly button first, and rolls to the side, hauling his legs behind him. He learned this torso twist because the leg-lifting, jack-knife move he practiced so many times arranged his body in this pattern, pulling it into his sensory awareness as a possibility. He learned it, he perfected it. Now, this corkscrew is his move of choice as soon as you lie him down, for example, when attempting to change his clothes or a diaper.

Once on his belly, however, he finds himself again at the horizon of his abilities. Stuck. He tries arching his back and lifting his arms and legs off the floor, waving and kicking, while making the sound of a strangled cat.

Then, after several moments of ear-scratching screech, he resorts to that same knees-up pattern of movement that taught him how to roll in the first place: he pulls his knobby knees up under his body. Lo and behold he finds his toes. They connect with the floor. Executing his usual downward push, something unusual happens: he finds himself launched forward in space, at the edge of his blanket, forehead to the floor. Wow!

What’s happening? Faced with a new challenge (belly down), Leif mobilizes a pattern of sensation and response he already knows how to make (knees up). When he does, the familiar pattern takes a different shape in relation to gravity and weight (toes connect). He learns about him self and his world based on what happens when he makes it (face to floor). The pattern evolves (a bit more up). He repeats the experiment again and again, playing with the possibilities, and hones in on those patterns of movement that unfold his potential to move some more (he's almost crawling!). The movement Leif is making is his making him.

While the spinal movements Leif is making are basic to human health--at the core of yoga, dance, and other physical disciplines, overlooked to our detriment in our sedentary lives--what's even more important about Leif's adventures is the process he is engaging. He's playing in the most fundamental way we humans can: discovering and creating the patterns of sensation and response that make him who he is. He is not just moving, he is exploring and unfolding his potential to make new moves. He is playing at his own horizons and doing so because it is fun. He is participating in the rhythms of his bodily becoming.
*
To survive in this century, we are going to need to learn to make new moves in relation to the most basic elements of our ongoing existence--food, water, air, earth, and its human and animal creatures. We need to be able to play--to envision, plan, and carry out scenarios that anticipate the impacts of our actions on the health and well being of the earth in us and around us. What are we creating?

We might think that once we learn the basics of rolling, sitting, crawling and walking, it is time to restrict the focus of learning to our intellects. However, for our thinking to remain free, flexible, and responsive to our time, we need exercises that challenge our intellects as well as bodily practices that call our attention to how our movements are making us. To respond to the challenges we face, we have to care. We have to know why it matters to our bodily lives, and to do either, we need to move in ways that bring our senses to life.

It’s our home-work.
*
Bright and Blaze may not know it. They are not just pulling a log. They are pulling into existence a passionate, patient, persistent problem-solver.

Parenting, Writing, Blogging, and other Radical Acts

2009-10-22T17:50:00.008-04:00

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

2009-10-15T16:48:00.007-04:00

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.

Movement Manifesto, Part 1 of 2

2009-10-06T10:05:00.014-04:00

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.

Who’s In Charge of Me: You or Me?

2009-09-27T18:01:00.009-04:00

“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.

The Limits of Listening (to Your Body)

2009-09-20T14:00:00.008-04:00

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."

Birth of B.B. (Baby Bull)!

2009-09-10T10:16:00.012-04:00

I am trying to draft this week’s blog entry while playing legos with Kai when I hear the cry. Jessica has just returned from her garden where she went to thin the plant-threatening weeds. “Daisy! She’s up in the field, licking something small and brown on the grass!”

I leap into action. We have been waiting for this moment. I slip Leif into the sling, grab Kai’s hand, and with Kyra and Jessica, stride up the hill. Of course, Daisy picked the farthest and most remote corner of our hillside pasture.

I see them from a far, mother and babe! It is here! I had checked a couple of hours earlier. Daisy is fast! Lucky her.

We draw near. Daisy hovers protectively. Our other cows circle with interest. The steers graze calmly further down the hill. While Daisy is usually as sweet as her name, we don’t want to risk a charging cow. We stop yards away and gaze. You know how new mothers can be. Dasiy doesn’t need us, obviously. However, we do want to make sure the young one gets Daisy's colostrum during those first vital hours when its stomachs (yes, plural) are extra able to absorb the early milk’s rich nutrients.

I send Jessica close. Bull or heifer? Can you tell? We want to know.

It’s a bull. A pang shoots through my heart. Ah well. Who knows what will happen to him. Breeder, ox, or meat? At this point we focus on his cuteness. He is so cute!

We watch as he struggles to his legs. Daisy circles him, placing her head between him and the electrified wires that bound their pasture. Good mom. Then, just as the calf starts heading for her udder, Auntie Precious comes along to give him a friendly nudge, and the calf goes sprawling to the ground.

Daisy steps daintily and firmly between her calf and Precious. A few minutes later, he is up again, and this time an eager Dandelion, Daisy’s first child, swoops in from the side to see, and again he is tumbling, legs like tossed pick up sticks. The steers are now approaching, sniffing with curiosity. Daisy moos persistently. Her udder is so full that her teats are sticking out sideways. I am sure she can’t wait for him to nurse.

I decide that we have to help. Jessica hikes back to the barn for a lead rope, bucket and bottle. We loop the rope over Precious and tie her to a nearby tree. I hand the Leif-laden sling to Jessica and take the bucket. Daisy is sensitive at first. Every time I touch her udder she swats me with her hind leg. I finally hold her leg back with my left shoulder while pulling on one front teat with my right hand. Slowly slowly the stream begins, so golden that it is practically orange! (Someone has to explain to me how the beta carotene in bright green grass makes milk peach-y.)

Daisy settles down and lets me pull. She obviously feels the relief. Meanwhile the calf is nibbling at my side. Not me, little one! I want to be the missing link.

The bucket begins to fill. When I have more than I want to lose, I stop, grab the bottle, and begin pouring from bucket to bottle. Colostrum spills over the edges and every which way, thick and sticky.

Finally the bottle is half full—a quart. I begin feeding the calf as Daisy noses the empty bucket. He is sucking! I hand the bottle to Kyra, take the sling from Jessica, who then takes the bottle from Kyra, to feed the (still unnamed) baby bull (hereafter "B.B.") the last few drops. Bottle empty, we begin again. I give the Leif-filled sling to Jessica, take the bucket and start milking.

I laugh. How is it I am here?

We give B.B. a second quart. He is getting the hang of the bottle.

We hear a car in the driveway. Geoff and Jordan are finally home from school (the rest of us are home schooling this year). Jordan! Daisy is his cow. I stride down to greet them. Daisy needs water; she is thirsty. Jordan fills two large buckets and we walk together back up the hill. He is walking with those heavy buckets as quickly as I am. “It’s what you call love,” he says.

A moment later I watch as Jordan's face explodes into a smile at the sight of his calf. He scratches B.B. under the chin, and then goes to work. He is the milking expert. Minutes later he has another bottle going. Lucky calf!

I return to the house, smiling. Time to finish my blog.

Today B.B. is steady on those peg legs. His large brown eyes gaze expectantly, waiting for all the sticky sweet things life has in store for him. We are waiting too!

By next week, we'll be "in the milk" again, and I'll post what I was writing earlier.

Making Connections

2009-09-03T11:16:00.003-04:00

A crispy edge cuts the air. Red hues creep across the leaves. School begins today. The seasons are changing, and so is this blog.

Over the summer I have done interviews about my book What a Body Knows with radio personalities around the country—men and women, Christian and new age, conservative and liberal, credentialed and not. Many times I have been heartened by the words: People need to hear this. Some people. Some where. I am starting to listen.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear some report or read some news piece and think about how my work could offer a different perspective and enrich the discussion.

Hence the new focus of this blog: I plan to make connections with articles and authors, books and blogs that are concerned with issues raised in What a Body Knows. It is time to map the range and reach of my emerging philosophy of bodily becoming, and provide a place for others to do the same. Chime in! Here goes.
*
On August 18, Natalie Angier, one of my favorite science writers, published a fascinating column in the New York Times about how the “Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop.” In its August 17th issue, Time magazine weighed in with a cover story by John Cloud on "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."

Both stories miss what links them together and what What a Body Knows teaches: that bodily movement is the key to helping us find wisdom in our desires.

Take the stress loop. As Angier reports, researchers have discovered among deliberately-stressed (i.e., shocked, bullied, and nearly-drowned) rats, that the rodents were “cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over.” The centers of the brain governing habit formation bloomed. Provided with a bar they could press for a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, the stressed rats “had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar,” even when they no longer wanted to eat.

Angier links these findings back to the allostasis of our dynamic stress response system, which is designed to maintain control by causing marked changes in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle activity, and the like. As she says, we “dance to the beat.”

Meanwhile, Cloud reports that exercise does not lead to weight loss. The reasons are many, but one rises above the rest. Most exercise does not burn enough calories to make a difference. Even when we burn some calories, we tend to overcompensate for whatever we have burned, rewarding ourselves for our efforts and eating more than we otherwise would have done.

Angier characterizes the stress loop as “vicious” and “sinister,” though she admits it might be helpful in a crisis for shunting as many behaviors as possible to “automatic pilot.” Cloud laments that exercise is of little value in the fight against obesity, though reminding us that it is still good for our general health.

What is missing from these discussions, and what links them together, is what our bodies know.

In the case of Angier, for example, heightened habit formation is not the problem. Nor is stress itself. The problem is that we get stuck in stress because the habits we form are ones that reinforce the causes of the stress. In What a Body Knows, I call it cereal box logic. In responding to our sense of frustration or dissatisfaction, we resort to the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place.

The fact, then, that our stress responses are making us more stressed is a sign of our bodily wisdom not stupidity. For this finding indicts the mind-over-body thinking, feeling, and acting that most people raised in American culture rely upon to cope. As I have described in earlier posts, this mind-over-body sense of ourselves is what we are taught, what we master, who we believe we are. It is one way of sensing ourselves, but not the only one.

If we were to adopt a stress response that shifted our experience of ourselves away from a mind-over-body sense, then the repetition of it would work to release us from the self-reinforcing stress cycle.

Doing so, however, is not a matter of willpower. Nor is it simply a matter of "relaxing." It involves cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodily selves regardless of what we are doing. It involves moving to breathe and breathing to move (see posts in Jan-Feb 2008), engaging in the kinds of bodily movement that draw our attention down and out and through our sensory selves.

Here is where exercise comes in, and its crucial role in our relationship to food. The value of exercise in this relationship has little or nothing to do with burning calories. More important is the bodily movement itself. Bodily movement has the potential for drawing our awareness out of our minds and into our bodies, and so that the loops of our mind-over-body stress responses loosen and fall. When they do, we stop pushing the bar for that extra squirt of sugar water. We don't have to--we don't want to--for we know a deeper pleasure, the pleasure of feeling and finding our own sense of enough.
*
I spent last week at the Washington County Fair. My three older children were there for the week, showing their Jersey cows. The fair overloads the senses. Barn fans whirr with an incessant, fly-chasing drone. Milk-machine-powering generators hum. The screams of truck and tractor engines pulling harder than they should punctuate the afternoon. Voices crest and collide. Dust and dirt swirl and stick. It is a stressful situation for a new mother, namely me, with infant in tow. I empathize with Angier's rats.

After a few hours, a feeling of disease slides over me. I start retreating from my sensory self. I start thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. I can’t stop thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. And the butterscotches. The coffee treats. Then I know. It is time for a walk.

I leave the fair grounds, striding hard through the surrounding fields packed with parked cars. The attendants look at me strangely, wondering where I am going. No where. Just around—around the largest perimeter I can make. Striding. Breathing. Releasing. Being. Becoming. Feeling. Knowing. Dropping into my bodily self.

Suddenly my thoughts shift. I am the movement that is making me. Visions of caramels fade into pictures of what I really want. To write that article. To connect with this friend. To make plans for the school year. Back in myself, I head back to the fair, reconnected, ready to begin again.
*
What connections can you make?

The Land of the Super Smiles

2009-08-17T08:31:00.008-04:00

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.

Animal Update

2009-08-03T11:49:00.006-04:00

I seem to have slipped from a one-week to two-week posting schedule this summer. Or maybe I am calculating my weeks by sunny days. By that count, I am right on time. Last week's post was simply rained out!

I realize as well that in recent posts, I have been so focused on Leif that I have been neglecting the non-human animals on our farm. Now, as Leif rounds out his seventh week, I am looking outside once again.

So how are the animals, anyway?

As with most matters of life, there is good news and bad news, and the two are intextricably entwined.

Beginning with the bad news: our birds. A couple of weeks ago, one of our hens mysteriously disappeared. We could find no signs of struggle or disease, and assumed she was safely nesting somewhere. A couple of days later, the rooster was gone, and our duck, Pikey. Then we knew. A fox had found our feathered friends.

Pikey was the saddest loss. She was our oldest bird. She had already endured the trauma of losing her partner (after quacking for 12 hours straight), and survived an earlier weasel attack. She could not outfox the fox.

Good news for the fox family.

Several days later, further down the road, someone's car found the fox. Good news for our remaining birds.

Also in the good news category, our neighbor had an extra rooster. Too many roosters in close quarters and you have a problem, and he did, penned as the birds were to protect them from the fox. So he brought his extra rooster over in a grain bag. When the rooster emerged, a blast of shiny orange, Kyra instantly named him Sunset.

"Don't you want to name him Sunrise?" I asked. No, she was sure. That orange was the color of sunset. The artist knows. The irony is that of all the roosters we have had, Sunset is the only one who crows when roosters should: first thing in the morning and then only.

We like this rooster, so do our orange-red hens. Good news for us all, though we wonder why. Our hens wanted nothing to do with Brewster, our white rooster. They would scatter as he approached. Sunset seems to have the touch. Or the right color. Or maybe it's that the hens' fear of the fox is working in his long-taloned, big-breasted favor. Good news for him.

Other news in the (mostly) good column is that we are expecting again--our cows that is. Precious, our Houdini heifer, is now finally and indeed pregnant! The Vet told us so. She is due in February, around Geoff's birthday. It will be a great gift for him--a night spent in a cold dark barn, waiting for Precious's calf to drop.

Daisy, our two year old, is also pregnant and for the second time. Good news, yes. However, in preparation for her approaching September due date, we have dried her up. No more milking. No more milk.

We are going through serious withdrawal. We miss the milk of course--the gallons of life-enabling elixir a day. We miss the butter, cream, ice cream and cheese we made with it. We miss the rhythms of milking that paced our days. And though I am reluctant to admit it, we even miss washing all of those buckets. Remind me in February, when we are milking Precious too.

Meanwhile our youngest human animal is growing like a weed. Seven weeks and a day, he is smiling left and right, up and down, beloved by all. Before we know it he'll be chasing the chickens, milking the cow, and maybe even washing buckets.

Looking Into the Future

2009-07-21T10:14:00.015-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dance Your Life, Leif!

Learning with Leif

2009-07-08T07:43:00.011-04:00

Lately I’ve been empathizing with small Leif.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it true? Look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I become your mom?

Surprising Leif

2009-06-25T14:13:00.011-04:00

Leif is surprising everyone.

He came much later than expected--by thirteen days. He was much bigger than expected--by nearly a pound. He came in a labor that was much longer than expected; and catalyzed a recovery that was quicker than expected. He is much calmer than expected--given his energetic action in the womb; and he has nursed, peed, pooped, and cracked a grin much earlier than expected. The last remnants of his umbilical cord have been smellier than expected.

Yet what seems to surprise people most is that he was born at home. I caught him myself. Not many babies in the U.S. are born at home. Why at home?

For us, the decision was a carefully pondered answer to a simple question: what conditions will make the best birth outcome the most likely?

As for the best outcome, experts across the board agree. Where possible, for the health of baby and mother, a vaginal birth without drugs is best. A mom's body works with the infant to choose an optimal birth time, making a delectable soup of hormones to ease the way. The hug of the birth canal stimulates a baby's internal organs; its flora prime a nascent immune system. Medical procedures, while sometimes necessary, interrupt a complex dance of physiological and chemical changes that science is only beginning to comprehend, not to mention emulate. If possible, it is best to go without.

What then would make the best outcome the most likely? The answer is not obvious, for in our current culture of fear, we tend to reason in reverse. We ask: what could go wrong? We tabulate the possible tragedies and seek to minimize our risks. From this perspective, giving birth in a hospital seems safer for the technological monitoring and emergency rescues it makes possible.

However, when learning to drive, we are taught that focusing on the tree we don't want our car to hit makes a crash more likely. Or as Jessica knows, looking down while urging a horse over a jump makes it more likely that the horse will miss it. The same can be said for birth: if we are focused on what could go wrong (while looking to hospital machines and personnel to tell us), then we are not attending fully to what will help the birth go right. Giving birth, like any significant human act, benefits from our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual as well as physical presence.

In my case, the answer was further complicated by the fact that my first birth was a C-section. Since 2003, administrators of small hospitals around the country have decided not to allow women to have Vaginal Births after a C-section (VBAC). The reason: the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended that hospitals offering VBACs have an anesthesiologist on the premises at all times--a difficult feat for a small operation. As a result, many local hospitals are not allowing women with a previous C-section the option of a vaginal birth, fearing that, if anything goes wrong, they might be sued. So it was for me. All that our neighboring hospitals would provide me was a C-section. Otherwise, I could drive an hour plus in labor to a medical center in Albany.

The pieces fell into place. What environment would support me best in being present to the birth process of my own bodily self? Home. We decided to give birth on the farm, under the supervision of a skilled, licensed midwife and her assistant, free to focus fully on the birthing process.

Knowing what we know now about Leif's birth, we are so glad we did. For given his surprises, it is clear to us: we needed to be home to succeed with this birth. If we had been anywhere else, Geoff and I could not have been as together; I could not have gone as deep into a meditative space. Using the cycle of breaths (see Jan-Feb 2008), I became the earth mother, feeling the plates of my pelvis shift open to release new life. I could attune to the process, listening and enabling, aware of the baby moving and of myself transforming, enroute to a beautiful birth.

Yes we were lucky, as anyone who gives birth is. But we were not just lucky. We created the conditions that would make the best outcome the most likely. It is how we want to live.

In the end, at his beginning, Leif surprised us too: he gave us exactly what we wanted. And more.

Hello from Leif!

2009-06-15T19:46:00.005-04:00

Yes, I am here!

I know I took a while, but good things do take time.
Besides, I had a lot of growing to do.

I am 8 pounds 10 ounces and 21 inches long!
I have a nice large head.

Mom and Dad and I worked hard....
and then Jordan, Jessica, Kyra, and Kai were all there to greet me when I came out.

It was great on the inside, but I think I am going to like it here too.

My lovely feet.

More soon!

Leif LaMothe Gee
Born at home on Sunday, June 14, 2009, 9:03 PM
41 weeks and 6 days

Birth Watch 5

2009-06-13T17:48:00.005-04:00

Everytime the telephone rings, we are sure it is the stork, calling to tell us that our bundle of joy has arrived. We placed our order months ago, shouldn't it be here by now?

Truth be told, the waiting is getting a mite harder. It would be easier, I think, if it weren't for those pesky expectations.

Yes, I've been expecting for months now. But I have been expecting a delivery somewhere on or around my "due" date! Sure, the first three children were all late, but the fourth popped out right on time, an efficient fellow. I was thinking that he was a trend, not an exception.

So much for thinking.

So I try to breathe away my expectations and just enjoy. Receive. Trust that the little one will come when he or she is ready. Mom is healthy. Baby is healthy. No problem! And then I experience another contraction... which pulls all those expectations right back into view. How about now?

Tired of trying not to expect, I take a different approach. As Geoff says: "Sometimes babes need to listen to their mommies." So I try talking to it and sending it pictures of the way out. It's really not so bad out here--a little noisy perhaps, but kind of nice too!

Perhaps I need to learn a different language.

Meanwhile, today was a beautiful day. We had no plans. No where to go. Nothing to do, except wait--I mean, enjoy. And so we did, topping it off with a long and lovely swim at a nearby pond.

Did I mention that we are ready?

Birth Watch 5

2009-06-13T17:48:00.001-04:00

Birth Watch 4

2009-06-11T20:59:00.003-04:00

It looks like June 11 is going to go the way of June's 1 through 10.
Nothing yet.

Sometimes it feels a bit like being stuck in one of Zeno's paradox: where every increment of progress made towards the goal is half the distance of the one before, such that the journey is infinite and the goal ever elusive.

Will we ever get there? To the time After the time Before? To the space There that will then be Here?

There are signs, but small ones. Incremental ones. Ripples of possibility.

We are waiting for the wave that will carry us all the way in....

Birth Watch 3

2009-06-10T21:32:00.003-04:00

Due date plus ten.... and counting.

The time that was supposed to be Before is now After.
The time that was supposed to be After is still Before.

It is a strange suspended time in between....
waiting for someone who is already here.
Just not yet.

Birth Watch 2

2009-06-09T16:47:00.002-04:00

What is there to report?

It is raining (finally).

Corn plants throughout the county are sprouting (perkily).

Jordan and Jessica have only one exam left (thankfully).

Geoff & Kai went to the grocery store (happily).

Yesterday's radio interview with Montana is available in the sidebar (easily).

I went back to the health club for another last pre-birth swim (gratefully).

And the wee one is moving (exuberantly),
which probably means.... not today!

Birth Watch 1

2009-06-08T09:47:00.005-04:00

This small traveler has always had an impeccable sense of timing. I should trust it by now!

It began to grow just after I submitted What a Body Knows for production, and was due to be born the same week as the book came out. It took root in the fall, when every other living thing was pulling its energy inward and underground, preparing for spring birth.

The morning sickness it stirred paced me through an endless editing process, ebbing just in time for me to be able to imagine dancing Genesis. Over the winter, its pull on my eyelids narrowed my focus to the writing I so wanted to do on a next book--farm life love. The first pass is now done.

Then, as the due date approached, it did not come when Jessica was on her environmental club overnight. It did not interfere with Jordan's community service project. It is not keeping Kyra from today's much-anticipated field trip to the Washington County Fair museum and ice cream shop. It refused to interrupt the interviews I have scheduled, last week or today (check out WKXLO in Lewiston, MT at 12:15 EST)!.

Already, it is proving capable of finding its way through the family maze.

Now it is one week late. So what do I do??

One of the personnel at the health club where I have been swimming--a woman with five children--told me that her fifth was thirteen days late. While waiting, she was so frustrated that she took down the changing table.

I can think of some other things to do!

Meanwhile, Jordan and Jessica have exams through Wednesday which they don't want to miss. Given how considerate this little one is, I am thinking... maybe Thursday?

Waiting Still

2009-06-04T07:24:00.016-04:00

What do you do when you are waiting—waiting for an event that could happen any minute, that will require your utmost concentration and strength, that will radically change your life, inside and out, and over whose timing you have no control?

How do you start any activity knowing you might be interrupted? How do you make any date knowing you might not make it? How do you live while waiting for a birth?

I keep thinking that this is the last time. It is the last time we will clean the house; the last time Geoff will go to the grocery store; the last time Jordan will mow the lawn; the last time I will bake bread, go swimming, do laundry, brush teeth… take a breath. And then it isn't.

I keep thinking that the wee one will blossom with this round of spring’s flowers.

First, nearly three weeks ago, there were the dandelions, short and pert, their sunny yellow heads bobbing in the breeze. Kai called them “dandys” and protested ferociously when Jordan set out to mow them down. “They’re so beautiful!” he cried. Would this child be a dandy? No.

Then there were the lilacs, my favorites, exploding in white and purple on either side of our house. Their soothing scent filled our sensory spaces for several days, until these short-lived blooms yielded to a cool rain. Would this baby be born in lilac? No.

Then came the buttercups, golden dots swaying in the meadows amidst the lengthening greens, their sweet and shiny leaves beaming back at the warming sun. Would this small traveler reflect the sun? Nope.

Then came the irises, growing in large clumps behind the house, blue-white, white-blue, and soft yellow, their animal-mouths eating the air. Would this one be breathing soon? It’s not too late!

What next? The hydrangea will be blooming sometime in July.

Then, on Tuesday morning, June 2, due date plus one, I receive an email from a woman named Gina Cloud inviting me to do a radio show with her later that day. I jump at the opportunity, before fully cognizing that “later” means 8-9 PM, Pacific Daylight Time. Past my bedtime! I spend the afternoon teased by every cramp and contraction. How can I go into labor now?! Please no! I vow not to schedule anything else until after the birth.

I sneak away from evening chores for a nourishing nap, rocked to sleep by contractile waves. Finally, as the hour hand slowly reaches its mark, I breathe a sigh of relief. I know I am going to make it… and then I have the most wonderful time! Gina is terrific. Once we sign off the show, I am ready! But nothing is happening. The womb seas are as flat as a placental pancake.

Ah well. For a podcast of our radio show, click HERE!

You can also subscribe to Gina's show through iTunes (search for "Gina Cloud") or visit the Contact Talk Radio website, and download her "June 2, 2009" show!

Here we are today, due date plus three. I glance out the window this morning to see a family of geese, four fluff balls flanked by two parents, floating across the pond. So when will we hatch?

Jordan and Jessica happen to be studying the reproductive system in their eighth grade biology class, and this morning they are scheduled to watch a movie of a baby being born. I’ll bet the movie won’t be late.

It is a beautiful day.

How about now?

On Television!

2009-05-25T06:25:00.006-04:00

I had a problem. It was a high quality problem, yes, but a problem nonetheless.

I was going to be on television--Albany's channel 13, interviewed by anchor Benita Zahn about my book, What a Body Knows. I had already recorded the interview at the studio, earlier in the week on Wednesday, after arriving an hour before I was due in my determination not to be late. The interview had been short and sweet, and I did want to see it.

The problem was that we don't have television reception here at Hebron Hollow. How was I going to watch the show?

While this problem was challenging enough, it was compounded by two others having to do with timing. For one, I wasn't sure which day the interview was going to air. At first we had planned it for Sunday morning, May 10th, Mother's Day. However, at the studio I watched as Benita recorded a second interview with a more-time-sensitive competitor for that same Sunday spot. So, I learned, my interview might air on Saturday, May 9th instead. Fine enough, I could be flexible, but how would I know when to tell people to watch... and record?

The second sub-problem concerned the time of day. The interview was supposed to air on the morning news, sometime between 8 and 9 AM. Whose house could I crash at that hour of the day?

On Friday night I hear the news: your interview will air on Saturday, between 8:30 and 9, probably close to 8:45. I am still chewing on my multiple-part problem.

A sudden brainstorm bursts: the health club where I have been swimming through this pregnancy. Don't they have a television in that front conference-area room?

I call. "Sure, we have a television you can watch."

Saturday morning I go to the health club early, pop in the pool for a bliss-stirring swim, and dress in time for my channel 13 debut. I go to the trainer who has kindly promised to set me up with a screen. He leads me into the weight and cardio room. I haven't been in this part of the club before. The curtains are always closed, and it isn't on the route connecting front desk, pool, and showers. He leads me to an exercise bike, which I instantly see is equipped with its own closed circuit television. There is a beautiful flat face, clear controls, and a pair of comfortable earphones. Looking around I realize that nearly every piece of cardio gear has its own television, and on the ones in use, those televisions are on.

I sit up on the seat of the bicycle--not exactly an arm chair--and we find the channel. I am good to go. I look around again. I can only see two other machine-users' screens, but they aren't turned to channel 13. Don't they know?!

I wait through a few advertisements, and then the weather. It is a very long weather report. I hardly hear any of it. Finally, the moment comes. Here I am, alone in a crowd, propped up on my exercise bike, watching... myself.

Towards the end comes the line that I know is coming. I am talking about the kind of bodily movement that can help us shift our experience of our bodies and desires. This movement, I am saying, is not where we treat our bodies like pets needing a walk--or propel our exercise bikes while watching television. At the time, I hadn't meant to say that such exercising is "bad"--it isn't!--only that it is more likely to reinforce than to evolve our felt sense of ourselves as minds over bodies.

Still, the irony persists. Here I am, on a health club exercise bike, watching myself on television talking about (not) watching television on an exercise bike!

Glad I had my swim.

Here is the clip:

A Great Idea

2009-05-20T07:09:00.005-04:00

It seems like a great idea, at least at first. It is even my idea. We are all so excited!

We spend days planning: on the fourth anniversary of the day that our offer on this farm was accepted, May 15, we will celebrate by sleeping in the meadow at the top of the large hill behind our house in our beloved tent.

Camping, nine months pregnant? Oh yes! I imagine parking myself in front of the tent, gazing over a robust campfire, admiring the sun as it touches down over the mountains. Nothing to do but sit. No problem!

I forgot. I forgot how much stuff we would need to lug up the hill in order to feed and clothe and bed two adults and four children for a night. I spend the afternoon of the 15th assembling goods and baking bread. The kids adamantly refuse to drive our car up to the meadow. No way. They will take multiple trips, if necessary, all day and night. So Geoff and I pull out our hiking backpacks and load them up. Jessica will wear mine. Jordan will carry the tent.

We are there, on the hillside green, not long after six PM. Chores are done and the house to bed. First step: set up our campsite. While Jessica and Kyra roam for sticks, Geoff, Jordan, Kai and I gather round the tent. Despite our best efforts, it resists construction. There are too many poles of assorted shapes and sizes, supposedly clearly marked with little round stickers that disappear with a turn. After several cycles of trial and error, we finally figure out front from back and lift the roof. We decide not to put on the upper tarp, the better to see the stars.

By this time, I am tired. We sit--finally sit!--on our blanket in a circle and munch a delicious dinner. Pasta and salad, cheese and bread. It is magical—even better than I hoped. The kids collect more wood to burn; our fire starts easily. The kids are in heaven, happy and free.

As the temperature dips and the first star appears, the trembling begins. It is as if my body is cold, though I don't feel a chill. I can't stop shaking. Or cramping. I feel as if I am separating from my self. I try breathing, putting on more clothes, crawling closer to the fire. I finally crawl into a sleeping bag inside the tent. Geoff comes with me, extra heat. By then, the kids are eager to slip into their bags as well.

We all lie there, silent, listening to the night, watching the stars pop out, but I know. I can't sleep up here. Fear edges every sense. I am convinced that I am going to go into labor at any moment. And I am so far away from home—our very best nest. I try to hang in and hang out, for the kids at least. Then the words tumble out, without my consent.

“We have to go down.” My body knows.

I am grateful that resistance is light. I don't want to go either. Everyone rallies. We pull on clothes, close up the tent, bank the fire, pack up the food, leave the rest, and parade single file down the hill on a long narrow path in the dark towards home, with flashlights bouncing along.

So much for our camping adventure!

Actually it is perfect yet again. As the others tumble into their beds, I spend the next two hours getting ready for the small one to arrive. Nesting they call it, a sure sign of imminent birth. I finish washing clothes, arranging towels, putting together the car seat, sterilizing tools, and organizing supplies. I can't stop. By the time I plop between the sheets, however, the cramping and trembling have subsided. They pick up again between 1 and 2:30 AM, then, with a huge contraction at 4 AM, disappear. After that, nothing.

Labor began; labor ended, all at once.

The next day dawns, sunny and blue. Big belly, no baby. We are sorry not to be up the hill, and so happy to be home. The meadow calls again. After breakfast we walk back up to paradise and snap some “good-bye belly” pictures.

It will all happen, just as it should... in another two weeks.

LAUNCHED!

2009-05-13T06:58:00.013-04:00

It is done.

On Friday, May 8, 2009, at 7 PM, I appeared at the venerable Northshire Books in Manchester, VT to launch What a Body Knows! Off it goes!

The whole family came along to share in the moment. While the others listened, Kai slept the event away, curled in the corner in a soft leather chair. Oh my small enabler!
*
Even though this book is my third, I had never given a book launch before. Sure I'd given academic papers on the topics covered in my books. I had lectured and discussed, but never had I talked about why I had written a book, then turned from time to time to read sections from the work.

I loved it. I loved the layering of it, the deep pasts, present, and future all coming together. Then the questions came--thoughtful and relevant, exploring the reach of the book's ideas. Something was right.
*
We moved to the farm so I could write this book. I have known this for a while. But as I prepared for the talk, I realized that the reverse was just as true. I wrote this book so I could move to the farm. Writing the book--the desire to write the book--made moving necessary. It wasn't just that I needed to practice what I was preaching, but I needed the experience of finding the wisdom in my own desire in order to discover and flesh out what it was that needed to be said. The book wrote itself through me, as I lived it.

It is a sobering thought.

This Friday is the fourth anniversary of that day when our offer on this place was accepted. Since then, there has not been one moment when we ever doubted or regretted the decision. And as we launch this book, our book, all together, I am awash with gratitude in the wonder of it all. Or perhaps it is just the smell of lilacs bursting.

For more about What a Body Knows or to purchase your copy, please visit: VITAL ARTS. Then share your comments, ask your questions, let us know what you think!

Cucumbers in a Cup

2009-04-30T08:30:00.005-04:00

It is an interesting time of year to be nine months pregnant. I am heavy with new life. So is the earth. Everywhere I turn, surfaces I see are sticking out, popping up, swelling forth. So is my belly.

The skin of my abdomen is taut and hard, yet yields to the touch and moves on its own accord, rocked by internal rhythms of its own beating and breathing. Dandelions poke. Violets unfold. Iris blades pierce the air.

The shell of winter is cracking, crumbling, shifting, and rearranging its pieces. Something else is coming forward in shape and shade, opening and being opened, seeing and being seen by the light of the sun. The bumps have different sizes—knee or hand, back or elbow.

Even so, as revelations shout forth, the mystery of it all only increases. I can no longer see the ground for the greening grass. Silvery leaves block my view of branches, bark, and the arc of a hill. What was so clear and reassuringly bare in winter recedes behind layers into depths.

Nor can I see what will become of what is appearing to me. I can see the life force in stems and petals, exposed and expressed. I can feel the pulse animating vessels and veins. I bear witness to beauty unfolding.

But what will happen to all these seeds? What will the story of each one be? Will it bend in the breeze or break with the snap of a dry twig? Will it unfurl in all its resplendence or disappear into the mouth of a bug? And what about the latest leaf on the LaMothe/Gee family tree—what will its story be?

Each bump and bang, each movement given, deepens the mystery. At this very moment I may know as much as I will ever know about this life inside of me.

The tomato seeds we planted a few weeks ago are now sprouts, some of them six inches tall. Following the directions, we put three seeds to a cup, prepared to “thin” the seedlings as needed. But thin is a devious word—a euphemism for kill. I find it devastating. Seeds that worked so hard to rupture their skins, emit roots, and reach for the sun must be mercilessly plucked by some hand of fate—mine—and left to die.

At first I waited. I just couldn’t face up to the task of playing eternal judge. I know it is good for the plants that remain to have a cup to themselves. Still. The plucked ones smell so good, so green, so worthy.

Then, as some plants grew faster than the others, the task seemed easier. For here was a clear reason, a definitive principle to apply: sacrifice the smaller. I am still stymied, however, when the plants are the same size. How do I separate twins? Each one has an equal claim. I just want to transplant one of them to another cup.
*
It is a time of life, and a time of death. We know two people who have died in the past week: the ever-glowing mother of childhood friends, plucked by cancer. The twenty-two year old brother of friend, broken by a motorcycle accident. Life cut off too early.

What will my story be? What will the story of my children be?
*
This child will be my fifth, and I still don’t know what it means to be a mother. With every birth, the answer seems farther away.

I moved here to the farm to be a mother, or so it seems. I was nine months pregnant, again. I was also here to be a dancer and a philosopher, and to create a way of living that would allow me to weave these three threads of my life so as to think thoughts differently, and think different thoughts.

One thing I had learned during my tenure in the academic world was to look for what was hidden by reason’s clearest revelations. So many tomes of western philosophy and theology—including my favorite books—were written by middle-class white men, educated and often single, cared for by mothers, sisters, servants, and sometimes wives, largely left alone to write. Their tracings of human experience can be luminous in shape and shade, expressing and exposing vital currents of life full and formed.

Even so, I found that each revelation deepened the mystery: how did this life become what it is? How did these thoughts emerge? Where were the wombs?

I wanted to write about this becoming—the bodily becoming that happens as a helpless infant unfolds into a thinking/feeling adult and learns to love. I wanted to hold our western traditions accountable to the rhythms of nurturing life.

I wanted to be a mother—to participate consciously in the process of bodies becoming who they are—and to allow this action to pull my thinking and dancing into new shapes and shades, new stories about what is possible. I wanted to be a mother in order to be a better philosopher—to expose and express what bodies know.

So we moved. So I wrote. Perhaps it should not surprise me. By accident and coincidence, it turns out that my first television interview about What a Body Knows will air on Mother’s Day. When I am nine months pregnant. Of course.
*
I still haven’t thinned the tomato twins. I know I am going to have the same problem too, in another week or so, with the cucumbers. We planted cucumber seeds in cups to celebrate Eostre—the dawning of desire, its rupture into yearning, and the hard work and patience needed to tend its fruition. We planted two seeds to a cup. Each is growing. How am I to choose which should live and which should die? Who am I to write the sentence that spells life or death?

I am going to get some more cups.

Back to the Farm

2009-04-20T11:44:00.005-04:00

We aren’t waiting any more, at least, not for what we thought we were waiting. The vet stopped by last week to steer our bull calves and we had him examine our Jersey cow, Precious. The news stopped us in our tracks.

“No,” he announced, after reaching his plastic-gloved arm into her body up to his elbow, “she isn’t pregnant.” We all stood there, silent.

Of course Precious was pregnant! We had seen the signs! We had waited and hoped and planned and prepared—for nine months! We had believed! But no, the expert evidence was in: she wasn’t pregnant.

Jessica was visibly distressed. She wanted that calf. We all did. She wanted to name it, love it, and milk its mom.

The swelling presence, moments before, of what would be was now a gnawing absence of what might have been. We all felt the pain of thwarted desire.

April is the cruelest month.
*
I just returned from a conference at Syracuse University on the Politics of Love. Philosophers and theologians, a political theorist, an historian, and a psychoanalyst, from Europe and America, were gathered to ponder common questions. What is love? What is politics? Might we develop a politics that is guided by love? That expresses love? Or that at least encourages love among concerned parties? Are love and politics even compatible?

As the papers unfolded, participants discussed concepts of love (as union or separation, public or private, eros or agape, miracle or gift), practices of love (as reconciliation and forgiveness), and various critiques of love (as masking, justifying, and even requiring violence). The discussions were animated and provoking, even passionate. It was clear: these people love their work.

Still, it seemed to me that something was missing—something that I moved to the farm to find. What?

I moved to the farm to learn about love by living a life that would enable me to do so. Yet the conference discussion seemed to assume that love simply is—that we can know it when we see it, choose it when we want it, and apply it whenever to wherever we think it is needed.

Is it so easy to get into love, or get love into us? How does it happen? Do we fall in love, grow into love, erupt with love, or will ourselves to it? Is loving simply a matter of deciding and committing? Or rather, could it be a matter of learning to discern the wisdom in our desire?

Our ability to live in love, as I have come to believe, is a matter of cultivating a sensory awareness of the movements that are always already making us. It is what our bodies know.
*
The day after the vet visited, Precious was showing signs of heat for the first time in months. Perhaps it was his muscled arm that stimulated her sensory space of want. Regardless, it was obvious: she was wanting. She was popping up on Daisy and Dandelion, heedless of their common sex; and when Jordan did the heat-testing trick of jumping up on her back, she stood uncharacteristically still.

The sperm doctor we called arrived hours later in his semen-bearing white truck. This time around we chose a bull named Echo. “She has an extra curl in there,” he confirmed while administering the dose, slowly and steadily. “She might need a bull.” He told us of a prize-winning Jersey not far from here. “A few weeks with him,” he said, “should be enough to get things going.”

For Precious, getting life started is a job best left to mother nature. And a bull.
*
How do we get love started?

Love is a primal force. Yes, it can sometimes be irrational and destructive, but the fact is, we could not and would not exist without it. Love is essential for human life—not necessarily to start life, but at the very least, to keep it going. We are beneficiaries of love long before we can debate its merits, given the gift of being carried in the womb long before we can think what a gift might be.

For without a loving touch we cannot grow. Our brain cells will not fire. Sensations of openness and pleasure will not unfold to guide us along our way. Without attention from our caregivers, we cannot learn to create the relationships we need to support us in becoming who we are.

It is not that we receive all that we desire from our caregivers. We rarely do. But if we survive, we have received enough— enough to know we want more. Our sense of it is stimulated. We want more of that pleasure we feel when becoming who we are. More of that love.
*
Back on the farm, I remember. This is why we are here: to create the conditions in which love can thrive as the most important thing, horizon and guide of every moment. So too, this process is a bodily one. Love is sensory. We can think it and analyze it, but “love” is not what it is unless we also feel it, move with it, and allow it to move us.

We learn to love when we open the sensory spaces that allow us to respond to each moment in ways that create the mutually enabling relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world we need to thrive.

It is What a Body Knows.
*
Echo’s sperm weren’t able to surf the curl. It looks like we are going to need that bull.

Celebrating Eostre

2009-04-10T20:12:00.005-04:00

We are waiting, as we have been for the past two weeks.

Jessica’s Jersey cow, Precious, is due to give birth—over due. At first, we were expecting a calf around March 25. Then we realized that we had misremembered the day the deed was done. Replacing the incorrect June 19 with June 25, we recalculated: back three months, forward five to seven days, and arrived at a new due date, April 1. We also realized that the “normal” gestational period for a Jersey can expand from 283 days to 291, taking us through the first week in April. Up to now.

So we are really ready!

Precious, however, seems to have other ideas.

Is she pregnant at all? It seems so. She has not come into heat regularly over the past nine months, and if you palpate her belly alongside her ribs, you can feel the lumps of what must be curled limbs. And they move.

On the other hand, her udder is still small—not yet bursting with the milk that her calf will need right out of the chute. The muscles of her tailbone have not yet sunk. She walks comfortably, munching the greening grass. As our farmer neighbor says: If she isn’t trying, nothing is wrong.

Is she waiting? Or is it just we humans who are drenched with anticipation?
*
Sunday will be Easter, and I have been researching the pagan threads woven through this most important of Christian holidays. A spring celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection dates back to the second century, when it was primarily a ritual of baptism. Those seeking to join the Christian community would undergo a 40-day period of isolation, education, and prayer before being born again with the sun/son into the body of the church as a member. This ritual of new beginnings wasn’t called Easter, however.

The name Easter, or “Eostre,” dates to the seventh century, when Christian missionaries purportedly subsumed the spring celebrations of an Anglo Saxon goddess by the same name within their own Paschal rites. As Venerable Bead (679-735 BCE) writes, the month of April, or “Eostremonath,” was named after a goddess of fertility (think “estrus” and “estrogen”), spring, and the dawning of a day (think “east”). The newly-converted Anglo Saxon Christians, Bede claimed, were now borrowing this “time-honoured name” to describe the “joys of the new rite” the missionaries had introduced.

Whether or not there actually was such a goddess is difficult to verify through other means, though few suspect Bede of lying. What is clear is that the Christian missionaries to England had been instructed by their pope, Gregory, in a letter of 601 BCE, to allow the “heathens” to continue worshipping in their own temples and practicing their own rituals as long as those temples were purged of “idols” and those rituals redirected to the Christian God. Bede may be confirming, then, the continuation of pagan practices under the auspices of a spring celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, now named “Easter.”

There are no bunnies in the Bible. No colored eggs or hot cross buns. But there is evidence that Anglo Saxons considered the hare an exemplar and symbol of fertility; that they decorated and exchanged eggs in celebration of the vernal equinox (as did many cultures), and that crosses on sweet breads may have represented the horns of a bull honored—or sacrificed—in the name of a a god or goddess, like Eostre.
*
We are not interested in sacrificing any bulls this Easter. (Come on, Precious! Give us a heifer!) But it is hard not to celebrate the new beginnings sprouting up around us. There is a sense of irresistible relief and joy that comes when the grip of cold breaks and new life peeks out from its hiding places.

At the same time, however, that joy is woven through with a sense of tremendous yearning for all the things yet to emerge. Spring is a time when desire wakes up—the sap runs, fluids flow, and we want what will be.

So what are we celebrating? And why?

We are celebrating the seeds. The return of desire, the return of hope and promise for what is not yet.

And we celebrate the seeds for there is work to be done. Hard work. We must plant and protect, warm and water, and watch vigilantly for signs of sickness. We must, in short, wait, and we will need all the good will and determination, all the patience and attention, that our celebration will stir in us.
*
Perhaps it is fitting that my book, What a Body Knows, is out just now, on the eve of Eostre’s festival. For this book is all about desire—and about how we deal with our own. The book is not about “getting what you want” as much as it is about how we sense and respond to the sensations of longing that surface in us.

There is work to be done here, and it is the work of opening a sensory space where we can feel our desires, and welcome the feelings of frustration that so often signal their arrival as guiding us to move in ways that will align our pleasure and well being. It is the work of waiting for an impulse to move, and following it through.

We are waiting. Waiting for Precious to calve. Waiting for spring to come. Waiting for What a Body Knows to make its way into the world. Waiting to be born.

Perhaps we need to celebrate Easter so that we will have the energy and focus to wait for the harvest, the birth, the becoming. It will happen, we remind ourselves. It will happen. The spring we thought would never arrive has finally come, and so will the birth we desire.

Come on, Precious!

THE BOOK...

2009-04-03T15:56:00.004-04:00

.... IS HERE!

You can now find What a Body Knows on your favorite online bookselling site (like Amazon or Barnes & Noble), soon to be found at your local bookstore!

"I simply cannot praise the book enough! The prose is positively brilliant. It is full of sparkling gems of insight and astonishing, concise yet profound formulations. The nature passages remind me of Annie Dillard. It is truly a remarkable achievement!"
--Miranda Shaw, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, University of Richmond

Stay tuned for more information and an updated Vital Arts website!

Thank you for your support!

Shaking Medicine

2009-03-26T17:40:00.011-04:00

A song flew into my ear this morning, slipping through the window I had cracked hours before. I opened my eyes to find a room still dark, and a first-blush of dawn sliding across the sky. I heard the bird sing again. Perhaps it was that first-of-the-season, spring-signaling red wing blackbird that Kyra spied the other day. Or maybe it was one of the many starlings making nests under our eaves. The song floated through once more. I smiled. You can’t stop spring.
*
The tomato plants we planted in the paper cups left over from our Genesis concert are popping their heads up to take a peek around. It has been just over a week since Jessica, Kyra, Kai and I filled those cups on a sunny stoop, lined them in shoe boxes, and began our watering routine. Tiny weed heads sprouted first, but now furry fronds are finally poking out and lifting their chins to the world. They are so fragile, so indomitable--the force of life breaking out, breaking forth, breaking free.
*
Everyone seems to be doing it—the birds, the cows, the rooster and the duck. The rooster and the duck? We haven’t decided whether the rooster thinks he is a drake, or whether the duck imagines herself a hen, but whichever way it is, these two feathered friends flock together. The ardent force of their lonely loins seems to overcome any differences, except for yesterday. When our duck decided to go for a swim with a couple of wild mallards in the pond across the street, our rooster paced the shore crowing with concern. He did not appreciate the competition.
*
We are waiting for Precious’ calf to come. While Precious was due on the 24th (we think), she is not yet showing signs of being ready to pop. She has not yet "bagged out": her udder is small and slack. Nor are the muscles around her tail soft and sunken. We know, however, the birth is going to happen. It will.

Meanwhile my small traveler is thrusting about with a life of its own. I can barely imagine the choreography it is taking to make such tattoos on my belly. The lumps and bumps, pressing and receding, fill me with delight in anticipation of what is coming: a new being, happening now, happening every day, happening soon.
*
I went to a terrific conference this weekend at Duke University on the healing powers of music and dance. The keynote speaker was Bradford Keeney, a scholar and shaman who has traveled the world studying bodily movement in healing traditions from Africa and South America, through North America to Japan.

Keeney applauds western cultures for how well we have appropriated the meditative strands of non-western religions. As he notes, the Relaxation Response, made handy by Herbert Bensen and others, is now a ready cure relied on for many ills: migraines to mental illness, cancers to colds.

However, Keeney insists, we have missed the other arc in the rhythm of healing. In addition to relaxing deeply, we also need to wake ourselves up, arouse our senses, and raise and release the creative energy stuck in our bodies by engaging in vigorous bodily movement. Shaking medicine he calls it.

Shaking medicine, as he defines and practices it, is all about (what I have described as) cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodies as the movement that is making us. Shaking we learn what our bodies know about how to participate in the rhythms of our own becoming. We tap our healing energy, and let it happen through us.
*
Shaking, healing, springing forth. Healing happens, spring happens, with a force that cannot be stopped. It is what our bodies do; it is what the earth does. It is our very life, constantly being born, constantly recreating itself, until the day we die.

Is it a coincidence that I heard Keeney speak on the eve of spring?

In every moment, the thrust of life is charging through us, breathing, beating, breaking forth. With every movement we are creating ourselves, singing and dancing ourselves into existence, creating the relationships with others that will support us in becoming who we are. As we do, we heal. We find ourselves moving in ways that do not recreate the patterns of pain and hurt in which we are stuck. It is what our bodies know.

Spring is here, and we remember the regenerative power lodged in our lungs and limbs. Catching songs in our ears, we hear new life. Stretching in the sun, we dance.
*
When I was gone, Jordan decided it was time to plant potatoes. He hoed six furrows, twenty feet long. He marshaled Jessica to help him cut potatoes into two-eyed chunks, and urged Geoff to buy another bag. Kyra counted the 100 pieces they made. Then, followed by Kai, all four kids went out to push their potato promises into the softened earth. The thoughts of nourishing their bodies nourished their souls. Aligning their energies with the growing, thrusting force of spring, their enthusiasm was contagious. The movements they were making were making them.

What should we plant? How should we move? What shall we sing?
What will grow if we do?

*
For more information about Keeney, see this article or this interview.

Yoking, Yearning & Yoga

2009-03-17T20:23:00.007-04:00

Kyra is drawing explosive, volcano flower sunbursts.

Jessica is plotting plant patches for her garden.

Kai wants to ride one of the puffy white clouds that dangle in the blue.

And Jordan is training his bull calves.

As I move through the postures of my yoga routine, the thought forms: it’s all yoga. Yoga: the Sanskrit word for “union,” and a root form of our “yoke,” means to join or connect, to form a bond. In yoga, a practitioner breathes into bodily shapes that draw our sensory selves into the present, so we can unite with ourselves, unite with what is. In all these activities too, these kids are joining and connecting, creating the relationships that will support them in unfolding what they have to give.

Isn’t this what life is about?
*
It is not easy to form a yoke.

In order to train his bull calves, Jordan first had to make one: a crossbar pierced by two semi-circle bows that would embrace the calves’ heads. Choosing a slice of birch, he carved a curvy bracket with his draw knife, drilled four holes, and began a regime of linseed oil application. A yogurt container stuffed with an old rag lives by our sink.

Then for the bows, he needed a special kind of hard but bendable wood. After a couple of scouting trips around the farm, he found the perfect shagbark hickory tree—big enough that he needed help felling it. After he and Geoff lopped off the limbs and dragged it back home, Jordan split the log into sixteenths and took out the heart to make two four foot lengths of one-inch chunk. It was hard. Would the wood bend?

We devised an apparatus for the top of our wood stove: on top of a water-filled spaghetti pot with vented lid, we placed with an upside down funnel, on which sat a PVC joint holding a five foot length of PVC piping. It looked like the stove had sprouted rabbit ears. Into the pipe went the bow. After a steamy soak, Jordan took out the wood, held the ends, and bended it like licorice around his knee. One bow bowed, the other quickly followed. Minutes later the bows were as hard again as the wood they were. After drilling some more holes and gathering the proper pins, Jordan’s yoke was ready to go yoking.

At first, the bull calves weren’t so sure about the yoke, but they liked the attention, the nose and neck scratches, and the walks around the yard. By now they seem quite comfortable, pleased to play this pulling game for a few minutes every day. Jordan guides them around the yard with his stick yelling “Gee!” to go right, and “Haw!” to head left. Then he says “Whoa!” and stands in front of them to block their way, his stick a wall. Good thing they are only calves.

The smile on his face when he came in today says it all: “Oh they were so good today!”

Kai agrees.

*
A yoke is the piece of wood, carved and shaped.

A yoke of oxen is what the calves will become when they pull as one.

To yoke is to join or connect these independent powers in the service of a common goal—becoming one force for action.

The questions arise: What kinds of yokes are we creating for ourselves? With what or whom are we joining? What kind of relationships do we want to create?

What are we yearning to do?

These kids seem to know.