Last Minute Emotions

Yesterday, I had an intense Hakomi therapy session. By the time I reached the evening, and I was getting ready to go out to socialize, I was frozen. I felt "ok" most of the day, and didn't see this freezing up coming. It was clear I had some processing to do, and couldn't go out. But why then? Why at the last minute?

Swimming While Sleeping

Lake Wingra, Madison: Sky in Water, July 2013

This is a student writing from late last spring. It keeps haunting me. The prompt was about "elements" - which of the four main elements (earth water fire air) do you relate to most?

This student had really been struggling with her writing, but this came out, well, like water.

It is unedited here, just as it came out of her pen on paper.

Enjoy.

She is swimming, always swimming, even when not swimming.  Even when sleeping.  No, that’s not right.  She sleeps and dreams of swimming.  Keep the pen on the paper.  Don’t stop.  Don’t look out the window.  Don’t listen to the trucks rumbling by.  No; let the sounds in, but don’t hold onto them; let them float by, as do the tiny sea creatures, down deep, that the swimmer swims through, in the deepest part of a dream.  Everything is slower in the depths, in the ocean, in the murky but strangely light fluid that is filled with life.  She doesn’t need to breathe, at least breathing is not an issue, and she can see everything, but is not aware of her eyes.  She can’t name what she sees, cannot hear, cannot touch, but she is aware of it all and knows it by heart.  This is the ocean, or is it sleep?  Or wakefulness?

She jumps into the clear, sparkling water of the Olympic-size pool, adjusts her goggles and swims freestyle to the end and back, once, twice, three times and more.  The air is warm, the water holds the blue of the sky and crystals of light, and the sun shines with enough power to propel her through the water.  She is smiling, even as she breathes out bubbles of air, turning her head to the side and capturing the sunlight on her face as she takes another breath.  This is what she has waited all winter for: the twelve weeks when she can have it all – the warm air, the bright sun, the sparkling water, the countless gallons of water holding her aloft, weightless, as she moves herself down the lane, back and forth from end to end, free from every single thing. 

In the water her mind is free.  Her thoughts float as she would float in the surf at the ocean, buoyed by the salty infinity that reaches around the globe.  And when her hands are in the water, washing dishes, her mind wanders then, too, and she is free to be anywhere, anything.  As she fills the dog’s water bowl, as she rinses off her dirty feet after gardening barefoot, as she stands under the shower letting streams and beads and bullets of water run over her head and down across her shoulders, as she points the hose at the thirsty plants, holding her thumb over the nozzle to make the water spray far and wide, and the sun catches drops and makes colors and translucent mist, as she watches the rain come in sheets and run in little rivers down the gutters in the street, she is at home in the universe.

How Was Your Trip?

side of a truck that's been graffitied, paris, june 2013

It's the first question I get upon returning from Europe each summer.
Sometimes I get it when I take smaller teaching trips - Toronto, Chicago, even.
But there's nothing quite like being gone for five weeks to Europe.

It's a fair question to ask. A kind one. And one I often don't want to answer. Here's why.

Thank You

"Eyes of Love," Paris storefront, June 2013

For my writing students.

 “Writing is constantly letting letters arrange into different combinations and meanings.”

-       a student from this last seven-week session

Thank you

for showing up

for speaking out

for putting up with struggle

for laughing when you can

for giving critic space before giving it the boot

for your sincere joy and curiosity

for witnessing words and their energy

for being game to go as far as you can at any given time

for your commitment to the unknown.

Sometimes total strangers trump intimacy in terms of safety and secrecy.

Sometimes metaphor carries deep feeling miles further than it can by itself.

Sometimes when breath hits the bottom of lungs, of diaphragm, something cracks and opens knowing that is otherwise unspoken

there in those spaces we pull out

the shovels

the maps

the compasses

and we curiosity our way through our minds’ landscapes

our hearts’ fire escapes

our instincts’ innate flow

our potential fates’ uneven knowing

Sometimes in the middle of the most ordinary-seeming statements, something clicks into place that’s been edging in that direction, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, for decades.

It’s in those moments

and the gaps in-between

that we practice

this writing.

Sacred and mundane

deep and cheap

real and fantastical

understood and undermined

woven and separate.

Chez moi, ou non pas? (My home, or not?)

"Please don't park here - car exit" Paris, 2012

I remember when I was eleven or so, I went on a trip with my brothers to Ohio, for a family friend's wedding. Staying in her apartment, one of a large building that encircled an active courtyard, I recorded the sounds that were so unusual - normal to someone but not to me - and enjoyed listening to them again and again. I wasn't bothered by being "kept awake" - I was curious about this place where even the pace of speech differed.

I could hear people's conversations, something I didn't often overhear in my quiet, "a suburb not attached to a larger city" town of upbringing. I heard basketball and sirens, yelling and people running around. It was what made me most aware I was elsewhere.

So, when I woke from a nap this afternoon in the lovely, light and open fifth story bedroom of my host's place in Paris, I had a similar curiosity. For a moment, I thought I was at home:
I heard skateboards outside, cars shuffling around one another, a cat on my left, cuddled up close.
It could have been home: comfortable, clean, cozy.
Only, it's not.