Seeing through the leaves

I worked with M again today at the Jewish school. I Left the school at the end of last term when the funding stopped. I mourned the disconnect of this abrupt ending and did a series of small colour pictures of faces changing expression as colours melding through one another like a dim light flushing between layers of cloth caught and held in suspension. The faces only come together at a certain angle of glance, then disappear again through the intensity of gaze.

Out of the blue I got to work with M after a local man died and left some money. So the mourning and the continuation of life somehow began to work through one another without cancelling one another out.

After work today I walked up the hill and I could hear the voices of the children through the leaves that were dislodging on every blow of the wind so that those that remained seemed to stand out in midair in spherical formations through which the thick bark of the trunk was clearly visible yet somehow set apart. Black birds were rising through the leaves as if pulled magnetically up to a certain height, then dropping back down through the cascading leaves to balance momentarily on invisible branches then fall away again.

I have began working at the school again with G as well. He was non-verbal when I last worked with him and into the rushes of sound that streamlined or cut diagonally his actions he would put "whoosh" and "wheee" which are now filled out into story-lines. Words now punctuate the push and pull of careful operations such as the hoisting and lowering of a stuffed animal on the end of a piece of string. This was a child who when wordless was immersed in process and now with his on-going word commentary, he still is.

M is a different kind of child. He is wracked with spasm, blotchy around the eyes, his chest heaving in gravelly shifts that stop and start at uneven gaps. Today I could see that his pupils were dilated and his eyes rolling back as he was coming and going into different states of consciousness. There was this slight pulsation around the black pupil; a thick band of gold flecked blue which was turning this way and that like a combination lock working on a code all by itself. Several staff peered deeply into the black and blue depth. Each one saw something different.

After calling his parents on a mobile phone we discovered that he had had an epileptic fit the night before. No one had told us. It was agreed that I should still go ahead with the treatment. I would need to keep aware of his eyes because there was the possibility that if things took a turn for the worse we had to phone an ambulance. But as it turned out we didn't need to do this.

Since re-starting work with M, I have found it hard to write standard case studies about him.
It seems that there is this cascading of events where the problem areas and their shift into a wider circulation are so much beckoning in on one another that the "positive" and "negative" almost give a reason for the other to exist. There are layers of affect in warmth, muscle tone and breath that come and go and that begins to organise how I make contact with M and how he beckons me into this contact or fills out into a spaciousness that we are both in. There are so many things streaming through one another- different temperature gradients of  hot/cold, rigidity and movement and even in the stuckness there is a certain clustering and a mounting up of intensity and then the forging of many new routes of connection that escalate out, then die away. These are not given by me but are gone into by his awareness as he interprets and unlocks the potential of a mute touch which starts to animate through his body as a living dialogue almost with a life of its own. It is enough for both me and him to witness this. 

There are points that work to relieve spasm just behind the ear and on the bridge of the foot. I am drawn also to the right side of his diaphragm that seems cold and unusually inflated and suggests a stress on the liver. But my hands simply pad to areas that lend themselves to be touched here and here and then there so that no point is active or useful outside of the living resonance of a wider pattern. Affects spill into one another and the pattern makes itself out of these emergent floodgates that are opening and are time specific and that then spill and superimpose one upon another. Touch becomes this sensing of varying depths drawn and re-configured around responsiveness; of going into and bouncing out at the level of subtle variation and co-adaptation. This is forged there and then like a pulsatory beat captured into an echo through the conditions of a wider space. This wider context only becomes visible through the foregrounding of immediate affects.Yes there is a tendency to bring the rising of heat and conscious busyness of excess activity away from the head and to follow a trickle-down descent through the neck, shoulders, diaphragm and remaining on the belly for some time. Ther eis also attention to supporting the junctions in the wrists, elbows, knees and ankles where there can be a build up of tension through blockage with the resultant unevenness of hot/cold throughout the body.

But no area of contact or attention makes any sense if it is not feeding through the visioning of the eyes and the patterning of the body-mind that is looking inwards and tracking these re-circulations. By following these spontaneous response patterns forged through the breath, through muscle tone, digestive and excretory sphincters, skeletal shifts in alignment, heat variance in the blood flow and neurological tilts of emphasis in the minute changes of light, touch and sound, these affects begin to organise like a melody that gradually comes through. In the physical torsion of yawning and stretching the voice begins to come through. It breaks into a moan that is sustained and carried thickening into a chord with many flavours. I chime in and out catching on the tail-end then extending past his ending only to stop as M chimes back in so that in relays there is a continuous sounding through which we than begin to cut away. Silence mounts up or shines through out of the excess that is falling away revealing frames through frames which are transparent and shimmering in the same view.

The concreteness of definite touch, definite utterance or steady eye contact is built up through the pulsatory and flickering quality of there/not thereness. This playing of presence and absence hones a sensitivity of touch-responsiveness by using touch to make space in the "off" touch and using sound to make silence in the interval. Negative space becomes imbued with significance. It's only when there is this spaciousness that there is the proper distance and right timing necessary in which to articulate contact. Gradually the voice becomes clear and resonant and M's grip around my fingers becomes a nuanced touch. I feel him coming through in these layers of on/off contact and the clear and unclear becomes one. Wherever there is an explicit connection it rises up through layers that are more porous than our idea of material existance and that in the practice, convolute together into a pulsatory whole. Contact then is not something overwhelming or harsh like a bright light or a high speed collision of muted impact. At every moment it is tenderised and nuanced but fullt present like the flickering light between autumn leaves. The base can settle and find alignment out of this play of continual dissolvement. There is something regenerative in this because it is on-going.

Even the harsh thrashings of spasm in an epileptic seizure carry the possibility of this re-tuning into circulation. And I have often found with young children who are epileptic that the day after having a fit they are open to radical reorganisation. A dramatic re-circulation of structural, emotional and psychological creativity becomes accessible on the surface and through the rippling affects at many depths of contact when that contact is open-ended. There is this merging of the distraught discomfort of the body as a rigidly held structure and the utter fatigue of successive waves of fitting that is a kind of giving way to movement and this creates the conditions for a possibility of clearance. In the blotchiness of the skin and the wavering of the eyes there are the beginnings of both symptom and the passing of a certain phase of blockage. This may come through little by little into a deep calm that is momentary but undeniably there. There is an occasion of meeting and it cannot be refuted. But it is on the edge between destructiveness and re-emergence and it must be held with great care and love by both practitioner and child.