Rocking our world

In a rocking perturbation something rises, unfolds, spreads out and sinks back down to the ground. Only to repeat this patterning again and again, rising and falling on the edge of its own disturbance. It is the disturbance that brings out the patterning in a movement at first reckless like a tangent or a distraction that seems to cause a missed beat to an otherwise perfect symmetry. But this symmetry is only our idea of the body; of a plan; of a function. And it is peppered with arrested development; unforeseen environmental beckoning or the simple uneven lay of the land. How to iron out these fault-lines? And where would we be in this uncreased landscape; if nature was such a good housekeeper that it equalised every nook and cranny; erased the tumultuous fluid and larva-filled rumblings of our ancient and not so distant past. In the perfection of an unmarked landscape we would be erased our history never begun. For it is one thing after another; one interruption or slight of hand; one slippage or runaway rumination that fashions our oblique disposition.

Yes we are swaying in this world which itself is one large swing hoisted who knows where subject to weather conditions and sedimentary shifts in the strata below our feet. The wind blows. It sinks into the hollows of our sunken cheeks. It screams out its escape hollering over the wasted episodes, blowing up a storm and making child-kites that flutter and glide, swerve and remain poised for seconds at a time out of the paper bags and polythene wrappers of discarded groceries. High up in the stratosphere they are balanced between jet-streams; submerged in the crevices of circuits that contradict one another, swaying with ease where at another level; in another split second, they might collide and crumple to the ground.

We are breathing; rising and falling; making and breaking these volatile patterns in our every gesture, our every hesitation. For in these split second coincidences; in these circuitous rebuffs and momentary mis-matches, there is a folding back onto itself and out of itself  in the mad dance of making and re-making an origami paper-weight bird that acquires some kind of gravitas not through its near transparent substance but through the passages and tail-ends of its own formation; the ground-swell of our own restless hands, our agitating bodies and the buzzing insistent distractions of colloidal sound-scapes that break in upon the flow, cut it up and re-assemble the pieces out of the fallen stars of our dreaming imaginations. This is where we come to rest; out of and in the midst of our own and one anothers continual agitation. We are dreaming the same dream and it is the same dream, out of which we meet as one or annihilate one another. Both are possible and both are playing out together.

Body Unforetold

Working with M yesterday I noticed firstly even when he was still strapped into his chair and I had yet to touch him that he was alert to my voice. His eyes seemed to scan the duration of a sound emission then blink and like a wind-screen wiper run the opposite way. I felt the slight softening of his lips- something between a puckering outwards and a pressing inwards. The first touch then is always through the lips- that in a sense feel themselves... in anticipation for the breast..and later for any kind of nurturing contact. Sound emission is a natural consequence of  this touching into; readying through the sensate reciprocity of lips feeling both the hardness and the give-point of this pulsing muscle that both reaches out and receives in. Communication is the out spill of an organism readying itself for need- and reciprocity where at first it sets up its own internal feedback loop, takes on a wider patterning of self and other; of taking in and giving out. This gift-giving is the flowing of our capacity of reach and absorption through one another; a rinsing through and a co-emergence of a wider sense of unity. The body changes in this process of pouring into and out of other until in a sense there is only one body continually re-shaping as if by the wind through the trees that does not hold onto any one shape or position. Need is met, reacalibrated and sent forth in continual dynamic shifts of attention, of balance; of emphasis.

I lift M out of the chair having undone the many straps that hold him in place like the bound contents of a tidy rucksack, strapped and secured.

His body becomes stiffened as he meets the mat, belly down, and he rolls himself over by tensing his neck and torso at a slight torsion and thrusting himself over onto his back. His upper back is arched and tense and his hips and sacrum area are buckling on and off of the mat. He thrusts his fist into his mouth.

There is often this going into habitual patterns of self-soothing when M is lifted out of the chair into a prone position; as if his organism was trying to wrap itself back up into itself, becoming in its soft and vulnerable exterior, the shell of its own dwelling. But the way this is sought is through stiffness and the momentary jolts of sudden release with the muscles playing into waves and ripples of contortion and this becomes the stimulus of his awake life. That the release does not really ever come fully before another wave of contortion is set into action, means that what results is a build-up of spasm through the entire body so that the ankles, the hips, the diaphragm, belly, upper back, chest, arms, neck and face become self-referential; locked in and looping around their own particular locality as if self-existing; as if not needing the support of the whole.
The bowels tighten and the breath rises locked into the top-most parts of the body. The head becomes hot and the senses overwhelmed. There is a sense of scattering around the head like bees that do not settle and there can be no moment of focus; no precision grasp and no lull or drop in the intensity of  this-low level exhaustive excitation in order to settle back down; to settle through and circulate out into a wider atmosphere in the intensity and impact of every felt gesture and contact.

Working on the "Off "contact to give more space can help. But this space is only available out of the first holding points of containment and stilled waiting. I use the outer palms of my whole hand wrapped around the lower back from the mid line of the bony spine to the soft sides of the body and simply hold here.
No movement; no stimulation, caress or disturbance. Simply the slow filter emission of a natural heat; blood to blood warming as if it were flowing across the border of my skin to his; through my hands, through his shirt with no directionality, no intent or concern; no goal of healing or helping. This slow emanation gradually sinks in and then the subtle ripples under my hands inform me where to momentarily give more space or slant a little at an angle; to go into a certain level of depth and then no more and to then release this level of holding like a miner rising up through the layers of rock and earth sediments deep below the surface of the land. A recalibration at the surface can only come out of these low intensity barely active mining journeys where one simply takes up residence, waits for the slightest of shifts in the flicker or lightening ripple of fascia or muscles as it is animated through the swift and mobile play of the breath and then, in the precise and apt moment of this occurrence, it shifts.

M becomes aware of this co-ordinated shift; a certain unravelling or loosening of a bundle of nerve-flesh fibres contained in a trapped breath that at the slightest evocation of a wider pattern, is reflected in the shifting quality of touch. And as this undulation of touch and release; like the belows that at first create wind and disturbance and then heat and an emanation of warmth, gathers a momentum of its own, other areas of the body like gateways that need the co-attention of M and myself, open to view.

The upper back, stiffened from protection and holding that constrict the arm bent and turned so that the whole fist is bottled into M's mouth and the neck and face and throat en wrapped in this backwash that reverberates and lets nothing escape, is called to our attention. With my one palm still wrapped around the lower back and side like a sheath and the other opened wide yet with the pad of one or two fingers moving and tracing into small rivulets that are like vortexes that swirl and descend, I move in and out of these cushioned intensities again not trying to change anything; just aware of what is there beneath the pads of my fingers. Then again I spread my hand open and wide barely resting now on the flesh at all yet still carrying down into a depth with the other hand wrapped around the lower back so that each hand becomes a different vehicle of transport or dwelling the one drifting downwards by a kind of gravitational sensing, the other wafting up like a leaf on the wind just above the ripples and froth of the sea.

In the gap between these two qualities of contact; these two areas of the body, something is beginning to shift; a recalibration of what it means to be heavy and sinking and what it means to be light and dissipated. And between the sinking and the scattering something of interest catches in and M is blinking and pausing, listening and softening through his puckering lips; catching on to the threads and distillations of his own body pulsing. And my body too is tilting and settling, recalibrating through my base sitting bones and releasing through my chest and throat so that there is this two-way movement of giving and receiving through the subtle discrimination's of on-off contact that are forming and reformulating around finer and finer levels of variation like the ebb and flow of waves on an ever re-patterning shoreline.

What is given? Nothing. What is received? Nothing. Yet here we are moving in barely recognisable shifts that at a glance would look like nothing happening at all. And that is the case. For these are the preambles to movement, to sounding, to song-making. To the celebration and dismay the outrage and smiling. They are the premonitions; the mere feint outlines or ambient hum, out of which  the physical readiness to act and grasp; to intend and to move away, to push down and to rise up in locomotion evolve and upon which the ability to rest and renew in stillness and resettlement take shape. So too are they the pre-emptive baseline upon which emotional and social levels of communication take shape in brief and passing manifestations, like clouds passing in the sky.