On Waiting as doing.

This tensile wait is an end in itself. Leaning through from potential to outcome it is neither. More delicate it is the straw bridge between these poles strung out between these erected pillars that are so convoluted with expectation, yearning and disappointment that they are compacted into substances; blinded in the realness of that accumulative dream.

But between landings and before the flight where is anyone, anything? How are we locatable? Not in and of ourselves. There is this pervading sense of settings infinitely and minutely adjustable as co-ordinate points that is this Waiting. And the Waiting becomes a verb "To do" no longer a position to take up. It is loaded- both compact and spacious- impacted and yet transparent. It's the circulation of air - the wind currents, the temperature shifts, the atmospheric pressure and humidity gradients. It is the rising and falling of particles of dust that hang and drop or are taken up on wind currents to be dispersed far and wide. It's the glint of the light onto and off of the bark of a tree, the buildings, the reflective backwash of a window. And also the humming drone of chanting cloaked religious men that pervade this area of the park on this Saturday morning; a Shabut, interlaced with bird-calls as they take up morsels of bread in their beak, swoop up into the tree foliage and drop back down again as the morsel slips from their beak. It seems not to be marked as a mis-hap, a loss, an altercation. Rather it is the pulse of sensing matter, following it through into movement and pressing it momentarily with the lightest of grips into matter once again. This is the heart-beat, the breath and the eidetic blink of our eyes that like the tree foliage lets in and screens the widening rays of the sun. Warmth can be felt on my skin where before there was a coolness and a light breeze that dissembled that gathering of warmth so that it did not linger for long enough to be experienced as such.

The birds on the lawn plateau, this plateau now strewn in loose tiny white feathers, are angling towards the brink craning their necks into the same direction, quaking and cawing with guttural throat sounds. Yet where I am now,  that sound is almost lost on the wind until I am more imagining it or transplanting it from an earlier experience when I was then closer to them.

These birds are waiting,  lulled yet infinitely alert in the threshold gaps between tiny leaps in atmospheric pressure, cool and warm interpenetrating swathes of air, slight breezes and their instantaneous dying; sounds that come and disappear as if around tangible corners as their passageway is eased or erased in concordant and discordant air-bands; light frequencies squeezed like bubbles through a hoop to intensify and bounce back and forth like an agile ball  in an impossibly small space. Or else thrown to the skies, the universe beckoning until light becomes a soft stroke that is no different to our experience of our skin;  not a division but a contour through which signals are forged and made meaningful as if in a wide and improvised artist studio. 

These birds are held  in these cross currents. More they are forged in this way only out of these particular vectors. And what appears to be inclinations, decisions or complex programs of coordinated movements based on unknown communication networks; the submerged signals of intelligent flesh, are simply the coming into fruition of all these movements. These do not stop at the border of each feathered bird but rather run right through these bulky squat bodies tainting them with the same brush, colouring them simultaneously from the outside and inside as if the birds were doorways; valves that sense invisible discrepancies in the pressure and speed of air currents, light flicker and sound resonance. And as a certain decimal of frequency is reached in these multi modular currents the birds simply take to the air. They find themselves airborne not because  they have made the move towards flight as if collectively following a good fact by fact Manuel on flying, but because they are no longer landborne creatures; they have become airborne and the relationship between these two states is not simply the galvanisation of skill sets; of muscle collectivity's and metabolic shifts. Rather the ability to imagine flight belongs to all the atmospheric vectors that make it so. And the birds simply lean in to that possibility made real; they simply take a ride on the currents that have informed them of that possibility. They are lulled into this new state much as a new-born is lulled into comfort by the singing voice of its mother or the falling into the nurture of a milk-filled breast that offers up its riches as soon as it is touched and seems in turn to touch back with the very essence of life.

In this sense to talk of the organism-environment is more than to say that the environment attunes to the organism's needs. It is to say that the environment- whether wind currents or the real or imagined solidity of
the mother or the mother's breast, lends itself to the idea of being harnessed in the very way in which it presents itself. "Use" then comes from this merging momentarily into the swell and surf of a sea that carries us and into which we let ourselves be carried. Yet somehow in this carrying we wake up, nearly die from the shock of being truly alone and separate from the object of our merging and then if we are lucky reconcile the mis-match and communicate to one another out of this new dream of a volitional encounter. Holding delicately in the balance between these two states; a merging with and a separating out from- so that we are neither engulfed nor spat out, is the ambiguity out of which the Waiting occurs. And we can truly listen into and sense the conditions in which this waiting occurs so that when we give our trust out into the idea of being carried and of having our weight borne through space by forces other than ourselves it is already brought to us out of the environmental conditions that make it so. It is in the action that we imagine the possibility that is emerging through us into this action at that very point in time.

Imagination is nothing more than this. We are given into a shape and form momentarily out of the tensile currents that offer up precisely this and no other possibility. Where we can lean into these forms lightly and gracefully and then as conditions change, re-formulate these imaginative shapes to a more updated Use, this is how we come into health and connectivity with our environment and with others who like us are manifesting into and out of these same environmental conditions.

In Therapy or between Therapies, this active Waiting: the tensile interim space that is not foreclosed into goals and objectives, is the place of Health. Wherever this loose tensile connectivity remains, there is Health. If the Therapist can be this kind of loose Environment then the child can move into action and move simultaneously into the idea of action as the imaginative rising and falling of brief forms.This is freedom and it is the basis upon which connective presence is felt and a relationship becomes possible.

On not taking hold

At the tipping point; a threshold. The backwash rinsing through.

At the extremity of a situation; an action; a contact situation; out of speechlessness, rigidity, incapacity; a coming undone, this spontaneous backlash to all that we keep on a tight meter unfurls and in its exquisite display it is unbehold to anyone, even to the personality of the person doing the action.

It is an exegesis into a wider pattern of relationality and an admittance of affect in this co-dependency.

However bizarre, ritualised, repetitive it may appear it is loosening the strings that hold us tightly into and onto ourselves.

In this case purposelessness is the catapult unfurling of our improvisation that knows itself in the doing. It is of the moment and so despite appearances is more real, more apt and more appropriate than the tight edge of choreographed learnt gestures of social mores.

It is the unwinding part on part felt sensation as it is happening in real-time. So it is an enquiry- facing a deep fear that to act and look out of this consecrated norm is to risk everything; to break down the borders of identity.

Yet it is a necessary loosening in order that the components may shuffle and truly relate through a feedback of holding one position in relation to another.

This accountability; a kind of intricate bodily accountancy where the mind is deeply imbued into the minutiae of each felt sense whether pleasant or unpleasant and hovering there like a bird resting on an egg, it has the patience to wait so that the discomfort, the pain, the impossible yield is held in this suspension warming yet not crushing until of its own accord the light shell of the egg cracks just at the point where new life might emerge.

It is a risk but because the breaking apart happens from the inside; as a new birth and life-form, and not from the outside as an intervention or theory for a better kind of life, it is authentic and there is self-reflection in and through every cell from core to bone, ligament and breath.

Sensory atunement rests on this apt placement and timing so that an accuracy, a settlement, a gesture or impulse however small and seemingly inconsequential, becomes the axis around all else and in that moment may turn and so thrive.

This is a way to value what is there whether a silence, an incoherent utterance, a beckoning or a rebuff.
All are the pieces upon which an atmosphere of coherence gradually evolves. Yet the coherence is infinitely spacious, not packed tight with a mission or a judgement of its worth but simply allowed to rest as it is.

In this sense it becomes part of a wider whole just as each person however seemingly rigid or monotone they appear as a cut-out figure, in a wider connectivity they become too the axis around which all else turns. In the supposed vacancy of these figures, the hollow spaces between one breath and the next, the compulsive and the person in transit- between gestures, moves, steps, sentences, there is a silence loaded with feeling; a wordless message that draws all into conviviality where not knowing is our shared human experience and making it up according to the deep respect of intervals and pauses becomes the grammar and meter of our life together.

Flicker

What is absent? What is missing? A deficit? A link broken? Can we jump over the absence? Scale the deficit? Where are the footholds- between one nothingness and the next? Our markings are the visitations we once made. The places we left behind. The time-spans we no longer fill. This is our trajectory, and our expectation into what has yet to arise; our gesturing through is this premonition between an imaginary past and an imaginary future. We are the bridge here in the present in which we eat up what we trail behind us and what we lean into. We are the missing link of our own gesturing. The hoped for into which we keep pouring ourselves and the mourned for and missed object always askew from where we actually are. In the actual gesturing there is a virtual object which is nothing but this absentee past, this not yet arrived at future. 

It is here in this catching of breath; in the stutter, the momentary delay, the deja vu or regurgitation; it is in these habitual slippages through which we pass our time and consolidate in this evocation of a pause, enough intensity- enough contraction- that like a spring-loaded lever we flip back out into another bearing. In other words we unfold and we do so only because of this folding in. In invisibility, unatainability, in the lost cause, the missing beat, the catched phrase, here is where we gulp back down our pre-aranged words so that they regurgitate into an unknown form; an unknowable consolidation. This is the factory in which our bodies mix. Sensations stew, cook in their own juicies, multiply and converge, warm into one another and fracture apart into the cooked up particles of new planets. We are not the object of our thought; we are the passing object of an idea that is propositioning us in movement- in transition as the on-off eidetic flicker of a light sensitive eye that registers everything without seeing.

Leaning

Every leaning is a proliferation. Yet is keeps to the centre. Or refers through the centre out and in again. It is not a bipartite bitten off bit that grows into a separate unity. It is not an equation to be set against an ulterior additive or negative. It is a bridge. A splaying through in the tendrils of separation- a proliferation of spindle-like limbs- of catapulting fibrous growths through which the thing itself - our selves- gathers cohesion buffeted and held in suspension on all sides from these invisible threads. The rocking tumultuous sway of our movement is drilled through and through from out of our core bodies into the earth, and form out of the core earth into our bodies, rising up into the space above us. We take shape between these ulterior tensions that are seamless because they go unseen. But what is seen is this instance or that instance of a sighting between one leaning and the next. We go up and down, tilt back and forth, seem to accelerate forward or hold back receding incrementally into the vacuous atmosphere. Yes we seem to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. We wipe our brow, feel the feint breeze upon our lips in the still clear morning sun.

Birds ready themselves for flight. They stand erect on the plateau, necks long and beaks all pointing the same way over the lean of the hill into the hazy moisture of  a dew-filled Nature Reserve. Runners have began to gather. Dog-walkers are calling their dogs to heel in the excitation of morning smells- of marginal signs on the edges of what we are able to see, hear or smell. A man calls "Lady...no...". The ears prick up for an instance then fold back barely a break in the pattern of movement. We too are trailing directions, limbs giving way and holding firm-over and over again- the fall is captured in the proliferation of steps. We walk, sit down, dawdle in the the near companionship of others seated elsewhere in this early morning vigil where recognition is held in the balance- the approach and the retreat excruciatingly tipping forward and backwards, wavering on the brink of something... The birds take off, wings flapping, throats croaking over the horizon. But we are already down below awaiting their arrival which is always somehow held in abeyance as their flight is prolonged even as they do not seem to make headway. We too are between the take off and the landing- between steps; between moves.

How do we feel the movement? Let unfold the idea of movement in the actual movement itself? Let it be the premonition- this launching out into the faintest of sensations that do not know where they will land. They have no plan but yet each point in the trajectory is precise, gathered out from across these fibrous tendrils that tease out the sky, press into the mounds of grass, squeeze between blood vessels and fascia lining;  ride down the inner tubing of our guts and change places across the thresholds between one cell and the next. Air becomes blood, blood becomes carbon dioxide. Food and wastage change places- and we look into the eyes of strangers or hold apart those we have known all our lives.

Habit is a killer. Can we remain alive in the fall- where pain resides? I cry quietly behind my sunglasses in the early morning gathering of a man with his three dogs on a far off bench and an older man with a walking stick and a bag-full of old bread that he is chucking teasingly at the dogs. We all have our own tables spread out on the grass verge some little way back from the canal and the bridge. They both have their backs to me. I am looking out beyond them into the haze hearing the rumbling of distant commuter trains. None of us our moving.  But we are breathing here together in the fresh morning sun. This is the point of connection- just before the action take place- in the hesitancy of a breath savoured just beyond itself; the taste of it. That is why I am crying, out of the sheer relief that this moment brings by resting in itself before any point of deliverance.

The man with the three dogs joins me for a chat. The older man wanders off with his stick askew, glancing behind himself momentarily and the tension comes undone- limps and stutters into this or that story, this or that need un-met. And it is only time before we go our separate ways.