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.