As small children transition into a certain amount of autonomy of movement, they begin to venture farther and farther from caregivers, to test their newly acquired prowess - but the freedom to reach themselves out into the environment is deeply contingent on their belief that they won't lose the supportive anchor of those caregivers in the process. To go far requires the knowledge that they can come back - fear of potentially becoming disconnected greatly changes a child's sense of security in an environment - and that response resonates through time as the adult that was once a child builds up layers of strategies to make up for that absence.
In quantum mechanics there is something called the wave/particle duality, that shows how atoms express the functions of both a wave and a particle, depending on the shape of a test, the way it captures data, even the attention of an observer can shift an outcome in one direction or another. With the discovery of gravitational waves that bend the fabric of time/space, and the fact that I exist here in this moment, but Now is always continually shifting into the future, it would make sense to me that we are all, including every atom in my body, in a place on a map and are a movement through time, a particle AND a wave, and that maybe we possess the appetites and boundaries of both at any given moment. Like our child selves, we must first have a connection to a moment/person in space to be able to express the part of ourselves existing as a wave - that I am a ship AND a tree at the same time, and some part of me has been afraid to invest in a direction, chart a course and set sail because access to my tree-ness was obscured. I can't help but see a mirror in human and quantum entanglement - evidence that some particles maintain an almost psychic connection where one responds to the other being impacted even at great distances - until/unless that invisible thread is severed. Maybe connections from an atomic level to our conscious, embodied experience of relationships ARE the threads that make up the fabric of space/time, being woven and unwoven around and by us constantly.
The yoga instructor pressed down on the top of my humerus bones while I lay in corpse pose at the end of class. I noticed then how very specific his touch has become - he's made similar connections, with the whole of my shoulder girdle, but in that moment, feeling my humerus externally rotate inside of the web of muscles that wrap around it and hook them into my body, I noticed a protective overcorrection in the use of my arms and scapula. A place I wasn't articulating independently from a larger mass, and therefore not strengthening at a really important/subtle juncture. After class, on the walk home, I noticed a shimmering kind of soreness, in the left side of my low back - usually in a hyperactive group of muscles, my lower latissimus dorsi and oblique fighting with my psoas on that side - but this soreness was closer in, coming in and out of focus like light hitting iridescence. The vertebrae of my low back felt like they were sliding around, like I suddenly had too many options for movement, and I had to pause my fear response that something dangerous was happening - its amazing to feel how scary new can be, and how quickly that newness can be labeled as dysfunctional or problematic rather then just unfamiliar. The multidimensionality of the human body is overwhelming to me sometimes.
That instructor said at the beginning of class last week how there are different kinds of power. I fixed the full attention of my gaze on him in that moment, when I normally keep my attention focused inward and my gaze soft and unobtrusive in such an intimate space. My boss the other day said he thinks I'm all about control, controlling everything around me. Maybe a much earlier version of myself would have resonated with that assessment, but I suspect that is a projection of his own internal struggle and not a true perception of me. That is his to process and work through, I have different questions I'm here to ask - and I think there is something here for me to notice, about different kinds of power, layers of choice and impact, what we can let go of to recieve at a higher capacity, what is avaliable for us to receive in the first place - gravitational forces, selfness, each other - and how those ARE the riches, as well as the source of our ability to have power in the world, as real as gold to buy ships to go discover new worlds.
When I finally opened my eyes this morning, I noticed the narrative playing out in my thoughts - how being a Technical Director/lead carpenter didn't have any real power to create or change anything. The work consists of organizing labor to recreate or puzzle piece together other people's ideas, and however I might fight for fair treatment of my crews or battle one on one with producers about what was physically possible in any given moment - every new producer or theatre or crew or warehouse or fashion show it started over, because the system at large was built on consumption and lack of care so deeply embedded, I could spend a lifetime being drained of hoping I'd made a difference. I had been growing wide and confusing the intensity of feeling with depth of meaning - but there was no depth available here, because I was existing inside of a long dead creature, unable to grow or change.
I would not have understood in that system what it means to grow deep, I would not have known how to love the appetites that I have and boundaries i need to do the work of building connections internally and externally if I had not stumbled into communities of like minded and deeply curious individuals - and I feel myself moving into a proximity of power to actively effect my environment. With all power comes great responsibility - that is what I'm currently excavating from my environment and its existing relationships, the nature of what I am responsible for here.
I think the amusement park ride I would use to describe this moment in my life is the House of Mirrors - instead of furtively searching for flashes of myself in people's responses to me, I feel like I'm seeing all the different expressions of my selfness in a way that allows me to begin more consciously choosing what or how I show up in any given moment.
