Hearing the Cello

Last night I had a dream I only remember small pieces of. There were grounded stingrays being whipped around by the wind and there wasn't much water for me to submerge them into. According to TheCuriousDreamer.com a stingray represents Fluidity of movement, agility, and the ability to lay low and camouflage oneself (especially emotionally). As I run into rough edges at work, I wonder about how I may be finding myself in situations where there isn't enough water for me to express my fluid potential, I don't even know what kind of environment might make such a choice possible.

we all move and make choices in response to the stimulus of our environments.

Something I have considered one of my greatest strengths is my capacity to orient so deeply around the people who can teach me the most in any situation, that I can anticipate their needs or next moves almost before it escapes their lips. I pay such fierce attention to preferences and body patterns that I can find a rhythm and fast forward my learning, but I have also continued throughout my life to run into a deep confusion of relationships from people I have needed, even momentarily.

I find myself staring that question in the face again, but I can't keep claiming innocence.

It strikes me now that I have very much embraced the role of the needle, or the hands guiding the warp and weft of the projects I have worked on at a massive scale. It is necessarily a tapestry of all of our efforts to manifest it, and the flavor and style of my impact has been relegated to sculpting the experience from above, the only evidence of my work lives in the physical expressions of the crews I run. The shape and structure of the tapestry, of all of the hands who did the manifesting remain, and I am a ghost, too busy piercing the space with other people's threads to have woven in my own. Performing the part of the invisible plane, the axis. Guiding everything through its intimate relationship to myself. I have spent years writing about feeling like a ghost, not tied to history, about seeking proof of my existence through other people's responses to me, and I see that same pattern in the tapestry of the piece I just finished constructing.

My mother and I were one symbiotic organism when I was a child. I was logic and follow through, she was desire and destination maker. Our roles were reversed, I learned there was no truth to hierarchy, no rules actually existed. I have always been the needle. The Compass. Guiding hands. A container, rather than something contained.

But I am starting to suspect that not having a clear through line, a thread of my own selfness is also a choice I am making - to be the teller of the story rather than the character inside of it. To be infinitely responsive/acquiescent to others around me, so I can wear the right mask at the right moments. Shaping the world so I can control how I am shaped by it. My desire to feel myself through contact with others is kind of like a weird nervous tic, betraying something I feel helpless to control, a way of getting close to the feeling of being inside of my own story, so I can feel its heat from a safe distance.

As profound a skill as my awareness often is, I think it is time to consider how those habits might be manifesting a particular kind of reality that automatically keeps other possibilities languishing in the shadows.

"the problem with war is the victor. he has proven that war and violence do pay. Who will then teach him a lesson? And how?"

The Elephant: Reflection for week 6

It's hard to come in quiet when you're about to do the talking, especially in the beginning when you don't know what's up w the student's body on this particular day, and quite possibly they don't either.

I'm having a hard time with the concept of holding an intention, especially one that may be unrelated to the person in front of me, waiting for guidance about how to be in their body, or where their bodies should be in space. If we are there for different reasons, how do I know where to begin the journey of that class and which arc will provide the questions they want to be asked?

As I come up against places where the student and I veer off in different directions or I'm moving forward and they seem left behind or stuck - I'm finding I need better questions I can ask to figure out what threads got lost and possibly a more accessible way of weaving our experience back together.

I did learn this past week that providing moments of physical resistance, or subtle selective pressure was really helpful to not only guide a student's attention inward when nothing was clear, but also in illuminating the pathways of movement they were taking. It was really interesting to see a kind of crystallization of the idea of agency into something they could feel and clearly delineate in their own bodies.

The shifting of tactics/stories I'm telling are kind of graceless and abrupt at the moment, but I feel like each shift is a broadening of both my awareness and the information I had received in the moments before it, as well as a letting go of preconceived plans to allow the needs of the moment to call the questions and knowledge out of me.

Breath as a Medium: Reflection for week 1

This one struck me because I have found breath-as-respite a confusing concept - evidence of a transition between states of emotional coherence/control, an often annoying mechanical function I'm usually pretty happy to ignore since my body can do it without my direct involvement, and the idea of anything as a potential form of expression is a line of inquiry I want to lather myself in, (like a baby with a jar of peanut butter) to unearth how it can be harnessed to help a voice be heard.

Before I took the time to consider my relationship to breath this past week, I had no awareness of the disconnect I was feeling when instructed to go back to the breath, to use the breath, to notice it at all. A piece of my childhood keeps coming up, especially as I followed this question - My stepfather used to shut me in the bathroom when I got upset because I often lost control of my ability to form words through the heaving, hiccuping, strangled breathing, like I was drowning on dry land. He wouldn't release his hand from the doorknob outside until I could breath normally, which sometimes took a very long time. In retrospect, I suspect it was a kind of anxiety attack I was having, and that loss of control and inability to speak up for myself, these shadows of helplessness and shame are the last places I would probably want to go looking for an anchor or sense of connection. As I consider how many times in a yoga class I've instructed about returning to the breath, of finding it, filling a shape with it etc, all respectable statements in light of its lineage - it seems a really clear example of a place where I've repeated motions rather than speaking from or even considering my own experience or relationship to what I am asking a body of individuals to partake in. At work, I make a real conscious effort to never ask one of my crew guys to do something I myself am not capable of doing, so this bit really shook me.

I feel like there is a strong correlation between drawing and practicing asana, layers of focus and awareness, and by flipping one for the other I get to take away the groove a student (of either discipline) might comfortably lean into. For Sunday's teaching game, I played into the idea of the Perceptual Cycle and the limited resource of our Attention, as well as Sam's meditation that involved shifting our states of awareness - I really liked how those shifts were so distinct in the back to back contrast. So I asked my partner to use his inhales to take in what he was looking at, and let his exhales become a gestural release/exploration of the information received via a pen in his hand to the sketchbook in his lap (I blocked his ability to see the paper, an attempt to remove the focus on judging its product, which alters the ability to engage fully in the noticing).

How does what comes in (via environment, senses, interactions) become an expression of its affect on us? How does an inhale transform into an exhale, how does a breath become a movement?

Both of the individuals I taught this week talked about regular difficulty and lack of connection to their breath, when we talked about it afterwards. I had continued the inhale to notice, exhale to move, and they both experienced the drawing mediation described above prior to taking it into the rest of the body. My non yogi friend felt that the literalness, 'concrete' in her words, of pen to paper drew a distinct connection between a familiar action and the presence of breath - and that bridge helped her feel agency, ease, and purpose in the breath focused movements we explored. I wonder if that is one of those things so fundamental it gets forgotten, not just our awareness of it, but our RELATIONSHIP with breathing. How can I take a step even farther back and help build something to anchor to? How can I weave the sensations of breathing and movement together in my language and my daily life? How many ways can I find to bridge between the taking in and the letting go, to maybe see how our individual expressions arise out of the conversation between them? How can I create a dialogue not based on the assumption that the foundation is already there, when I may be trying to build something on top of uneven ground? I may not be the only one who sometimes feels like I'm drowning on dry land. What is the pathway in? Can my words and the space I shape be a kind of divining rod?




I'm also starting to get a clear sense that it is a collaboration, that there is something between the teacher and student being woven, crafted, made real, but I can't quite see the nature of the artwork that we are working on together, whether I am the student or the teacher. At least not yet.

as though matter was trying to copulate with itself

I.
What is the sound of being alive?
of cell growth,
of the primordial weaving of tissue and bone,
of stars being formed and babies becoming,
What is the sound of Creating?



II.
I am That I am
A laundromat in sounds and textures only
Adjusting to someone else's timing
The layers of consumption
How interesting that objects remind us of people

trying to manufacture a myth from the materials at hand

A woman comes to greet me.

Dragons wind their ink drawn scales around her fierce little body, laughter crouches at the corner of her dark eyes, and in the accented syllables that escape from her mouth, equal parts music and brusque staccato.

Leading us down the hallway, she pauses to point at a variety of looms, young people crouched over them, working patiently. Some small swatches of fabric tests are pulled out, and while she talks about the weave as experimental structure, I am distracted by the regular patterns they display. Clearly their intention was manifesting an architecture, but I suddenly had a sense of the development of fabrics like Scottish plaid, or the various patterns claimed by small African nations, how that architecture became a symbol for bodies of people, of a culture. It seemed vastly important, this idea of strength underlying aesthetic value, driving our instinctual relationship to form and function. Like a kaleidoscope I suddenly saw the relationships between weaving and community, how everything in our built environment is an expression of that from cell walls and bone tissue to cityscapes and culturally distinct neighborhoods.

We were documenting the deconstruction of a woven installation piece designed by two young Latin American architects, to be taken to a group in Oaxaca by the tattooed Filipino woman, and all around us are accents and cheek kissing and this ancient art form they all were involved in various aspects of and I could feel so clearly my lack of connection to history. My history. My profound lack of cultural presence.

The oldest known cloth that's been unearthed came from ancient burial sites, and death rites are some of the earliest distinctions between human and animal in our anthropological history. The 'patterned sky' we helped to disassemble was designed around a similar self awareness, of life after being a canopy, it was made to lead multiple lives, just like it tied into preexisting holes in the concrete wall it was threaded around. Histories layered on top of each other, meaning arising and dispersing as that wall falls under new eyes, gets viewed with a new lens. Our tattooed loom master brought a bunch of handmade cakes for everyone to break bread/cake together before tackling the walls with tools, and it felt like communion, like a ritual that was necessary to take part of. I took a bite of something out of respect for some underlying sacredness, but might have had more to do with my hunger for connection, the void where my roots should be, those internal pathways I never even knew existed.

My parent's generation who came of age during/right after the civil rights movements and the draft and the Vietnam war and the slaughter of MLK and JFK and the student riots - they were doing the hard work of tearing down the walls and institutions that were holding America back, but as those same people move towards their twilight years, they have less communities to feel apart of, have formed their lives around fearing and distrusting the desire to be connected for what might come with it, and I've come across articles and statistics about an age where loneliness is largely becoming the thing that walks our parents and their parents through the threshold at the end of their lives. In older cultures, still living closer to the earth, age is a highly valued part of the life cycle, and the rites and rules they keep are still connected to a sense of why they are doing them in the first place - but I live in a reality that covets newness, youth, where an accumulation of history is a Cardinal Sin. Even my grandmother communicates care through a scattering of 5 or 20 dollar bills we've all been handed throughout our lives, and I wonder if she feels like she has nothing else to offer us. As we continue to succumb to capitalism's appropriation of our individual traditions into seasonal profit, how does it erase the histories that created them, those grooves in time and space through which we have carved our existence, our identities, our path? As our relationship to the harvest fades, do we distinguish 'Fall' by a pavlovian response to the smell of pumpkin spice in the air? How many Pumpkin Spice Lattes will it take to fill the void in my memory of when my grandmother used to hand-make pumpkin pie, but gave in to the ease of the grocery store? What would happen if the moon suddenly stopped rolling along its samskara? How has its steady weaving across the night sky and through our bedtime stories and in our blood helped us to know ourselves?

If our species evolved out of nomadic family groups who weren't anchored to a specific plot of earth - then maybe we aren't creatures with literal roots and childhood homes, maybe it was always stories that connected us to each other in the river of time. Maybe we have confused the transubstantiation of idea to flesh as brick and mortar, as something permanent, a monument, rather than bearing the warp and weft for a spell, until we can pass it those younger than us. As we spin the yarn of our lives, shaping the fibers and coloring the thread with our individual fight for space and sustenance, shelter and connection, the care with which we craft our social fabric is what builds the walls and pathways we walk along, and I am becoming aware of the cut threads and gaps in my transmission. We are all momentary manifestations in a multi-generational artwork, claiming that responsibility might be our birthright and burden as a member of this human collective. The threads falter earlier in my family history than I can quite reach back into, but maybe I've been fumbling most of my life looking backwards, against the arrow of time, to figure out what threads are mine to bear before I can turn around and move into my future.

If something has no history, how can you prove it exists? How can I prove I exist?








The spider, along with its web, is featured in mythological fables, cosmology, artistic spiritual depictions, and in oral traditions throughout the world since ancient times.

Traditionally, the stories involving Spider Grandmother are narratives passed down orally from generation to generation. The Hopi have the creation myth of Spider Grandmother. In this story, Spider Grandmother thought the world into existence through the conscious weaving of her webs. Spider Grandmother also plays an important role in the creation mythology of the Navajo, and there are stories relating to Spider Woman in the heritage of many Southwestern native cultures as a powerful helper and teacher.

Although accounts vary, according to mythology she was responsible for the stars in the sky; she took a web she had spun, laced it with dew, threw it into the sky and the dew became the stars.


The Fates were a common motif in European polytheism, most frequently represented as a group of three mythological goddesses (although the numbers differed in certain eras and cultures). They were often depicted as weavers of a tapestry on a loom, with the tapestry dictating the destinies of men.