the threshold at the end of Space is also where Time was born

My recent encounters with bodywork have only shown me clearly how valuable social acceptance with that kind of intimate self immersion really is, for a culture increasingly growing dry and afraid of being in relationship with Other.

Both individuals that handled my body with such focus and care are immigrants, molding my flesh with foreign mysticism and accented ideas, listening to the subtleties of my body in a language that lives outside and underneath words. The woman applying fierce pressure up and down the length of me was strong and focused, but her comments were mostly English and warm with humor. Even when she spoke in English to the man getting a massage in the space next to me, through the curtain, as she translated for the woman working on him, her hands never stopped. My fingers dragged and rested against her thigh, her hair brushed against me as she crawled across me, as her hands and elbows reached into the past that had woven itself into the fibers of muscle and connective tissue between my shoulder blades and pelvic halves. As she worked she told me not to shower for 6 hours afterwards. "Chinese medicine' she offered as a quick explanation to a question I hadn't asked.

Later, I noticed a curve in between my shoulder blades, a gentle rounding like my spine had been released from a cage. I paused to consider it because I have never seen my body look like that before. I don't know what it means, and I was too sore to be aware if anything else seemed different the next few days. That is not the first time I haven't recognized myself in the mirror over the past few months.

Normally I am sharp and succinct, focused like a laser, but I can feel the fuzziness taking over. Rereading emails I'd sent hours before would show egregious mistakes and overlapping times, forgotten words and dates. Its been hard to get up early, and harder to rally around the things I want to address in my life. Forgetting to feed myself and my dog, how to get to the places I'm going like I updated my software and lost the memory of routes I always take. I feel like I have no control over myself, but somehow am safe enough in the love of the people I work for and with and love and live with that I can coast through the day, each day that keeps coming. I'm still here.

Walking to the train from the homelike office near Columbia of a school for the Alexander technique, I felt like the flesh had been peeled away from my spine to my sides. Like all my machinery was exposed along my backbody, I could feel distinctly the multitude of tiny pistons and pumps, wires and circuits that moved me through space. I realized my shoulders had drawn themselves back, so consciously released them forward, trying to retain the calmness from his hands on my body, and found an automatic mirroring in my pelvic halves. My patterns wrestled with this newfound bodily existence, drawing my shoulders and pelvis back and forth along with them. Every time I caught it again, my shoulders would initiate a wrapping out and around that my pelvic halves followed.

On the train everything seemed to happen at the same time and I noticed all of it. The sticker peeling off of the door, the concentration of sheen on the zipper of that guy's jacket, the smell of something savory like food, the shift in someone's dyed hair from one color to the next, the hint of a crease in someone's closed eyes as their facial muscles shifted gently, a few curling strands of hair on someone's neck being rhythmically blown around by a stranger's breath, the sound of the train, the sound of the rain, the sound of someone's headphones and distant chatter in the train car, the rain hitting the windows, the light from vehicles outside the window moving towards us, as the train moved past, their lights playing off the million droplets on the window between those two events, the different ways everyone's feet landed on the stairs as they walked down them towards the street...

Maybe I need time to process everything I've thrown myself into. But what if it keeps coming? What if this is just the beginning? What if I am too busy spinning and noticing to accomplish the things I want to do? What if I can't hold back the desire to kiss everyone who touches me, or blast with harsh words everyone who trespasses on my particular sense of justice? If I'm not in control over myself, what am I? What holds me together? If I am not sturdy and reliable, who am I to those that I work for and with and love and live with?

So much of the somatic and embodiment work circles around the question of Choice. Having it, acquiring access to it, being able to pause in our patterns to find it - but I am having a hard time distinguishing the difference between Choice and Control at the moment. So in trying to let go of the need to be in Control, I feel like I have neither.

But I do feel I have managed to surround myself with people I can trust, that speak similar enough languages that I would be heard, should I have to ask for help. For how unsettled and foreign I feel to myself, at least I am not afraid.

Maybe its ok to sit inside of this question for a spell.

Australia is the clearest place on earth to witness the milky way from this planet. The aboriginal tribes there devised mythologies based on creatures they saw sculpted out of the darknesses between star clusters, rather than shapes defined by an outline of specific stars.


Like the ocean at night, the stars are the foam riding the waves, born from the swirling depths, merely an expression of the teeming currents moving invisibly in the darkness underneath what we can actually see.

the proprietor of the china shop in the time of the bull

Nathan's Famous Hotdog Eating Contest - July 4th, 2016

I have been supervising the staging build of this monstrosity since 2011, except for last year, when I didn't need the money and ditched it a week before it went up. That has been my 4th of July ever since I moved to nyc, and it seems too sharply on point as popular event/commentary on the de-evolution of what America was supposed to stand for, once upon a dream.

Some of my boys from my first steel shop arrived to supervise with me, the richness of their love for me outshone the nature of the event. One of my favorite people in the world, my shadow brother, wide and dark and stronger than anyone I know - taught me an enormous amount about the physical world and the laws of physics, I still wear his fearlessness with steel, I think about it every single day. In our current cultural climate, I am afraid for him, his big, beautiful blackness, for his wife and children who are loved by this bright human being. Once, years ago at the shop, he came back late from grabbing lunch, because he was stopped outside of the Chinese restaurant to be patted down by bored cops under the premise of a robbery nearby - apparently he fit the description, but he knows they stop black guys regularly with excuses while they check their backgrounds to hopefully snag someone over peanuts. Like me, he hasn't ever smoked, is pure and good, we are even the same age, born weeks apart - but he has already been held at gunpoint by cops more than I will ever be stopped by a cop and questioned for my existence on a city street. He lives the dystopian reality white people have been writing about for decades.

I am strong, but only as long as the adrenaline is coursing through my body, in those moments where my Meyers briggs type flips from INTJ to ENTJ, extroversion as a necessary mechanism to function at the level that comes so easy for him. For a lot of them, actually. I'm convinced none of them would recognize me if my system weren't flooded w that adrenaline. It's taken a long time for me to realize that I may be taking someone else's place in the labor world and leaving vacant the place where I should be, utilizing those things that come naturally to me as well. To realize what I have to give is important too, and denying that expression IS a rejection of self. Watching my friend move, I am stung, as always by his ability to move his weight through the air with such grace compared to my clunky ineptness. Seeing his face across Surf Avenue, I can read his frustration with the other guys. I swing in to work with him, to show the other guys how its supposed to work, and I notice in my hands the familiar lightness of objects when we are working together. The ground moves through him, I now realize. He radiates the support of the earth underneath his feet out through his hands, which is why he can fly through the air, and up on to the back of the truck like its nothing, his weight. Maybe he doesn't even know the nature of his gift, this resonant rock, transubstantiating ground to a force that flows through him into the relationships around him - but it has dawned on me, clear as day.

After two days of flipping decks and tossing screw jacks and unloading and reloading carts of pipe and crates of scaffolding clips, waking up is rough. Walking to the dog park, my low back is so tight my pelvis can't move, and since it can't shift around the ball of my thigh bone, the connections on the outer edges of the hip joint are screaming as simply walking asks the joint to overextend itself on one side of the relationship, struggling to articulate from the frozen mass of my pelvis. The movement travels up my body and leaks out via a sway of the shoulders. The shape I make echoes a traditional masculine gesture, a walk that is associated with power, strength, intimidation. This is how I naturally move when walking alone at night, losing the feminine glide of pelvic halves sliding with and around the thigh bone - the lumbering and stone like expression sends a message to would be assailants, much like stances signal aggression from one dog to another.

I was trapped in that shape. I see now how so many of the aging men I know in the labor industry have developed their ways of maneuvering. How joints fall apart after a lifetime of accommodating a self induced lack of mobility, and in the familiarity of that shape, we have formed a stereotype, a flavor, a style of man and movement, and I am trapped inside of that shape - suddenly all I can see is the damage it is doing. I don't feel strong anymore, I feel crippled.

Patterns are important, because they streamline processes, so the body can move faster and more efficiently - but the patterns I have when dealing with weight are useful in the short term due to their familiarity, but damaging in the long game. Seeing my future flash in front of my eyes, I reach back to the beginning, with my spine. Since all I can hear is the groaning of my back body, I look instead for the shadow, listening for what is silent. Walking with my dog, I locate a sense of the front of my spine, trying to shift where movement is emanating from - almost instantly my low back lets go and my pelvic halves feel individuated, begin to wrap around thigh bone. Chasing that awareness in both directions, I feel for the first time the front side of my sacrum, and as I follow the front of my upper spine, my shoulder blade release, sliding forward. My back is quiet.

I still can't fully extend my left elbow, and the fingers of my right hand refuse to extend past anatomical neutral and send pain shooting up my forearm, but at least I can walk without my lower back screaming. It takes constant vigilance to keep looking for the sense of the front of my spine in daily movement, but the back pain is a quick reminder to look inward, to invite the front of my spine into the conversation so it isn't like living inside of a constant monologue of having my back up, a chip on my shoulder, a lonely soldier, a shield protecting the soft insides. Its an invitation for the rest of my body to experience supporting itself, for all of me to be strong, not just the outside edges - like thick skinned fruit that draws predators due to its energy packed sweet soft insides. If the rest of me is involved, my back doesn't have to go it alone, but since that's all I've known, it is an arduous task to keep that invitation open.

On the train, I think a lot about force traveling through the body, I think a lot about my friend and his fluid relationship to supportive contact, the idea of transmitting the support of the ground up through the body - and it quickly becomes clear that I freeze my shoulder blades the way I freeze my pelvis with an all consuming back body response, which asks the head of my arm bone to overarticulate which causes pain I feel almost every day, and the remedy is the same. When I find the front of my spine while holding the bars on the train, my shoulder blade shifts and I can feel the relationships that allow for the force in my hand to reach my spine, to flow down to the sacrum and split, pass down my legs and out of my feet. It's a glimmer, but I get it.

I've had strange and intense experiences over the past year, studying the body - first I woke up to a fierce vibration flooding the length of my spine, almost to the point of calling out for help, except it wasn't painful as much as deeply stimulating - as well as weird electric zaps between my shoulder blades and along my body. Last night I woke up to a humming electricity, but instead of just my spine, there was a clear line of energy along all of my limbs. I felt like a Pisces symbol sculpted in neon. It flickered on and vibrated softly like flourescents flipped on by a light switch. The phrase that popped into my head was 'coming online'. In the light of day those words remind me of local networks being connected globally. It felt like I must be glowing in the dark, like I was a character in TRON.

The picture shifted, or maybe access to the light I was using to look at it with - everything just got a little clearer.

i glow the way unwanted things do,

 

 

 

like the charge of electricity in my body last night, humming so fiercely it woke me up

the crackling, static filled line that draws a new connection in the vacuum
from one shoulder blade to the other 
after exploring ancient reflexes together, as we unburied them in our bodies

I am discovering that I am a conduit

Shortly after yoga teacher training, I woke up in the middle of the night and knew I was about to be touched somehow. there was a buzzing at the base of my spine, the sound of water rushing in my ears, and slowly like the humming vibration of an instrument gradually increasing in tone, my entire spine felt like a faucet of water being slowly turned on to full blast, humming heat rushing through the spinal column and I was paralyzed. it didn't feel bad, but I was scared of the intensity, scared that as it grew more fierce, I might not be able to handle it, and that there was no one for me to call out to for help

right as my fear peaked it began to dissipate. god doesn't give us more than we can handle. I am full of walls. I am a labyrinth, and I am lost inside of it

I can feel the edge of that energy right now as I write, a low hum that will eventually express itself, but this time I am ready, I recognize the electric vibration in my sacrum that has nowhere to go but up, to ride the roller coaster of my spine and I can feel a response in my palms, static, like a storm rolling in, charging the air. there is no question, only clarity

My hands. pathways I was too scared to allow in are like the invisible map drawn by a negatively charged surge of electric potentiality from sky to earth. when negative and positive collide against the ground, the hull of the vessel, my body, electricity takes every path available to it. a lot of time is lost in looking for the route, the root, territory that needs to be mapped out so the energy knows where to flow like water without losing the spark, the light, the power - instead of wandering, searching for a path, exhausting itself

 Like lighting that rises up from the ground, I am a conduit

All I need to is find the shortest, most efficient pathways in
the electricity already knows what to do

 

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”

― Warsan Shire

 

Lightning happens when the potential difference between the clouds and the grounds becomes too large. Once the voltage reaches a critical strength, the atmosphere can no longer act as an electrical insulator. First, a stepped leader is created at the base of the cloud which is a channel through which electrons in the cloud can travel to the ground. But while moving towards the ground, it searches for the most efficient (minimum electrical resistance) route possible. It does so by traveling 50-100 meters at a time then stopping for about 50 microseconds, then traveling another 50-100 meters. In this process it also branches out looking for the best route. As the stepped leader gets close to the ground, a positively charged traveling spark is initiated on some tall object (trees, towers etc) on the ground. The traveling spark moves upward and eventually connects with the stepped leader. Once the stepped leader and the traveling spark have connected, then electrons from the cloud can flow to the ground, and positive charges can flow from the ground to the cloud. This is known as return stroke. But this flow unlike the flow from up has a well-defined shortest route now. This massive flow of electrical current occurring during the return stroke combined with the rate at which it occurs (measured in microseconds) rapidly superheats the completed leader channel, forming a highly electrically-conductive plasma channel. The core temperature of the plasma during the return stroke may exceed 50,000 K, which makes it shine so bright.

 Lightning is also known to occur in dust storms, forest fires, and volcanic eruptions.  Particles such as sand, smoke and ash, which exist in these environments, can also become electrically charged and create atmospheric conditions similar to that of a thunderstorm.