unreroute the rivers

Seeing footage of the Aids epidemic and ensuing homophobia around the time I was born gives such a deep context to my mother's response to me dating someone of the same gender. "I really fucked up, didn't I?" she said to me with haunted eyes. Since so many of our friends and coworkers at the time were LGBTQ, I was shocked to see something so dark and hypocritical rise up in her. Who is she really, how much of her day to day was just pretend? Maybe the more I know about history, the more I can understand about the human that made me, the more I can unravel about her intentions and her fears.

During my figure modeling career, I ended up in a classroom taught by an intense older Russian man, who was so exacting and specific that his students rarely spoke, so intent on giving him something he considered acceptable. He would tell stories of his previous life in his homeland, about subsisting on the network of the black market, a thick spider web of tricks and tools to circumvent rations and rules. Once he described being in an American grocery store for the first time, the utter shock of choices suddenly available, of shelves overflowing with products, something completely foreign in his younger, 40 year old self. That same person I was dating still, the one that had caused such an unexpected revelation about my mother to manifest. One of those days, headed to his class, my partner dropped me off at the curb outside. The entire car ride there she had been screaming at me that I was a slut for taking my clothes off in front of people, that she was disgusted by me for how I was making my living after graduating from college. For the next three hours, I was the perfect model, still as a statue, but could not stop the tears rolling down my face. Even the teacher was silent, until a break, when he came to ask me if I was alright. There was nowhere I would have wanted to be but there, all of me exposed. In those classrooms, though I am merely an object for learning, the ability to see the truth of what lies before us, free for a moment from its prison of contexts, devoid of sexuality, is the ultimate goal and one of few places where I felt the closest to myself. They were there to draw a human being, and that is something I could give them.

When I was a freshman in college I started dating a man twice my age that I had met in class, a fellow student. He said to me once, with a hint of derision in his voice 'Oh YOU are always going to need a man to take care of you.' I think about that moment often, like when I'm sitting on a forklift, or when I've stepped back to watch an ocean of men I'm supervising on a build. I can hear that same undertone when I'm in bed and a man has positioned himself over me and I've already sunk so far inside of myself, he couldn't make me feel him no matter how hard he might try. That same man told me it hurt his feelings that I didn't refer to him as my boyfriend while we were together. He was the first person I had engaged with sexually on more than one occasion, and months into our relationship when I mentioned something about an orgasm, he reacted suddenly, surprised. 'You have orgasms?' he asked. I was too young and inexperienced to know how to respond.

It takes so little to make someone feel invisible. Especially when they grew up feeling that way. It is amazing to me how a lifetime of careless comments can stack up inside of a person, how moments these people may have instantly forgotten might rattle around in another human being for the rest of their lives.

On the subway awhile ago, I watched a large unkempt man greedily eyeing me. He started at my legs and I watched his eyes travel up my body almost as tangible as a touch - until he got to my face. I don't remember why I was upset, but tears rolled down my cheeks in a constant stream, and he could tell that I had seen his path of attention. His face changed, his whole demeanor shifted. I felt myself transform from sexual object to human being in his gaze as he turned his face respectfully away, and glanced with thoughtful worry at my face a few times before we arrived at my stop and I stepped out of his awareness.

In a developmental movement class a few weeks ago, it was just me and an instructor. As I came upfrom my side to my belly with the support of my arms wrapping towards each other, there was an intense moment of sweetness in the lack of muscular involvement between my shoulder blades. A freedom, a sense of spaciousness, that felt so good I was surprised and almost immediately ashamed of feeling in the presence of another person. I thought about that yesterday while cleaning my room, surrounded by a bunch of figure drawings I was sorting through, choosing which ones to keep. It suddenly hit me that some people draw for the pleasure of it, something that I had never quite felt, or maybe let myself feel. Art for me was almost always a product of intense pain, or someone else's desires as a constraint for me to work around, probably a deeply rooted way of engaging with the world that goes back farther than I can quite understand. Both my mother and my therapist have tried to make points to me about my inability to receive, whether in the medium of gifts or sexually, but I think it is both deeper and subtler than that. My therapist also clearly found that my mother treated me like an object, so my mother's anger at my unwillingness to receive anything from her is intimately tied up in her way of engaging with me. It feels like I intercept and absorb a constant flood of information from the world around me, like sometimes I have no ability to shut out the amount of things being recieved.

Moments of places I've lived have been flooding my senses the past few days. The smell of salt and the piercing blue sky of Sarasota, except I can't tell if its an image from my earliest years, growing up on the beach, or from when I went back decades later for college. The smell of musty coolness in my Grandmother's kitchen, full of Rooster and Apple paraphernalia from her days as a school teacher. We spent our summers there, all of the cousins, wild and free with almost no supervision. Her collections seemed related to us back then, the room full of Care Bears, her Jacuzzi bathtub, unused in decades was filled with beanie babies, and recently I've heard she sleeps amidst stacks of romance novels and kewpie dolls, that angels sit on every surface. My little sister also possesses this fierce desire to collect things, something that manifested pretty early in her life. Last night I had a kind of night-terror, something that happened to me a lot as a child, but only has happened a few times since moving away from my childhood home. Lying awake, it will look as if the shadows are shifting, and gaping dark shapes will seem filled with the potential for something to step out of them. I distracted myself from the flickering shadows and managed to find sleep, unlike anxiety ridden nights of my youth.

Now that I have remembered my emotional attachment to that bear, I understand how the ball they hand us in the developmental movement classes can represent something we desire, it had been such a foreign concept prior to today. I have thought about that ball and that bear overlapping in my physical responsiveness, and every time it crosses my mind I suddenly can't see through my tears and I am filled with almost debilitating intense feelings in the center of my body. With a developmental workshop coming up this next weekend, I am terrified that I will be unable to participate because I am drowning in an ocean of my own tears, helplessly regurgitating the offhand and careless comments, the bricks in my being formed in a thousand careless moments.

The only way out is through.

I’m building a body
From balsam and ash
I’m building a body with
No god attached
I’m building a body
From blueprints in Braille
I’m building a body
Where our design has failed

There’s a book full of plans
At the feet of poor Atlas
Titled ‘For Man’
But the architects Only drew blanks
Now there’s nowhere to go
But go back, go back, Go back, go back

Your horse teaches you to drink the ghost of its water

From the booth I sat in at the Columbus Circle Holiday Market, I watched the eddies and flows of the bodies moving past. Eyes flicked and scanned, individuals glossed over the variety of potential gifts with something or someone in mind. Often the gaze stopped on the wares displayed in my particular booth, a weird double vision, where it was clear that they were looking at objects for sale, but saw someone very specific while taking that object in. This time I was selling someone else's handcrafted items, instead of my own, and in the lack of fear about my own value as an artist, I was able to participate in the gift buying business in a completely different way. All of the emotional space I might have held for things I gave birth to was instead available to hold the customers needs and desire as they considered their loved one's needs and desires. It was no less intimate than having my own things handled, but I was invited into their sense of love or care for an individual, I was a way to express that in the future ritual of gift giving. I felt like a Sphinx, like my job was to ask the kinds of questions that gave me clues to this invisible person, to guide me as I offered different items to my audience. Oracular in my booth, the days I worked ended up being big money days for my friend who had hired me, as I took in mirrored gestures and matching laugh lines suggesting the similarity of structure gifted genetically, as I witnessed mothers and daughters confer, the unsure and the confident gift givers, as I silently showed children the inner structures of the hand built Book Clocks, while their parents perused the selection surrounding me.

In the booths around me were mostly mass produced home goods and jewelry, much farther along in their transition from handmade art-thing to full fledged capitalist venture. My friend's process by necessity gets more streamlined, when faced with the kind of volume that the market's proximity to Times Square had to offer, but his particular product still lived in the space of being novel and somehow familiar, being crafted from books that so many grandmas paused to consider because they recognized titles from their youth. I've come across Craigslist ads during slow season that are explicitly asking for skilled fabricators to work in shops that create the things that famous artists are known for. People like Jeff Koons send their specs in and teams of highly skilled, underpaid craftsmen build the things that sell for so much money, with that man's name on it, that 'artist'. There are entire towns in Italy filled with mold makers and bronze masters that spend their whole lives reproducing other people's work, but it is Rodin's name that is spoken in hushed tones in the antique show booth I just finished constructing, for a tiny copy of a copy of a copy that will sell for $45,000.

What is the difference between being an artist and a slave? Between being a Subject and an Object? What does Ownership really mean? When you buy a reproduction, or something fabricated by individuals being paid to produce someone else's ideas, what now belongs to you? The sweat and sensitivities of those unknown hands? The shape of an experience born out of a context of which you may know nothing? A feeling you had when you first looked at that thing? Part of me wonders if antique shows aren't a product of age trying to prove it still has value.

I watched an ancient man spew unkind words and an attitude of such superiority towards me as I sat in a scissor lift waiting for my crew to get back from their union specified break. 'You are going to move this 'contraption'.' he informed me. I explained that we needed to finish building the wall it was parked under, to which he replied 'Not right now, you are not.' He was an appraiser of antiques, there were about 50 of them let in before the build was complete. I finally stopped working for Fashion Week events, the divide between 'worker' and the Production team is so clearly delineated by those who touch things and those who don't, and Designers won't even respond to you if they have seen you lay hands on something. The last Alexander Wang gig that I worked I received excited comments from someone I went to grade school with, who still lives in my home town. I didn't mean to dump my darkness on her romantic associations of the fashion world, but this divide between people with ideas and money, and those who actually have the skills to craft it but are paid to make someone else's art are held in the kind of regard we might associate servants and slaves with. I have found this attitude to be pervasive. And no one seems to know that we treat the builders of our physical and cultural reality this way. There is only so much of ourselves that we can give away in obscurity before we are merely selling the effort of our bodies for money, and they too become simply objects to be filled with other people's desires, and we in turn become numb to our own cravings and creative impulses.

When I had the pleasure of working on a massive project with Marina Abramovich, we all were participants in the creation of what was essentially a piece of art. When I asked her how she felt about the way the director had translated her life, she responded with 'I don't know, I give him my story and he make slapstick.' Its impossible to describe the herculean effort of constructing the space for this performance, and I worked on almost every crew that installed and then ran the show, I was backstage surrounded by performance artists from all over the world who have devoted their lives and physical bodies to becoming an object of expression to be consumed by an audience. And when I rode the train home every night, I was surrounded by that audience, most of them the older wealthy patrons of the Armory. All I heard was one vicious dismissal after another. They didn't care how hard any of us worked to give that experience to them.

In a circle of conversation the other day, there arose a distinction between heart and intellect that someone was seeing as important, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. I tried to explain how my crews and I communicate in and around a spatial plane that involves a bodily understanding that supersedes that distinction, and she quickly blew me off  'that's an object. I'm talking about an idea.' she said, flipping her hand vaguely in my direction without making eye contact. I thought about one of my best friends, from the first shop I worked in. He had almost a superstitious reaction to drawings, and had really intense fears of feeling stupid, something that was beat into him in the public education system. He wouldn't even come near the drawings at first, it took me months to make him feel comfortable enough to be confused or unsure in my presence to finally talk him through the symbols we use to indicate shapes in space and relate that to the time of building a thing and the organization of what comes first and how abstract numbers relate to physical markings in the room. And in the midst of this conversation with these educated women, I suddenly felt, for the first time like I shouldn't be there. There was no space for my reality in her dismissive gesture, in the words she was trying to find to describe some specific internal feeling about having an Idea. Like objects aren't inherently a manifestation of ideas, like material and immaterial aren't deeply intertwined expressions of each other. Like these men aren't having ideas while they discuss how to build something.

Objects are often things that we fill, with memories, with symbolic weight, with fear or desire, but not as much with their own sense of history, of being born, of being filled with something before or outside of our interactions with it. I wonder how a baby experiences an object, as they grapple with organizing and coordinating their own seemingly disparate parts. Do they feel that object possessing its own selfness the way they themselves do? Is having that little bit of dominion in an alien landscape that they are initially helpless in an important piece in distinguishing themselves from other things? Is it something to wrap the sense of experiencing around, a container of sorts for their growing awareness? How does the way we handle objects when engaging with a baby help define the way in which they will handle objects or other people later?

I wonder if I lost my mother in a sense, when she met my stepfather. I was 3 and suddenly she was pregnant and in love, when they eventually married she asked him to dress in the same white tux with a red rose in the pocket, like her favorite potential option from the board game Mystery Date. I'm sure in some fractured vacuum in myself, there was a desire for some animal affection that I saw in the face and the soft triangular body of a stuffed bear I found at a garage sale with my Grandmother. Digging through other people's things was a regular weekend event, whether it was driving around looking for handwritten poster board signs with arrows, or riding from one thrift store to another to another. My Grandmother was born in the middle of the great depression, and grew up during a war time era, a rationed society, so store bought gifts and school clothes were a once or twice a year kind of event for us when I was growing up. I don't know anything about that bear's previous name or life, but I cried so many tears into Brownie's fake fur over the years. When I was 11, I knew it was time, that I was too old for stuffed animals and tucked him away in a box in my closet. In the 7th grade our Labrador puppy dug him out and chewed off his nose, so I moved him to a high shelf in the closet. When I came home from college every once in awhile, I would apologize, not with words, but the feelings in my body when I saw his dark eyes up there in a forgotten cardboard box.

Once when I was a tarot reader for an event, I asked that payment be some form of exchange, whatever the receiver of the reading chose to give in return for my energetic focus on their question. People laughed and cried, there were intense pauses, and furtive glances towards partners who were out of earshot, and I was an anonymous vessel, to be filled with their burning questions about a looming decision, about something they were second guessing, things they didn't even want to admit they hoped for, things they admitted to me but wouldn't even admit to their spouse. I took it all, wrapping them in my steady presence, listening without judgement, paying attention to what rose to the surface in them during our session. Things that went into my cup included a lock of hair, a poem written in lipstick on a piece of trash, two small silver rings that the girl told me later had been made with someone who had died, the person who ended up being a major part of her reading.

Out of respect, I wore those rings on my pinky finger, every day for an entire year. I still have them. It seems strange to me now, that I would treat someone else's memory filled objects with such reverence, when I have vehemently refused to keep pieces of my own history.




"Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns."

If it looks like a tornado isn't moving, that means it's coming towards you

I so rarely dream. Especially when I'm exhausted from so much work, yet they are piling up.

The sense of foreboding told me it was a nightmare. My little sister had passed out in my arms, and then she called me on the phone from California a second later. I asked her to check the weather for me, I knew something was up. She laughed it off and I asked again, something was coming, I could feel it. I walked over to the window while I waited, and saw what it was. The length of Manhattan was a writhing mass of partial tornados, forming and unforming, at least four where solid, pulsing and spiraling through the cityscape. almost above the building I watched from, a cloud began to twist in on itself, and I knew I had moments, barely even minutes. Wrenching my siblings from their disparate activities in different rooms, I gathered the four of us into a closet in the center of the apartment. My older brother dragged his feet, annoyed at my intensity, but clamored in with us. This closet had no door, and my littlest brother, the tallest of us now was exposed in that opening to potential debris, traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, and my fear of his vulnerability to the impending storm brought me out of my dream state, my mouth dry, my lips cracked.

As I lay there awake, my body hummed in the night. I've felt this before, a vibrating in my sacrum, the sound of roaring waves in my ears, but this time the energy poured upwards from the soles of my feet. They were so active they felt hot, vibrating up through my pelvis and pooling in my thoracic spine. The energy splashed out along the muscular columns that framed the groove of my axis, fanned out in the space between my shoulder blades. I could clearly distinguish a conductive quality in the radiating of my sacral and solar plexuses, and there was a hint of a tingling response in the base of my skull. What reminded me of elementary particles pinged and ricocheted underneath my eyelids at rapid speed and I was out of breath and almost numb from the vibrating in my body. I didn't want to chase away these bizarre sensations, but I was so thirsty finally I rolled myself over and reached for the glass of water at the table by my bed as the waves of sensation slowly subsided.

In class earlier that day I had felt like one of those radical particles, or filled with them maybe. I bounced and pinged around the room until it was time to focus. We spent a portion of the lesson discussing Joints - the relationship between bones. In the roundnesses of our rotating parts I felt a familiar slippery freedom, a space of infinite possibilities, but was introduced to their containers for the first time - Sockets, the concavities that help give those possibilities a sense of direction, a vehicle for expressing that potency in the material plane. I learned that I am not just a million possible paths, but that I am my own vehicle, and those possibilities are there to be responsive to what I stumble across on the path I happen to be traveling down.

I have always had this system of checks and balances and I never knew it was there. I keep finding myself deeper and deeper in the labyrinth. The labyrinth is me. I am both the virgin and the minotaur, I now that much, but I do not know what will happen when they finally meet.





In English, the term labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze. As a result of the long history of unicursal representation of the mythological Labyrinth, however, many contemporary scholars and enthusiasts observe a distinction between the two. In this specialized usage maze refers to a complex branching multicursal puzzle with choices of path and direction, while a unicursal labyrinth has only a single path to the center.


Many [New World] Indians who make the labyrinth regard it as a sacred symbol, a beneficial ancestor, a deity. In this they may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints.

But a sailor must sail just as an engineer must make machines

After two weeks of having to be up and off to work too early for dreams to rise far enough to the surface that I can actually remember them, this morning I slept in, and now carry the dregs of strange internal landscapes around with me.



For someone who has very little interest in the performance of marriage, that was what I was doing - getting married. On a huge decadent boat, I was the bride, and I knew it was an act of convenience. I did not feel very strongly about the choice I was making, or the vows I was saying, I did not feel trapped or annoyed or relieved. I did not see the groom's face, and I did not stay for the afterparty.


Instead, I stepped off the top deck of the boat into the window of a large, beautiful Victorian house, in its uppermost floor.


Like Peter Pan, I was looking for my friend, but she has taken the steps I have been afraid of, and the toys scattered around that beautiful room were for a child that her husband played on the floor with, not for her anymore. As she cleared a place for me to sit while I regaled her with my exploits, I noticed a vacancy on my hand, and wondered if my wedding ring had fallen off when I stepped across the threshold from boat to window. I wasn't upset, just thoughtful.



Moving through my house this morning, in my lazy tie dye pants and messy bun, I felt a sudden sense of missing something as familiar as my glasses or keys. I instinctively searched my left hand for a ring, and suddenly remembered I don't usually wear jewelry, let alone place much value in physical objects. But there remains that feeling in my belly, a feeling that is somehow connected to a pseudo memory, a bizarre connection between my gut and my hand that became clear in the loss of some constriction, an idea that manifests as a physical claim on our attention.

I can still feel that ghost of a ring I wore in a dream, wrapped around my finger.

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

the development of eyes as an arms race

My body spoke to me today. Clear as day I could hear its question, the first time I have ever received a direct transmission from myself. My own voice. It took me 30 years to finally have access to it.

It is the ground's job to receive weight and give support, not mine. My job is to give weight and receive support. To witness, to be responsive. It would be redundant to call myself an Empath, because we ALL are, but I forget most of the time how fiercely my empathic capacity is involved in my survival. It suddenly makes so much sense, the intensity of the walls I seem to have built around myself - while the nature of my childhood is definitely a factor, it is a noisy layer in my life story that overshadows the reality of my energetic needs and awarenesses. For a mother who can't fathom the danger she put us in constantly, I realize suddenly how ill equipped she would have been to recognize the subtle damages suffered by a child missing certain crucial walls who was asked to become an adult too soon.

It has taken this recent foray into multiple embodiment practices for the brevity of my sensitivity to come to my own attention. I have been misunderstanding the source of this disconnect on so many more levels than I would have thought possible. I almost can't even believe my previous anger at violent physical reactions to places my body would not let me go - I never once paused to consider that they might be there for an incredibly valuable reason. That my ability to charm dogs, small children and jaded construction workers, to gauge intentions and gain other's trust and confidences might also come with serious repercussions if not handled respectfully. I know, and then I forget.

'I see', said the blind man.

It has taken a week of me wandering around at the precipice of nausea and panic, lost in an ocean of sensory information for me to really understand and appreciate my teacher's approach. By asking us to turn inwards and witness sensations and shadows living inside of ourselves, I got to experience turning that empathic gaze inward, to touch myself with the heat of my own powerful attention. Only I can unlock these walled off places, and forcing my way through them or allowing someone else to remove them leaves me completely unprotected, stripped of even the slightest membrane between me and the world. I am exhausted from my inability to prioritize all of the messages and details being received right now, by the massive multisensory organ of this body.

While some of this embodiment work is simply too much, too fast, like a baby being sat before they have the skills to get in and out of sitting on their own, I still have acquired some information of inestimable value:

trust the process that I have begun, and the woman shining her light on this particular path.  - When my body asks me to stop, there may be a very valid reason. Trespassing on myself may have laid the groundwork for others to follow. It begins and ends with me. - I am not my walls... rather those walls are a container and a clue about something deeply sensitive and incredibly important, and maybe even I wasn't allowed to go there until I could treat it with sufficient respect.

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 thickness and thingyness of knowledge

linoleum block prints that I carved by hand

stencils cut from cardstock

posters designed for 2 very different choreographers

stock exchange building I designed to look like it came from

a child's inner landscape (for a narrative short film)

I've seen her glance at a particular place a number of times, a tucked in area underneath my ribs that I've always had. It showed up in the drawings by students when I was a figure model, I ignore it in the mirror. In a movement class, allowing myself to consider what it means to grow wide but stay fluid at the same time, she asked if she could touch me along the front of my ribcage, just above my belly. Her hand slid over that place where I fold in, held tight by my own sinew, and she asked me to soften underneath her fingers as I initiated a roll from my side onto my back. For just a moment I could feel my spine free, twisting on its own in the jelly of my being. I can't stop thinking about that sensation. That my body might stay together even if I didn't constantly try to keep it from falling apart. That there may lie underneath my skin an entire bodily experience that I have never had access to because of holding myself back. Up. In.

There was a baby the other day, in one of those classes, born sooner than expected and so small, and I imagine all of his systems were struggling to catch up to the amount of stimulation the world provides. When he got overwhelmed, this tiny human cried and cried, and I suspect every adult in that room felt a deep, primal response to the heart-wrenching sound of this little being declaring his existence with all the power of his developing lungs. So we listened while his mother rocked him, as we continued our individual actions. Maybe he cried out for the safety of the womb, we can't ever really know, but I felt his cries all the way down in my bones. Maybe there is a particular note being sung, that most animals can still recognize - a language we have forgotten - but his voice called it out of us, I could see it in the other women's faces. I tried to stifle the flashbacks of being trapped in the bathroom by my stepfather when I cried. His constant denial of my truth while I was growing up would burst out of me helplessly. Uncontrollably painful sobs led to hitched, repetitive breathing like hiccups trapped in a pathological loop, they would last forever. His hand holding the doorknob from the other side until I could breath normally, had control over myself. My mother's vicious words any time I tried to communicate to her when I was in distress. That I existed. That I had feelings and that they were being crushed. That I was being crushed.

I had to step outside to regain control over my face.

Since I was assisting, providing support to Facilitators and Caregivers with infants, this was not the place for me to be swimming in my own pain. But as I considered where my response was coming from, I realized for the first time that maybe it wasn't just Art School priorities that got in the way of me learning how to develop my self expression. Maybe I had already learned everyone else's needs and opinions were more valuable than my own. Maybe it isn't the men who have talked their way into my bedroom who robbed me of the ability to defend myself, perhaps it was always me, robbing myself of my voice. I am the one suppressing my ability to communicate how I feel. Since I never had a safe place to express it, I have no idea what could possibly come out of me - I am terrified that telling people how I feel means I will lose them or myself. Listening to the cries from those tiny lungs, I realized how long I've been moving through the world like I had that horrible man breathing in my face, like my mom's defensive, cutting words were true. That I brought them with me into my sexual encounters and my friendships. Their physical presence has long since evaporated from my life, but I've been reacting as though they have always been there. How have I not known I was free?

Later that evening I was one of 30 dancers in a performance art piece. The piece had no cues, just a sequence of scenarios that were equal parts choreography and improvisation. As we stormed and stomped through the tiny gallery space, we welcomed in 3 guests/audience members and randomly ignored them and focused on them as we also responded to each other. It took a specific kind of openness, where you could almost feel the energy of the room shift as bodies morphed into a new shape, a different pattern of movements. One of the transitions went from a fast, low to the ground stomping shuffle to locking arms and legs with any body close enough to grasp, anchoring to them and freezing. The 3 audience members watched a roiling sea of bodies suddenly coalesce around them into a sculpture, a coral reef, a gently breathing aquifer that air and space moved through, that they were held inside of.

Inside of the anchor, the kinetic landscape of our connected bodies, it is evident when the mass begins to shift because there is a subtle releasing of weight - the force moving through our points of contact with each other pours back into our feet - and slowly, we all find ourselves standing face to face with another body that becomes our Mirror. There is such a strange deep resonance in the mirroring, a silent exchange through our eye contact and a physical responsiveness that passes the role of leader and follower between us, that gives my limbs permission to be drawn into the rhythms and gestural nuances of another being with a consciousness that lives underneath the patterns I typically move within. We did 15 repeat performances in 3 hours, and almost every time I moved from Anchor into Mirror I was looking into a completely different face, open and hyper aware of a different heartbeat. Once I looked into the tremulous, watery blue eyes of a much older woman and felt something powerful soften inside of me as I let her lead my body in space. Another time my focus was tuned to a man who looked like he might have walked out of a Dostoyevsky novel, but with laughing eyes that I was helpless against. He slowly covered his face with his hands to give me the space to regain my composure as my hands followed, and we took a deep inhale together before the next wave of synchronized movement rippled through the collective. A few times, audience members folded themselves in with the performers, pulled in by a deep desire to be a part of us, and I ended up Anchored with one of them during the course of the evening. She became the partner I mirrored, my body responsive to this curious outsider, extending the fearless support and trust of the other performers by including her in the co-creation of this experience.

I started to understand how the body of performers was tapping into an ancient, primal awareness, and the presence of the audience members allowed them to feel the edge of that collective fabric, sometimes enfolding, other times shutting them out completely, like a wave pulling back from shore after it had reached out and engulfed you. What I discovered in that room was this potential that we all still possess - a primordial capacity to be connected to each other.

Maybe we have misunderstood our inheritance.

Kainos: the thick now, which extends into many kinds of time, into presence.

It was a job, like any other. In the armory - a massive space filled with dysfunction and confusion - was an antique show, or at least the early skeleton of what would be walkways and Grecian inspired booths for people to wander, with their thousands of dollars to spend for their private collections.

My fierce, feminine little self faced a wall of tired, surly, uninspired men, with a Union mood and Union attitudes I would have to battle to get any work done, while they related to me in the only way they know how to relate to women. The first thing I have to do is size up the skills and temperaments of the individuals in my crew so I can affectively play them off each other and assign responsibilities they might prefer. There is always a Rooster, he is usually taller and better looking than most of the other guys, and often wields the most power to set the pace and productivity, and he is the one that I must convince to align their purpose with mine. The Rooster on this crew still has mostly dark hair, resonates with an old school nyc cop vibe, painfully good natured, even when weighing the combative desires of the crew against the venue's needs of speed and accuracy. He is impossibly tall with large carpenter's hands and a thick nasally accent, a direct manner of speech that is easy for me to catch and twist and trap him inside of. His desire to prove himself to me as both a competent carpenter and as a man is the currency in which I am dealing, a system that sits outside of the monetary one, invoking a kind of ancient exchange.

I always think of old Celtic rituals, where the priestesses represent an eternal female god, and the seasons are marked by the choosing and eventually consuming of her consort, after he has served his divine purpose of inspiring an act of creation.

It is rare, on my own, to have a sense of my femaleness, I often feel completely genderless until I show up at work. The ability to flip on that character has become a unique signature that I get hired for, when the floor thunders with my footsteps and the power of my voice reaches the rafters of the massive armory. But I have to make that space to be filled with something greater than myself, and it leaves me exhausted by the end of the day, and in the moments when it slips, someone always comes up to ask me if I am ok. Finding the male energy that calls her out of me is vital, my approach to this work is almost ritual, I even fast to keep my messy vulnerable selfness out of the way, to maintain a clarity of the overarching vision and all of the elements involved in the manifesting I've been hired to orchestrate.

I read once that to cast a truly effective love spell, it necessarily affects the one doing the casting in equal measure.

This particular Rooster was keenly interested in the selfness that I set aside to be a crew chief. I watched him as he tried valiantly to penetrate my Cat Mother mystique, with my sharp and sometimes loving tongue. 'She's not so tough under that hat' he kept saying when I was in earshot. I wore a winter knit cap that covered most of my head, containing my hair has been a method for removing my sexuality from most situations, ever since I started working with steel, and I saw his sheepishly hungry glance when my hat fell off at one point.  He had daughters not much younger than me, and I suspect he was trying to reconcile his frame of reference with the character I played. I appreciated his attempt to see the wholeness of me, so I started to call his interest out by suggesting I would answer his questions over beers. I heard him call me 'his woman' when he thought I wasn't nearby, and the other men joked amongst each other that he would get angry if he saw any of the other guys talking to me. Its a game they all play, I pick and choose when I think it is valuable and when it is problematic.

On the final evening of the build he hung back in the lift as I surveyed the room, so I asked him flippantly when we were getting drinks. He turned towards me and asked me how old I thought he was. I had assumed around 48 or 50, but lowballed, partially in hope, and a little bit to flatter him. '42' I responded. Right in front of my eyes, I saw the energy leave his body. I suddenly realized just how grey his hair was, noticed the slightly sunken flesh around his eyes. '58' he said back. He climbed down from the lift as if he were 1,000 years old and slowly walked over to me as if he were too exhausted to find the movements, and extended his large hand to engulf my small, childish one in a farewell salute.

I barely made it to the train before I started crying, and I didn't stop for 3 days.

For the first time in my life I had a clear sense of my relationship to time. I could see the ship that was myself with its wide vista full of possibilities and potential paths, and his ship, far out, so close to the horizon I could never catch up, his Union world and sense of place holding him fast to the direction he probably chose when he was my age. Asking him to spend any time with me was kind of like asking him to be in two places at once, in his current worn flesh and in his memories of when he was my age, and possibly introducing the weight of regret in choices made ages ago that cannot be unchosen.

In this primal confusion of the role I play in time, perhaps it's a question of being a Daughter. Before we are almost anything else, we are formed out of a relationship to a parent, it is an identity that defines our connection to history, a way of knowing ourselves and our place in the world. I realized I didn't really know what it felt like to be one - I've never had a boundary I wasn't able to dance across with anger or laughter. Maybe I have been clinging to the earth, pouring myself into places of contact between self and other, wheeling around the axis of that contact to compensate for the lack of clarity about what holds me together in an ocean of relationships and feelings and exchanges and unwritten social expectations. It was bizarre, this strange feeling that something huge had happened, yet I had no clear sense of what - I know it's related to that missing Daughterness, and this overlapping of timelines that may resemble Father, but I have no idea. I am starting to understand that I must make a choice and begin following some sort of path, even though it will necessarily move me towards the horizon. I can't live forever in the pregnant space of possibility, and I first have to let go of the anchor point through which I have been clinging to the edges of the earth, the Mothership. I can't avoid entropy, I can't live outside of time and society and the place waiting for me inside of it. I have to learn what it means to be bound. Tamed. Claimed by something.

One of the other men on my crew was retired, I was told. Apparently he keeps showing up anyways. With so much of his lifetime devoted to this work, how could he not desire the purpose, the usefulness one feels on a team? And after so much time amongst this brotherhood, how is it anything else, but a social experience that is vital to his lifeblood? I'm starting to notice how many of the people I work around have become the source of family that we used to go home to in the past. Our blood families often pull us away from the vibrant communities and deep love and trust we have come to know amongst the people we work with.

At the end of the month I was back running the same crew to break down and pack the pieces of the event we were responsible for and send into storage for next year. As I was assisting the forklift load the last of it, my crew's Union Rep called me over and sent me inside - my men were waiting in a lopsided circle and they declared that none of them were leaving until I had hugged each of them goodbye. In the history of Union jobs, I doubt a hugging circle with the crew boss has happened more than a handful of times, if at all.

These men, from all these different crews, have taught me so much about myself, and I have found a voice I didn't get to have growing up. Because I see them as Men, let them be strong for me, they care about their work and they give me what I need. I love them for it, in the face of their eroded knee caps and calcified lower backs, grumbling ancient attitudes and beer bellies. Someone has to love them. I have only just begun to understand the depth of their affect on me and my relationship to the world. This too is my family, this ragtag band of old habits and weathered flesh, these silly, misunderstood, idiosyncratic men.

Maybe I'm not an orphan.




The word yoga, from the Sanskrit word yuj means to yoke or bind

an observer’s measurement in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past

My first day of kindergarten I was so nervous I just stared at the piece of toast with butter and jam that my stepfather made for me. This man I didn't like was the person dropping me off in this new environment and the thought of eating that toast seemed arduously painful. I waited until he left the room, then ran down the hallway to flush it down the toilet. I couldn't just throw it in the trash because he would notice it, and I would be in trouble, but there was no way I could choke it down. 10 minutes later, as we were getting ready to leave, he called me into the bathroom. That piece of toast had betrayed me, it floated on top of the water in the toilet.

At our previous apartment, I remember clearly having a similar reaction to food, I couldn't take a single bite of the dinner put in front of me, and didn't have the words to convey my distress. I was given the option to take a bite of everything, or receive a spanking. I chose the spanking because it felt safer than trying to force food into my body. I exaggerated my cries so my mother wouldn't hit me as hard, or have my stepfather's ruthless hands do it. For years I had a hard time eating in front of people, even through high school, if I had prepared food, if one of my brother's friends walked in, I would leave it at the table and hide in my room, come back for it much later. Even now, when supervising labor crews, I often drink coffee instead of eat lunch, something about having a full belly makes me slow, feels vulnerable, like I've lost some essential sharpness that I need to see everything and respond at a rapid speed.

Earlier still, when we were still living in Sarasota, the daycare that my brother and I went to was a place of terror, where the people who worked there were unafraid to slap any of the children left in their care. I was constantly in trouble, because I apparently always looked guilty, I knew they particularly hated me. It was impossible to sleep during naptime, but I learned to pretend after countless days of them discovering my eyes wide open, even though I was silent, and I had to lay in that cot alone as punishment, watching everyone else play. Years later, my mother admitted she knew they were abusive, but felt like she had no other choice, could afford no other solution.

In the years of dealing with my stepfather's addiction as he moved between jail and our home, we experienced increasingly dangerous scenarios. I remember all of us huddled in the hallway with the lights out, hiding from windows like it was a hurricane, but it was my stepfather banging to be let in. I don't know much, but I know my mother had filed a restraining order against him. I remember being in the fourth grade, on the playground at school when he walked up and tried to convince me to leave with him. I refused because I was not stupid. Fast forward to the seventh grade and he lived with us again. He would clench and unclench his fists whenever he spoke to me when we were in the house alone together. I woke up in the middle of the night often to see him in my doorway with my light on. I would walk home from school as slowly as I could and lock myself in the bathroom with books for hours. I pushed him in every way I could, using large words, speaking to my brother only in French, I wanted him to hit me. It would have been easier to remove him if he did. So when his wealthy mother informed us she wouldn't send us Christmas gifts if we didn't send her thank you letters, it seemed like an odd stipulation. We wanted nothing from her. That same year she sent us a bunch of wrapped gifts, and my mother and I opened all of them in confusion. The bright packages turned out to be things like a loaf of bread, a box of waffle mix, pop tarts, other various things that might be lying around someone's house. My mother also received a box of used makeup and a broken ornament from my stepfather's sister. Horror and comedy often live close to each other - we rewrapped everything and put it all under the tree for my siblings to experience. We laughed ourselves to tears.

I don't remember ever having any illusions about Santa Claus, since I went with my mom every year to purchase Christmas gifts for my siblings. For all the times we had to scrape together quarters to buy milk at the gas station, or take the bus to go grocery shopping cause we couldn't afford a car in suburbia, or couldn't pay the electric bill sometimes and kept all of our food in coolers - watching my mother wrestle with what she thought we might be excited to open that she could afford was awful. All of our gifts, from everyone in the family had a similar desperate cheapness that seemed to have nothing to do with knowing who we were or what we needed. Year after year I received Barbie stuff I never played with, because I was never interested in dolls. I drew constantly growing up, and it wasn't until I was almost in high school that someone caught on and sent me dollar store watercolors and cheap sketch paper, even though I was already working with sophisticated media at that point. All we really cared about was the food, because we could eat our fill of delicious things for weeks afterwards, and we could see our cousins, who understood us in a way my school friends never could. The closest person to me growing up was my cousin Elizabeth, her and her brother were all but ostracized from the family because of her mother's death, leaving them with the shady man she chose to marry and have them with. My aunt was disowned by my grandfather on her deathbed at 30 years old, and her children grew up starved for a feeling of being inside of a family. Every Christmas Elizabeth and I would walk my neighborhood for hours discussing what we had heard the adults say about each other's parent, desperately trying to figure out what was true. We wrote letters for years, while she was trapped in the house with that man and no phone. The two of them eventually joined the airforce to pay for college, since their father hadn't reported taxes in decades. They are making their own families now. I am so proud of them.

I've started to notice that I choose people with walls, I find impenetrable surfaces and I patiently push against them until I find myself inside of them. If you were to ask my closest friends about how we met, they would tell you variations on a single story - I showed up, and I kept showing up until I was familiar. I think I get a sense of being held inside of other people's walls, like I can let go a little because someone has my back. There is a sense of kinship in our closed offness, our tactics of protection. It is a specific kind of intimacy, much like the kind you might share with a sibling, and we can speak frankly of our distancing techniques, proudly of the coldness we bring to passionate situations, disdainfully of people who are unaware of their lack-of-affect on us.

The more you don't need me, the more I can trust you.

I had a tarot reader/professional therapist call out this false premise during a reading recently. 'You are misidentifying the source of the disconnect', he told me. 'I get the feeling that for you to win, someone must lose in most cases', he said. I can't stop thinking about that, how often I come into situations and walk away the hero - I know often someone is cast as the villain, the failure, the incapable by a necessary comparison. To be right, someone must be wrong. Am I fighting for validity by invalidating the people who made me question that? -'Who would you be harming by being you?' he asked. I don't even know what myself feels like, because it always seemed like a threat to the people I needed to keep me alive.

'If you are the ground, what do you step onto?', he asked me.

Walls can't move. I have to give up my identity as a wall, if I want to take a step on the path towards myself.

It is amazing to me, how we carry these experiences with us, how they become bricks in the walls we build around ourselves, forming the foundations for how we perceive and react to all the people and situations we encounter in our lives. My story is specific, but not unusual, and the rawness of my presence makes perfect sense if you consider all the ways in which I've learned that I am alone, because my feeling safe was inconsequential in the minds of the people making choices for the child that happened to be me. I learned that feeling safe was unnecessary, rather than a vital part of establishing how we engage with the world. As an adult, when people are sharing their childhood memories around me, any time I bring up my experiences, it is met with extreme discomfort, and I have learned that my history is shameful, is something I am not allowed to share, is somehow not as valid as everyone else who can exist around me. And my mother insists I forget, that I focus on the things she offers me as indications of a happy childhood as if I can erase her trespass to make her feel less guilty, at the expense of my shining a light into my own shadows, forever trapping me blindly inside of them. It seems daunting, as I listen to other's stories - to consider the idea of feeling safe, a luxury that I cannot relate to, like owning a hot tub, or vacationing in Europe . I wonder, looking back, if my mother also didn't have a sense of that word in her vocabulary. I wonder if the seeds of that were sown in my great grandmother, who had my grandmother at 16 years old, in the Great Depression. Maybe Safety was something lost long ago, maybe that gaping hole is my heritage, that absence IS the thread that connects me and my relatives through time. Maybe learning about that word is the key that might release the unheard little girl trapped in my body, in the web of fear and fight or flight responses, where my 'self' expression constantly requires dangerous situations for me to mobilize around, to feel called into action.

Though it has gotten me this far, I'm tired of being a tank.




"Remember The Tinman"


There are locks on the doors
And chains stretched across all the entries to the inside
There's a gate and a fence
And bars to protect from only God knows what lurks outside

Who stole your heart left you with a space
That no one and nothing can fill
Who stole your heart who took it away
Knowing that without it you can't live

Who took away the part so essential to the whole
Left you a hollow body
Skin and bone
What robber what thief who stole your heart and the key

Who stole your heart
The smile from your face
The innocence the light from your eyes
Who stole your heart or did you give it away
And if so then when and why

Who took away the part so essential to the whole
Left you a hollow body
Skin and bone
What robber what thief
Who stole your heart and the key

Now all sentiment is gone
Now you have no trust in no one

Who stole your heart
Did you know but forget the method and moment in time
Was it a trickster using mirrors and sleight of hand
A strong elixir or a potion that you drank

Who hurt your heart
Bruised it in a place
That no one and nothing can heal
You've gone to wizards, princes and magic men
You've gone to witches, the good the bad the indifferent

But still all sentiment is gone
But still you have no trust in no one

If you can tear down the walls
Throw your armor away remove all roadblocks barricades
If you can forget there are bandits and dragons to slay
And don't forget that you defend an empty space

And remember the tinman
Found he had what he thought he lacked
Remember the tinman
Go find your heart and take it back

Who stole your heart
Maybe no one can say
One day you will find it I pray