I think Walt Whitman would be tickled pink - or rather, tickled red-jellied - to be named the poet of the groin. Or really, the poet of any other physical structure! Think of his worshipful list of sacred body parts at the end of "I Sing the Body Electric": eye-fringes jaw-hinges neck-slue hind-shoulders breast-front man-balls man-root knee-pan foot-ball lung-sponges stomach-sac skull-frame palate-valves breast-milk womb teats marrow in the bones and thin red jellies: "O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,/ O I say now these are the soul!"

Whitman is my favorite would-be Quaker. If his ol' gramma or great-gramma hadn't been thrown out of the faith for marrying outside it. He referred to his "Quaker intuition" and for years obsessed about writing a book on Quaker minister Elias Hicks. The very heart of the Whitmanian ethic dovetails with Hicks': a worshipful approach to nature and the belief that the divine resides in all beings equally. But Whitman couldn't get on board with Hicks' thrall to purity. How different, if little Walt had been born a few generations earlier. Before we'd been forced to erase the quaking body from our culture and history to protect our people from brutal persecution, creating the scrubbed-down, repressed Society of Friends we see today. Anyone encountering contemporary Quaker culture would be hard pressed to see how we could have possibly been mocked for quaking. But originally, we practiced a deeply embodied 'enthusiasm' (spirit possession) and divinization (an inner experience of oneness with the divine) - a trust in the personal, individual channeling of spirit that happily coexists with faith in the spiritual power of the collective. Early Quaker forms of communing with the divine included shouting out, speaking in tongues, reenacting the birth pangs of the second coming, practicing hands-on healing, and chanting ministry in an incantational style. Whitman would be right at home inside the wild mysticism of first generation Friends. So would I. 

So this week in classes and workshops I've been inviting a little Whitman into the collective bodysoul. To shake things up and remind us to keep Quaking. Here's a quote from the post-election live embodiment practice with Prentice Hemphill: "Let us be guided by the tremble - the kind of connection that changes us, that allows us to feel what is, to come undone, to be more real, more honest, more here. We seek connection that has us shake a little bit. Take a moment to think: Where might I find connection that can allow me to be with what is here, without requiring me to comport myself into what has been, what we know gets things done or makes the world make sense? Or, how might I come to connections that are familiar, in a new way - with a soft front, with an open belly?” 

The rhyme between comport and contort isn't by accident. We can only resource from community when we feel our imperfect ragged humanity mirrored and supported. We need to stop contorting ourselves into artificial shapes in all the ways that are so popular right now, like virtue-signaling, performative allyship, and righteous public proclamations. Instead we need to show up with all our confusion and our conditioned tendencies, encouraging it to come undone by letting ourselves shake a little. That's the only way to allow a new shape to emerge. Borrowing from the traditional association of the pelvis with the earth element, let's dunk down into our soulful, soilful hips and visualize the bowl of the pelvis as a thick earthen flowerpot full of rich, life-giving mulch. What do we have to do with mulch? We have to turn it, aerate it, mix it up to break it apart so that it may yield something new. What turns your mulch, my friend? What practices stir you, allow your patterns to get a little mixed up and turned around, so that you can put yourself back together differently, allowing for the emergence of some new life, new form of being? You might invite more mulchification, by rocking your pelvis on your ever-rooting-down ischial tuberosity tubers. Here (for the gazillionth time) are Walt Whitman's marching orders, when we're all so lost in what we should do in this crazy moment of history:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
-Preface, Leaves of Grass

Whatever stirs your soulsoil, that's your calling. The thing that revitalizes your creativity, that brings you into connection because you are pulling from the most intimate recesses of who you are and what you care about. That's what you've got to offer the world, from the most authentic level of your being. Please. Bring. It. Right. Now. "Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear..." (insert music note emojis). Just follow your leading, be faithful to the call, and bring it. 

This video is set to excerpts from these three poems and also a recording of my sibling (cello) and my mother (piano) and her dog Daisy (claw-scurrying on the kitchen floor), playing Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" for my 50th birthday.

Linda Pastan, "October"
Who can mediate
between the body and its undoing?
At night in each of my limbs
I feel the skeletal tree ache,
and I dream of leaves
in their feverish colors, floating
through the small streams
and tributaries of the blood.
At noon in the smoldering woods
I gather black grapes
that purse and caress the mouth,
I gather thistles and burrs-
whole armfuls of dissolution,
while from a branch
the chuck-will's widow calls
forgive, forgive

Marie Ponsot, "The End of October"
Leaves wait as the reversal of wind
comes to a stop. The stopped woods
are seized of quiet; waiting for rain
bird & bug conversations stutter to a
stop.
Between the road
and the car in the road and me in the car,
and the woods
and the forms standing tall and the broken
forms and the small forms that crawl there,
the rain begins to fall. Rain-strands,
thin slips of vertical rivers, roll
the shredded waters out of the cloud
and dump them puddling to the ground.
Like sticks half-drowned the trees
lean so my eyes snap some into
lightning shapes, bent & bent.
I leave the car to wee where, lower,
the leaves of the shrubs beaten goldleaf
huddle together. In some spaces
nothing but rain appears.

Whatever crosses over
through the wall of rain
changes; old leaves are
now gold. The wall is
continuous, doorless. True,
to get past this wall
there's no need for a door
since it closes around me
as I go through.

Czeslow Milosz, "This Only"
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

POETIC THEMES
Last week I woke up and noticed my front tooth is turning gray. There's a meme of a tree in its full glory with the message, "The trees are about to show us how beautiful letting go can be." Last October I saw it and it struck me as very poignant. This year I saw it again and, for some reason, it made me furious! Something between Covid or my dog dying or my kid leaving for college or maybe perimenopause - who knows - calls bullshit on the beauty of letting go. I's not beautiful. It's just plain HARD. In a poem entitled "In a Northern Country," Linda Pastan confesses, "I'm tired of the way the seasons keep changing, / mimicking the seasons of the flesh which are real / and finite." Amen, sister. There's a fatigue that I recognize in Pastan that keeps me company. It's an exhaustion with the deterioration of the flesh. In "End of October" she wonders, "Perhaps beauty / is the mother of death, / not the other way around." There's a kind of crone-wisdom in perceiving that truth can be toothed, arresting and still tender. Nothing can mediate the ache of undoing as we watch our colorful leaves float on down the river. Buh-bye Youth and prettiness! Living is an exercise in loss, as we break down to skeleton. Still, the grapes that purse the mouth also caress it. Knowing as we do that we can't hold the world forever, our "armfuls of dissolution" are spiky, bristled - not pussy-willows but thistles and burrs.

In the autumn of our lives, not only do we experience minute by minute the dissolution of the body, but also an increased feeling of urgency to give up the ghosts. The rolling call of the nocturnal chuck-will widow, with all the implications of loss implied in its name, is beautiful until it is crazy-making, persisting as it does all. night. long. The cadenced onomatopoeia haunts us with its insistent repetition to forgive, forgive, before it's too late. The hard work of forgiving is not, in fact, about someone else's behavior, but about surrendering to our own past. What has been will be, and we need to decide what we're going to do with it. There's nothing complacent about forgiving; it's about making peace, in the sense of actively forging something out of nothing.

Marie Ponsot's "End of October" is another dissolution poem, where the leaves are low to the ground. The skeletal trees are in lightning shapes; all that is left are the leaves of the shrubs, huddled low and beaten gold. The transformation of old leaves turned gold gives a sense-based experience of the liminal, in the spaces between raindrops, between car and woods, between the witnesser and the autumn leaves, between human and animal. To enter this rain-drenched scene is not to pass through it but to become different in it - the doorless wall partitioning stages of change is continuous, and it closes around us as we move through. We huddle together, bent. 

A depiction of this transformation, "This Only" enacts a distillation of our needs as we age, redefining what is precious. The poem looks backward and forward at once, to a past winter when a traveler visited a valley down in the forest. In this first visit, some epiphanic moment dissolved him into the natural world. But the poem is set in autumn, with winter still to come. When the traveler returns years later, there's no sublime epiphany. It's more of a streamlining of need. "He wants only one, most precious thing / To see, purely and simply." With age we discover a kind of pure dissipation of self into our surround, the dissolving of ego that enables pure witness. At this edge, beyond and yet definitive of self, there is no fear or hope, only rhythm and joy and reasonlessness. From the perspective of the autumn of our lives, that time of year where leaves, or none, or few do hang, we can look forward to our winter crone wisdom that privileges presence - only. We are whittled down.

In an episode of "On Being" with Krista Tippett, John O'Donohue describes this process of distilling and streamlining, in the etymology of the word "threshold." Coming from the verb to thresh, to separate the grain from the husk, he describes the threshold as a line that separates "two territories of spirit." As we transition from one way of being to another, O'Donohue draws our attention to the question of how we cross over. To cross "worthily," he says, is to heal certain patterns of behavior that had us stuck or caught. He concludes, "It's a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life." The kerfuffled verb tense of this last line recalls Milosz's: we are returning home to a memory of our future as we always knew it. The word "worthy" is an interesting choice, Biblical as it is and the root of the word "worship." What is it, then, to cross worthily? Perhaps it is to attend to every micro-detail, each worthy of our attention, so that we may dissolve what is and join with whatever future thing awaits. To worship every autumn leaf is to fully inhabit this threshold of change, this period of crossing over that promises the dissolution of ego and the discovery of true presence.

PRACTICE
Expressing the "skeletal tree ache" in movement is to find the sway inside stillness, the certain sadness in the extension of limbs. We could express longing and limit by reaching out our arms and gathering them back in, like Pastan's "armfuls of dissolution." There's a kind of threshold play in a physical exercise exploring boundaries: bringing your hands to the center of your chest, interlace your fingers, flip your palms to face away from you, and as you push the hands away, round your back and drop your head. It's sometimes nice to linger in this extension, maybe lifting one shoulder at a time. Then turn the palms to face inward and gather the interlaced hands back to the chest, lingering again as you receive the warm imprint of the palms on your chest. Go slowly, so you might check in with the space between letting go and longing and receiving and releasing again. Whatever crosses over changes. Notice the shifts in the streams and tributaries that flood from the heart center. Tune in to the flow of blood and energy from the trunk to the branched tips of fingers. Could you drop in deep enough to find Milosz's"edge where there is no I or not-I"? What does that zone feel like and how does it relate to forgiveness?

The last two weeks in class we've been prepping for, working with, and recovering from eclipse season. This week's solar eclipse was in Libra, themed around balance, especially in the scales of justice, according to my favorite astrologists Mindy Nettifee and Chani Nicholas. It was the third in a cycle that began - guess when? - October 2023. Occurring on the axis of Libra and Aries (sign of fire, ruled by Mars, the planet named for the God of War), this signature asks us to locate an imbalance in our lives, collectively and personally, around where we fight and where we capitulate. All eclipses happen in one of two "nodes," North and South, and the ancients conceived these nodes as the head and tail of a dragon. The North node dragon mouth is about the advent of something new, something that's being hungered for, and the South node dragon tail signals something that is ready to fall away, something in need of release. Maybe we're being asked to question what it is that's worth fighting for and where we need to back down or surrender our needs or wants or convictions. Maybe we're being asked to interrogate where we fall on the continuum between fight and surrender, in order to let go of some conditioned tendencies in a way that might bring more balance, as individuals, as a community - maybe as a planet.

Traditionally, South node eclipses happen subtlety, in the quiet dark places of our psyche, in ways we might only be able to identify in retrospect. But this week I had a not-so-subtle exchange that kept me up (as eclipses will do) and has me thinking and wanting to share. It was, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, an exchange that began on social media, as some of the least productive skirmishes do. But over the course of the private conversation that ensued, I experienced the felt sense of movement from both parties, shifting and coming into a more subtle understanding and a greater intimacy, as the best conflicts do.  

My Facebook "Friend" (capitalized because this is a fellow Quaker) posted that the word somatic is being recruited willy-nilly in redundant ways. "Somatic" just means "embodied," she pointed out, so the term "somatic yoga" is meaningless - yoga is already about the body! I responded with an earnest attempt to describe the function of the term. Of course yoga is a practice of thousands of years originating in the Indus Valley with whole-self spiritual transformation at its center. That's just not what yoga means to most Americans anymore. Adding "somatic" as a descriptor for a yoga practice might be an attempt to specify a certain set of intentions or approaches that are different from, say, tightening the skin under your chin to eliminate unsightly jowls, or stretching your hamstrings to avoid back pain. Somatic work is interested in studying and shifting the whole organism of our being, by working with patterns in our bodymind and soul. It signals a trauma-informed approach; someone with a history of trauma will not necessarily or automatically heal by lying on their backs and bringing their feet together and knees apart. Being ordered or forcing oneself to do so might in fact retrigger and cement habitual patterning. In that awareness of how to recognize and approach forms of harm and work towards healing, Somatics has naturally ventured into territory at intersection of the personal and the systemic. It's a field that envisions broader forms of transformation through healing. Many somatic practitioners have their sights on healing at the micro and macro levels, in a way that bridges embodied practice and political action. Attention to the body reveals that it's not enough to change our opinions or even - I know this is controversial - to take political action. Write to your senators, yes! Show up at the rally, sure! AND BUT there is also work to be done in how we might better align our dreams for the world with how we actually show up IN the world: how we connect, what vibes we give off, how be behave under pressure. As we bring our soma into alignment with our values, we experience a fractal rippling outwards - we feel the shifts in our primary relationship, our families and friendships and neighborhoods. Hopefully over time we begin to notice signs that this ripple effect follows the laws of physics, also changing our communities and country and globe. 

And especially as we reckon with the political intensification as we approach election season, if you're doing All.The.Things "out there," but you're noticing relational stickiness - if you're NOT experiencing growing intimacy and understanding and depth in your closest relationships and the communities that matter to you - it's a sign that something's off in your approach and needs recalibration. Like, for example... when I got a whiff that my Friend experienced my Facebook response as a sanctimonious soapbox lecture, I immediately changed approaches and reached out to her privately with an attempt to contextualize what I was saying inside a specific set of emotional needs - "please see me I feel invisible!" - and relational needs - "hey, we've taught retreats together, trying to bring more embodiment to Quakerism... are we still connected in that purpose? I care about feeling connected to you because I super respect your work, and also it's scary to feel alone in this!"

And I invited more collaborative investigative play into the important questions her post raised - YES, capitalism will absolutely appropriate every possible meaningful term! I see the word somatic used in ways that do seem meaningless or even antithetical to the purposes I've been trying to describe. 12 Somatic Tricks that will Make Your Butt the Envy of Every Woman at Your 20th High School Reunion! But it's not always this obviously exploitative. Is that workshop you just saw on Instagram called "Somatic Hiking" for a hashtag that will help sales? Or is there language about incorporating embryological movements like creeping, crawling, and swimming to explore embryological and developmental movement outdoors, to deepen our direct experience of nature? Because the first thing ain't gonna get my 75 bucks but that second... fuck yeah!  Could we identify some signs that help us flag appropriative or exploitative uses of the term? Like, create a little rubric together? Is it for weight loss? FLAG! But hmmm... the focus on beauty... When I don't want to host a somatic photography workshop that promises to get women in touch with their natural beauty, I'm like... nah. Our work is about internal experience, not appearances, even if it's dismantling the strictures of The Beauty Myth. But... is that allergic reaction really just a form of internalized body-shame, especially given our spiritual taproot of Quakerism, with its austere, puritanical standards for living into Simplicity? It was lingering with questions like these, together, that catapulted our dialogue into our shared heartbreak around the lack of any attention to embodiment within Quakerism. This was the original source of our connection I was hoping to feel. Not as a return to beginnings with no progress, but as a spiral towards feeling more complexity and nuance in a vision we've always shared - of this awesome, radical faith of ours making space for the wild embodied ways of being that earned us our name as QUAKE-ers in the first place. The vision that I wanted to rekindle, stoking the common ground from which we could act - from a connected heart space.

Maybe the spiraling movement I'm trying to illustrate with this story of conflict, repair, and deeper reconnection is what is being burnished inside the refiner's fire of this eclipse season. How can you bring your operating system to function not just from the head space this culture reveres and requires, but from its alignment with the feelings in your heart and the intuitive knowings of your gut? Between last October, the second eclipse in March, and this week, have you become more aware of what's at the dragon's tail? What do you need to release to bring those three centers into balance, as a springboard for spiraling growth? Has spirit sent you any hunches about what you might be ready to let go of, to make space for the bigger alchemical transformations this world is so ready for?

To help you engage that self-study, here's some poetry, thoughts on seasonal release, and somatic practices to help with this process, from this week's entry in Thinking Feelingly. 

"To the Light of September," W.S. Merwin

When you are already here 

you appear to be only 

a name that tells of you 

whether you are present or not 


and for now it seems as though 

you are still summer 

still the high familiar 

endless summer 

yet with a glint 

of bronze in the chill mornings 

and the late yellow petals 

of the mullein fluttering 

on the stalks that lean 

over their broken 

shadows across the cracked ground 


but they all know 

that you have come 

the seed heads of the sage 

the whispering birds 

with nowhere to hide you 

to keep you for later 


you 

who fly with them 


you who are neither 

before nor after 

you who arrive 

with blue plums 

that have fallen through the night 


perfect in the dew


"The late year," Marge Piercy

I like Rosh Hashonah late,

when the leaves are half burnt

umber and scarlet, when sunset

marks the horizon with slow fire

and the black silhouettes

of migrating birds perch

on the wires davening.


I like Rosh Hashonah late

when all living are counting

their days toward death

or sleep or the putting by

of what will sustain them--

when the cold whose tendrils

translucent as a jellyfish


and with a hidden sting

just brush our faces

at twilight. The threat

of frost, a premonition

a warning, a whisper

whose words we cannot

yet decipher but will.


I repent better in the waning

season when the blood

runs swiftly and all creatures

look keenly about them

for quickening danger.

Then I study the rockface

of my life, its granite pitted


and pocked and pickaxed

eroded, discolored by sun

and wind and rain--

my rock emerging

from the veil of greenery

to be mapped, to be

examined, to be judged.

excerpt from "Humors," Part III of Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum

But if that dangerous humour ouer-raigne,
Of Melancholy, sometime making mad,
These tokens then will be appearing plaine,
The pulse beat hard, the colour darke and bad:
The water thin, a weake fantasticke braine,
False-grounded ioy, or else perpetuall sad,
Affrighted oftentimes with dreames like visions,
Presenting to the thought ill apparitions,
Of bitter belches from the stomacke comming,
His eare (the left especiall) euer humming.
​
If we call autumn "fall," maybe we could call this fifth season "lean." Late summer, so replete it can't even hold up its own fullness, is yearning downward for earthy rest. According to Chinese medicine, the fifth season is associated with the stomach and especially the spleen, which is not only part of digesting the ripe harvest, but also controls blood vessels, keeps the organs upright, and governs clear thinking. Medieval medicine in the West shares the view that the spleen is the center of physical imbalance in this transitional season.

According to the system of the four humors, the autumnal season of melancholy can cause imbalances of stomach and spleen, whose symptoms are described in the Regimen Sanitatis. Even if your left ear isn't humming, if your pulse is not beating hard (as Marge Piercy puts it, "in the waning / season when the blood runs swiftly"), the tendency toward pensive introspection as the light shifts at the end of September might be familiar.

If this sounds hypothetical rather than experiential, try listening to Arvo Part's "Spiegel Im Spiegel as you read Merwin's direct address "To the Light of September." In that violin croon, I find all the sweet melancholy of the golden lengthening light, with its morning glint of bronze. But that might be because I listened to it a lot when I was hospicing my dad into the next world. The days still feel like "the high familiar endless summer" marking September as an interstitial realm, seasonally, "neither before nor after." Something precious is slipping through our fingers as we reach out to hold the last of summer. We have nowhere to hide it to keep it for later. The cacophony of springtime birds has died down to a whisper. The sage is in seed. The ground is cracked, and the shadows are broken. The plums are falling. Perhaps so are your spirits.
​
While this downward, inward pull is almost Buddhist for Merwin (Is it too much to read an implied theology in his existential-ish riddle of a first stanza?), Piercy's "The Late Year" adds a sense of reverential dread appropriate for the Days of Awe, counting the days toward "death / or sleep or the putting by / of what will sustain." The sense of impending doom in early autumn refigures chill mornings into stinging twilight. The frost is a premonition and the creatures are alert to danger. Merwin's birds are whispering, whereas Piercy's are davening. Rosh Hashanah's call to repentance gives a very different feel to this season and to the sense of bowing down, leaning in to perceive our life's granite rock face with frank reckoning.

THE PRACTICE

The grace and sadness of sidebends! In the fifth season of "lean," we might explore the relishing extension of the limbs and the arcing ribage in a sideways bow, a drop of an ear toward a shoulder, a downward turm of the chest that isn't fully frontal. Even as we turn in and down, there's the feeling of reaching, yearning, for something. Anatomically, we are growing the gith of the ribcage to allow for a bigger breath, but simultaneously squeezing the organs. Our focus-not just the gaze, but the tonal focus-can be upward, looking up to relish the light, or downward, like the yellow stalks bowing to the cracked ground. As you engage these stretches and pressure points, note the subtleties of emotional tone—for me it bends between sadness and bittersweet nostalgia.

Try sitting with one leg extended in a straddle and the other knee bent out to the side, leaning toward the straight leg. Rest your head on one hand fif the elbow doesn't reach your leg or the ground, bring the earth up to you with a big pillow). Flop the other arm loosely over your head in a way that doesn't require muscular effort, or rest the hand on your bent knee. Breathe into the top ribs for one or two minutes, then switch sides.

Or, if you are inclined towards bigger movements, engage a supine whole-body side stretch, with arms extended on the ground overhead, creating a crescent with with your whole body. Perhaps cross your ankles and bracelet one wrist with the other hand. Or you could start in a fetal position on one side, open the body through center (with feet together and knees apart, while windmilling the arms on the ground overhead), and close the body back to fetal on the second side.
​
However you come into the side ribs, close by stimulating the acupressure point for the spleen. Bring one hand, flat-palmed, just below your armpit, and use the other hand to feel around just under your pinky finger and a few inches below for a sensitive spot. Spend just a few moments gently tapping or massaging this point. You might go medieval in this practice by imagining black bile draining from your side waist, down the side of your hip, and into the earth, taking the melancholia with it and bringing you into balance.

A video from last month's Centering and Wayfinding Retreat, of Shiné folk engaging the Laban Circle meditative movement I wrote about last week - one that we'll practice in the first Centering Movement session this Wednesday!

My best friend Lizzy dragged me on a 2-hour hike last Saturday. I'm not a big fan of hiking, maybe because as the smallest member of my family, the Saturday hikes of my childhood tended to just make me tired and crabby. So with Lizzy, the best part was when we stopped - sweet, sweet sweetness of STOPPING! - and she pointed straight ahead at the stillness of the tree trunks, and then up at the tops of the pines, which were swaying wildly, as though in a different world. This week in classes we embodied the rootedness and wildness of trees. AKA lots of balancing poses standing on one leg-trunk while the upper body shifted in space. Inside the transitions we turned our gaze around the full 360 degrees, taking in the pine trees and the gorgeous perfect weather through the open doors. It brought to mind the ee cummings poem many of you already knew and loved: 

i thank you God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should any tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

It's a gratitude prayer! A second-person direct address to whatever it is you want call the great creative force currenting through the universe. Yes to the leaping greenly spirits of trees and yes to a blue true dream of sky and yes to the yes, that emphatic renewal that doesn't come from us but from outside us and maybe it might be called mercy and it might be called rebirth where we come alive again today that emphatic YES that continually (infinitely) somehow rescues us from the depressive slump and opens the world back up to be experienced.
And speaking of run-on sentences - which this whole poem IS... If we separate some clauses in the third stanza and pare it down to its bones, it's not just a gratitude prayer, it's a statement of faith as experienced by a human, be-ing! (Richard Rohr's ever-useful contrast between a human being and a human doing). When we are just being, when we are abiding with our tastingtouchinghearingseeingbreathing, this sense-based awareness leads us right to an experience in and of the divine. cummings asks his God - who is not a dude with a white beard in the sky but something vast and unimaginable - how could any human doubt the divine? Or more specifically, how could any person who engages their full, sensate, whole-self being-ness, allowing it to lift them out of that black hole feeling of nothingness, not have some kind of understanding of... Divinity/Presence/Truth/Ultimate Reality... that which is beyond words and images. The unimaginable, mysterious, infinite YES. Our physical senses can lift us/drop us/shift us into a radical experiencing of and inside what cummings calls God. Like the first of Patanjali's Sutras: "NOW, the practice of yoga." Sutra is Sanskrit for thread - like, suture - and in the classical form, the first Sutra or thread encompasses and weaves together all the threads to follow. The first sutra states that Yoga - yoking, or oneness - happens whenever you're fully in the now. When we are present, in the present, gifting all of us as a present, the ears of our ears awaken and the eyes of our eyes open up, and we come into the Presence.

The extraordinary scholar/mystic Cynthia Bourgeault calls this the apophatic mode of experience. As part of a 12-month program on deepening Quaker ministry, on Labor Day weekend our School of the Spirit cohort was lucky enough to have Cynthia Bourgeault come to Pendle Hill and teach us more about this apophatic register of Oneness.

Here I want to bring in another poem about pine trees, from the September week 2 entry of Thinking Feelingly: Ama Codjoe's "Slow Drag with Branches of Pine" 

     Here I am, holding one more
mirror. This time smoke, winding
                                                like a river. I close my eyes,
not because the smoke stings—it
does—but because it’s a way
to examine myself, like looking
                                  at your face in a river certain it is not
              your face. The smoke combs
like a mother through my hair
or like searching the shoreline
for shells unbroken. I sing to myself
and the smoke drags my voice on its back
                just as the breeze heaves it.
                                   Here, in my half-singing,
I’m reminded how to slow drag.
I watch the pine trees creak
                                                and sway. Here, I am
my own twin. I rest my cheek
against my cheek; I barely move at all.

In the book I talk about this poem in conversation with others by Ruth Forman, Thomas Lux, Daniel Nester, and Zora Neale Hurston, as models for alternative, non-guilty-making gratitude practices. I write about how Codjoe resuscitates the sensual from its cultural configuration as profane, placing it firmly back inside the realm of the sacred. Smoking, in this poem, isn't just a ritual of elemental rapture - smoke is wind is fire is a river is a mother's touch is shells on the shoreline - but also  a mode of self-companioning - a solitary reprieve where we can reconnect with self. Codjoe's speaker lifts their face to the swaying pines, closes their eyes not because the smoke stings but because "it's a way to examine myself, like looking/ at your face in a river certain it is not/ your face." This sense of self-confrontation, self-examination, self-companionship brings two presences as closely together as possible without losing their separateness - "Here, I am/ my own twin." What does it mean, to rest your cheek against your cheek? Resting along the midline of your face, or, I suppose, your butt? Or the inner cheek resting against the outer cheek, mirror-like? I dunno but it's such a close, intimate experience of nearly-oneness that it brings about the stillness it describes. I can't help but STOP at those final lines. Like the speaker, "I barely move at all."

But now, in my PCB life, Post-Cynthia-Bourgeault (to say Cynthia is too familiar, and Bourgeault is too cold because I'm in love with her), this poem hits me differently. For starters, it hits me in all my longing places. It's like a Rumi poem about the Friend, so close so near... this excruciating yearning for oneness. Which is maybe why we smoke - as a friend once said, "I smoked because I was trying to shove my heart down into my lungs." Lungs, the seat of grief. Grief, the seat of longing. Longing, for Sufis at least, the evidence of our connection to God. We long for it because we've gotten a whiff of it! (or a drag of it, if you will...) It is in us - we have experienced oneness with it!

In the words of Kabir Edmund Helminski (who we were asked to read in preparation for the retreat with Cynthia Bourgeault), "In the Sufi tradition it is written that the absolute Spirit said, 'And I breathed My Spirit into humanity.' We are each enlivened by this inbreath. The essential Self, the soul, can be understood as this individualization of Spirit. The soul, however, is such a fine and subtle energy that it can be obscured by coarser energies of our existence..." So much gets in the way of these little moments of abiding in our essential Self. This launches Helminski into description of the seven stages that separate the false self from this "essential Self," in classical Sufism. In a subtle, careful passage, he explains, "This reveals a fundamental truth of the essential Self - that it is infinite and can never be fully comprehended by consciousness alone - but it is only a partial truth, because, at the same time, we can see with the eyes of the essential Self [now the eyes of my eyes are opened], hear with its ears, [now the ears of my ears awake], act with its will, forgive with its forgiveness, and love with its love." 

Cynthia Bourgeault helped us with this tricky fundamental/partial truth, dancing with the oh-so-subtle slippery ground between the two-ness and oneness, or duality and non-duality. She simplified the seven stages for us simple Quakers, offering the image of a Bell Rack. There are many voices within us (and here she referenced the "987 little selves" joked about in the Work of Gurdjieff, the teacher she shares with Helminski). These little selves operate like a rack of bells, each with its own tone, and if we wish to spend more time in our essential Self, more time with Spirit, our job is to bring the separate tones into their proper harmony. There are three broader categories into which these bell tones fall: Heart, Soul, and Nafs, a word borrowed from Sufism. Nafs represent the defensive mechanisms operating in us to keep us safe, the operating system alternately referred to as the ego, the False Self, or charmingly by Thomas Keating, "the homemade self." I'm going to use the term "little selves" for NAFS, because it steers me away from my critical, judgy voice and towards a more parental, forgiving mode.

​To proceed from lowest to highest (oh yes, this system is 100% hierarchical), I'm going to stay pretty faithful to my notes, with some tweaks in places where my scribbles are less than coherent:
The Nafs, or little selves, represent the smaller, passional self, motivated by anger and full of emotional issues and agendas. This part of us carries the shadow (all that we disown and stuff and numb against and project onto others) and it came into being in response to hurts. There is a need for deep tenderness and thanking, in approaching these little selves. They stepped in to protect you. They gave you hope. The goal is not to override them, but to get them on your side. To speak to them in such a way that these voices release their stranglehold on your life. Silencing these voices is spiritual bypassing. To bring them into harmony within the highest form of being - Spirit - you must first engage Soul, and then Heart.

The Soul is your true self essence. It is authentic. It emerges when you are speaking and feeling from a deeper and more qualitatively real and spacious, connected state. Much of our work is Soul work, where we're closer to our true or natural tongue. It is the most real and intimate and authentic taste of self that we can have, as mirrored through the ego structure of consciousness. But as in a mirror, this operating system is still dual. It is a self-reflective consciousness that is still about how we are unique, special and different from everyone. It is a way of being in relationship with the image of yourself. Which brings us to:

The Heart. Swoon, y'all. In the Sufi tradition, accessing the heart requires a jumping ship from one mode of consciousness to another. In this system of thinking, the heart has nothing to do with our personal emotional life. The personal, emotional passions get in the way of the heart being able to do its thing. In our culture, we often imagine passion as some driving force within us that inspires our highest actions. But "Passio" from the Greek, is to be acted upon. The passions have to do with stuck, reactive emotions. The Heart, in Sufi thinking, is much higher than this. The Heart, as a cosmic reflector and magnifier, sees directly. When you are in a Heart space you coincide with your being. It requires a strong moving and feeling center (the centers of self from Gurdjieff Work, which I wrote about in the last blog entry.)  You don't reflect on your being, you just step into it. The awakening of the Heart brings us into a kind of unreflective, unconflicted knowing. It is a free, clear awareness. The price you pay for your Heart is your meta-narrative. The Heart voice is not an equal player, it kicks in a bit later. It is the real agent mediating between the smaller aspect of our makeup and our entry into Spirit. The Heart coming online provides the alchemy.

In this analogy of the Bell Rack, it's about harmonizing these parts. We need to hold and honor the tension between the Heart - the part of us that knows - and the needs of the lower selves. The Heart takes care of the little selves, when they feel frightened and wounded, and the Soul, with its sad story of being an orphan (or whatever the story is). Pain and uproar can't be stuffed. Our woundedness is our angle of deflection from being able to live out our highest truth. But we can't live it until we bring order into our "lower house," in the language of Gurdjieff. All parts are needed. As the Heart comes online, it takes the sting out of the hurt and enables movement. An alternative path arises.

So we need to find practices that bring us into contact with the Heart space, in order to alchemize Soul into an experience of Spirit. We need to tune into the heart, to bring its bell tone to the fore. I guess that's what we make space for, when we come to practice. It's not that every class you're going to dive so deep into apophatic Heart reality that you're transformed. It's that we're practicing this way of being unified within ourselves - balancing the tones of our sensations, thoughts, and feelings,  without sacrificing or demonizing or privileging any of them, with deeper parts of our being-hood. And the hope is that tuning our bells a few hours a week will, over time, make room and way for more moments outside the practice of experiencing oneness and Presence, however we configure that in our own cultural or faith tradition. May the ears of our ears awaken, may the eyes of our eyes be opened. 

This is a film I directed and edited, shot by Chris Scarafile with an original score entitled "Enso" by my sibling, Dani Hawkins. It's of my teacher, then-92-year-old modern dance legend Mary Anthony, doing a circle meditation that was, of all the dances she taught to me in the 9 years I studied with her, my very favorite. She was known to cry out happily, "dervishes!!" when she witnessed us doing it. I don't know if the choreography was inspired by her work in Laban technique, or from some other early modern source interested in Sufi spinning. But her hands, y'all, her hands... the voices are my mom and dad and Thich Nhat Hanh, riffing on the cyclical return to source, the current of away and back we all ride, over and over. 

I want to talk about a deep longing. One that we were born with, one that predates us, a hunger in us that is foundational for who we are and how we move in the world. How we move. My longing took root in the years just before my conception, in my mother's discovery of sacred movement. This passion for an embodied communion with something higher - one I'm so lucky to share with you - might come from her. I know I know, this is my second newsletter that holds my mom at its heart, but isn't that the way? Maybe the mother is really actually at the heart of everything, especially if it's true that the creator-as-mother predates all patriarchal religions... in any case, she's on my mind since I'm just returning from a week at the ocean with this mother of mine, who banned cell phones and not-so-subtly pressured us into swimming in perilous waves churned up by hurricane/tornado/flood conditions. We were given the evacuation order on day three, when my daughters arrived on the last plane. We moved the car off the island, shored up our food and water supplies, flashlights, and candles, and got right back in those waves. A sibling and I each held one of her hands, until the whitecaps got real and I had to physically shove her out to where she could dive under the big swells. And I thought to myself once again as I so often have... this lady is crazy.

And while she almost certainly is, she also defies the insanity of our culture and its priorities. Is it sane to experience much of life through the lens of a six-inch glowing screen? Is it so crazy to revoke our right to that addiction, to return us to an experience of being on Ocean Time, on Storm Time, on Real Time? Is it totally crazy for an octogenarian with pretty radical end-of-life preferences who feels she's lived her life fully to risk drowning in that stormy sea? The ocean is home to her. Every day, all summer, her mother would drop her at the beach in the morning and pick her up at sunset. She would explore the tide pools and body-surf the waves, part natural scientist and part mystic. Actually, those are probably the same: my mother's mysticism centers on observing the natural world, from its beasties to its weather patterns, and her love-verging-on-worship of the ocean is kind of the perfect instantiation of this animist fusion. Across cultures, the ocean is associated with consciousness itself: a vast mystery, less understood by humans than outer space. The shoreline is the threshold, a liminal ground between the known world and the beyond. To love the ocean is to love - and feel most beloved at - that edge. That is where my mom has always lived, if you rewind her from eighty, in her second Thai Chi class of the day, to writing books about Christian mystics in her forties, back to her twenties, the time just before motherhood, when she was peeled open at the core by a certain practice of sacred movement.  

There was a Gurdjieff Center in Rochester, New York, where she went to college and grad school. She tolerated the top-down hierarchy of culty culture, its misogyny and the rule-bound obeisance that her imagination so resisted, just to move in a circle of bodies at the thresholds of dawn and dusk every day. She describes being ineluctably drawn to this practice of movements, although she can't remember a single one! Not one. Perhaps this is because Gurdjieff's movements were not about thinking or feeling, but about total absorption into moving. Plenty of folk in his day were turning to dance as a way to resuscitate the sacred in the face of the rational empiricism that dominated the time - Laban was doing it, Dalcroze was doing it, Steiner, others. What distinguished Gurdjeiff's movement from similar practices by his contemporaries was expressly the resistance to making them about ideas or emotions or artistic expression. Instead they were gestures designed to imprint the deeper patternings of creation into the human body.

It's a crazy claim, I know. Gurdjieff was crazy. And arrogant. And *possibly* slightly cruel - or at least really, really rigorous in the demands he made on his people. But he might also arguably be the only Western spiritual master ever to create a systematic practice for cultivating a deeper experience of mind, heart, and body. In what was dubbed "The Work," each of these three "centers" - moving, thinking, and feeling - were given equal attention, in tandem, their balance carefully maintained. According to Gurdjieff, human development is stunted if attention to any single one of these centers dominates, as he perceived to be true in Sufism, yoga, and Christian monasticism - the three traditions he claimed not just to fuse, but actually to intensify and expedite in a "Fourth Way." This proud approach would be perfunctorily cancelled, in our current climate of hypersensitivity to cultural appropriation and its history in the West. Which would be an entirely legit accusation to lob at a guy who almost certainly lied about his travels in the "Far East," and who is believed to have fudged ancient esoteric origins to the practices he taught. Is the Enneagram truly a secret system of the Babylonian Sarong Brotherhood dating back to 2500 BCE? So secret that even though there's no written evidence of its existence, it was revealed to someone who, just in examining the timeline of his life, couldn't have sustainably engaged any one spiritual tradition for more than a decade? Maybe, but probably not. Does this mean we should toss aside the longing that inspired his life's work? He was a major player in his time, and many of his teachings inform current practices that could not exist without him. Feldenkrais, for example, names Gurdjieff as his primary influence. The Enneagram traces back to him. And importantly, he used the Enneagram not as a nifty personality profiling tool for exploring our individualism (this isn't quite fair - I love Enneagram work - but this entry is meant to be polemical!) but instead as a tool for experimenting with dynamics within the collective body. The Enneagram in Gurdjieff Movement was a structural template for imagining how the sacred moves inside the collective, and how the collective can interact inside the sacred. The nine points and their intersections governed how multiple bodies interacted in space and time. So like, maybe he was a charlatan who had no business teaching Sufi dervish dances and also maybe he was working out some mad important shit - of which the radical cutting edge of progressive politics is just beginning to get a proverbial whiff. 

In this particular moment of history, as in Gurdjieff's, there are very real exigencies at play in the search for a way to deepen and bring into balance the thinking, feeling, and somatic centers of human experience. I'm upstairs reading Thomas de Hartmann's account of nearly dying (as in, hospitalized and unresponsive for weeks) after following this crazy-eyed Master through a treacherous mountain pass - his bad-ass wife in heels, btw. And while Gurdjieff framed this as a spiritual exercise, de Hartmann learned that the journey had saved him from the Bolsheviks. He followed someone on a crazy escapade that broke every cultural norm, to learn that he probably would have been assassinated in the fever-pitch social chaos exploding as two rival political parties struggled for the power to define a country according to their own particular worldview. How the sacred moves in the collective, how the collective moves in the sacred. And I come downstairs from my book to watch the Olympics, one of the few cultural traditions that remain fairly sacrosanct, and the special coverage of the oh-so-heartbreaking story of Jordan Chiles' "revoked" bronze is paused so we can be force-fed ads for destroying the planet, like DoorDash's promise to "unlock unlimited power" with immediate access to unlimited stuff. Oh, and also political smear campaigns brilliantly concocted to stoke the fear that will empower a different wild-eyed dude - crazy, arrogant, and clearly cruel. And I'm thinking hmmm... What is our "Work"? And how do we recover the fervor of our search for it, knowing that it just possibly could be the most important thing right now?

After this past weekend,  I'm more convinced than ever of the political imperative to engage collective healing of the split between body, mind, and spirit that was created by design to keep us all numbed out. A group from Shiné joined me for a retreat focused on the concept of the Sacred Compass, a concept borrowed from Quaker J. Brent Bill. We explored his idea of an internal compass that helps us find our direction, our next right step, and placed it in conversation with a Gurdjieffian mode of thinking that I can describe in more detail if you ask me about it in class. Most simply, we explored three truths about what a compass needs to function properly, three things we too require, if we're to keep our wayfinding spidey-sense functional:
1. Its needle must be tethered to the center. So do we. And we can't know our center if we lose connection with our bodies. We can't keep an intuitive sense of operating in the world from our center if we are dissociated. So the first step to building our sacred compass is centering meditation and centering movement.  
2. A compass can't find its True North if outside magnetic forces overwhelm it. How can we keep the destabilizing forces in the outside world from pulling us away from clear gravitation towards our True North - our purpose, our calling, the thing we're here to be in the world?
3. How do we come to understand the dynamic dance between the need to stay oriented inward towards center, and the pull outward towards our growth, our expansion, our deepening into the True North of our lives? I'm so so sooooo grateful to have shared a deep dive into these questions in a powerful group of people with some mad juju, and I can't wait for winter retreat. Keep your eyes peeled for dates, maybe in January. In the meantime, I hope those of you who are interested in questions like these will join me for the 10-week Wednesday night series that begins in mid-September, focusing on the exploration of sacred movement. Deets soon on Katyhawkins.com.

Kazim Ali, "Ramadan"
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month's

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,

the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment-

The secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully -

You are never going to know which night's mouth is sacredly reciting
​and which night's recitation is secretly mere wind-
| Kazim Ali, "Ramadan" from The Fortieth Day. Copyright © 2008 by Kazim permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org

POETIC THEMES
        "Ramadan" is a poem about religious ecstasy (from the Greek ekstasis, the state of standing outside of oneself, to echo last week's entry). The yogic and Muslim spiritual practices that pepper Kazim Ali's poetry facilitate an experience of the body deep enough to transport the practitioner beyond the worldly plane. The "hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness," to quote Rumi's "Fasting," is an evacuation of the self that makes way for a more expansive state. In Ali's poetry, identity presents as diffuse and prismatic; now a river, now an angel, selfhood can manifest as stairs, hunger, a bowl for rain, or the rain itself. The shapeshifting seems rooted, paradoxically, in an excruciatingly precise awareness of one particular body. In the first line of "Ramadan," for example, one could travel into hunger so deeply as to "break into branches." One truth at the heart of embodied spiritual practice is that the only way out is through.
          Not surprisingly, what draws Ali to Ramadan is its mystery and complexity, not just in its angel visitations or its spiders weaving protective webs, but even and especially the liturgical ambiguity about which day is sacred. If identity is a shifting field, there's also a temporal unmooring. This might have something to do with surrendering to an inherited faith, where childhood memories flicker inside spiritual practices. The ghostly presence of precognitive awareness or even epigenetic memory engender a multiplicity of view. Ancestors and family members float through Ali's poems, variously angelic or bedeviling. But this shifting field of reference orbits around a strong spiritual center.
         In his gut-wrenching poem "Home," Ali wrestles to expand what might fit within the boundaries of the religious practices he grew up with. He opens up the confines of which languages might be sacred to include Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic. He finally dismisses the notion that divine messaging could ever even "fit into the requirements of the human mouth." Ultimately, the poem asserts, the divine transcends the limits of language: "I learned God's true language is only silence and breath." Fasting is one way of gaining entry into this extra-ordinary world, where one learns secret skills, like how to harvest fog.
         Among these superpowers is a linguistic or sonic hyper-refinement, where Fasting allows us to access patterns at the limits of language and recitations in the deep quiet. "You will have to listen very carefully, Ali tells us. Listening for God is seen as something that one refines over time. It seems right, in treating a religious poet who stays true to his heritage, to offer a practice of sense deprivation from my own. Quakers, too, regard the realm of silence as communion with the divine.


PRACTICE
          Like fasting, the cultivation of deep quiet stores up the energy we typically disperse with sense experience. And for some, the practice of observing silence has the capacity to reveal God's true language. At Pendle Hill, the Quaker hub of the East Coast, the practice is common; there are even lanyards available fo hang a sign around one's neck that reads "Observing Silence?" I often wish I had that sign to wear at my local food co-op. When I offer a day of silence on retreats, nearly everyone who is new to the practice dreads it, and yet never has anyone regretted having tried it. The practice of silence offers one somatic entryway into communion with the divine, but, like fasting, it requires time. What would be another way of diving deep into the body to be transported beyond it, into the Queer Sublime?
        If you are looking for a practice that takes minutes, not hours, here's a centering technique I learned from Staci Haines and Patrisse Cullors, with a Quaker twist. Haines talked us through the practice of orienting the body on the vertical, horizontal, and sagittal planes to align heart and mind toward our purpose in the world. Practitioners orient themselves downward into gravity. upwaid in dignity, outward toward connection, and sagittally in time (the personal and ancestral histories behind us, the present-moment happenings inside the body, and the future we're leaning into). There's a fourth plane related to an all-over experience of longing, related to touching in with our purpose.
         Cullors named centering as her number one strategy for unlearning her strategic defense of numbing out to challenging feelings. As a trauma survivor, this resonated with me; it was the Zendo, not my home Quaker Meeting, that helped me build tolerance for difficult feelings. Perhaps that was because in First Day School (the Quaker equivalent to Sunday School), no one gave me step-by-step instructions on "centering down," which I've subsequently learned is typically just a simple body scan. The very idea of bringing any technique into worship is hotly contested, not being a part of the ministry of early Friends. The first use of the term "centering" came late, maybe from the controversial minister Elias Hicks, who was the endless source of fascination, verging on worship, for Walt Whitman.
         I can't imagine how I might be different if First Day School had taught me an actual centering technique at an early age, to balance myself down and up, out and in, and between past present and future. I imported the practice into Meeting for Worship, and over the course of a few months, spontaneously my breath began to synch up with my centering. Exhaling outward into connection, inward into the somatic present, backward into the past, and forward into the future, yielded a different orientation. It wasn't my purpose, exactly. It was a transcendent experience where "centering down" became a natural extension of the vertical plane upward into the divine. Perhaps experimenting with centering breath might help you too drop in to sense experience, to be transported beyond.

Ross Gay, "Sorrow is not my Name"
-after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
-for Walter Aikens
"Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.


Ross Gay, "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt"

No one knew or at least 
I didn't know
they knew
what the thin disks
threaded here
on my shirt
might give me
in terms of joy
this is not something to be
taken lightly
the gift
of buttoning one's shirt
slowly
top to bottom
or bottom
to top or sometimes
the buttons
will be on the other
side and am a woman
that morning
slipping the glass
through its slot
I tread
differently that day
or some of it
anyway
my conversations
are different
and the car bomb slicing the air
and the people in it
for a quarter mile
and the honeybee's
legs furred with pollen
mean another
thing to me
than on the other days
which too have
been drizzled in this
simplest of joys
in this world
of spaceships and subatomic
this and that
two maybe three
times a day
some days
I have the distinct pleasure
of slowly untethering
the one side
from the other
which is like unbuckling
a stack of vertebrae
with delicacy
for I must only use
the tips
of my fingers
with which I will
one day close
my mother's eyes
this is as delicate
as we can be
in this life
practicing
like this
giving the raft of our hands
to the clumsy spider
and blowing soft until she
lifts her damp heft and
crawls off
we practice like this
pushing the seed into the earth
like this first
in the morning
then at night
we practice
sliding the bones home.
"Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay, copyright (c) 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.


POETIC THEMES
           Ross Gay teaches the mechanics of how to train our curiosity in order to cultivate delight as a discipline. "Fleeting intense attentions," he explains to Krista Tippett in the On Being podcast, are the "butterflies of delight" which land on the thing that is joy. Notice what's not a part of this process: he does not demand that we say thank you! Neo-spiritual gratitude practices can be so damn guilty-making, y'all. When we dutifully make our gratitude lists in our journals each morning, we are sometimes called back to the feeling of the child unwrapping the gift and plastering on the smiley face for Aunty Linda. I remember when my kids' cousin opened his Christmas present and obediently repeated, in a robotic tone, the forced acknowledgement he had been taught:
"thankyousomuchitissperfectitisjustwhatiwanted." The gift was, like, a book or something. The notion of delight frees us from the "should" of gratitude at the gift of the world, by dissolving our attention into it. We actually, temporarily, become one with it, in a non-dual merging of self and our surround.
        Gay's trademark modality of practicing delight as a discipline offers a welcome respite from the unachievable happiness model. And no, this isn't a mode of bypassing, but rather a way of allowing our joy to co-exist alongside all that is crappy in our world. The subtitle of "Sorrow is not My Name" refers to an assertion by Gwendolyn Brooks: "I have no right to sorrow" (from "Another Girl, 1936"). The pull of darkness is no match for tree-green. Gay acknowledges with a "yeah, yeah" the world's suckiness; he remains fully aware of the creepy guy behind him on the bus taking notes, as a black man in this twisted culture must. Then he turns our attention - "But look"- to two million naturally occurring sweet things.
         Because we need to believe that, ultimately, the wind will carry away the vulture, poems like this should be taken like vitamins. Gay (note the titular play on his name) reminds us of okra, agave, and persimmon. He's irresistible, and we want to be with him in joy, and decide too that our color is green, and that we too are spring.
        All the phenomena in "Sorrow Is Not My Name" are visual or aural. But "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" introduces the sense of touch. This ode to touch achieves a rounding out of focus, a spatial generosity on the page, even through the vertical stack of these short button-like lines. The poem shifts from front body, to hemispheric split, to back body, to the line between living and dead, human and animal, above and underground. The car bomb slicing through people places harsh reality firmly at the center of the poem, co-existing with the sweetness of the legs of the honeybee "furred with pollen." The poem itself functions as fingertips, delicately spiderwalk-touching this thing and then that thing.
        Playing with the thin disks on our shirts is a touching example (wink, wink) of the joy to be found in the little things. "Untethering" the two sides of fabric is described in terms of pleasure, in the sexiness of "unbuckling / a stack of vertebrae" (aka, let your backbone slip). The pleasure here, for Gay, seems to lie in the delicacy of what fingertips can feel and do. Our fingers learn by practicing, and the practice of subtle touch has real-world applications: we will use that delicacy to free a spider, or to close the eyelids of those we lose. Anyone who has done this gentle maneuver must feel shivers upon reading this line. My dad's eyelids were stubborn, unyielding, and I held my hand over them for a long time before the imprint was made. This association can only persist in echoing and re-echoing in the subsequent action of "pushing the seed into the earth." The poem's final action - "we practice / sliding the bones home" - brings us home to our participation in the practice: we become aware that even in reading the poem we are rehearsing a way of being. Gay's poem brings together shirt-buttoning and closing our beloveds' eyelids in death. Buttoning together multiform meanings, tangles of associative networks, changes and enriches our experience, making us more sensitive. Each micro-action of our fingertips is an opportunity to hone our awareness to nuance, and to practice delicacy in all things.

THE PRACTICE
        I love the idea of buttoning two things together as an alternative to dualistic thinking. These new combinations can be galvanizing, like trying on a new and fabulous outfit. For example: I'm not a good mom or a bad mom, instead I'm a part of a generation of good-enough moms whose kids suffer from experiencing the full range of emotion (because they have been given permission), and so those kids also have extraordinary compassion for the suffering of others. In the context of Ross Gay's magical notion of delight, co-existing realities, and the sensitivities of touch, we might choose a practice that plays with the expansive modes enabled by pleasure.
           Pleasure activist Kai Cheng Thom teaches a somatic exercise that seems to fit here. The practitioner touches one hand with the other, focusing first on giving the touching hand pleasure, then giving the receiving hand pleasure. Simple but deep, this activity can be used to explore many different embodied skill sets like consent, or giving. Or serving. It fits well inside a Queer framework that explores the potential of non-normative desire to create ingenious new modes of meaning-making. (I could queer this section further by contextualizing this exercise where I first encountered it, in a session with an Estonian sex therapist where this was one of the most erotic, and least overtly sexual, of all the things she did with me.) Kai Cheng Thom framed the practice as a bottom-up exercise, privileging the experience of the body before assigning any interpretation. Fusing the somatic with the linguistic, as my work seeks to do, you might dissolve this line by inviting a few of Gay's wonderful action verbs into the experience of touch. In fact, you could smudge that body/mind boundary further by trying out Lucina Artigas' Butterfly Hug, a bilateral stimulation exercises that neatly embodies Gay's butterflies of delight. Cross your thumbs at the notch of the throat, laying the hands over your chest with the fingertips just under the collarbones, and alternate hands as the four fingers together softly tap the chest. Remember, your color is green.