ruth forman refresher

man. it's been a hell of a last few weeks... call it astral, call it political, call it weather or allergies or covid, call it coincidental - everybody's feeling trammeled. here's your favorite poem this month with some lymphatic massage to free up the body for the equinox to bring in something new. This cycle of decay and regeneration isn't as much the topic of my thoughts on the Equinox in Thinking Feelingly, which focuses more on circular cycles... but the vibe I got from you in classes all this week was definitely that the letting go right now is really, really hard. So I'm attaching the Equinox chapter excerpt, but thought for the practice video, I'd focus on the poem that gave you the most comfort this week - Forman's "On This Day." 

Here's the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly:

Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem”
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress


Joy Harjo, “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars”
(For we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live)
Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind,
I am amazed as I watch the violet
heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth
after dying for a season,
as I have watched my own dark head
appear each morning after entering
the next world to come back to this one,
amazed.
It is the way in the natural world to understand the place
the ghost dancers named
after the heart breaking destruction.
Anna Mae,
everything and nothing changes.
You are the shimmering young woman
who found her voice,
when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away
from you like an elegant weed.
You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars.
(They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us
through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them
nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks
on the corner.)
This morning when the last star is dimming
and the busses grind toward
the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
the second time in Lakota, a language that could
free you.
I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico,
how the wind howled and pulled everything down
in righteous anger.
(It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly
the ripe meaning of your murder.
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
of the seasons
that we have just begun to touch
the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,
we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
entered
crazily, beautifully.
From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

POETIC THEMES
    The autumn equinox marks the point where the days and nights are nearly of equal length (from the Latin, aequus nox). It’s a time of balance, where growing things begin to die and, traditionally, harvesting winds down and folks give thanks and take rest. Migrations start. Hibernation plans begin. We accept the movement of nature toward dissolution because we know it is a part of regeneration. There must be death to make way for new life yet to be, like the larva swimming in its own soup before it can grow wings. I think of Mary Oliver’s “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness,” where our acceptance of death is an expression and extension of our love for the world. I imagine Mary Oliver on her beach walk in the sky, wagging her finger at us for being such babies about death. The invitation to reach past late September decay to intuit the promise of rebirth highlights circles (our movement around the sun), the balance of light and dark, and life and death.
    Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” is a meditation on these mysteries, insisting on the secret, invisible messages we can’t see or hear. Meaning is conveyed through a language of circular motion. I think of this poem as an instruction manual for praying in circles, configuring the cyclical pattern of ruin and renewal as a kind of cleansing. The eagle manifests this cycle, flying in circles and “rounding out the morning inside us,” and at the same time is surrounded, “circled in blue sky / in wind.” As containers for the world and contained by it, we are asked to open ourselves and breathe, “knowing we are made of all this.” We are cleansed by the eagle’s circular flight, sweeping our hearts clean. Our perspective, too, is scrubbed clear, and we come to see that we are encircled in something much larger. We glimpse the ultimate truth that our little life is a wee blip in a broader circle of motion.
    It seems important to marry Harjo’s well-known “Eagle Poem” with the circle of decay and regeneration illustrated in “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.” Naming and telling the story of the murder of one woman who refused silence is part of a different cycle of continuance in the context of broader cultural genocide. This poem depicts all the same cyclical movements between this world and the next: each spring the crocuses erupt “after dying for a season,” each morning the last star dims and we re-enter this world from the spirit world of sleep. But in giving Anna Mae voice, this poem also illustrates a darker ghost dance, performed ritually to connect the living and the dead. The howling winds of this poem’s “righteous anger” pull everything down to the grinding buses in steely cities where “tattered drunks” lie frozen on street corners. This “dazzling whirlwind” of anger is an important corollary to the soft wind carrying the eagle through its blue sky circles. Harjo’s “own dark head” echoes not just the “heads of crocuses” but also the ghost dancers who “prance and lope like colored horses.” “For Anna Mae” performs another kind of ghost dance: giving voice to the heartbreaking destruction of a people is part of keeping that culture alive.


PRACTICE
    Perhaps you could source your movement practice back to circular dance forms from your own ancestry. It’s not only Native American dance that manifests in flesh the way we orbit around a spiritual core, even as we move within broader circles of motion. Many other movement traditions sequence in circles, both within specific gestures and in the broader structure that turns the practitioner in a complete 360. The only circle dance I studied in any significant depth was a technique by Rudolf Laban, the Austro-Hungarian dance theorist. Laban devised a circular, spiraling sequences inspired by Sufi circling, where the body moves in a deliberate spatial polygon, on the vertical, lateral, and sagittal dimensions. Mary Anthony, a contemporary of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, taught me the traditional Laban circle, which I’ll simplify here into an accessible exercise. Imagine a figure 8 on the floor, and take eight steps to trace one circle back to the center of the figure 8, then change directions to trace the complementary circle. Keep your eyes at the spot where the circles merge, and do your best to make each step precisely even in length, so as to divide each circle of steps into a perfect, symmetrical octagon. Slow your pace. Begin to rhythm your breathing with your steps. As your concentration transitions to an effortless zone where you begin to move spontaneously, stay with the practice just a little longer. What is the feeling-state rounding out inside of you?