embodiment studies semester magazine - spring 2006 & fall 2006 - goddard college IMA program
	back issues fall 2003 spring 2004 fall 2004 spring 2005 fall 2005

Editor's introduction

Juliana Borrero and the Lenguaje y Paz Project Where does the writing lead

Al Garcia 100 could have beens /// Mother / father

Stacey Ginsburg Smoke /// Anywhere taxi to Bessemer, Michigan

Chris Gray 2.28.2006 xo

Alexandra Hartman Body and early relational trauma /// Strong women and their anger

Lisa Johns The classroom /// Technical notes

Susan Moul convection / further notes on the body as a spiritual vehicle

Angela Mullins Part one: the awakening

Gwen Stanley Paper moon

Laura Taylor Resilience, emotion, experience /// Naming her /// Message from my soul

Ellie Epp, Editor's introduction

This collection of student and alumna work for the spring and fall 2006 semesters includes work by my own students and embodiment-oriented work by students of other advisors. It also, for the first time, includes the work of a second generation - a student's students' work.

For work by students of another advisor, I give that advisor's initials in brackets after the student's name.

To know more about embodiment studies at Goddard, follow this link to our embodiment studies web worksite.

 

Juliana Borrero (alumna) with the Lenguaje y Paz Project (Carolina Peña, Gloria González, Lizzbeth Sánchez, Rocío Gavilán, Deicy Pérez, Adela Ávila), Where does the writing lead: notes on a process

Juliana teaches at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica in Tunja, Colombia.

Juliana's students write:

Writing scares me, I am afraid of my body and my words. I wrote twenty pages without stopping. I put in a notebook my childhood, my lost father, my blind mother, my perverted stepfather, my lost baby, my fears and tears. I made a weavework with them. However, it was very difficult to read. I said, I am this: death, blood, loneliness, suffering, abortion, hate. I avoided to speak about those pages because I saw others in a different way. They were machines and I was an alien. I could not look at my mom, I did not believe in love. Now I scare my mom, my family acts strange when I talk to them, my boyfriend thinks I am mad; in the university, people ask me if I only write about dark things. I hate superficial women. I hate men´s stupid words. Through words, I have opened my womb; while people use words just to lie, to hide their fears or to judge. I am afraid, I really want to cry, I do not know what continues now. I do not know if I can save myself through writing. I do not now if writing is an illness.

I usually want to commit suicide, and I do it while I write. I die in my texts; writing has become a vice. I do not know if I am masoquista or if I am really mad. Sometimes I think "I want to be normal, please, I want to be normal again", but I can not come back.

-Carito

My voice has been a weak thread, similar to that silence where before, the body was a cage, while inside of her there was something that watched in silence. Words, if there were any, dwelled inside, immaterial. Outside, only the eyes covered in cobwebs. I slept by the window, my wings wet from impossible dreams. My body existed in long nights, and in the background, a web of sounds that I could not differentiate.

Then I would feel that thoughts were males wanting to penetrate everything, and words were females, sometimes allowing themselves to be inundated. But even then, my words could not translate them. My thoughts were platoons machine-gunning my head; because thoughts also shout. But they, the words, would become fugitive, cotton sweets in my mouth, clouds, and they would not exist, and they would not speak. And since my words would not allow themselves to be guided, my thoughts would tell lies, that wanted to be truths.

I tried to see myself through my body, I tried to subtract what people had generously given me in order to be. How to recognize what I was, not as an extension of them. I discovered myself monochromatic, and now I arrive at a center where my words do not separate so much from my thoughts, and I feel that only there is my voice strong. I discover myself a lagoon, with an undulating body, where to write is to dance for myself, facing the mirror, recognizing the eyes of the other side.

-Mónica

Something has broken inside my body. Before, I was a girl hiding under the blankets of fear, crying hidden away in a corner because she broke her father´s favorite glass as she was washing the dishes. I was a frightened girl looking for her mother´s hand so I could come back home. Now the girl is twenty years old and without meaning to she has bumped into her mother´s eyes. Looking into her fragile, lost girl eyes after so long is not easy. Her eyes have saved me from my abandon, the eyes of my mother bring me back to the calm, to the trust that today I don´t have as a woman. Her eyes have reminded me that she is my mother, that she is somebody who still preserves a woman inside that body that is no longer hers. Her eyes confess to me that she has illusions with my sisters and me. They confess to me that she loves life when I tell her, somewhat serious and without looking at her: Chao, mamita, have a good day.

I dream with this, I dream that it is my mother now who carries the sons for me inside her belly, because I can´t be a mother, I lost my right, my gift of being mother the moment I decided not to be one. She is lending me her belly so that my son grows and feeds from her belly button. But I feel fear. I know that any moment my father is going to appear to hurt my mother´s belly and make her abort my son again.

-Gloria

July 27 or 28: I just read about contagious diseases. Erisipela. Note: before taking any determination I must keep calm.

Needles going through my head, my forehead, my thorax, my hips, reminding me that it doesn´t matter where or how strong the next stab of the needle will be. I had lost sensibility and even faith. It is difficult to accept an illness or a discomfort in my life or in my body, especially when there is no definite place to hold on to, but it is tempting to risk finding one.

My legs hurt. I tremble. I am weaker every time. Time is running out. I want to do more things. I need to write a lot more. Writing, like neurotherapy, injects substances inside the body that make me dizzy, that may not relax me, may not heal me, but lighten the pain. My body is shocked as it receives the change. It only lasts a few seconds, it doesn´t matter. We are here. With no lips, no ink. Now what?

I helped facilitate a workshop on literature from the body for 300 school teachers. Working there I realized that literature was a thread that could sew back the isolated parts of any human being, including myself (...) I realized that they, as well as I, were reluctant to read in a different way, to read our selves, and to learn to listen to the tissue of each other. Welcome to this surrealist adventure, I told them. Remember, the hand must not stop moving. Keep in mind that you as I are anxious, you as I are ill, you as I are haunted by ghosts, you as I are reluctant to go through the eye of dreams, you as I are hesitant to dream yourselves into being. We don´t know everything, but we can guarantee you that words, like dreams are powerful

-Lizzbeth

Story, lost, confused, in memory. Tangled in some part of my body, the same as my language, a language full of fungus, full of moss, with spiders that circulate from here to there. Cobwebs all around me, give me the appearance of an old woman, they let me know that I have been kept for years in a box in the attic.

One afternoon, somebody entered that room, regardless of the indications the grown-ups had given her, and surprised, she looked at each of the corners that the scarce light allowed her to see. There was a box that had the shape of a woman´s body. Her curiosity pulled. She caressed that body of wood, as if it were her body. She let the cobwebs wrap around her as if they were a part of her. She opened the box. What a surprise

Night, lights, slant, stroke of a brush, fairies, aire, a dasmófera, quimaperi, sym-phony, sinfos, enfos, elfos, la noche, the night, flight, barn owl, fleeting, stealing, with orange eyes, white chest, me with grey wings, buzzing in their ears, don´t escape, no, no, I lose them, I lose my self, I escape I fall into the deep sea, glu, glu, glanaque, my invented language, il pa mua, inesapacua, fur mi naré, o na lai, si pua fen sa, in la la pai, fimunari, feripe, flotar, floating, to go out. How was this word written? How were all these words pronounced? Be quiet! Good, I am quiet. No more now. I return, I return. I am on the street walking, looking at the stars, those that in my dreams I dare not see.

-Rocío

Through this process of writing from the body I have begun to know my self (it can sound commonplace, but it is certain). I have left aside pretty words in order to begin to say what is truly important in my life. But it has been really difficult, especially to recognize my real voice among all of my internal voices. It is necessary to silence those voices which can deceive oneself with words that sound good, but for the heart they are not true. Then this process becomes diffuse, because one day you can be connected with yourself, but other days there appears the "vain ego", who doesn´t let you write seriously, and you find yourself lost among pretty words and the opinions of others, but never your own voice. There have been some pages where I could be an honest woman, however I haven´t been able to see them again, because they confront me with that face I never dared to see and that others do not know. Writing from the body means to engage one´s skin, to think in one´s history, in one´s fears, in one´s scars.

In my search for what it could mean to for my body to speak, I have also found contemporary dance. The same as in writing, my body has found inside certain barriers which repress my movements. However, there is a force that wants to go out, that traverses me to the finger tips The same thing happened last week, at the Slam poetry session, where I felt naked and free with my own movement and rhythm, writing on the wind with my body without endpoints, but with silences which let me be more true.

-Deicy

I began to write at the age of twenty six, after long years of silence, loneliness, fears and hate. I have drunk different faces of violence, this is why I believe that most of my writing is aggressive and full of vengeance. It is like a constant wound inside my soul that does not permit me to cry, because tears are a symbol of life and I have not been able to do it until now. Each time I face the white paper, I sharpen the sword of my memories, and the sheet is left splashed by hits in the body, shouts in the ear, gushes of blood across a face, drops of sperm between small legs, dead bodies resting on two weak arms, and a huge and lost desire to commit suicide.

After three years of dark and painful writing, of walking alone in the night, drinking more and more liquor, of not having a place to sleep, a certain pair of forest eyes began to caress my sadness. Those eyes love literature, too. Those eyes are the light that makes visible the shadow that I am. Those hands bring hope into my skin, with those lips I know the breeze of a smile, and the wetness of something uncertain. That body gives me every day the smell of calalillies recently stolen from whatever forgotten garden. That voice cares for my dead tears and my young sickness.

Among us there is no tomorrow, we only desire to live ourselves today, with poetry, silence, dawns, writing, music and the present. When I have that silhouette touching my hand, I do not remember my nightmares or the smell of my 3 years of notebooks that my mother burned because they knew more about me than she knew.

-Adela

-

Images from a performance of Women at the Edge: Monologos de la vagina y otras curiosidades performed by Lenguaje y Paz project and others at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica in Tunja, Colombia.

-

Juliana writes:

He would not listen. He would not listen to what I needed so much to tell. He did not want to know about the thing that made my life five floors deeper. He could not understand the language in which I had found the other side.

If there was another side, he would not hear of it...

He said I sounded like a conference. He said I had changed. He changed the topic. Said language was not everything ­ convenient for him.

Impossible conversation.

I went to bed every night with a strategic space between us. My foot touching his foot as the last sign of hopeless hope.

I sank my face into a pillow, shut all the doors of my waking world and dreamt of wonderful women in northern forests. A place where I could hold on to this ­ this secret other layer ­ this infinite me.

I was dying of sadness. And my writing was dying of thirst.

*

Because I could not speak to him, I turned my body to the world.

How to explain this, academically, to explain embodiment as a methodology.

The setting up of a literature program rooted on a legitimate interest in the relation between language and self.

Like, what would it mean to take Barthes seriously, to take ourselves seriously. How long have you shoved yourself into a drawer in order to exist?

With a principal research interest in creative thinking, as the integration between the critical and the creative, not just one on each hand, but the crossing of the two, something that requires quite a bit of hand gesture.

I strained my brain to get there.

And the 23 women working together... women at the edge, sharpening edges against each other.

All the beautiful women

If we are going to do this, then it must be by our own standards, our own parameters ­ it must be an aesthetic defined by our bodies, whatever that means.

The intelligent women ­ my co-artists, my friends

So much good writing ­ but how to pass from the lucky fragments to ­ really ­ the composition of a larger structure ­ to a real dialogue with the artists, those who are creating.

2 hours of women's stories, non-stop... And 23 consecutive orgasms at the end. I define this as the howl, the savage scream beneath language that has to literally claw open the realm of meaning.

So many difficult stories. Was there enough of me to help them?

You're not a psychologist. Never have cared for therapy.

We had to literally claw open a space.

A molotov cocktail, one text after another. Language ripped right out of the strange, the ungeneralizable experience that was each one.

So violent.

All dressed in black with something red.

Beauty is essential.

Unaesthetic ­ claimed the poet ­ . Vulgar. A shame. Beware, it is dangerous to think that this is literature.

It was the possible impossible.

Not enough to expose ourselves for 3 hours, we had to defend ourselves for weeks.

Do you ever write about anything that is not pain? Is there no other muse?

What was aesthetics? (I guess I never learned my lessons.) What was its relation to the particularities of each body?

All the time getting into trouble. Were we starting to like it? Didn't we ever learn?

So tired ­ what was the relation between aesthetics and getting into trouble? How to turn the pain around into something more... desire... the reconstruction of hope... what was the next step?

...to have to literally claw open a space...

...for

...that which does not exist...

So that it did not surprise me when a hole opened up in the sky and it would not stop

Raining.

Swimming in the silver lake with the tall grass and thunderbolts.

Leave me here. Leave me here, I will stay here forever ­ floating, arms open to embrace the sky.

And absolutely wet, driving through the naked mountains, yelling songs in English with two ten year old girls.

So that it did not surprise me it did not surprise me when one day he was back and I did not care to explain anymore because he already knew. He had understood. Some things are not said in language.

*

But it is this I really want to talk about.

You will forgive me if I speak from the orifice of my reviving. If I speak impudently. If I poke into what is none of my business.

We all have our problems, like what to eat and who to love. (Elfriede Jelinek)

Now that I know it all. Now that under the trees, on the path, such a beautiful afternoon, we have touched... the impossible conversation... I can feel it come, like a flame inside my belly. Desire.

So have you finally got tired of thinking?

One day my writing broke open ­ and oh, what tenderness, what a surprise.

The sense of spring... things tossing their fluff everywhere... Undeniable.

One day... some things can not be talked about within the confines of a cafeteria table. Let's walk. Where do we start?

I think I am sick, she says. Rivers flood my eyes.

We flow down the path, umbrella swinging on my arm.

What you are is in love.

After all this time of living inside a brick.

Let's sit here - it is so nice. A schoolboy climbing up the fence to escape from school. I will do nothing to stop him.

I have not slept in months. Do you really think I am in love?

Sometimes everything is a miracle.

You cannot deny a flower has come out of the ground. You can cut it, put it in a vase. You can suck the honey out of it, or put it in a poetry book and plas ­squash it- like me.

It is horrible, but you are right ­ at least there is a reason to live.

We laugh. Impossible conversation.

Rivers flow.

This is the sacred space.

Your eyes today, like looking into a honeycomb ­ like a sky after a rain shower.

Something pulling from the belt; not provoked by penetration. More subtle, resisting being broken. Like waves on the water. But violent as the shaking of an antenna and the sound that it produces. Undulation. Inner movement. Something is moving which gives life.

Your eyes, blue fire.

My story tied to hers and hers. And you, what is your place in this. I can never say enough.

I will bring you a bottle of Curaçao ­ what's that blue liquor? I will pull it out of my sleeve and say: this is for you. Shhh. Not a word, not a word until we have drunk it all.

In honor of all that is ridiculous. I am so grateful.

Drinking in the germinal process of plants. It is thus that I survive. To awaken before the image of two young girls like old women, reviving in the finding of first love.

So beautiful, so dangerous.

Like a homage to the spring. I cannot stop smiling.

The secret authors of this wetness. She and her.

You cannot deny...

Like the bee comes to the flower ­ you were so ready.

I give you this bunny. That is how I want to touch you. Your nose smeared with carrots. That is how I will jump.

Mark me, baptize me...

Two women, melting the borders of identity. Two women face to face. To allow oneself to be woman, to be women, furry white bunnies and all ­

Do what you want with it.

This is the impossible conversation.

How happy you have made me.

And what it means to me ­ to watch her there ­ to recognize her as if finding my own hymen. Again.

This writing like swinging on a hammock.

These pieces I put together over and over again.

There were 3 looks and a half, 2 dreams, those letters, the precision in language, the intensity of tone, that turquoise shirt.

Lately everything she writes is a love poem.

You knew there was more than this.

You opened the door and all the water in me made it come down.

I fall 5 floors through your eyes.

You watched me drown, unmoved.

At... the bottom of the ocean... You were waiting. A stone buddha.

I owe you so much.

Endless chain of women ­ my story tied to hers and hers ­ and you you you what I want to say is...

Because one can be in love and just honor that.

Because one can be love.

This is what one woman can do for another.

This is the art of conjure... to remember what has not been lived

... that words,

                said in the precise places,

                                can...

                                                invent...

                what is real.

The recovery of joy -

                                there are tiny bells in the air.

You open your hand that has been closed for centuries and at the very center ­ a date ­ so sweet, so tender.

I cannot not take it.

Al Garcia (EE) , 100 could have beens

[January 2008. Al has asked to have this piece removed.]

Al Garcia, Mother/father

Mom:

Yo lloraba cuando me quedaba sola y no podia alcanzar el creal que me iva a tomar en las mananas. Translation from Spanish for those of you who need it: "I cried when I stayed alone and I couldn't reach the cereal that I was going to have in the mornings." This statement by my mother via email is quite possibly the very first time in my whole life, when I read it, that I felt a desperation for her. She said it very matter of factly, like as if that kind of suffering is simply part of life-not saying it to say oh look at me I'm in pain. But just more matter of fact.

My mom's arthritis used to be so bad that she seemed to handle her hands like little houses made out of super flaky material, in her palms, with this weird beige colored bandaging or brace or something that she used to wear and that I'd play with when she wasn't around and I was small and rummaging through my parents' things. It was like she was a cripple, she couldn't work doing secretarial data entry anymore and that's what her occupational degree was in from Mexico. So she became a housewife who sometimes helps my father at the family market. My father told me once and once only that it was the medication that my mother took for her arthritis that made her emotional. My mother fought with me when I was little as if we were the same age, and she would huff and puff and call me something like a no-good delinquent, or like a spoiled brat - it's hard to translate exactly.

I'm not sure why but I always made things worse by saying things that I knew would spin her into hyperventilation. I've called her lazy and I've also called her a liar. These things really pissed her off for some reason. My mother hyperventilated and her nose flared and she cried as if she was being tortured, all this when she got overwhelmed and angry. It was as if she was animalistic in a way, because if you spoke another word when she said to not say anything anymore, her whole body would jump a little and it was a little bit like a Venus Fly trap that knew that there was food there but didn't know where and just sort of snapping every time you came near it or touched it... or, in my case, talked to it.

For a small child, I'm talking about me, well, for me, it was strange. Because it was so intense, these fights, for her, but yet I was so detached. And yet, my hatred for her was not. I hated her for most of my life up until VERY recently. I hate her less, but there's still resentment there. She oppressed me. With chores and with house rules. She looked through my things. Almost every day was about my mother's dominion in the house. She wore the pants. She belittled my father all the time, but it didn't seem to affect his self-esteem. And yet, he never really stood up for me or my sisters. He just went around her back (not connivingly) and did nice things for us. She always yelled at him for making her out to be the bad guy, he always spoiling me. But she WAS the bad guy.

She loved me so much. But she was too nervous to know how to express it through her logic. I mean, quite literally, she was always nervous. I swear to you that there is not a more nervous person I have ever encountered. When she cried and got scared part of me accepted as normal the extent to which she cried and got scared - but part of me, subconsciously, always always knew that it was somehow abnormal. I think she was sort of bi-polar but in a Mexican way not the Anglicized DSMIV way.

She was so tender to me. So so fucking sweet. She cradled me in her arms when I was a baby and one of my earliest memories is this very thing. She even took me to Mommy and Me classes. She still loves me to this day very very much. With ALL her heart. But it's still so strange that we interacted and fought so much every single day of my life, and that our fights were so incredibly astoundingly intimate, and that yet only once or twice did I feel like I could see in her something that made me think Wow that was beautiful and special what my mom just shared with me. What I'm referring to is basically this one time she told me that as a little girl she was terrified of the ocean because she thought there was no bottom to it.

I knew nearly nothing of her childhood until very very recently, and even now I only know shreds. I don't really understand what motivates her. For a long time I wondered whether or not she was smart. Lately I've been thinking maybe she's smart but not innovative, and that she clings to her cultural conservatism to a point where it is I must say a large handicap. She's so religious, always thanking God for everything. When she's especially terrified she'll do the hyperventilation thing, or something like hyperventilating, and she'll pray so hard but like in a way as if she was a tiny little girl running to hide under the sheets while singing a song that she sang because she was brainwashed into believing it was somehow truly effective - I don't know either way if it is but what I do know is, going with the little girl metaphor, that it keeps her comfortable because she swears maybe it makes the monsters go away.

I feel like my mom probably had a really hard childhood. I know she was Third World poverty-level poor and know that she had lots of siblings and know that she had to work her way really hard to get a car and her own place. That's the only thing she did share with me, and drilled into me, my whole life - that she worked since she was fourteen. That's about it. I think a couple of years back she told me that she came here to Los Angeles for vacation but then decided to stay, that when she was at the train station some very creepy old lady with missing teeth offered her a place to stay, since my mom was stranded (the person who was supposed to pick her up didn't show). My mom said the lady was so scary but then a little boy came up to the old lady, like a grandson or something, and that my mom felt safer and so went to the lady's house. And my mom said that the old lady gave her bread and coffee even though there were so many children in the old woman's care and that this old lady obviously had nothing herself - also that the woman would accept no money.

I'm going to try to find out more about my mom. Because every tiny little thing that I find out about her totally slams me in my heart. I'm not sure why, but I feel like getting insider information about my mother and her brain and her history and life is more of an event and more humbling but also gives me more of an understanding of myself and I love finding out things about myself - all this with an impact more than if I were to get insider tips from a spy in the White House.

I used to hate my mother, down to the bone, down to my core, for things like the fact that her nervousness got in the way of everything. It was always about things making her uncomfortable and the need to set things right so things wouldn't be scary anymore. She lives in fear every single day. I'm just now, at 22 and 23 years old, starting to understand, or at least hypothesize, that maybe she is always so nervous about every tiny little thing that happens (or might happen) because she was never secure as a child. She had no guarantees that there'd be food there. She probably lived in a really shitty and therefore unsafe part of town. This never occurred to me until just now as I'm writing this - the unsafe part of town thing - and it really does break my heart to think of my mom as little and feeling scared. My mom said also that I think one of her older sisters hit her and was hard on her and that she was passed from relative to relative. This also probably made my mom ALWAYS feel unsafe or at least not stable.

I am not a violent person by nature. And yet when I think of anyone harming my mom when she was a little girl, it makes me want to go back in time and physically hurt the person. For some reason I imagine hurting a bad woman, like teaching her a lesson by pulling her hair and staring her in the eyes with my own vengeance. Maybe I'm thinking of her sister who was not very nice to her. I also know that my mom was the youngest, which I feel gives me a particular type of insight into her that I didn't have while I was growing up. What I'm talking about is the fact that she's very under-developed. Not very emotionally mature, I'd say.

And all my life I never ever thought of her as selfish, because the things that she was so strict about or the chores or her reasoning for doing certain things - I used to think it was, though oppressive, I used to think it was necessary in a way. But now I realize that, in a way beyond her control, her fear her perpetual fear, makes her selfish. What she does have is resolve and the will to survive and to move forward. It's quite possible that without these things she would not be alive today. I think she will certainly outlive my father even though she's about half a decade older than him.

My mom has diabetes but she's adjusting her diet because of this. Otherwise, though, her diet was relatively healthy and she never ever let my sisters and I have soda and rarely did we have cereal with sugar. My mom takes very good care of herself, especially her skin. My mom has the softest skin. (I inherited this obsession with taking care of my skin.) She has a very light fuzz on her cheeks and though you can see wrinkles, there's a softness to her face. When I look into her eyes it freaks me out because I can tell she's related to me, that I came from her. This is what happens when you stop talking to your folks for years and then see them in person again.

Since you're not seeing your mom's eyes every day it takes you aback when you come across them again, those two dark and dewy eyes that you can't help but stare at with awe and wish you could set them aside on a table to stare at them some more. But a longing to stare at eyes is self-defeating if you don't want the person to know you're staring at their eyes. They'll just think you're staring at THEM, not their eyes per se. And if my mom ever thought I was doing that, just staring at her, well, I'm honestly not too concerned about what she might think I was doing - I don't know WHAT she would think to be honest - I just don't think I could bring myself to stare at her. It would make me uncomfortable as hell. Me sitting alone with my mom in the same room makes me nervous as fuck. So much of my life, when I was in the same room with her, was about feeling like she was about to demand something of me.

Dad:

With my dad, I could be in the same room as him, just coloring or something. I have the vaguest memory in fact of just hanging out in the bathroom while he peed. It wasn't sexual in any way; I truly think it was just that I was his best little buddy and we were just hanging out like pals. He even often picked his nose in front of me like nothing.

My father's relationship with me is far far more tragic than my relationship with my mother. Whereas with my mother it was fight after fight after fight, with my dad it was him desperately trying to connect with me but there was never any kind of bond with him or much interaction after I was old enough to go to school. I started off in first grade kissing girls by running after them during recess, but I think I did it to be scandalous, not because I was trying to be suave. The nun who was my teacher had to have a talk with my parents and I think it made my dad so proud of his son, for being such a stud in development. But like I said, I was never truly interested in girls.

I was involved in sports, like a normal boy, and sometimes we played basketball together (my dad and I), so this definitely gave him a way to bond with me, but eventually I played sports less and less and in high school no one on my teams ever really invited the folks to come to the games when it came to my sports - volleyball, cross-country Running. Anyway, there was always less and less to say to my father. Even in the high school years when he took me to school in the mornings for some time, I had nothing at all to connect about with him. He tried teaching me how to shave this one time but I was embarrassed and said I already knew how. He always told me that if I had a question about girls or girls' private parts that I could ask him, because, he said, he had to find out about girls and sex in textbooks because he didn't have a father. He told me this all the time, that he didn't have a father and that I should appreciate him.

He ADORED me when I was born and wasn't too occupied with hiding how much he spoiled me, probably because the rest of the family kind of were spoiling me too, especially with attention. But he especially spoiled me and thought of me like a little King who he'd help guide to rule women and to rule toughness. My dad always constantly told me it was important that I know how to fight, said that he fought a lot in military school. He always tried teaching me how to fight like a boxer. I was never interested.

To this day I don't think he (or my mom) have ever given me a piece of information that was truly useful except for like how to start a bank account. I mean, in a sense I've always been smarter than them or more wise or something like that. And I mention this because it makes me feel especially that therefore there's EVEN LESS that I can do with my dad. I feel really embarrassed when I can tell he's trying to give me advice about life and he's being all serious and fatherly and solemn but to me it's just like so trite what he says. He's also very under-developed, not necessarily emotionally, but culturally. His vision of the world is VERY VERY Mexican, very macho, very family oriented. Everything is about family and his legacy through his son.

His biggest problem with me being gay was partly the fact that his Garcia name would die with me. He told me that before me all the males on his side were pretty much all named Alvaro Garcia. He also talks about his death all the time. Even when I was little. "I'm going to die one day" or when I'd say something about the future he'd say, "if I'm still alive then."

Well, it's been 20 years since he's been saying this and he's still alive and mostly strong. He's getting a tiny bit weaker, but until very recently he still lifted boxes that were way too heavy for him. He's fought with burglars with guns if they tried robbing the store. Once his head was busted open and this other time he got a broken finger. So he wasn't all talk, I must admit. The guy was, for my whole life pretty much, short but very very very strong. Brute strength. Thankfully he never hit me. He almost never got mad at me the way my mom did. I can still remember times when I could tell that he was pretending to push me and pretending he was so mad at me. But the truth is he didn't really feel like disciplining, but more just like being my friend.

He's a character, always goofing around with people and is really really good with groups of people. I can tell he was probably a huge flirt with da' ladies when he was younger, because he still flirts now but it's just embarrassing for anyone watching who knows what's going on. Anyway, I know a little bit more about his past than my mom's, including the fact that he was very political and vocal and all those things, that he was rebellious and did protests. He was apparently very good at having friends in key places and I think if he had stayed in Mexico I have no doubt he'd be in a high office there, maybe even President. I say this in all seriousness. I can still see this type of vitality at times when he interacts with his customers and how amazing he is at running a business, but for the most part I think that me being gay and detached from him and this country and its foreignness has muffled his spirit.

It makes me so angry, and I'm not even sure who to be angry at, that my dad, who is very tough and likes being tough and likes being a big shot but not an asshole big shot but instead like a nice guy big shot, that he has these characteristics but that here in this country the language intimidates him to a large extent. Once he gets comfortable with someone the language thing fades and he's an excellent and charming conversationalist. But at first he is at a loss. It made me so so angry when we'd go to order food through the drive-through and I could tell that he felt weak and stupid for not being able to say the words right, like maybe the person at the Del Taco just wasn't understanding him and he'd get frustrated. He never became as good at English as my mom, maybe because he's also very stubborn and so wasn't as up on learning the language as my mom was. She's much more American than him. She likes tacky knick-knacks and jewelry.

Anyway, my signature is similar to my father's because I feel like I have nothing really to give him except for that. Maybe more of my time is something I can give him, but I don't know what we'd do. Maybe we could bowl. Even though I'm gay, I can bowl. He likes bowling. Yeah, maybe that's it. Anyway, we will never be buddies, kicking back beers and talking about women. The closest we ever got to bonding over something was me working at the family market here and there. He was so happy to be working with me. And the thing is I didn't think I would be, but I was too. I was kind of shocked. I thought I was doing it more for my dad, like to make him feel good and to indulge his desire to bond with me but it felt nice for me too. Like we were really bonding at least a little and it wasn't just pretend.

Stacey Ginsburg (EE) , Smoke

We didn't go to a funeral. I didn't know what a funeral was. My dad was buried in a wooden box in a Jewish cemetery in Hollywood. I visited it twenty years later for the first time. I brought my dad's favorite sandwich, corned beef and rye, and a bottle of beer. I couldn't find the grave. I couldn't find the grave. I was desperate and trying not to cry. The caretaker found me. My mind was wild with thoughts such as, 'see, he didn't really die, but where is he?'

The caretaker told me that my dad was here. He showed me where my dad was on the map. He walked me there. There was no marker. My dad died and not one adult person, not one family member or one friend had honored his memory with a marker. He was buried and left forgotten, just a piece of land growing on top of him. I had walked over his grave three or four times, stopping on top to rest, before that caretaker found me.

I sat on top of the place where he lay and offered him beer and the corned beef sandwich. I wasn't raised Jewish. I never ate corned beef. We didn't have any trace of Jewish culture in my town where I was grown. I only knew Judaism by going to a deli. To my dad, God lived inside damn good food.

He had taken me to the delis when we lived in California. He bought corned beef and matzo ball soup. He gave me deli pickles, and afterwards, for desert, my favorite candy, the raspberry jelly candies covered in chocolate. He'd eat deli food and say, 'God, this is so good!'

I was a vegetarian, but I ate that corned beef sandwich for my daddy, right there on top of his grave. I ate the pickle even though my throat was tight, and it was difficult to swallow.

I put flowers on his grave and poured the bottle of beer all over it, in honor of him. I knew he would have liked it. I think I may even have lit a cigarette and smoked it, just for him.

I cried the entire time. I talked to him with my tight throat. I told him that one day I would get him a marker. I was so sorry that he had been forgotten. I hadn't known. I had no idea. I told him how much I missed him, how much I thought of him, and I told him I was letting go now, so that he and I could both be free. I wanted him to find his way to a better place. I thought about church and purgatory, and wondered if he was in some place between, neither here nor there, his ghost haunting him and haunting me.

I needed and wanted to be free. I needed and wanted him to be free.

I took a picture of the tree near his grave just to remember him by.

I was devastated and furious that my mother never bothered to get him a marker. I called her and told her that daddy had been buried in a pine box without a marker. She didn't want to talk about it. She was busy. She said she thought his friend Bob had got him a marker.

My dad looked a lot like Elton John. Whenever I see pictures of Elton from the 70's, all I can think of is my dad. My dad wore big goofy glasses. He loved Billy Joel and John Lennon. Before Mom and Dad separated, I grew up on Glass Houses and Crocodile Rock.

After he died, I learned how to play "The Way You Are" by Billy Joel on the piano. I played it for him, sang it when nobody was home, crying while I sang "Don't go Changing, to try and please me. . .I like you just the way you are." I mourned him by remembering the things he loved when nobody was around, when nobody was watching. I wasn't allowed to be sad when they were around. So I did it in secret. I was too proud and too strong to be sad in front of my mom and sister. It was confusing. It spiraled into a whole mess later on.

We had a memorial at the church in town for my dad rather than flying to the funeral, because it was too expensive. The memorial, in my opinion, was stupid. I hated it. I read my reading and we lit candles, and I don't really remember anyone crying. I didn't want anyone to know just how sad or mad I had been. I didn't want them to know how much I had loved him. I was his baby. I was his girl. I didn't want anyone to know how terrified I was to realize that that was that. That it was just mom and Melis and I now. Forever.

I prayed every night for four or five years because I was concerned that he would go to hell for having been in prison. Even though I didn't believe in heaven or hell, some conditioning runs deep and I didn't know for sure, so I prayed an Our Father and a Hail Mary every night. Sometimes if I was feeling particularly energetic I gave him an extra one or two. But I still doubted that he was dead. A part of me was sure that it was a lie. The part of me that died when he died also believed that he would come back and surprise me. The part of me that died found its way to purgatory with him.

I had a dream that first year. He was under the water in a swimming pool staring at me. I was surprised to see him. He was alive, but he was underwater. I wanted him to come up and be with me. He wouldn't. But he was alive, he was right there, breathing underwater. "Come on, Daddy, come on!" But he didn't. But he was alive. I hated him for teasing me like that. I just wanted one of his hugs, but I couldn't get it. All I could do was look at him underwater smiling at me. And then he disappeared.

My mom and sister and I never really spoke of him after that. I mean we never celebrated his birthday, which was only ten days after his death day, and we never talked of his death together, as a family. He died and that was that. It was buried and forgotten, the way he had been and the way a part of me had been.

We received the last two letters that my sister and I had sent to him, a couple of weeks after he died.

Geoff, my mother's Oklahoma boyfriend, had taught us that special beings receive messages in smoke. We burned our letters to Santa Claus because it was through smoke, not real mail, that the special beings receive our thoughts. I remember knowing that the dead would get our thoughts if we wrote them on paper and burned them. When we got our return letters from prison, it was sobering. It was disappointing that he hadn't received our last thoughts before he died. I had told him that I made the part of Annie. But he never got the letter. I reminded Mom that we should burn the letters. The three of us held each other and watched. It was the only thing that made sense and comforted me.

Every year after that it was my secret ritual. Every year on his death day, I wrote him a letter. I told him all the things I wanted him to know. I included pictures, drawings, whatever I felt he might enjoy, and I burned them, crying and trusting that the smoke would get my secret messages to him.

But every year after that, Christmas and my birthday became confusing. I celebrated but I also felt sad. I didn't feel like I was supposed to celebrate. I couldn't authentically celebrate because underneath the celebration was the pain I had been too stubborn and proud to show. And because the pain came out later, when it wasn't allowed, it was even more painful and confusing. I became awkward about my birthday. The memory of my dad lived underneath the magic of the season, just lingering there, darkening the supposed joy of the season. I wasn't supposed to be sad.

Stacey Ginsburg, Anywhere taxi to Bessamer, Michigan

It started here. It could have started anywhere. It was one of those times when I had the wisdom to sneak past judgment. So here's the picture. Goddard, Vermont. Anywhere Taxi. Driver, big guy, balding, rough. He picks me up and first thing out of his mouth is what a jerk this guy is for screwing him at work.

Then he tells me about a weirdo he almost picked up, who asked him to drive her from Burlington to Detroit, Michigan. She didn't like flying. He thought she was weird, so he passed her along to his friend. His friend took her to Michigan for 1200 dollars, after she opened her blouse, and let her breasts and her money fall into the cab.

And then he tells me about Hooters. I'm thinking this guy is annoying the hell out of me. I want to fade away and disappear into the carpeted seats.

I get real quiet. I don't want to say anything. I'm being polite. I also start to space out a little but catch myself. Something tells me to be patient, and to be present.

I ask him about children. "Do you have any kids?"

He tells me about his kids, his daughter, who is 12, and wants to be a writer. "She's good", he tells me. "They want to put her in the gifted class. She is writing an anthology for children. They want to help her publish it."

For some strange reason, I'm surprised to hear the words anthology and Hooters just three sentences apart from one another.

"But my other kid, he's getting' C's and D's. They tell me he has a concentration problem. But he's a whiz on the computer. He fixed the school computer after it broke down. But he can't sit still. If only they'd let him do his work on the computer. He'd be getting A's. But they want him to learn the old-fashioned way."

We talk about teachers and that stupid 'no child left behind' act, and the teacher who demands respect from his son. He told the teacher recently, "'Why don't you start learnin' to respect him?' Christ, they take away his computer privileges and his recess so he can fix his concentration problem. Like taking away what he loves and is good at is going to help him concentrate?"

I agree, the logic is stunning.

I start to feel myself getting hot, and feeling my anger towards injustice. I can't find the words to articulate why. I am surprised by the direction Anywhere Taxi is heading.

We talk a lot about education (well, he does most of the talking still), and I'm feeling my body, and I'm feeling inside my body, and I'm grateful for this man's honesty and candor, and, well, salt.

He tells me about how his daughter got beat up for shaving her head. How the kids called her a dyke. So he goes to the school and says, "Where're those girls who beat you up? Ok, you go now and punch 'em. I'll wait here."

I start to feel uncomfortable, and thoughts like, small town, ignorant, red-neck, hick, start racing in my head.

He continues to tell me how she marches up to those girls and bam! Socks her in the face. She goes back to him and says, "You know, I didn't want to do that, but you know? It felt really good."

My body contracts a little more.

He tells me about the questionnaire that the 5th graders have to bring home. The one that screens for behavioral issues at home, like, "Do your parents smoke?" "Do they drink?" "How much?"

He tells his son that when the teacher gives him one, he's supposed to either tear it up in her face, or say, "My dad says, kiss my ass."

I'm wondering where this conversation is going, and if I should say something or not? I'm pissed again that I'm missing graduation. I want to space out again, and just drown him out. He reminds me of my hometown. The attitude that numbed me into silence.

Something tells me to remain present. So I do.

I do want to say something, anything, but all I can muster is, "You from Vermont?" He tells me all the towns he's lived in. I'm familiar with them, as I used to live in Vermont, and traveled to a lot of high schools to introduce youth to cross-cultural exchange opportunities. I remember the school district he lives in. It was rough.

I comment on how he's lived in a lot of places. He responds by telling me about his dad. "My dad beat the shit out of me bad. When I was 12, I wrote an essay for a contest in Time magazine. I wrote about a boy who gets the crap beaten out of him, and all the different ways he's beaten. I won the contest for the best essay. The editor called me and says, "You know, you can turn him in." I said, "How did you know?"

"He says, 'Nobody writes like that who hasn't gone through that.'"

And he continues, "I couldn't turn my dad in. But I did run away to an old farmer in Williston when I was 13. Lived in a tent and had a stove that I made. I worked for the farmer. When I was 17 I went back home and had my mom sign me into the army. I learned how to fight. I got into stupid trouble though. Spent a lot of time in jail afterwards for doing stupid things. A friend dared me to throw a rock in a liquor store. I did. He went in and stole a bunch of liquor. Spent 18 months in jail for that."

I like him. I like his honesty. He reminds me of the men in my hometown, a lot. I like how I feel in my body when he talks. He barely looks at me. I like the largeness of his head. I listen to the silence for a while. I feel tenderness here. We are both quiet, I'm just taking in his story. I'm not sure what he's taking in.

I ask him if he ever works with kids. He says he'd like to. Says he used to, after he got out of jail and got cleaned up. He tells me he wants to work with the kids they call "bad apples" because he knows deep down they aren't. They just need some guidance and love.

I tell him my secret. For some reason, it just slips out and wishes to reveal itself to him.

I tell him about my roots. "I was one of those 'bad' kids. Well, sort of. I hid it. I drank, smoked, had tons of sex, did drugs, and was pregnant by 15. I tried to kill myself many times. I hated myself. I just kept all my sadness in, so nobody knew. After all, there wasn't anybody to tell. My mom never knew any of it, until I got pregnant. But she never knew how miserable I was. She thought I was moody, just too intense and sensitive."

And then I tell him the second half of my secret. "I want to go back. I've wanted to, but I've been a little scared. Mostly, I just feel it is a depressing place."

"No!" He jumps in. "You can't be scared. You have to go and face your fear. That's the only way to move through. The only way to heal is to go through the pain. And if you don't get back to your roots, how do you know who you are?"

His voice changes and sounds like the voice of wisdom.

"My mom," he says, as if reading me, "says I am her miracle boy. That's all she ever says, 'You are a miracle. You lived through hell. You are a miracle.' If you don't go back to your roots," he repeats himself, as if I already have forgotten the crux of our conversation, "how do you know who you are? I mean, really? And how do you know what you're capable of doing if you don't find your own miracle there? "

He starts to talk about kids again, and how important it is to inspire just one. We arrive at the airport. He gets my luggage out, still barely looking me in the eye. "What if your story helps just one kid do something a little different, so they don't have to make the mistakes you or I made?"

I'm quiet again. Reflecting deeply. He hands me my luggage. I thank him for sharing his story with me. He gives me a hug, and says something about roots and making a difference. He thanks me, and drives away.

Chris Gray (EE), 2.28.2006 xo.

Republished from Chris's blog, Everything hits at once.

I just finished re-reading Dave Eggers' seminal memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's the second time I've read the book cover to cover, and the first time since high school (or early college, I forget).

A Heartbreaking Work is often thought of as the defining work of a generation. What generation? For the sake of generalization's ease, let's consider it all those who greeted young adulthood from the end of grunge era until today. Eggers' story begins with the death of his parents, middles with his informal adoption of his younger brother and their move to San Francisco, and ends after a few years in San Francisco, when Eggers and his brother Toph leave town for New York City. The story is shaped by death and life, confounded by the necessity that the two define our existence, and because of that it's filled with anger and frustration, fatalism and hostility.

In the five years since I first read this book, I forgot about all of that. I've held an image of this book as a triumph of playful wordsmanship and unique humor, wryly self-aware and just a little pretentious. I remembered Eggers' major introduction and acknowledgements section, wherein he outlines all of the themes and metaphors at work in the book, along with the lies he tells, characters he truncates, and offers those who are dissatisfied a full refund (which I believe he honored) if they would send the book back to the publisher. I remembered the forty-page fake transcript of Eggers' interview to get onto the San Francisco edition of The Real World. I remembered his unbridled hope and imagination, and his incessant love for his brother, who he must protect at all costs.

But I forgot so much. I forgot about the lengthy tirades against those who stand in his and Toph's way on their way to anything ­ school, prosperity, a future. I forgot about Eggers' deep-seeded morbidity, how he is convinced he has AIDS and will die of AIDS unless he is first killed in a car accident or plane crash or by gang members. I forgot how he is surrounded by fragile people who get into accidents or are too weak to conquer their addictions, and how mad they make him and how much they remind him that he will be dead soon. I forgot that he is much more than the ingenious prankster he's discussed as.

I actually don't want to talk about this book right now. I want to talk about myself in relation to this book. I was excited to plunge into it again, to really think about it, to see a virtuoso talent at the peak of his audacity. I wanted to read the book and write a term paper that was a hopeful treatise for modern literature and for my generation. I pored through some of Eggers' more challenging diatribes and wondered, Can I still do this? Is my optimism for myself and for my friends a figment of my imagination?

No.

The real triumph of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the fact that it is, for almost 400 pages, both of these seeming contradictions at once. It is bitter and deprecating. It is hilarious and vital. It is often all of these things at the same time. And it does define my conception of my generation.

And how to explain all that? First, a caveat: I cannot fairly make a claim that I can define any one person (even myself), let alone any group of people, with any measure of accuracy. All I can do, all I will do, is project my well-considered impression onto this page and onto the Internet for the world to gape in awe at.

I try to think of the bond between all of the people I admire, love, interact with on a daily basis. They are a disparate group, of teachers and educators, retail clerks, graphic designers, artists, musicians, carpenters, photographers, crafters, and coffee roasters. On the whole, they all understand each other, like each other or much more. They, meaning we, are at once a part of the world, a part of American culture, yet are simultaneously a cultural anomaly. We watch TV, but not a lot. We know the news, but we don't have cable. We go to the mall and we go to Target, but only when we have to and we generally try to avoid Wal-Mart at all costs. We drink and some of us do drugs, but we're selective about where, what, with who. We are consumers, but we are shrewd and when we can be, we are socially responsible consumers. We are trying to make the world a little bit cleaner, a little bit more upright morally, with whatever extremely limited funding, talent, and knowledge we have.

Our existences are shaped by compromise. We get depressed but can only wallow in it for so long, milk it for its artistic worth, for its alcoholic worth, at which point we dust off our shoulders and start again, largely rejuvenated. We have people who help us get through this and know quite precisely what it's like. We are introspective, but we have the opportunity to be unusually gregarious and polite and social, because we are amongst others created from the same mold. We can create truly groundbreaking moments, in the form of concerts, parties, ideas, and art shows, and they will never leave the comforts of that room or this town, and that is just fine. We work at jobs that we don't necessarily love, but that are ideally suited to help us achieve later goals. Failing that, we work at jobs we can leave in order to move to that position. We are in the mainstream because we are out there, because we participate. We depart from it because we have smart friends and because we know how to navigate the Internet, and these two resources provide us with limitless forms of alternative knowledge. We understand that others don't do the same, because even the country's most average household is already bombarded by more information than it can possibly consume. We have found a means to be selective about our information and our entertainments, to have them suit us, and we are proud of it.

We live in Portland because it's inexpensive and beautiful. We make it worthwhile because we are eager to espouse and promote our ideas. Because no matter what we desire the future to hold for us, Portland is the appropriate launching pad. It's the pep rally before the big game. Like the pep rally, it can get old fast. But it's quick, and when it's over, we are as energized and as ready as we need to be.

Me? Every moment's a compromise. Any moment of outlandishness or earnestness or honesty I portray is usually carefully measured and self-aware, probably more than anyone else's I know. That doesn't mean I'm never surprised, and it doesn't mean I never surprise myself. I smoke. Sometimes because it passes the time, but in a manner that allows me to be thoughtful and productive. Sometimes because I just like it. And when I hate it, it's because I know I haven't gotten everything out of it that I will (like cancer, I know). I drink every day, but just one almost every day, because it tones me down or greases the wheels or whatever I'm wanting it to do that day. I'm a romantic conservative, but only because I know I've still got time to do it right, and because I've done it too wrong for too long. I am more loyal to the people I love than anyone (I swear it might be true), and by extension I am reserved and leery upon first encounters with new people. I'm ready for most anything, but I'm not often ready to do it without a gameplan.

And today, as I write this, I am happy with all of it. This is not a standard day, but these are the days I have been having, the days I owe to this town, these friends, this year and, begrudgingly, myself. I am grateful. I am exultant. I am in complete control of my universe. And, for now, I can have a sense of humor about it. Thanks.

So, that's what I'm studying. Pretty neat, eh?

"We need to change him."

"Inspire him."

"Him, everyone."

"Get everyone together."

"All these people."

"No more waiting."

"Means through mass."

"It is criminal to pause."

"To wallow."

"To complain."

"We have to be happy."

"To not be happy would be difficult."

"We would have to try to not be happy."

"We have an obligation."

"We've had advantages."

"We have a platform from which to risk."

"A cushion to fall back on."

"This is abundance."

"A luxury of place and time."

"Something rare and wonderful."

"It's almost historically unprecedented."

"We must do extraordinary things."

"It would be obscene not to."

"We will take what we've been given and unite people."

"And we'll try not to sound so irritating."

"Right. From now on."

- AHWOSG, p. 130-131

Alexandra Hartman (EE), Body and early relational trauma

Personal history

My mother was 22 years old, and eight and a half months pregnant when my father was killed in a plane crash in Japan. I was born two weeks later. I can only imagine my mother's grief and isolation while giving birth in a foreign country. I can only imagine her rage at being robbed of her baby's father. I can only imagine her sense of failure in the days after my birth when I refused to let her hold me in her arms. I can only imagine her bewilderment and even anger as we struggled to bond, and I interrupted her suffering by reaching for comfort she couldn't give.

I grew up with my mother and my grandparents in a home where arguments and harsh criticism were the norm. I was shy and solitary, and I spent my childhood immersed in books. As I grew older, I learned to disengage from the chaos of my surroundings and observe from a safe mental distance when my emotions threatened to overwhelm.

In my early teens, my family life progressively splintered. My mother remarried over the objections of my grandparents, who withdrew much of their support. After moving into my stepfather's home, I was subjected to my mother's combative marriage, and her attempted suicide before the marriage ended in divorce four years later.

As I struggled to maintain stability, I perfected my powers of disengagement. I learned to protect myself from overwhelming emotions by sliding my focus to the right of my consciousness. This shift in attention felt like looking hard to my visual right, but instead of using my eyes, I used my mind to pull myself away, like averting my gaze from mangled bodies. If my attention returned to the center and my anxiety increased, I dragged my attention back.

Until I was in my twenties, my dissociation felt innate and often automatic. It never felt like an aberration until the day I sat beside my husband in the car, while watching us from above. Reality confronted fabrication and I stopped overtly dissociating.

Defining dissociation

For most of my life, my body's physical sensations have been dull and muted. I've never derived pleasure from being in my skin, taken pride in my body, or moved my body just to feel myself in motion. I've mentally disconnected from reality, and shut myself off from the totality of who I am, as someone who breathes, feels, and senses her surroundings. I've always moved through life without being fully conscious.

Dissociation is a defense against feelings that threaten to overwhelm. It's not uncommon, nor is it necessarily pathological. Everyone occasionally spaces out by creating mental distance between a stressful situation and ourselves.

Dissociation manifests in numerous ways. Many people dissociate when we tune out the world in front of the TV. Then there are people who self-harm, overeat or use additive substances to escape strong emotions. Others have difficulty integrating their emotions with their cognitive functioning. Some who cut themselves off from their connection to the environment or to family and friends. And some people induce positive dissociation by distancing from pain or entering trances. At the severely pathological end of the dissociation spectrum is dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder) in which separate personalities develop for separate sets of memories.

Dissociation's many forms and levels of severity complicate efforts to force it into a single, encompassing definition, and for that reason, its official clinical definition is currently being debated (Eisen 224; Holmes; MacMartin 343).

The American Psychiatric Association defines dissociation as, "a disruption of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the environment," (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994; DSM-IV). Dissociative pathologies are more likely to develop when awareness of one's body, thoughts and emotions, one's ability to perceive one's surroundings, and overall mindfulness and consciousness of past experiences aren't integrated holistically. Put simply, mental health is enhanced by a strong sense of self-unity.

Bessel A. van der Kolk professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and medical director of the Trauma Center in Boston, describes dissociation as compartmentalized experience. "Elements of the experience are not integrated into a unitary whole, but are stored in memory as isolated fragments and stored as sensory perceptions, affective states or as behavioral reenactments" (1995). When the mind receives overwhelming emotional input, the content is wrapped and put away to protect the self, similar to the way a muscle spasm immobilizes and protects injured muscle tissue from further injury.

Neurologist Robert Scaer, former medical director of Rehabilitation Services at the Mapleton Center in Boulder describes dissociation as, "Fragmentation and splitting of the mind, and perception of the self and the body" (2001), but since the mind is of one piece with itself and with the body, and cannot split or fragment in a literal sense, Scaer's description seems inexact and confusing (Epp).

Psychologist and author Carol Gilligan describes dissociation as, "Our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings" (20). Dissociation is nuanced and subtle. It compels us to expend emotional muscle to suppress and cloak memories and meaning within our body. Awareness and sensation are muffled and stay within the iron vault of our body, but the sensations never die until we do. We don't know what our bodies know.

Gilligan writes, "The brilliance of dissociation as an adaptation to trauma is that it keeps alive what had seemingly been lost. What is known and then not known remains out of reach, buried in the depths of the psyche; an innocence and ignorance that becomes frozen in time (185).

My early relational trauma

It took years until I was able to name my disordered mental processes, but once I knew them as dissociation, I learned that people dissociate as a response to severe trauma. "Trauma has been identified as the principal antecedent to dissociative disorders" (Lego, 246). This was confusing, because I have no memories of abuse, and I began eying my family suspiciously. Had my grandparents sexually abused me? It seemed unlikely. Had my mother harmed me physically? I remembered few spankings, and no overt physical abuse. I wondered if I'd suppressed memories, or if the turmoil in my family had prompted my retreats into dissociation.

My confusion eased when I read a paper by Giovanni Liotti, MD, former associate professor at the Institute of Clinical Psychiatry, Rome, and currently teaching at the School of Cognitive Psychotherapy in Bologna. Liotti wrote, "Traumatic losses in the life of the dissociative patients' mothers that took place two years before to two years after the patients' births proved to be a significant risk factor for the development of dissociative disorders" (Liotti, 476).

Small babies adopt dissociation as a defensive response to influences other than overt trauma and abuse. Just two weeks after my birth, my mother was undoubtedly still grieving, but I never understood how I might have absorbed her trauma. But Gilligan says, "as babies we pick up and respond to emotions in a third of a second, registering pleasure or anger or whatever emotion is felt by the person relating to us" (6).

Liotti cites John Bowlby's work with attachment theory, which holds that humans, and indeed all mammals, are born with a strong, instinctive drive to seek comfort, food and nurturing from a caregiver. The baby communicates hunger, and her need receives a response. Warmth, stroking, love... it's circular, and the baby's needs are usually answered, except when the mother suffers trauma within two years of her baby's birth, in which case she can be so overcome and distracted that she's unable to sense or respond to her baby's needs. Instead she reacts to her baby's cries with sadness, detachment or even anger (Liotti, 476).

An infant sees life simply in terms of life and death. If she feels fear in response to her mother, she assumes that she could die. The mother's rejection feels like death, but while the fight or flight response might ensue in an adult, a baby can only freeze like a hunted animal (Liotti, 477).

I believe experiencing my mother's trauma prenatally made me see my mother as a fearful influence when I was an infant. Freezing became my primary coping skill, and I froze whenever I experienced strong emotions. As I grew older, my freeze response became dissociation, first from my mother and then from my surroundings. I learned to annihilate frightening thoughts by dragging my attention away, and I refined my dissociation to the point where I could not only distance myself, but I could also paint an alternate view of reality.

Hunger

I no longer cope with strong emotions by engaging in the more pathological forms of dissociation, but at times of stress, I still dissociate by trying to satisfy my hunger.

I believe hunger and desire go hand in hand with dissociation. A baby's cries for food and nurturing are repeatedly ignored or perverted, so hunger becomes an antecedent to dissociation. The child comes to understand that her needs are rarely met. She grows up with a sense of isolation and emotional poverty, so later, whenever she feels needs or insecurities, she has no expectation that she or anyone else will be able to soothe her. As an adults she relieves her pain with food, alcohol, drugs or sex.

As a child I was always trying to soothe myself, and I was always hungry. Hungry for food, I hoarded sweets beneath my bed and my body grew. Hungry for attention, I endured criticism from my family and taunts from my peers because my body's appearance didn't conform to societal norms.

Hungry for rescue, I imagined myself a victim saved by handsome men. Hungry for companionship, I pressed my back against my bedroom door to prevent my friends from leaving, while their parents called them home. Hungry for acceptance as a teenager I drank, abused drugs, and gave my body to boys.

Hunger, desire and lack of control twist through my life like tight cords, as does dissociation. I've always felt out of control, and my body has never felt like part of me. It's felt more like an other. Like something I drag somewhere below me. I've never been satisfied with the way my body looks, or appreciated how beautifully it works, nor have I treated it with anything but contempt. I'm strong and healthy, but I've consistently responded to my body with hatred. To heal myself, I need to increase my somatic awareness and counteract my tendency to dissociate when emotions threaten to overwhelm.

Healing dissociation

My intuition tells me that honoring and understanding my body is key. I want to explore my prenatal physical states. I also think trusting a skilled professional to care for my body and emerging from the experience with a sense of safety and well-being is essential to my process.

Body-centered psychotherapist Christine Caldwell recommends, "moving consciously and satisfyingly," with Tai Chi, hiking, biking or dancing, but she says the best activity for overcoming dissociation is play that includes vigorous exertion. "It is in the arms of play behavior that our finest movements may arise, and capacities such as behavioral plasticity, intelligence, creativity and advanced problem solving coalesce" (229). I love the idea of engaging in physical play because early trauma gives birth to old souls. As children, we're so occupied with eluding fear that there isn't time for play, and I've always longed for a life with more play and fun.

Robert Scaer suggests touch-based modalities like acupressure or craniosacral therapy to offset dissociation, as well as carefully induced movement of the body. Since a threatened baby's escape attempts are futile, her only recourse is stilted locomotion. As an adult, moving beyond this contracted bodily state can eliminate fears associated with old patterns by allowing them to be fully evoked.

When I journal, I often find myself writing about being compressed and bound but I never why until a few weeks ago, during a disagreement with my lover. I felt emotionally frustrated, agitated and miserable. I had recently read philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin's book Focusing, which teaches how to focus attention on the body to discover what Gendlin calls a felt sense, or inner knowing. I started observing my body while I was in a high emotional state, and I immediately noticed that my forearms were tingling and almost numb. When I sat down, I felt that my body was tightly contracted. When I tuned in even more, I could barely breathe, and I felt claustrophobic, as if straps were pulled tightly around my belly and chest. I recognized it as a defensive posture adopted as a child. I became almost desperate to counteract the constriction, with an opposing movement to break free. I know now on a visceral level that I need a practice like yoga that will allow my body to stretch, expand and break free.

Scaer also recommends visual art as a way to explore trauma since it bypasses the limitations of verbal communication and taps into preverbal, somatic memory ("Trauma Spectrum" 265-7). As a lifelong artist this is enormously appealing to me. I especially like the idea of working with room-sized canvases and lots of paint so my entire body is reaching, stretching and bending, while releasing emotional and cognitive expression at the same time.

In addition, Scaer recommends self-defense training (268), which allows the body to break free of the freeze response and complete itself in defense, rather than compressing to save itself from annihilation (Epp).

Dusty Miller, Ed.D., a clinical psychologist and author specializing in trauma and addictions, writes, "failure to process the dissociated memory of the traumatic event is the essence of trauma," (98). She advocates gentle trauma reenactment in a group setting, where participants can learn about the nature of trauma and as well as healthy alternatives to dissociation and addiction (99-104). I understand the importance of reprocessing buried trauma memories, and I see this as a useful treatment strategy as long as it includes supervision from a therapist trained in working with trauma victims.

In Carol Gilligan words, "The process of recovery centers on the recovery of voice and, with it, the ability to tell one's story" (182). I am absolutely convinced that the best way to heal ourselves is through the power of our own words through journaling. Journaling allows the quiet voice within to speak and be heard. Dissociation is about muting ourselves, and writing allows us to whisper or to protest or to scream at the top of our lungs, and it's the way out of the vault and into the light of morning.

Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., author and originator of Somatic Experiencing says, "successful healing methods inevitably involve establishing connection to the body" (28). To that end, I've begun turning my awareness into my body by meditating into it to discover its inherent wisdom. The process of body meditation is simple, but it's different for me than traditional meditation, where I'd struggle to empty my mind while furtively peeking at the clock. With body meditation, I lie comfortably, breathe deeply and observe my body's murmurings. I begin at my body's core, and observe the physical and emotional sensations. Soon I'll sense my belly throbbing and burning like lava, and feel energy racing through my hands and feet. I find quiet answers there.

I have contained my emotions for almost 50 years, but when I meditate on my body, my emotions surface easily, because they're clamoring to be heard. There's deep sadness in my body, and I cry easily when I turn my attention inward, but there's also deep stillness there. I am emotion embodied, and my body is wise. It is God embodied. It's the spirituality I've always desired but never felt until now.

Works cited:

American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed (DSM-IV). Washington, DC, APA, 1994.

Caldwell, Christine (2001). "Addiction as somatic dissociation". Heller, Michael (Ed.): The flesh of the soul: The body we work with. Bern: Peter Lang.

Eisen, M.L.; Winograd, G. Individual differences in eyewitness suggestibility. Eisen, M.L., Quas, J.; Goodman, G.S. Memory and Suggestibility in the Forensic Interview (Eds.),Cambridge, MA: Earlbaum.

Epp, Ellie. Email interview. 2 May 2006.

Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. 1st Ed. Ed. New York: Everest House, 1978.

Gilligan, Carol. The Birth of Pleasure. 1st Ed. New York: A.a. Knopf, 2002.

Holmes, E. A., Brown, R. J., Mansell, W., Fearon, R. P., Hunter, E. C. M., Frasquilho, F. & Oakley, D.A. (2005) Are there two qualitatively distinct forms of dissociation? A review and some clinical implications. Clinical Psychology Review, 25 (1), 1-23.

Levine, Peter A. Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body. Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2005.

Liotti, Giovanni. "Trauma, Dissociation, And Disorganized Attachment: Three Strands of a Single Braid." Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 41.4 (2004): 472­486.

MacMartin, C., & Yarmey, A. D. (1999). Rhetoric and the recovered memory debate. Canadian Psychology, 40, 343-358.

Miller, Dusty, and Laurie Guidry. Addictions and Trauma Recovery Healing the Mind, Body, and Spirit. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Scaer, Robert C. The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency. New York: Norton, 2005.

--- "The Neurophysiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease." Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 26 (2001): 73-91. 2 Apr. 2006 <http://www.trauma-pages.com/scaer-2001.htm>.

van der Kolk, BA, Fisler, R. Dissociation and the fragmentary nature of traumatic memories: overview and exploratory study. Journal of Trauma Stress 1995. 505-525.

Wylie, Mary S. "The Limits of Talk; Bessel Van Der Kolk Wants to Transform the Treatment of Trauma." Psychotherapy Networker 28.1 (2004).

Alexandra Hartman, Strong women and their anger

How I'd love to feel light in my body. All bright and lit up inside, moving like a firefly or a bright, small fish. Strong and balanced and breathing from my belly. Delicate and strong.

I used to confuse strength with ANGER!!! Oh god, this is huge. I just remembered that I used to confuse strength ­ strong women and men - with anger. I've always been terrified of my anger! I don't want to become my grandmother. My mean grandmother. Fucking bitch treated me like shit. Embarrassed me in public, and only said nice things when there were people there to hear and she could brag me into having something to do with her.

I knew exactly who she was, because I carried part of her in me. Smart, hard as nails, tough, abrasive, angry, abusive. She was also weak. I could FEEL her softness, shyness, and fear, and I loved that about her. That part of her was me, and I kept my finger on her pulse. Maybe she didn't like that. She refused to speak with my mother ­ really, really want to dissociate.

Placate her, calm her down. Someone shut her up. She's going to ruin everything.

That house was splitting apart from the inside. She pulled a pistol on my grandfather because he wanted to maintain contact with his own daughter, after she brought shame onto our fragile family. Want to cry. But my mother smelled money in that wounded, influential man. One-armed lawyer. Scion of the community, he was, and she must have seemed like a breath of fucking sunshine to that man. My mother was beautiful, light and crazy, but he never bargained for the shit she brought down on him. Want to dissociate.

Okay, should I tell the damn living-with-the-lawyer story, or stay with being afraid of my strength? I'm a strong woman. I could have stayed wimpy and shy but I'm leaving this crumbling shroud. No more living in the tomb. Breathing heavy ­ hard to even think about the bad time.

I had to leave the only home I'd ever known, the only friends I'd ever known, and move to another town, and nobody in my family gave a shit that I was terrified. I felt like I couldn't breathe, couldn't eat, for months feeling like I had to throw up. That's when I realized how insignificant I was to everyone in my life.

Moved to another house, another school. Blue bedroom. My consolation for moving was picking the colors of my walls. Blue. I hate blue now. Blue pool in the backyard. Definite upward move for the family. And then my mother met Gordon.

Oh, that reminds me of the time my mother told me about sleeping with Uncle George, who was married to Aunt Marie. He wasn't really our uncle, just my grandparents' oldest friends, but she said she slept with George. I'll bet I was 15 when she told me that.

She met Gordon, and this guy was old. He sat on the draft board, and not one of his four sons went to Vietnam. He was huge and he had one arm and he was 22 years older than my mother (want to diss). Bad, bad years. My grandmother never liked any of my mother's men, including my father. She abandoned my mother after she married my father, and they weren't speaking when my father was killed and I was born. Bet my grandmother finally forgave her after that.

This is my body. This is where I live. This is where I Alex, live. I am a turtle, and I am protected here in my body. Imprisoned here. If there was a way, I'd totally leave it here. Leave it where? In the care of strangers. Lonely body, nobody loves you. Lonely body, lonely baby body. Lonely baby body.

Where does my mother reside in me? I am curled around and over her, protecting her inside my body. Inside my chest and belly, I'm wrapping myself around her. She's the grit inside the oyster. I'm birthing her as a pearl and no body's birthing me. I'm underground and she is all the world. I'm so tired of protecting her. My father's vapor and fog, drifting around me, sometimes he's in my mouth, but he isn't wrapped around me, and my back is too exposed. I cannot sense the back of my body. I'm numb beneath my turtle shell. My body, buried in the shell. Glossy, hard and black, the river turtle, with blood red somewhere on my body. I'll take the black turtle as my totem instead of the crow.

Lisa Johns (EE and LW) , The classroom

Lisa's graduating project was a novel, Mother-naked. "The classroom" is a section of "The relevant question," a process paper that accompanied her novel.

She is leaning against the blackboard. Her arms are crossed and she is frowning. She is watching us. I am in the back and I do not have to turn my head to look at her. She leans forward and pushes herself off the blackboard. She picks up a piece of chalk. She writes:

"The Need for Feminism."

The letters are block and her handwriting is perfect. She replaces the chalk and turns around. She takes a breath and begins to speak. I open my notebook. It is brand new and I select a new pen as well.

"The institutions by which women have traditionally been controlled - patriarchy, motherhood, economic exploitation, the nuclear family, compulsory heterosexuality - are being strengthened by legislation, religious fiat, media imagery, and efforts at censorship."

I write this down verbatim. I quickly go back before she speaks again and add the punctuation. This is my job this is my job sitting in this desk and writing it all down. I listen and I write. She is speaking again:

"... how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, lovers, community has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise..."

I write this down and I am amazed that I have almost filled a page.

"... the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings ..."

I look at her teaching. She is speaking to a classroom full of girls girls of different ages and different races different backgrounds. She is teaching all of us teaching the ones who come into the classroom as well as having taught the ones who have left.

She is speaking again. She is asking questions questions I think are rhetorical. She is speaking quickly pushing out words and I am trying to write her words down.

"What does a woman need to know?" She looks around the room she gathers our faces before she continues she has a way of doing that drawing you in getting your attention.

"Doesn't she need a knowledge of her own history, of her much-politicized female body, of the creative genius of the women of the past?"

There are rows of us all sitting in front of her near her watching her. Some are constantly writing some talk with her. Some of them I know and some I do not. I am sitting in the back. My friends sit around me. I do not talk much but I listen. Sometimes I daydream. My friends talk all the time.

"Doesn't she need an analysis of her condition, a knowledge of the women thinkers of the past who have reflected on it, a knowledge, too, of women's world-wide individual rebellions and organized movements against economic and social injustice, and how these have been fragmented and silenced?"

I remember coming here. My mother took me here she wanted to listen to see what this was about. I came in with her and we stood by the door. The teacher asked my name and when my mother and I left the class said goodbye to me in unison. The next day my mother signed me up for another classroom but I came here instead. She does not know I am here.

"Doesn't she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power?"

I am writing again writing quickly trying to catch all of her words. She suddenly retreats to the blackboard. She grabs an eraser. She picks up the chalk and in block letters writes:

"What is a lesbian?"

I start a new page in my notebook. I take out my ruler and underline this heading. I poise my pen and I am ready. She is already speaking.

"What are some of the names they have called us?"

The class is alive. Words are thrown back at her words coming from mouths wet with spit words that are epithets insults words hard words full of hate.

"Dyke!" "Pervert!" "Man hater!" "Pussy eater!" "Freak!"

But these words do not touch her. These words do not touch her because they are not said in hate but in response to her question. She smiles and nods. I try to write some of these words down but I cannot get them all.

"And what do we name ourselves?"

Again there are words but beautiful words.

"Lover!" "Mother!" "Daughter!"

She nods once.

"And we have something to say."

The girls are nodding back to her some are already writing again. The teacher looks down at her feet for a few moments. She looks like she is gathering her words making them come to her tongue.

"The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, non heterosexual, women-connected existence in the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the "only ones" ever to have done so."

This must be a beginning. She is revving her words throbbing her words throwing them into the room. She must be beginning an oration no a discussion a sharing. She must be beginning she must be setting up. She is trying to teach us about this trying to tell us this is the most important thing we will ever need to know.

"We begin to grasp breaths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of lesbianism."

I write in my notebook "definitions of lesbianism." I highlight the words in yellow ink. I number some lines underneath. I am expecting the definitions expecting her to order them say them aloud make them simple so that I may memorize them. But she does not give us a list.

"We are all in a lesbian continuum, all of us."

I quickly write "lesbian continuum" unsure of my spelling but she is still speaking.

"I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range -- through each woman's life and through history -- of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had a consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman."

Someone raises her hand a girl I do not know. I watch her face as she asks her question but I do not hear her words. I am distracted. My friends are whispering to each other they are having a conversation. Girls often whisper to one another in class and they often get in trouble. When the teacher catches any of us talking she makes the offenders speak aloud to the whole class. But my friends avoid getting caught they usually avoid whispering they pass notes instead. Long notes each scribbled in a variety of handwriting as they get passed. When they come to me I only read them.

My friends are bright eyed their faces red their conversation is not brief and I worry they will get caught. But they don't. It ends when a note is passed between them. I watch as it is read and before I can object before I can warn that they are being too loud too obvious the note is thrust onto my desk. I cover it with my arms just as the teacher looks up to answer the girl's question.

The note is in Dorothy's handwriting.

"What the books did contribute was a word -- the word Lesbian. When she finally appeared (with her hair sprouting from both her upper lip and her nipples, bloated, fat, and sweaty) I knew her immediately . She wanted women; I wanted my girlfriends. The word was Lesbian. After that, I started looking for it."

I look down at my chest to the place where my breasts have begun growing. I try to picture myself naked try to remember if I have hair on my breasts and I get upset that I cannot remember. I look around the classroom I wonder if I could sneak a glance pull my shirt out and duck my face inside to see but I reject the idea because I am wearing a bra. I vow to myself that I will check the next time I go to the bathroom.

I hear soft giggling and I see Dorothy and Chrystos smirking at each other. The teacher turns her back to write something on the blackboard and as she turns Dorothy holds up a sheet of paper. At the top it says "All the Lesbians I Know" and underneath are names and she has filled the whole sheet. Chrystos collapses her head on her desk in laughter. The teacher turns back around the chalk between her fingers and she stares in our direction but she says nothing. She turns back to the board.

I take the note Dorothy gave me and ball it up. I chuck it at her head. The ball bounces off her and she turns in my direction. She does not say anything. Instead she makes a gesture at me with her fingers and her tongue. Chrystos is now laughing so hard she puts her face in the crook of her elbows.

The teacher erases her notes on the board. She talks to us as she writes something in block lettering"

"Lesbian Relationships."

I turn back a few pages in my notebook to the page where the class gave the teacher beautiful words. I highlight "Mother" "Daughter" and "Lover."

"Can anyone think of examples? Write something about lesbian relationships. I want a discussion I want you to share."

The teacher gives us a few minutes to write a response. She paces the room as she waits. I look around me at the desks clumped close together at the girls occupying them. I watch some of their faces memorizing their movements the way some cock their heads the way some wear their hair watch who smiles secretly at whom.

I look down at my notebook I recite the assignment in my head. Relationships relationships as a way of knowing a lesbian as a way of defining a lesbian. She wants an example she wants our opinion a reaction a response. The response can be anything something we have heard or something we have experienced. I look up as she calls for volunteers.

Lillian is the first to volunteer. She sits closer to the teacher than I do. She always has a few books open on her desk at once and sometimes the books spill over onto the floor. She is older than me and she is the class secretary. She is the detailer of the class's events the recorder of the class's words the biographer of lessons. She writes down what the teacher says word for word. She asks a lot of questions.

"But the truth of the matter was that women who were concerned about their future as independent beings and the future of other females, women who were "woman-identified," women who gave their energy and commitment to women's interests, did love other women. Such a love was weird or evil, however, by male definition. It was women's job to reclaim female same-sex love by redefining it for themselves."

Lillian looks up at the teacher. She asks can she read more share more and the teacher nods. Lillian pulls out of her pile of books another notebook. She must have at least six on her desk. I notice for the first time that there is a pile of notebooks at her feet. She uses this pile as a footrest.

"If women were able to choose a life partner without concerns about economic security a social and political status, might not the institution of marriage be under siege?"

The teacher is clapping. She is exclaiming and she asks that Lillian tear out the pages she has read from and give the pages to her. Lillian tears out the sections first folding the paper and making a crease with her nail and then slowly tearing. She hands the neat sections of her writing to the teacher. The teacher takes the page and pastes it to the blackboard. Lillian looks pleased. She opens a notebook and writes down what just happened.

Someone is asking Lillian a question about her writing and I take the time to reread my notes on Lillian. Lesbian relationships we are talking about lesbian relationships. I look at Lillian's writing. I take out my highlighter. I highlight "same-sex love" and "love other women" and "life partner."

The teacher looks around for another volunteer. She spots Audre. Audre also sits in the front. She is older than me too. Audre nods and fumbles in her notebook for her response. She has already written pages more after finishing the assignment. She scrambles but she finds it.

"I had no idea what making love to another woman meant. I only knew, dimly, it was something I wanted to happen, and something that was different from anything I had ever done before."

Audre puts her head down and continues writing. But the teacher asks her for her work as well. She rips it out and hands the jagged page to the teacher who puts the work next to Lillian's on the blackboard. I resume highlighting Audre's words "making love to another woman."

The teacher looks around again and this time calls on Mary. Mary has not even raised her hand. Mary is sometimes a show-off. She always has something to say. And she stands up next to her desk to read her response. I can tell she is being overly-critical over-thoughtful. But she is precise and she is correct and the teacher walks closer to better hear her.

"Women loving women do not seek to lose our identity, but to express it, dis-cover it, create it. A Spinster/Lesbian can be and often is a deeply loving friend to another woman without being her "lover," but it is impossible to be female-identified lovers without being friends and sisters."

Before being asked for her writing Mary carefully removes the page from her notebook and places it in the teacher's already outstretched hand. Her work is pasted beside Lillian's and Audre's.

There are no more volunteers. I look back at my notes again. I highlight some of Mary's words "identity" and "friends" and "sisters."

I look to Dorothy I look to my friend the one with the long dirty blonde hair. The one that teaches me dirty words the one who scrawls messages onto the bathroom stall doors. She is what my mother would call a misfit one I am not allowed to invite home. She is writing but she looks up. She smiles and she passes me a note. It is a new note the page fresh with only her handwriting. She smiles as our fingers touch and I quickly put the note down before the teacher sees. I do not want to have to read it aloud for the first time before I can even get the chance to savor the fact that I am the first to read this.

"Even now I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then . It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that -- as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much or made love to me so much ."

I cover my smile with my hand. I am dying to know more. Dorothy tries to reach for the note back but I smack her hand away. I ignore her as she pats my arm taps my desk with her nails. I put the note under my notebook. I want to think of a response to her.

I catch the last of the teacher's words:

"... it is the women who make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each other."

She turns again to the blackboard. She writes:

"Personal and Political Writing: We Find Our Voice."

She turns to us her hands clasped in front of her. She smiles slightly and she begins to side step as she talks. She is hypnotic.

"What do I mean by political? What do I mean by personal?"

Mary raises her hand but the teacher shakes her head. She comes closer to our desks and she makes eye contact with each of us. I avert my eyes when she looks at me.

"The personal is political."

She raises her eyebrows a quiet challenge a thoughtful prompt. She repeats it again. She is moving faster now getting into her words her body pushing along with her mouth her feet hitting the ground harder and harder with each step keeping the rhythm a tempo.

"Your personal experience is political. "

I practically rip the binding of my notebook going back to the beginning. I reread the notes I have written about patriarchy about invalidation and I realize that what I am reading is really about silence. What I am reading is really about voicelessness about oppression. I look at the verbs she used the verbs being done to us before feminism before this classroom existed: controlled, censored, crushed, forced, neglected . all of these verbs and I am angry.

"I asked you in the beginning, "What does a woman need to know?" Does she need to know the state of her oppression the state of her voicelessness?"

I sit up straighter her words are crisp and clear. Everyone is sitting at attention.

"How can we move beyond that state? How can we speak out speak aloud our experience?"

"Every one of you has the ability to say something. And you will all say something differently."

She goes to the board raises her hand and touches the responses. She looks at the words for a moment before turning back to us.

I write in the margins of my notes I write and I turn the notebook around and around as I circle these notes adding in my understanding. I think of what I feel and see when I think of political. I think of what I feel and see when I think of personal. I write in the margins:

"The political the outside the public the acts which demonstrate that voice is needed. The personal the inside the experience my experience ."

I look at the teacher and I realize I am breathing hard. My hands are sweaty so I wipe them on my jeans. I look to Dorothy I look to Chrystos I want them to look at me but they do not. They are writing too. I go back to my note I try to finish the thought but I am interrupted.

The teacher is opening her own notebook. She says she wants to share a poem. She reads:

"I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I've been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You've kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carried the feathered grass a long way down

_______the upbreathing air."

The teacher is calling for words calling for a response. I open my notebook to a fresh page and I get ready to transcribe. I feel I want to say something but I do not know what to say. It is an interminable long wait waiting for the others to hurry up and write. I cannot sit still and I can feel redness in my face and my scalp itches. I feel the need for words. I feel others have the words have the right words so I get ready to listen and to write.

There is a girl named Judy. She is quiet and she reads a lot mostly newspapers magazines non-fiction stuff. She sits in the corner and she props her head on one hand and writes as she listens. I watch her as she moves her pen back and forth watch as she glances up once in awhile. I have never heard her speak. She has a girlfriend. I do not know the girl's name but she sits next to Judy and often when Judy reads or writes she is holding this girl's hand.

She is the first to raise her hand. She looks nervous she bites around her nails scratches her head. She moves her butt around in her seat. The teacher quiets us with a finger to her lips as Judy begins to read:

"We," and she looks at her girlfriend, "discovered that women love poetry which is true to our own experience, and art which helps us see ourselves without masks."

She looks up at the teacher her face red her neck red. The girlfriend grimaces and I think Judy squeezed her hand too tightly. The teacher nods and smiles. Judy nods as well. The teacher knows she is not finished.

"She came to me out of the silky midnight mist, her slips rustling like cow thieves, her hair blowing in the wind like Gabriel. Lying in my arms harps played soft in dry firelight"

Dorothy leans out of her desk and slides me another note. She leans so far in an effort to be quick she almost falls over. I take my eyes off Judy to read it.

"I was working ferociously to take my desires, my sexuality, my needs as a woman and a lesbian more seriously. I believed I was making the personal political revolution with my life every moment."

I look at Dorothy. She is facing away from me again. I try to whisper to her to get her attention. I consider waving the note at her but then Judy is speaking.

"in the place where

her breasts come together

two thumbs' width of

channel ride my

eyes to anchor

hands to angle

in the place where

her legs come together

I said 'you smell like the

ocean' and lay down my tongue

beside the dark tooth edge

of sleeping

'swim' she told me and I

did, I did"

Judy is sweating now and red all over but she continues. She still has her girlfriend's hand clasped in hers and when she gets to the end of the page her girlfriend uses her free hand to turn it. Judy looks grateful for this but does not look at her girlfriend.

Chrystos passes me a note and I nab it from her fingers. I am turned on and I look around to see if anyone else notices.

"She tender whiskers dip me in molasses sucking deep

her back I dreamt in afternoon light

comes to me in rainy 3 A.M.

fingers delicate as rainbows in puddles my ass arcs

she takes me then again

lights fading in the dawn our lips cling

swollen when I wake she's left for work

my nipples reach

to where she lay

burying my face in her smell rolling over laughing

when someone asks me how

I feel

I grin Oh

so good still swollen wet my my my

I'm Natalie's puddle"

Judy is still reading it seems her response is endless but the teacher does not mind she is leaning on the wall her arms crossed a state of bliss visible on her face. I want to make the teacher feel like that too. I pull out my notebook I open it to a blank page and I doodle at the top. I am trying to think on my words trying to have Judy's words run in my head over and over so that I may think on mine. I see the corner of Dorothy's note sticking out beneath my book. I pull it out and notice that there is writing on the back too. I turn it over and read:

"'Oh, fuck me. Goddamn it! Fuck me!' I begged. When her fingers opened my cunt and her teeth found my breast, I started to scream . I jerked and pushed against her, wanting to fight wanting to give in, wanting the world to stop and wait while I did it all . Toni climbed over me and put her naked belly against mine, and I began to cry the deepest aching sobs. It felt as if my skin itself were trying to absorb her, soak up the peace and silence inside her. I wanted to stuff myself with her until I was all cotton-battened, dark and still."

Judy continues:

"How they came into the world,

the women-loving-women

came in three by three

and four by four

the women-loving-women

came in ten by ten

and ten by ten again

until there were more

than you could count"

I can feel myself responding feel myself sweating and I look to Dorothy. She is grinning at Judy sucking on her pen biting on the cap pushing it around the side of her mouth. She is grinning and she is listening.

I am staring at Dorothy flicking paper at her trying to get her attention. The paper bits are landing in her hair but mostly at her feet. She is sucking on her pen ignoring me.

Judy is standing now gripping her girlfriend's hand a few inches from her desk. She is clutching her notebook her knuckles white.

"How they lived in the world,

the women-loving-women

learned as much as they were allowed

and walked and wore their clothes

the way they liked

whenever they could. They did whatever

they knew to be happy or free

and worked and worked and worked.

The women-loving-women

in America were called dykes

and some like it

and some did not."

I rip out paper and I start licking it into balls and throwing them at Dorothy making them stick making them plaster themselves to her face her hands her desk. Still she ignores me.

"They made love to each other

the best they knew how

and for the best reasons"

Dorothy is writing now her hair trailing her desk. She is plastered in bits of paper doesn't seem to mind them doesn't seem to know they are all over her.

"you have right, what is right

for the bond between women is returning

we are endlessly within it

and endlessly apart within it.

it is not finished

it will not be finished ."

Judy is done. The teacher is applauding the girls are applauding some are out of their seats roaring and clapping Chrystos among them. Dorothy writes through it. I don't know how she can concentrate. The teacher asks Judy for her work pastes it to the blackboard as the clapping continues. Judy is sweating profusely her underarms wet and she pulls her girlfriend out of her seat and hugs her. I am glued to my desk I cannot move cannot make my hands come together. I stare as the girls applaud and Judy sweats.

The class is still applauding when the teacher holds up her hands and quiets them. She shakes her head and smiles. She touches her hands to her face and I see she is holding a tissue. She wipes her forehead wipes her lips. She takes a bow in Judy's direction and Judy's face gets redder.

I look down at Dorothy's notes look down at my own scribbled writing. The personal is political. The act of loving women is political. I look at Judy's words her wonderful words of "what is right" of the "bond between women" and I am blown away.

The teacher is calling for another response and there are hands waving hands fluttering trying to get picked. The teacher has called on another girl to speak one I think is named Susan. Susan is quiet calculating in her gaze. She walks to the front of the room holding her notebook. She stares at the teacher waiting for the cue to begin.

"These words are written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and sponges, for those of us who speak our own language"

I hold Susan's voice in the back of my head. I am trying to think of something something that I can feel behind all of their words something that I am missing. I look over my own notes the ones sprawled in the margins. I look at the words mother daughter lover that I have highlighted that my eyes keep going back to keep reading.

"We open our mouths. We try to speak. We try to remember."

Susan stops. She looks up at all of us moves her eyes around the room until she catches each of us. She is quiet again. Looks at her notebook. She fingers the paper and then continues.

I finger my own notebook. I gather the pages that I have written on between my fingers compare that with the pages that are still blank. I listen to Susan and I think try to think try to form the words.

I look at the words I have written in the margins. My own words crammed into the margins. I look at the notes next to them my words defined because of these notes. I look at the process the movement from silence to voice. The movement from oppression to freedom. I look at the power that exists the power evident in the words spoken aloud today in the words pasted on the blackboard.

I look at the two notes on my desk words from my friend. She is saying something different but yet she is saying the same thing. I listen to Susan again.

"Her name from her daughter. The named from the unnamed. The spoken from the spoken. The daughter from the mother."

I think of my mother and how she does not know I am here. I think of how she should be here how she should be sitting beside me so we can talk so we can share. I think about how I would not mind that.

There is a tug on my sleeve and a piece of paper slides onto my desk. I have to grab it to keep it from gliding to the floor. The paper is ripped on one edge a rip running through some of the written words.

"I was thinking about Bobby, remembering her sitting, smoking, squint-eyed, and me looking down at the way her thighs shaped in her jeans. I have always loved women in blue jeans, worn jeans, worn particularly in that way that makes the inseam fray, and Bobby's seams had that fine white sheen that only comes after long restless evenings spent jiggling one's thighs one against the other, the other against the bar stool."

Dorothy's words are not a distraction. Her words are fierce and sexual. I am drawn to her words just as I feel drawn to Susan's. I feel hot again. I feel agitated but in a good way. I feel like my pen is light as a feather I feel it quivering. I feel like I need to say something need to write something or I will begin to shake. Dorothy throws something I catch it out of the air without thinking. I open it and read:

"The fiction I make comes out of my life and my beliefs, but it is not autobiography, not even biomythography that Audre Lorde championed. What I have taught myself to do is to craft truth out of story-telling."

I feel this process. I feel the process flowing in my fingers. I feel the need for voice. And I see something I see behind all of these words three women three characters. But they are vague they are outlined but they are not full. I turn my notebook back to the first page. I let Susan's voice fall around me her words fill the air. I imagine the block lettering of the teacher on the blackboard.

I write out each line write it out on a new page.

The Need for Feminism

What is a Lesbian?

Personal and Political Writing: We Find Our Voice

And I imagine myself I imagine my characters I imagine what this process means. I look to Dorothy who is constantly here constantly writing constantly sharing. I feel I am so close. So fucking close and yet I cannot get a grip cannot fully wrap my head around those words the words that I am filled with to bursting.

Chrystos passes me another note and smiles. She does not look long because she and Dorothy are leaning forward in their desks their feet propped on their seats their shoes left on the floor. Their faces are now intent on Susan.

"This room of her wants. Of her desiring. This room of her desiring to live. This place which allows her to exist. Where the women stare into each other's eyes. Where the daughter feels the life of the mother."

My heart is pounding. I look down at this new note I have a collection of them now. I think that is unfair to them that I take and take and never respond back never pass them out with my own words.

"But if I can write a story that so draws the reader in that she imagines herself like my characters, feels their sense of fear and uncertainty, their hopes and terrors, then I have come closer to knowing myself as real, important as the very people I have always watched with awe."

And again there are words the same words I have been trying to catch the same words burning my tongue. And I look to Dorothy and she is not looking. She thinks I have something to say knows I have something to say maybe that is why she is ignoring me. I whisper her name and she waves her hand at me to shush me but I cannot be quiet. I keep reading.

Dorothy writes about a woman named Bertha Harris who says, "Remember what I said about fear and the forbidden? I want you to write about sex, about sex between a mother and a daughter, you with your daughter."

And I feel as if I have come. I feel as if I have died. I reach for my pen and I write and I write and I write and I cannot stop. I write to Susan's words spilling out in what could be darkness because I can no longer see the rest of the room. I write and I fill the pages fill each line and it is wonderful.

"Wrapped up. Not warm enough in my coat I seek out hers. Hers is long down past her knees thick wool with big buttons half the size of my fingers. I tap the coat over her stomach a little below my eye level and she opens her coat to me. I press my face on her chest and she closes the coat. She leaves one button undone for light. Mali finds me by my feet."

These are my words and they are coming out like unstoppable bleeding they are a hemorrhage. I have run out of paper so I pull out Dorothy's note I write over the words in a red pen write right over the words:

"The dutiful girlfriend, coffee in the morning. The coffee she drank with a smile at the first sip and her pinky in the air, the paper read and done and refolded in an hour with a scolding for refusing to be interested in it myself.

She smiles when she and Jane fight. Jane, wearing her t-shirts and jeans and her hair pulled back, after work after her run with the students, after the day in the sun in a march or memorial or after class conversations. She's tired she's hungry she's just not in the mood and all the while Mali smiling."

I look up I rest my hand my wrist I don't want to I have more to say I am seeing these people these women their names are directly in front on me tattooed on my skin carved into my desk. I listen to Susan wiggle my fingers get a better grip on the pen.

"This room of the revelation of all she thought horrible, and of her endlessly demanding body. Of all she shrank from in herself. This room filled with herself. She fell into this room. This room of outcasts. Where we uncover our bodies. Where we meet our outcast selves."

I take my note pass it to Dorothy. She reads it and smiles. She gets a new piece of paper and sends another.

"In the brave new world of lesbian-feminist fiction"

I respond. I share my words again. They come effortlessly. I have them tapped.

"She promises every year that she won't put me in the water. She complains that this year I've grown too big for her to simply pick me up. For years before I beg her to promise and she promises and I make her repeat the promise and check her for crossed fingers or toes and every year she drags me into the ocean drags me through several waves makes me stand in waist water and grins. I make her carry me on her back to the shore and she drags me back fighting the surf and deliberately taking forever to get to the shore and she drops me and covers me with sand.

"This year I make her promise. But I know enough to stay away from her on the beach. And Jane is no better. Mali recruits. I made her promise but I might not go on the beach at all.

She says the salt water is healthy and she's proud she's never been stung by a jellyfish or crawled out of the water when the waves get really rough. She will stay in the water no matter the color of the clouds or the retreating tide. She wants me to have a record like hers with the water.

I tell her if she breaks her promise I'll bury her in the sand.

She smiles and I know she has broken it but I can't figure out how."

I quickly pass it on and she writes back just as quickly:

"knowing I have not yet exhausted all I need to learn from them, that what I am engaged in is nothing less than my own explication of what it means to be a lesbian, the kind of lesbian I am, in this time and place."

And there it is there is the idea that has been shirking my tongue shirking my pen. All of their words all of them everyone that has shared they are all personal they are all giving of themselves. And they are speaking about their experience their love their inspirations. And they are speaking from a place that is a lesbian place a place of pure lesbian existence. And that place that place supports real relationships real authentic relationships full of voice and passion. And there that is the idea that is the idea and definition of political. That place of voice that experience that lends voice that is the political.

And I can't sit back in my seat. I am leaning forward pressing myself into the desk pushing my face my eyes as close to the notebook as possible. I can't exchange anymore. I am writing too quickly to stop. I have to keep writing I don't know what would happen if I decided to stop. Susan is done the others are done and the teacher is busy pasting their work to the blackboard. If I hurry I may make the next response.

Lisa Johns, Technical notes

Also from "The relevant question".

I can be pissed. I can be pissed all day. All I see are fists flying and open hands coming towards my face. I see their faces across the room and they are staring. I don't care for what they are saying so I ignore them. I can't sit still because I am so pissed. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I take it with me. I take it downstairs. I yell at my sisters. I yell at my mother. I do not eat. I do not want to stay in the room with anyone. And no matter where I look those faces look back. I wish I could scream at them think of new words and just scream. But I lose my voice. I repeat the scene I remember the words I yelled and I change them. I remember what they said back and I change those too. I think of where we were when we said them and I change that. I yell and yell and ignore everything else. Eventually I find the right words. I write it down but I cannot say more.

I never intended Mother-Naked or any other story I wrote to have an end. I gave each story a basic plot and then focused on the climactic scenes. I loved the emotive quality of these stories and I would change stories to fit my mood. I loved how the climax could propel me into a different state. If the scene was angry I became angry and I would stay angry. I would be pissed off all day long upset for no reason at family or friends. I would write other angry things. And this mood would last until I changed stories. If the mood in the story were peace or joy or sadness or whatever that is the mood I would retain. I would suck the story inside of myself and this would enable me to write.

But there is a downside to this that I did not realize until this point. I never intended to finish anything. I was so preoccupied with the mood of the story that I never visualized getting past that place. The stories were not stories but fantasies where I could engage in a limited way not a deep way. I had no real sense of the characters or where they were going. I could not frame the story. I couldn't even take the title seriously. The whole story was a fantasy meant to entertain me and no one else. And this did not change no matter the story. As a result I wrote little and fantasized a lot.

I did not have a writing practice. I had fantasy. I wanted to be a writer but I did not write anything for more than a month. I concentrated used the story milked it dry and then moved on. I eventually came back to the idea but only after other writing ideas were exhausted. I was a vulture who made the story happen without ever participating in it. I was a user instead of a giver and as a result the story gave me nothing. I was a vampire and I bled it to death. I think with Mother-Naked in particular it meant nothing. I was curious and approached it that way. I got mesmerized by a few scenes and that was where it stayed. I did not try to think of a connection.

Without a writing practice and without a writing connection I could not have written this story from beginning to end anyway. With mood writing I was prevented from traveling emotively from happy to angry. If I started with happy I would get bored and if I started with angry I could never calm down long enough to shift. So either way this story seemed doomed to remain a fantasy.

From this perspective it seems hopeless to want to remain a writer. However it is my job now in evaluating and writing about my own writing process to include any information that may have contributed to how and why I write. And though this mood writing practice was futile for actually finishing stories it did serve to amplify my own ability to log in to the emotional content of a story. I would log in so thoroughly that I would produce bodily reactions. I would sweat; I would be turned on; I could increase my heart rate; I could sustain a mood for weeks. And even though I didn't write and in fact enjoyed logging in to a story I knew later how to hold an emotive quality and for how long.

*

I change the faces I imagine too. I cannot keep working with the same faces. They get tiring. They lose their voice. They no longer add anything to the conversation. The faces start to fade until I see a new one. Suddenly the conversation is heated again. An argument ensues. I fight I cry I work on my articulation. The faces are fresh. Their words fresh. Their words sting and bite. I get a high off those words and it is sustaining. When theaces fade when the faces get tiring new faces come to take their place.

Visualization is my favorite part of the writing process. It started when I would see a show or movie and add new characters. I would pretend the characters were in front of me and I would talk to them. And sometimes I would write down the conversations. And eventually I decided the characters were boring and would create new names for them with other stories. They would make up my fantasies. When I thought of other stories they would play those characters as well.

With Mother-Naked all of the characters except Ren have these visual people, or what I call muses. And with this story there have been many per character. Since I originally created stories from other stories that I saw on television or film naturally I liked using actresses as the muses instead of people I actually know.

The muses are so critical because I see what I write before I write it. I need to see sometimes quite a lot. If I don't have a muse a character doesn't seem real to me. They become like shadows or like conversations I hear through a wall. But with faces they are present and I can interact with them. And I can use Ren to move with them speak with them and act with them.

The muses literally act out the character. I am assigning them a role and they use it. Each one has exposed something different about the character to me. It is like a change in perspective every time I change a muse. It is like a layer. It is as if each muse represents an emotion or one characteristic that helps me to see the big picture. I could not have written this with only one muse or with none. All of them have helped me to shape the characters.

The muses offer a listening technique that I use. Imagine your relationship with a close relative, like a sibling or parent. You have known this person a long time know their moods their changes in voice their habits their personality. It has taken years to read or listen to this person and you may have gotten good at it. Imagine taking that intimate knowledge of that person and applying it to a character. By the same token, it would take years. In your personal relationship you can rely on observation, hearing, touch, etc to understand your relationship. So all I do is take that same principle of actually being near a person and apply it to writing. I am near ­ mentally ­ don't have dashes butted up against the previous word. to a character. I can see them hear them observe them and through this create a character. Although you cannot change the physical appearance of the person you know changing the physical appearance of my character helps me know them faster.

I am not taking any part of the real physical person, namely the actress, but I am portraying the character in a certain way. I can visualize every scene in the story. I can listen to the scene and it tells me something. What I hear I write. The first few words or sometimes lines of each section are the actual words I hear.

I have counted up the number of muses I have used writing this story. For both Mali and Jane I have used eight and for Ronnie I have used two. Sometimes I try out one muse for another character and I feel it out to see if it fits. I have only counted the ones that have fit. There have been many others but I am not sure I could count them all. Sometimes the period of time a muse lasts is astounding. For an example, the majority of writing on Mali has been done with only two muses. Other times I listen and I think and I get very little.

Visualization is also important to establish place. I do not just require a face but also a background. I need to know the dimensions of the family home for example. I need to know where the bedrooms are how far to the stairs where the couches go. I need to see an environment for the characters to move in and interact.

Over the course of this story and after reviewing all my journals and current process notes I realized that the visual technique I practice has affected my writing in another important way. Not only do I rely on visualization to create a scene but I actually used it to shift to another way of writing. Before I used only dialogue. These characters still had a muse but there was no action. I used to detest all the other words used in a story that weren't dialogue. I called it filling or shit. When I wrote a dialogue I didn't even write out the characters' names but expected the reader to figure it out. It was confusing.

Basically writing only the dialogue was not saying anything about these characters. I was deliberately making them shallow so I would not have to know them. And how could I take this type of writing into the lesbian feminist discussion? How can I know these lesbians if I am not willing to write about them?

Since writing Mother-Naked in relation to academic reading, I am more interested in the non-dialogue. I was interested in the relationships themselves not just the words. I wanted the characters' relationships to demonstrate their authenticity and intimacy without having to rely on words. I wanted these characters to know each other in a way that transcends verbal articulation. When I visualize now there are no words. I am not saying that words stand in the way. I am saying that I no longer depend on words that I can actually depict these characters with limited dialogue.

* * *

The music the music the music. All I want is the music. I search for music I listen for the right notes the right words the right crescendo. I play the music and it isn't enough. I listen to the music over and over the song on repeat and the batteries dying. I drag over the boombox and adjust the volume fit in the headphones lie on the edge of the bed to listen. I listen and listen and the song plays over and over on repeat. I memorize the song memorize the mood memorize memorize memorize. I can pick up the song anywhere and know how much more is left. I wear down tapes wear down CDs I wear down the headphones. I listen and change songs and I listen again.

Each song holds something and I can build it. I can build and build and it is like a volcano inside me. I hold the song in my head and I carry it around. I do not sing it I do not mouth along with the words. I cannot let it out or the feeling goes away. I cannot share it I cannot play it aloud. I can only hear it with headphones and no one else can know it or they will ruin it. I save it all day save it save the listening for night. At night I can go to sleep from the song's rhythm from the rhythm of playing it over and over and I dream it. I dream them. And in the morning they are more real.

When I think of a scene the first thing I do is look for a song to match. I set the scene to the music and I replay the song. I do not get sick of the song; instead the opposite occurs. I can actually increase the mood of the scene and the mood builds on each repeat. I have listened to certain songs over a hundred times. In fact, the music was part of the problem with the fantasy writing. The music played such a huge role that I was reluctant to actually write the scene because I enjoyed listening to it so much.

Two things happened in my writing with the inclusion and use of music. First, the writing actually becomes timed. I think of a scene. I call this a scene because really it is a moment to me just a moment that passes quickly. I find the right song. And then the scene becomes matched or set to the music. When the song repeats so does the scene. The scene actually plays out like the song with the most dramatic moment in the scene occurring at the same time as the most dramatic moment in the song. If I stop feeling something in a repeat I change something in the scene. In adjusting I see more and I feel more and I continue. I can change a location I can change a muse I can change a specific detail about the exchange between characters. All of these affect the mood.

The writing also reflects this timing. The music is fast and so is the writing. I do not like to use a lot of punctuation in the writing because it detracts from the speed of it the way it feels. I don't feel anything slow even in the most dramatic of moments. Even in the most poignant and important scenes for me there is speed. So it is written quickly and most of the time I have to decipher my own handwriting because I am writing faster than I can keep up with.

The second thing is listening which I mentioned very briefly when I discussed visualization. Listening is engaging. Listening is interacting with the characters through their body language. When I use music I call this thinking. Thinking is visualizing the scene with the music and listening is what I pull out. The music sets a kind of tone and the characters match this tone. Their body language, the way they move and hold themselves, matches the music. If the music is slow and sad, then the characters reflect this tone and I usually visualize a scene that matches this tone. I do the same thing with fast and upbeat music.

When there is music when the song is on repeat I lose my thoughts I lose all sense except for the scene. When this happens words form, like a prompt. Sometimes there is only a phrase sometimes a whole sentence. I immediately if I can take these words and start to write. I know the music is wrong if I am thinking and listening and nothing happens.

* * *

Writing is an obsession. It is intense. It is free flowing. It comes and it goes and when it comes it is good. And when it does not come I feel pulled apart I feel its need and I barely can wait until I write again. It is an obsession. I stalk it. I watch it. I search for its next movement. I hibernate until it comes. I listen. I train my ears and my heart for its words for its breath. I hold my own in anticipation. I live for it.

Sometimes it has been necessary to wait to write something. I would listen to hear what I needed and before these semesters at Goddard that meant that I lost the idea. I was completely unable to sustain any mood or words. I would have to carry around a notebook to jot them down. But the problem really wasn't the sustainability of a thought but rather the infrequency. For all the thinking and listening I did with Mother-Naked I reverted again and again to a fantasy. I loved thinking about it a little too much and I would ignore what I heard. I needed to stop doing this.

I started paying attention. I started forcing myself to write. And in being consistent I started getting somewhere. I kept the story constantly flowing. I changed and rearranged. If I didn't hear anything within the first half hour of a thought or idea or scene then I did something to it. If I wasn't writing a sentence for one day then something needed to be fixed. The biggest change I could make was the muse. That single change could affect the entire visualization. And that visualization changed the mood and the music and forced everything about what I was writing to morph.

These changes actually became my focus. I focused through change. If I had an idea I would work on it until I heard something until it was written. Until I could see it in front of me it didn't exist and it wasn't right. Through change I could focus on a particular scene until it was written. When I transcribed it from handwriting to computer I could pick it back up again and write on it more. In comparison with how I used to write before Goddard waiting months sometimes for a single line that old process seems ridiculous. Within a matter of a semester I had the bulk of my writing completed and the story was well on its way.

Another function of focusing allowed for a deeper engagement with the story. I realized that the problem of not being able to sustain focus meant that I was disengaged. Previous to Goddard, none of my own experience went into the story if I could help it. All of the scenes were fabricated and the result was this distance. I didn't feel connected to the characters. I couldn't interact with them the way I wanted to. I felt like they were writing me.

These constant changes this constant attention to detail interaction movement visualization all of this contributed to my being a part of the story. I felt drawn to certain ideas like personal stories from my own experience. I paid attention to this drawing. I thought about it. I played it out. I used the characters to take part in these personal stories. Suddenly pieces fit. The personal stories fit. I felt as if the personal stories happened only for the sake of this story. By including myself I felt more focused and more driven. I was engaged to these characters they were more real.

I am trying to find the right words to articulate exact;u how this worked. I am thinking about my characters every day. Every day I am engaging in a writing practice to allow this to happen. I am creating their backgrounds, their memories, their experiences. I am trying to imagine them as a family, how they move, how they talk to each other. As I am doing this, I sometimes start to associate certain scenes of the story with myself. I do not think of my childhood or my family and decide to use my experience or my memory. Instead, as I am developing the characters' experience and memory, I get distracted and think on a personal story. You start this para in present tense so shd continue in it.

For example, I was thinking about Mali and Ren and the ocean. I wanted to see them on a vacation of sorts, someplace outside their home environment. I loved the idea of the beach, of water. I was thinking about Mali and how she loves the water, how Ren enjoys pools but not the ocean. I was thinking of how they would interact together in that scene and a memory popped up with my Dad. When I was about six years old we were in Florida and he was treading water in a pool. I was always afraid of my Dad but I got enough courage to go ask him how deep the water was because I had not yet learned to tread and I was fascinated he could do it. I also had not remembered everseeing him swim before. He told me the water was 100 feet deep, a complete lie. I decided to use the personal story, although I did change it around.

I did not think my own stories were irrelevant; but I felt like my own stories did not hold the same weight standing alone. Through all the ideas I had for Mother-Naked, suddenly I felt like my own experiences were essential. I felt like Mother-Naked could translate these personal stories into something more.

* * *

I feel it I feel it and it is feeling fast it is moving. I do not have time to think it just comes on and there it is and it needs to be put down. These faces look at me and I know they have something to say. And instead of saying they show me. Instead of wasting breath they move. They exchange. They create. They act. And it is all I can do to keep up.

The music inspires this speed. But because I went through a shift from dialogue to action I feel like writing long paragraphs and pages of words and minute details is not important. This sentence isn't clear because the underlined reads as one phrase all of which is the object of "I feel like writing". I definitely connect to the speed that I feel when I think of these characters. As a result of connecting to that I feel that writing just what I feel is more effective. The story is in sections. Because that is what I feel when I think about it. That is the meat right there and it is wasteful to try to add more.

I write by hand first. I have a notebook and I use only one side of the page and I draw a lot of lines between scenes. I cross out a lot because sometimes I do force it despite my better intentions not to. And when I hear those opening words it just pours out. At one point writing Mali I felt like I was bleeding. It didn't hurt but it wouldn't clot. And there was no way I was going to try to clot it anyway.

I have to also say sometimes I want more out of a scene. Sometimes I want to just keep going. But it doesn't work that way. Some of the sections are really short as short as one line. And that is it. I can't force it farther. It's like that sums the moment up. Why keep talking about it? And sometimes despite myself I find myself going back and thinking about a scene again. Some of them are written in two different ways because I heard something different. And then I have to think about which way is better. I confess if I let myself I would keep doing that. Or maybe this is just my way of telling myself there is something missing and to keep trying.

The only time I feel like it is okay to embellish or add or whatever is when I am transferring the writing to the computer. Then something else happens I just pick it back up like I was writing it earlier. I can just take on the idea and I stop looking at the written scene and I write. Most of the time something longer and different comes out on the computer. And it is nothing like what I originally wrote or thought. And sometimes this messed with my head because when I went back to arrange it and I used my notebook for reference I didn't recognize some of the writing.

An issue in writing this piece was applying this idea to older material. There was some writing prior to Goddard that I loved and with this newer sectional style this faster style the old writing did not mesh well. So I would have to rethink it rewrite it and then add to it. All of the older material that I wanted to use was saved on the computer already. So I would find the corresponding handwritten passage somewhere in my journals and then rewrite it again on the computer and it would change. What didn't change I threw out.

 

Susan Moul (JS), convection / further notes on the body as a spiritual vehicle

Two series of quotations in the piece below form a sort of helixed armature to the reflection on personal experience. Both are in italics. One series is left-justified; these are quotations from Chogyam Trungpa. The other, indented, quotes Gabrielle Roth. SM

 

 

- the purpose of meditation is not to get higher, but to be present, here -

 

 

the methodology is simple/ feet that lead and a body that follows/

dancing with gabrielle roth is a study in thermodynamics / the room

shimmers brilliant jazz temperatures

 

cool

hot

 

three musicians / drums and electronics/ beats begin and the air hums

there's a permeability breathing my skin/ in the thickness of my tongue/

beats themselves as waves of structure find and marry my body

temperature/ ride into my blood chemistry traveling my nerves and the

porosity/ of my bones / joints even the hollow centers in my white hair/

entered

 

beats like spirit guides that accompany us three days journey through

the steel string sutras of roth's reeds and water voice/ begin

 

For many of us, the body is a feared enemy whose instincts impulses,

hungers are to be conquered, tamed, trained for service, beaten into submission.

 

 

one hundred people walking / first moderate speed lots of politely self

conscious bumping / circle random and bisect the room asynchronous

reverse return go/ again / go the instructions are in your feet let go

let go of the idea of my space or your space let go of

where let go of going

 

our bodies get locked into patterns

 

we struggle to feel this to feel feet to feel not possessive stop

struggling she tells us just let go just let go

 

the speed increases

 

the room is four walls full/ ceiling floor and no sight line across the

space in any direction

 

and yet

around my body there is space around every/ body and

 

within every body the space between the cells of skin and blood the

molecular galaxies the quantum spaciousness the breezes of neurons the

skipping of ions the play of protons the

 

deeper we go the more space we find

and this space is continuous touching breath on breath from far away in

the courtyards of royal bone outward through densities of energy and

flesh to the refracting surfaces of light in which our bodies move

 

dancing/ we do this exercise a number of times before settling into it

for a long hypnotic stretch in which it happens/ letting go

 

letting go

 

thinking [I / could let go if everyone would/ relax if I didn't have to watch you for/ if she would just/ stop if everybody] thinking

 

I discovered that when I dance I bypass my personality. It can't keep up.

 

changes vaporizes reveals

 

You drop searching for anything altogether, drop trying to discover

anything, trying to prove yourself.

 

 

a body continuous with the spaces of the room and everywhere is space a

body that sails and swoops on the energy of the bodies passing mine

 

the speed increases

 

blur colors limbs forms delight / fearlessness intoxicates I laugh and

hear my voice in laughter darkly reverberating

 

[later I wonder what is there in fearlessness and the intoxication of

fearlessness that opens this darkwood timbre sound of myself/ someone-me

seasonless and timeless laughs that way]

 

[You are yourself at the beginning of any beginning. You could almost call it "unoriginated trust in yourself.]

 

what I notice is/ that

 

once I escape the patrolled border the contested territory of social me/

ego me/ no I'm really trying me I/ find

 

my feet are flawless in their knowing/ yes my body follows roth

instructing the weight of our bodies upward even as our feet remain

primordially intelligent finding paths finding patterns and syncopations

and hiccups of empty space for our bodies the spaces themselves organic

propagating from the fluidity

 

If we eliminate the filter of "I" and "other" then the whole space

becomes sharp, and precise and intelligent.

 

 

quickened I release/ let go of planning and become happening/ there is

suddenly nowhere to be going no ambition/ how to say it/ there is

nothing more attractive than the moment and it/ the moment of now and

here/ the moment is hugely deeply you could say erotically you could

say/ eternally attractive / the moment and then the moment and then

 

what happens is that I don't need anyone to do anything that's / just

gone the need the attachment I actually feel myself disentangled from

the frustration of it as though slipping through unbuttoned clothing

being lifted over my head/ free of it there's no dialogue about why I've

been caught up no story about how I've struggled to stop identifying

with it's just/ gone and gratitude rather than being an appeasing

reaction

 

lives me simply for a moment that one pulse when a bird's wings unfold

the moment before reach

 

up and out a feeling all its own before flight and/ flight

its natural fulfillment

 

One could experience tremendous joy in the first flash of openness,

which is quite beautiful. But what comes afterwards is important:

whether one is working to grasp and recreate that experience or whether

one is letting be, allowing that experience to be just one experience,

not attempting to recreate the first flash.

 

unencumbered unrestrained deeply of my self somethingshifted/ along an

ancient fault line of internal external my rhythm a manifestation of

community rhythm I'm self structuring self assembling it's pure

potential and my ideas about me about how I have to take shape dissolve

instead of

 

disappearing I'm/ really here responding I'm/ almost entirely response/

around me the kinetic loose muscle of shared breath responsiveness to

responsiveness/ to convection and condensation and the energy in the

room that begins to intensify as person after person releases I'm

 

physical present completely and swimming toward rapids lazying into

eddies tasting swooping gliding and though the same rhythms carry all

one hundred and more bodies the energy of each is different in density

 

density

 

that's what we have not definiteness but density and the density is

elastic and when I extend out into it it correctly assesses the rush and

push and flow and spaciousness of the other densities in the room as if

every person were current in a stream which all of us are

 

The whole idea is to let "this" not be there, and "I" will not be there.

Or else, "I" is not there, therefore "this" is not there. It is not a

matter of telling yourself, but of feeling it, a real experience. You

must take away the watcher, the observer of the two extremes. Once the

watcher is removed, then the whole structure falls apart. The dichotomy

remains in existence only so long as there is an observer to keep the

whole picture together.

 

the dance she says / you don't need to be a dancer give up being a

dancer be the dance

 

And the bodies spoke to me, I saw stories in the flesh, the untold tales

of dead arms just hanging there, of pelvises locked in "Park," of

clenched fists and locked jaws, physiques molded into attitudes of "I'm

not good enough" or "Get out of my way." Chests sunken in shame,

shoulders riding high, voices edgy with anger or constricted with fear.

 

many of the dancers cannot give up being dancers no matter how she

croons or importunes groans growls at them/ hungry fish they feed and

feed and fall fat they never reach the threshold exceed the self and

spill out of the yolk of that definition/ they remain for the weekend

trace and artifact like pillars in the empty room and energy eddies up

around them the kayakers and flowers and stick boats and leaf pods and

bird flights of the group surge around them morphing and softening and

the dancers never come free but we do

 

including me/ I do

~

 

surrender

 

self deception means trying to re-create a past experience again and

again, instead of actually having the experience in the present moment.

In order to have the experience now one would have to give to the

evaluation how wonderful the flash was, because it is this memory which

keeps it distant. If we had the experience continuously it would seem

quite ordinary, and it is this ordinariness that we cannot accept. "If

only I could have that wonderful experience of openness again!" So we

keep ourselves busy not having it, remembering it. That is self

deception's game.

 

 

The body never lies.

 

 

five rhythms five/ embodied states

 

flowing is first/ is centered in the feet

 

You become a continuum of movement, creating an infinity of circular

shapes, as you move up and down, breathing deeply in and out, rising and

sinking like a heavy sun.

 

after the walking exercise I'm/ all here alert quivering still a bit

self conscious but willing to believe I can let that go/ that something

will happen/ differently I'll happen differently we

 

come close and watch roth demonstrate then we move we/ go in successive

waves across the room trying it out she sends us/ into each other to try

it out

 

a kind of confidence begins in me/ all physical I/ get elemental and I'm

excited because I have had feelings like this before I am going

someplace familiar going/ as my selfbody/     body     self     that

I seem to forget about forget / the existence of during the day to day

states of submission of dissociation of sleep walking

 

we are moving and there is something hopeful because we are not

cooperating now we've let go of that doing enough/ of us have begun to

get out so that the gate is open and we all begin flowing through

 

think of upslope / down slope weather events the effect of sun exciting

the air how it moves and changes the forms of moisture over the

convecting land think/ of tornadoes and water spouts of thunderstorms

and the way that snow/ falls on one side of the mountain but not the

other / depending

 

There are not sharp edges to your movements, only curves, endless

circles of motion, each gesture evolving into the next.

 

earth water air fire how/ they combine and move each other and that we

are this that we are elemental/ this

 

is embodiment/ how this

yes how embodiment

is the holy spirit

 

 

Stretching, undulating, feeling the weight of each movement in space,

you're inventing your own tai chi. You feel your feet firmly on the

floor and the circular movement of your legs, your arms and your hands

describe an evolving continuum. You're centered in your belly and all

the movement begins and returns there: rising in the inhale, exaggerated

and prolonged, and sinking and contracting on the exhale. Now follow

your feet -

 

 

the practice has been as whole group/ hive mind or as self-in-community

repeatedly finding our "own thing" then letting go/ resuming in concert

crossing again and again an increasingly diaphanous threshold and in

the crossing learning our bodies as a felt self sense that grows clearer

as we cease to require the form the definition the existence of it as/

we cease to enforce

 

Although we may hate ourselves, at the same time we find our self hatred

a kind of occupation If we begin to give up our self criticism, then we

may feel that we are losing our occupation, as though someone were

taking away our job. We would have no further occupation if we were to

surrender everything; there would be nothing to hold on to.

 

and then at her beckoning dyads arise and dissolve

changing the angle of light on that threshold going back to work on it

we begin/ we

 

partner and re partner and re partner / roth calls out the names of

limbs joints elbows feet hips bellies hands shoulders

 

attention she tells us is what we want what we need and in the end all

we have to give in truth attention is what is desired most of us from

others luxurious/ does she call it that/ she is moving her elbow in

swirls before us as she speaks and her elbow believes so strongly in our

gaze that none of us can look anywhere else this/ is what we give and

ask for next

 

focus/ on the moving hips of the other she says give/ those hips and

that other all of your attention you/ don't have to do what they are

doing/ do your own thing or riff play jam copy lead follow everything is

ok the only rule is to be your whole body and to give all of your

attention to the other person

 

"Surrender" means opening oneself completely, trying to get beyond

fascination and expectation.

 

 

the second rhythm is staccato

 

and though we are instructed to/ stay in our feet this rhythm/ lives in

the hips roth/ tells us the hips are the mother of the heart and that

the heart is father energy that the father/ is the child's first friend

 

Your arms and legs become percussive instruments torso twisting sharply,

arms flashing, feet pounding, one with your pulse, living on air,

exhaling into one movement, and breathing life into the next. Your

body's jerking, jabbing, jamming, falling into patterns and repeating

them over and over till they die and a new pattern is born.

 

father is the first person who helps us distinguish ourselves as

separate from mother when/ I consider this a sigh lives out of me into

my limbs the motions of the staccato rhythm are short and percussive as

roth describes them having definite beginnings and endings I/ realize

that my version of this percussiveness is tight and angry I feel in the

motions the potential for something else for getting things done in the

world for

 

specific movement discreet from the general the communal yet capable

versatile in being essentially of and essential to the entire group's

rhythm a/ great sadness comes up in me welling sharply a lack or a fear

of lack or a fearfulness or a frustration or an occlusion or something

convolved and forced inward that now wants unworking

 

We surrender because we would like to communicate with the world "as it

is."

 

release is in the pleasure that grips my entire musculature as my

movements become convulsive repeating and repeating / a faint sense of

the multiple contraction of orgasm pervades the yank and thrust of

patterns of my elbow swinging up and out in spasmodic time to my hip

dislocating to one side strongly enough to send me nearly out of balance

until my whole body lifts and sinks drawn into participation the/ motion

smoothes out and then gets cranking

 

You're moving in lines and angles, no longer in circles, and your moves

are percussive, short; they've got edges, and your breath releases in

burst of sound. As in every other rhythm, if you ground your awareness

in your feet, the waves will flow through your whole body and you'll

become more and more aware of all the parts of your body as they're

swept into the beat.

 

bouncing high up against the rhythm of the drumbeats finding a

syncopation that takes me deeper and deeper until the need for that

motion dissipates from my body a new repetitive motion rising up

rebalancing or dipping deeper into the syncopation I'm moving without

thought without design and the satisfaction is intense the field of my

body begins to hum as though every network is up all the circuits are

up just as we break out of the staccato rhythm and whirl into chaos

 

 

 

the rhythms change the movements change

 

chaos is the third rhythm

 

You dance over the edge-

 

we stay in one place we move on we partner and break partner and break

the room is hot we are peeling clothes we are mindless I

 

am mindless

 

You're swept up in some primal rite, falling deeper and deeper into

yourself, an intuitive stream of essential movements. Your body is

gyrating, limp as a ragdoll, spine undulating, head loose, hands flying,

feet locked in the beat. You're electric, turned on, plugged into

something huge, something bigger than yourself. You are vibrantly alive.

 

hours pass elbow circles elbow pulls away from ignores flirts with needs

seeks passes drops break re partner another elbow two feet moving bodies

attentive to elbows in motion when it isn't elbows it's

 

bellies/ it's heads or moving behind or moving around / it's hips it's

facing into it's standing next to/ it's feet it's whole arms or legs

 

Chaos is rooted in flowing and staccato rhythms but revs them up beyond

control. Jerks, spins, releases, taking every movement over the edge,

yet totally grounded in your feet. Your carried away, surrendering to

the surging of the music. Letting the brain and the controlling mind go,

and letting the body loose ­ no blocks, no inhibitions, no doubts, just

pure animal gyrations.

 

 

sex becomes so palpable in the room that we grin at first and then fall

into passions attitudes are born grow up and fall away new partner new

partner I

 

want the next belly I want the next head the next set of hips we dance

some times we circle each other break says roth switch and we turn to

the next closest body without any care of shape boy girl seeking tasting

the salt of each rhythm lived differently our bodies sucking at each

other sliding past bringing breezes stoking fires finding play finding

desires liberating ourselves again and again from one layer of self

governance and then the next and the next / eyes roll and I do too I

 

am liberated I dance I am ready as soon as she calls us again I drag

at my water bottle greedily but I don't want us to stop don't need rest/

how can I put into words that hours and days have passed in motion each/

time I tire I roll into the energy of friends of another desire another

playmate another partner/ there

 

is a natural curiosity now an arousal / have this fleeting thought of

bathhouse sex its anonymity its raw and momentary passion vulnerability /

the open collarbones of trees expansive to the sky the tongues of

lilies held out pollen crusted/ call and response sexual play / display

and none of it postured the fluidity of the room its own thing its own

organic entity

 

which I personally begin to feel thickly in my blood with the oxygen

exchanged at every cell I am enticed I am available I am freely given I

am open receptive

 

responsive

 

One could experience tremendous joy in the first flash of openness,

which is quite beautiful. But what comes afterwards s important: whether

one is working to grasp and recreate that experience or whether one is

letting be, allowing that experience to be just one experience, not

attempting to recreate the first flash.

 

every time we break and re partner my eyes caress the eyes of the

departing joy slipping pulses / the next energy soul kissing dance /

move differently energy changed and changing I / am interested I'm

connected/ every subtle variation every/ virtuosity of being

 

together tired we lust and stretch our bodies slick with sweat sticky

all over with salt and the blood between regains its freedom as though

the tiredness were symptomatic of something like a toxin burnt through

and discarded and as we detect this/ as we find out that we/ will be

renewed again and again we seek out the tired spaces in ourselves and

flush them the room getting clearer and clearer as though with smoke

offerings as though with incense the air shinier shimmering with the

heat that burns off this poison we become pure

 

the walls are wet

 

~

satya

 

The rhythms don't only exist in the dance; they infuse every aspect of

our lives.

 

roth never mentions her age but she intimates it often/ reminding us she

has been teaching or dancing for fifty years I/ like her best in the

places she becomes verbally inarticulate when her body moves/ as it does

without any hesitation/ at the slightest provocation a/ flame leaping to

life on the fuel of her desire to express/ ideas

 

her words seem disarmingly limited that/ sense of genius as being an

overdevelopment in one area that robs rudimentary social skills of the

use which gains their casualness she / revels in her dominating beauty/

her sinewy form is wraith like yet anything but frail she tumbles/ knees

across shoulders at the drop of a hat like a teenager like a break

dancer like a skateboarder rolling/ right back to her feet in blues

chord licks of movements the/ instinctive and the practiced lost each in

each/ and more familiar to her than finding words

 

her striking cheekbones rise straight up the unassailable cliffs of her

somewhere deep amusement her/ face of the century / black eyes the

blacker for the new york layers of eyeliner and mascara a visage the kin

of nevelson and vreeland patty smith and chyssie hinde

 

Your body is the ground metaphor of your life... your Bible, your

encyclopedia.

 

to be in her presence is to know intimately and keenly an energy that

has passed from the common dream of our culture is/ to be reminded of

questioning authority and saving the planet and sit ins and happenings

and to realize the physical and embodied nature of that dream as the

characteristic plainly missing from contemporary life the

 

world of blogs and text messaging web surfing and cell phones no longer

has the inspiration of bodies that held out against police lines bodies

that took bullets bodies that shut down administrations bodies that

challenged sexual repression bodies that lived questions did art and got

naked and for that trembling moment shook off the hegemony of paranoia

and mediocrity

 

roth's humor penetrates without hooks or barbs she rasps / narratives on

the promiscuity of breath how/ if we refuse to breathe our breath it

will find someone else to breathe/ breath she explains is pubescent in

its sexuality breath/ wants to do everybody in the room

 

her fables are irreverent and blunt she / tells of tripping over a

corpse in a california park at the age of four the experience seems to

have formed her life she learned/ dead people don't move/ that's as

basic as it gets she says/ dead people don't move

 

it's the foundation of her philosophy

 

The first creative task is to free the body to experience the power

of being

 

 

 

~

presence

 

the fourth rhythm/ lyrical is centered in the hands but not only the

palm and five fingers of hand but / the body sense of hand as touch into

the world as movement/ of hand being in the world/ the freedom and

articulation of self that the hands express

 

Your body shifts into the trance-like state of the lyrical rhythm ­

grounded but soaring. There is a lightness of being in your feet, a

sense of being airborne in your dance. Your body sweeps in graceful loops

like a bird in the wind, bouncing, darting, dipping, diving..

 

partnering slowly gives way as we dance the community is deeply familiar

the energies mingled combined permuted

 

where you let go of letting go.

 

a day of body moving through seven hours of dance at one point well over

an hour without leaving off even to take instruction or water

 

one hundred people

 

at some point an outside door is opened for half a minute and our bodies

are revealed as great clouds of steam I feel/ a literal awe

 

what is ecstasy

 

in lyrical movement our bodies exceed the limits of faith the ends of

belief the experience of experiencing motion/ evolves because nothing

stops it that first exercise of walking now the basic tenet of self

knowledge the room a steady pulsation of natural breath that has not

know the spectrum of judgment that ranges from inhibition to uninhibited

it/ is a free breath born in a free body a/ free land

 

You do not have to regard the watcher as a villain. Once you begin to

understand that the purpose of meditation is not to get higher, but to

be present here, then the watcher is not efficient enough to perform

that function, and it automatically falls away.

 

 

the fifth rhythm is stillness / a rhythm whose living is in the breath

 

calling you into spaces between the beats, between your bones, between

your moves. Your body shifts through many shapes, sometimes holding

them, feeling their vibration, sometimes letting them go. Your attention

is drawn to your inner dance, where everything is alive, awake, aware.

 

 

what I learned was if I wanted to hang on to my story I could and no one

would stop me or want to stop me unless they were also hanging on to a

story and then our energies would tangle up somehow we'd collide we

could get fluid we couldn't find the space we made with our own

movements but only the increasingly sharp edges of the stiffness the

rigidity of the form/ I

 

found that I could go on insisting on this thing or that about myself it

was not difficult to maintain the sense of being clumsy if I wanted that

or the memory of violence if I couldn't bear to be without it

 

that somehow in struggling these issues I'd increased their strength I'd

insisted on them / by wanting to stretch them and make some room for

myself by finding ways to engage or improve the situation I had

inadvertently or perhaps/ it occurred to me then/ deliberately/ made

them stronger resilient to change all weather wear that

 

made my weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and neuroses color the experiences

so that I came to see that solidity as the world and to see that as

myself and that I lived in the concave convex flux between this

diaphragmic self world boundary/ an

 

utterly nonexistent boundary that I created with my own body that I

lived as a body and re inscribed with every movement

 

when the possibility existed every single moment of letting it go

 

The breath is strong the vitality intense. The time is now, the place

here. Every gesture is total, measured, your body full of breath, your l

ook direct.

 

a gasp an intake of air a freshening to life and a dance that sloughed

off the accumulation of habit and

 

if I did these things/ danced for three days with total strangers

stripping and stripping and letting go of stripping/ if I did this and

did not accept that it could change everything then why was I doing it/

if I

 

did this practice this dance these rhythms this re patterning of every

wave of my own energy and did not allow the reality within which I

experienced them to acknowledge the character of their pervasive reality

the truth then I could simply go home afterward and have had a good

time/ something out of which to make a memory

 

we

 

eventually slow I/ find my self moving through broad and gently tapering

circles of sacrum knees hands and shoulders rolling bones and gluts

across the floor the relationship of hip to arm returning me at angles

to standing the understanding of limbs and back muscles folding me again

to the floor and after awhile each time I'm on the floor I find I stay a

bit longer/ we

 

are all on the floor there is a long period of meditation and

integration

 

coalescence arises/ writes patanjali in the yoga sutras/ and the body and the infinite universe are revealed as indivisible

 

 

He'd asked his father on his deathbed, "What was the most important thing in your life, the Torah?" And the old man had answered, "My body." "I was stunned," his son now told me. He stared past me in awkward silence and finally said, "I always thought my body was just a vehicle for my mind; feed it clothe it, send it to Harvard."

 

-

Trungpa, Chogyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1973.

Roth, Gabrielle. Maps to Ecstasy. Novato, CA: New World Library, 1998.

 

Angela Mullins (EE), Part one: the awakening

There are some experiences that transcend explanation and yet it seems important to communicate them. What follows is my best attempt to share one such experience.

In the early fall of 2003 I entered into a period of darkness. In outward appearance, my life had finally come together. I had just returned from touring the south of France as principal flutist in an orchestra. I was freelancing full-time, teaching and performing. I was financially stable, creatively fulfilled, my home was a nurturing place, and my friends were supportive. My life and career seemed enviable in many ways, and that made it hard for me to freely express the intense sadness that filled me. When my sorrow became nearly unbearable, I contacted my best friend, Michael, who was on a concert tour in the Middle East.

Dear Michael,

I've been trying to discover the source of these extreme mood swings I've been having lately. In the last few weeks, I keep feeling myself being pulled into this horrible dark sadness. Last week while driving in my car I kept bursting into tears for no apparent reason. I often wake up in the morning and I am so overcome with sadness that I can hardly move. I have been trying to take apart my life to figure out what could be causing this crisis.

Dear Angela,

That "horrible, dark sadness" is something every sensitive being should feel at one time or another. This is a realm of suffering. There is constant change. You will die; everyone and everything you know will pass. feel into it .

I followed Michael's advice. I did "feel into it" and after a few days the sadness began to subside. The feeling that emerged next was violence. There were moments when I felt the desire to let go of the wheel of my car. I wanted to crash, to lie down in the street, to feel some kind of shocking impact that would destroy me.

The feeling of violence gradually faded just as the sadness had. I could feel something else beginning to emerge, but I didn't understand exactly what it was. I felt suspended in every way, until one Sunday night in September.

The energy of the entire day seemed different. In the evening I chose to walk along a street I had never walked before. I found a single red chestnut on the sidewalk, though there was no chestnut tree nearby. I carried it with me on my walk, and the whole time I could feel its presence. Even though I wanted to bring it home with me, I could sense its desire to leave me, and this feeling intensified as I walked. I finally made my way to the river. I stared at it. I knew I had to throw this little chestnut into the water, and I considered its path. On one side, the flow was stopped completely, all stagnant; in the center, the water flowed freely, unobstructed by any stones; and on the far side were many rocks and obstacles that could tear the chestnut apart. I decided that I should send the chestnut down the center of the river into free-flowing water, and I tossed it up in an arc toward that section of the river. It hit a large rock and bounced very high, landing in the middle of the rocky flow. I felt shocked. I even felt like crying. What have I done, I've sent this little chestnut along a path that it may not survive. And then I felt like laughing to think I had any control over the destiny of this little seed.

At that moment, something changed. The light of the evening began to fade. It was very cool, and I felt like I, too, was caught in the river, following its ever-changing flow. I walked home, buzzing with this strange little symbolic scene.

At home, I couldn't concentrate. I wandered into my bedroom and cleared the clutter from my meditation cushions. I had never once sat there to meditate since I moved into the house, but that night I followed my intuition to sit and allow everything to unfold.

At first a million things swirled around in my head. Eventually I began to see images, faces of friends and other people from my life with their eyes closed, expressionless. At first the images came very slowly, and then flowingly, and then in very rapid succession. Suddenly I felt like I had driven off a cliff, and instead of falling I was afloat in darkness. I became aware of my body as a single, synchronized being, much more than a sum of parts. Then the energy flowed evenly through my entire body all at once: vibration. As the experience continued, I couldn't feel the form of my body at all, only energy. It felt round and light. Sometimes my head felt detached and full like it would burst. There was sudden hot and cold, and an extended period of a forward, churning energy that started from the base of my spine and built up. It was strange and very powerful. The energy stirred for a while, and finally rushed up my body in a jolt, and I felt deep grief. Tears streamed down my face.

The energy began again as before. It came in waves at first, then it became a continuous circle, and then it was a constant presence, saturating every bit of my being. Something within me shifted and I began to feel a circle of energy forming on the top of my head. The sensation was the most incredible, present, perpetual blissfulness, and a smile began to spread across my face. This smile was unlike any other I had ever experienced. It wasn't in reaction to anything, but just there in the whole of me.

I have no idea how long I sat in meditation that night, but eventually the experience came to a natural conclusion, and I went to bed.

The next morning when I woke, the entire world was glowing, and the blissful smile was still within me. I felt so full of everything that I could hardly maneuver my body. I saw more clearly, I felt everything more deeply, and I was quivering with energy. I felt alive and attuned to every cell. The quality of the morning light was so golden that I could actually feel it. It wasn't at all abstract, but touchable, tangible. I felt very strange in relation to the ground, the bathroom sink, and the computer. Everything seemed both too close and too far away. My body could hardly contain me. I had never felt greater joy and happiness.

In the months that followed, my experience intensified. I became aware of the subtle energies in my body and all around me. I meditated daily and experienced euphoric states of bliss that filled my being with greater pleasure than I had ever imagined possible. Some days would bring uncontrollable laughter or weeping. Sometimes my energy would expand and I would lose all awareness of my physical body. I began to feel energy pouring down through my head, warm and dense like honey.

After a few months of these amazing experiences, I began to feel the energy gathering in my head. During meditation, the pressure would build and it felt as if my face was being contorted and stretched. Initially, the feeling was merely strange, but the sensations of pressure became more and more intense. It felt as if my skull was being expanded from the inside out, and though it was reminiscent of a headache, I couldn't locate any 'headache' in my body.

This feeling became constant, and whenever I would enter into a passive state of attention, as in watching a movie or driving, the pressure would intensify. On several occasions the experience became so overwhelming that I began to panic. During these panic attacks, I felt as if my skull would crack open. Sometimes I would hyperventilate, sometimes I felt like I was floating out of my body, and sometimes I would feel as if I were going to faint. I began to intuitively understand that my body was undergoing a transformation to accommodate these powerful energies. As the energies stabilized, I experienced blissful peace and love, and I began to receive great insight and personal revelations during meditation. During one such meditation, I realized that the time had come to walk El Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

 

Gwen Stanley (EE), Paper moon

The first section of Gwen's graphic novel is serialized online here.

 

Laura Taylor (EE), Resilience, emotion, experience

So here's the thing I'm figuring out about resilience. I think the real reason I'm resilient is not so much because I have resilient traits or skills. I think the truth of the matter is that I spend a TON of time, my whole life, working on and figuring out how I really feel about things, sensing them, knowing them. I pay attention and I work at it. When I'm in a difficult situation, I am especially attentive to getting at the root of what's going on, how I feel about it, and what's important to me. My decisions and actions are based on this full sense and knowing. When I move on from the situation, I've done so having processed it quite fully already and I generally finish up whatever loose ends remain.

I think this process, by its nature, fuels development of the traits generally associated with concepts of resilience. I think they are a natural outcome of this other self-investigative process. What I see in my behavior in these situations, and in this tendency for seeking understanding, is what I am coming to think of as emotional intelligence. This is what I think has really been behind my success dealing well with difficult situations. It looks very much like resilience.

*

Not only were my own ideas about resilience called into question, but my self-investigative practice was questioned by others. I wanted, and needed, to sit right in the middle of what I was feeling in order to know it, in order to move on, my way of moving through. other people wanted me to move on, move out of where I was, get on with my life.

*

I think the fact of the matter is that I didn't fail, nor did the process that's at the heart of my resilience fail. That process continued to guide me to the proper places and in the proper directions to find my way back to balance. Where I got way-laid was where I tried to side-step and take short-cuts, where I got lazy and where I got tired. It's been a really slow, long, complicated process, but one I have come back to complete.

That, for me, is the ultimate meaning of resilience, rather than a resilience that is defined by being unchanged. Had I tried to remain unaffected by what I was experiencing I would have had to dissociate completely from what I knew was happening to me (the embodied me).

*

There is no room in the typical concept of resilience for trauma, because trauma implies disruption embedded in the very structure of being, and resilience implies limited disruption. What I want with this concept of sustainable self is a concept of strength and success that includes the ability to recognize, embrace, navigate, weather, and move through disruption and change. I want those changes to be acknowledged as natural states, even if they are disruptive. And I want people to understand how to respect and foster the restorative process. I want people to feel what they feel, know what they know, and understand something about how to use that to find their way.

*

I really liked this statement: " ... the body itself is the most sensitive and accurate instrument we have. Its read-out is our feelings and our sense of reality; and what it perceives thus by the unconscious senses is no mere subjective fantasy".

*

I think this concept of emotional intelligence laid against a background and understanding of emotion as described by Damasio and Pert (I'm thinking of this as embodied emotion. I'm not sure that's the right wording but I think it's the right direction) is where I'm heading in my thoughts about how to answer the question of how emotion can be understood and used intentionally and attentively in life experience.

I'm really excited about this idea. I've been rolling it around, mixing it with the topics I've been studying, looking for applications in my own experience, trying it out in the context of personal experience, work experience, social experience, and it all seems to fit. Or rather, I haven't found anything that doesn't fit or doesn't feel right with what I've been trying to get at as a core concept. I'm excited and energized to start sorting through this and making more specific connections and applications.

*

For me personally, these books prompted me to really think about the key role emotion has played in my experiences, not simply as an emotional response to a situation but as the actual experience. Emotion also becomes who I am physically, who I am as Self, how I experience the world, and how I chose to respond to my experience.

As I take these thoughts backwards and through my experiences, how I know myself, and who I am, these ideas have a ring of truth to them. The idea of explaining my experience through the lens of emotion . I'm trying to get at something here and I'm not sure what it is.

In the realm of emotion I could explain how I did it, how I managed, how I experienced it, what it was like. It is through emotion I know the things I love, the things that move me, the things that scare me, empathy, anger, love, joy, sadness, numbness, sensuality, and on and on into eternity.

I have called this experience. I am an experiential person. I want the experience of being alive, the taste of things, the feel of things, the sense of things, the doing of things. When that's not present life is dull to me. All this is emotion based. There's a twist here in that I recognize the emotion in what I call experience. But the evolution of my idea of what emotion means and is based on, changes the application of its meaning. There's also a connotation that to be based in emotion is bad or not good, while using the word experience implies something more acceptable. Interesting, but not surprising.

So in a sense, I feel freed to wander into this redefined world of emotion as the basis for who I am, what I am sorting through personally, and how I experience the world. I am left with the question of what do I do with this new information? Kind of a then what? How do I take this and apply it? How do I use emotion intentionally and attentively in my life? That might be a good way to put it. I began to think what I might be headed towards was a theory based in emotion.

 

Laura Taylor (EE), Naming her

As all good hostesses are supposed to do, let me introduce you to her as I met her. She is a part of me - an inner sense I discovered and connected with during a body awareness workshop. She and I have developed a relationship in the months since then. This story is about how she came to have a name. I like the story because it really is about how she named herself, how she appeared to me so vividly in order to do so, and how perfect a name she chose. Until her name is revealed, I will simply call her She or Her, since to tell her name now would jump entirely to the end of the story.

Let me start with the place I discovered Her. I attended a workshop in which we focused attention to the inside of our bodies. When I did this, I was drawn to a spot 3 inches in from my left hip towards my belly. This didn't surprise me as I'd been ignoring sporadic pains in that spot for a few months. I was ignoring them because they reminded me I had health problems, but they weren't bad enough to make me do anything about them. It was really being sick I wanted to ignore. As I brought my focus to that spot, I sensed the shadow of a shadow ducking behind something to hide, going deeper into my body. It was Her, but She wasn't a Her or a person then. She was a movement, an energy, small, living there in that part of my body.

The sense of hiding was strong and immediate. This small energy was hiding from my attention. I felt like a parent realizing I had unintentionally hurt, not been there for, or not provided emotional support to, my child.

I spent the rest of the exercise coaxing and soothing, welcoming this young scared energy back to my side. Over the next few days, when the pain appeared, I sent reassuring energy and attention to it. The pain settled, and mostly went away. I stayed with a reminder to honor the young scared part of my being that also deals with the illness I have. As I began to think of this energy as part of myself, it became a She.

This was our relationship for the next 8 months or so, little swaps of attention-grabbing through physical signs in that same spot, for a little nurturing TLC. It was good to be reminded, from time to time, to stop and handle gently the fragile part of my self. I began to picture Her and me as a cartoon I had of Pooh and Piglet. The image is of Pooh and Piglet walking away, hand in hand: "Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh!' he whispered. 'Yes, Piglet?' 'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'" I tried to honor this part of me, make more room for Her, walk Her back from the scary ledges she sometimes stood at alone because I didn't want to look and she didn't know how to not look.

Our relationship developed into small conversations, mostly about fear and reassurance, that were short on words, mine, and big on feelings, Hers and mine. She took on the definite character of a young girl, a child still, of undetermined age. She was still small and associated with that small area in my body. Still more of an energy than a personification, so I never expected her to say much. Our interaction was more sensed, my thoughts connecting with the feelings her presence elicited when I listened.

Then I began to give voices to different parts of myself when I wrote in my journal, as a practice of re-connecting with feelings I was dissociating. Some of these voices seemed as if they should have names and I began to casually think about what names might fit which voices. This was where my mind meandered one night as I drove home. It was this night I considered She should have a name.

I rolled around ideas for names in my head trying each one against what I knew of her nature. Lily - yes that would be good - a sturdy flower, but a flower still. I liked this metaphor of strength and delicacy combined. I felt more than heard a "Hmmph" sent through the nasal passage. My attention drawn to the commentary, I saw that what had been a sense of energy had materialized into the image of a girl who'd made this disproving noise, and I knew her immediately.

The vision was black and white like a photo. She sat, arms crossed in front of her in a huff, bare legs, face squished in a disagreeing scowl, youthfully thin, short pixie haircut, turned away and not looking at me as if She wasn't listening, but She was. The strong connection with a photo, the haircut, and the air that emanated from her, helped me pinpoint the source of Her image and Her age.

At first, I thought the visual image was a combination of my 4th grade school picture and an elementary school picture of my son in the same kind of serious, but not serious, scowling huffy pose. One of the huffs you know could turn into laughing at any point. Later, as I read the description of Her to my mother, before I even came to my own association with a photo, she told me there was a photo of me about this age, with exactly this look and stance, coming in the door to our sun porch. As she talked about it, I remembered it too. So She is 8 or 9 years old, which feels right.

"I like Lily," I said. "You don't like Lily? Are you sure? Lilies are so beautiful. It sounds nice and it feels good on my tongue when I say it. I think it fits you." Another "Hmmph." conveyed that it did not and my comments could be the stupidest thing She'd ever heard. Hands tucked deeper into crossed arms, elbows raised higher, adding to the sense of huff. Her head tilted a little more into its cocked position adding to the air of waiting for something worth acknowledging.

I came up with other names, nice ones, I thought, none of which elicited even a glance in my direction. Tapping fingers timed my efforts while raised eyebrows and rolling eyes indicated the dullard nature of the names I conjured up for Her.

"Ok, Meg," I said. "I was saving Meg for a story character or a secret name if I ever had to run away and take on a new identity. But you can use that name. At least I'll actually get to use it." I sensed movement, and thought I'd finally hit pay dirt.

Drawing back from my mental "what to name the baby" state, I brought my attention back to Her. The movement was Her, alright. The skulking, still child was engrossed in an imaginary sword fight, with a good sized stalk of green and red rhubarb for her sword! "Rhubarb?" I asked, in slight disbelief, knowing she was showing me something. "You want your name to be Rhubarb?" She sparred earnestly, moving in a way that was both childlike and graceful.

I puzzled at this choice of name. I had a relationship with rhubarb. As a child, I had a summer ritual of eating sticks of raw rhubarb licked and dipped into sugar. The combined taste of sour and sweet made it delicious. Adults and children shook their heads at my delight in this ritual. Rhubarb and sugar were to me what Sour Patch Kids candy is to kids today. Recently I tried to eat a piece of raw rhubarb and couldn't do it. I guess my adult taste buds have lost that superhero quality of my youth.

"Rhubarb." I said it a few times. Was I getting the right message? "Rhubarb Rhubarb," I repeated, trying to get the feel of the word as a name. If that was what she wanted to be called, that was fine with me. But I sensed there was more to this rhubarb mystery.

I watched Her. I knew while it looked like she was using the rhubarb as a sword, she really was using the rhubarb itself as Her weapon. We often as children used whatever plants or sticks were available to us to complement our play at overcoming imagined enemies of all sorts. That She would use rhubarb in this way seemed natural to me. There was a calm of assured action, that to my adult eyes could only end in victory. To Her though, I didn't sense it was about winning or losing. It was just what it was.

"How are you going to slay a dragon with a piece of rhubarb?" I asked. "Seemed like the thing to do at the time," She said with the casual confidence of someone who was entirely comfortable in Her own skin, exactly where She was, with whatever She had available to Her, and simply attending to Her task at hand. Struck by the elegance of this little girl's ability to slay the dragon and fight the enemy with a piece of rhubarb, I laughed.

My pretended defenses and the fears that She and I shared so intimately fell away for a moment. Here in this little girl was my defender, a champion. Here, while I thought I had been comforting Her, I saw that she had been comforting me. Here, laid before me, was a way to connect with what I did not want to feel. Here was a child's wisdom of acknowledging what was, good or bad, without judging, and moving through it simply as part of what was. Rhubarb for her name, suddenly made all the sense in the world to me.

I wrapped my sense of Her in the name to see how they fit together. I tried some variations, really because I always wanted a nickname myself and never had one, to see how they felt, and see how She reacted to them. Did I have it right? She continued to spar. These slight changes made no difference to her. But the energy between us had changed some, strengthened some. She, in her own right, was reclaiming her presence, her space, her capability, and her confidence.

When I came to Rhu, as a nickname for Rhubarb, it resonated for me. Adding the next letter in Rhubarb as an initial - Rhu B. seemed perfect: a little closer to Rhubarb; reminiscent of Roo in Winnie the Pooh - not Piglet, but close; sounding like Ruby if pronounced without a pause between Rhu and B. (which seemed to us both to also fit Her). "Yes, all that was ok" I sensed from her. I was delighted. She was satisfied. Rhu B. had her name.

Rhu B., Rhu, Rhubarb, Ruby all these names I call Her now. Mostly, I call her Rhu B., because She said she liked the initial B. since it was the same as my middle initial. My middle initial B. stands for my maiden name, Byrne, which seems an especially appropriate connection between us. She said she liked being the same as me that way. I liked being the same as her too.

 

Laura Taylor (EE), Messages from my soul

About time you asked

Where have you been?

I thought you forgot me.

You are special - did you forget?

I remember when you were small.

I held you when you cried.

I kept watch while you were in pain.

I covered you when you were cold.

I made you broth when you could not eat.

I heard what you did not say.

I held you when you had things you could not speak.

I watched when you couldn't look.

I went when you couldn't go.

Didn't you hear me calling you?

I love you.

I know you love me.

I did come and save you.

I did come and save you.

I will be there the next time and the next and the next.

I felt what you could not feel.

I thought what you displaced.

I went to the road and walked when you were too tired.

I read what you read, knew what you knew.

I love you. I LOVED YOU THEN TOO.

I am not the same without you.

I made you a popcorn garland.

I remember what you like in your coffee.

I hushed you to sleep when you had bad dreams.

I sent you lots of messages in your dreams. You ignored a lot of them.

I made you grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.

I got lost one day at the market. I had to pay a boy fifty cents to take me to the gate where we were supposed to meet.

I went to the doctor's with you. It's cold there.

I know what's in your heart even when you think it is lost.

I know you love, how deeply you love, how much you love.

I know the sadness you know in the world.

I know the sadness you know in your heart.

I know what you mean by vulnerable and needy. You're not.

I know you're imperfect and I love you still.

I love to hear you sing in the morning, those silly old songs.

I love to watch you reading

I love to lie with you in the sun.