Spaces

I find myself sidelined once again, once again having pulled a muscle. This time I tore it where it attaches to the bone, but it didn't tear all the way through like I did to my hamstring. Two weeks projected recovery time.

I wonder what it is that makes me so inclined towards the pulling and straining of muscles.

So with these things in mind, I'd like to take this post to hop onto a track parallel to my dance training. In dancing, in studying dance, my body has changed from what moves me around to an unending internal space, rife with potential and mysteries to be plied with infinite patience and calm. Joints, instead of points where things bend, are open, extendable, pliable. The spine is long, strong, and capable of unbelievable spirals, not a mere stack of vertebrae that supports us when we stand upright. And the feet, and the shoulder blades, and the lungs, and the abdominals... all different types of spaces in the body, where before there was no life, movement, or awareness and that now extend and grow, like widening, detailing, and arching the ceilings of an internal palace structured to our own imaginative specifications, vaunted or tortuous or minimalistic as we like. And always mutable.

The more I live in these spaces, the more they are populated with sensations of the mundane. Anxiety lives beneath my jaw, triumph in the lumbar spine, anger along the front of my thighs, and so on and so forth in networks of deepening complexity. I stumble across these connections while dancing, while walking, or in the meditation of stretching, and really they are so astonishingly clear, so brazenly and intuitively comprehensible that there is no question in my mind that they are trustworthy. Beyond trustworthy, really--they are the closest things to self-knowledge I'm ever come across. Like instead of passively perceiving then channeling sensation to the mind, the body manifests the kinesthetic information spontaneously, exactly as a whim or a thought, and this body knowledge has a part in governing our behavior and our state equal to the directives of the mind. And I'm reminded then that the brain is really just another organ, subject to the stresses and movements and homeostatic rigors of the entirety of the body. I'm thinking of a hard-earned, experientially constructed mind-body unity, as opposed to a New Age (in the perjorative sense) one. It took dancing to break down the mind/body dichotomy for me, in a way that I can live and that makes personal sense. And it feels like the responsibility of existing is spread out somehow, or maybe that I have a more comprehensive set of tools and sensitivities to locate and enact myself.

And so I came across the space of immediacy, or ecstasy, or desire, or hunger, or whatever that sensation of fullness is that no one seems to be able to name and that lives on the line between bliss and desperation. It washed over me relentlessly as I walked over the bridge to school, while visions of the future and of fantasy ran through my head and I was glutted on opportunity, imagined or otherwise, reeling from the force of all the experiences of all the possibilities of things to come. For me, strangely enough, it was directly over the left hip joint, kind of like my lower left gut all the way back through to my kidney. Out of habit, I approached it as a physical space: how it can be relaxed, how stretched, how made tight with strength, or with a malleable force. Its effect on the surrounding regions of the body; its effect on the entire body. I tried to let it have it's space, like when you stretch and damn it hurts like hell, but you relax into it so that this feeling blocks out anything else you could possibly focus on, and after the hurting part you're left with something warm and emanating, the ghost of the pain that promises consolation in the form of pounding blood and physical satisfaction.

And I try to extract resolve, and motivation. From the feeling that is bliss and desperation or the muscle, blood, and organs in my lower left gut.