Returning Home to Our Bodies
Your bones are in a relationship with gravity, in large part because your bones are filled with blood and lymph, which is to say, your bones are filled with fluid, similar but different to the way trees are filled with sap.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
At its most basic, this is awe-inducing; I find it much easier to pull myself back to awe, even in the midst of a gray winter, when I look around at all these leafless trees and remember they are mirroring the shape of my own dendrites and neurons.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
So much of safety is feeling like we have things outside of us that validate us or mirror us, what are things around you that can do the same ?
Using our poetic license, we can call that space another ecotone, naming it a place of vibrancy, a place where growth that is impossible elsewhere can easily thrive and flourish.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
What growth has occurred since you were forced to slow down that would have been impossible had you not done so
Slowing down is not an excuse for inaction, but must always be a precursor to action. If we don’t slow down, our actions will originate from the cultural paradigm we claim to be resisting.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
I think ableism makes us think that if we move more slowly, or allow those around us to move more slowly, that nothing will get done, but we rest to give us a wider capacity.
The Great Basin bristlecone pine’s unhurried growth saved it from the greed of industry. Such a dense wood that grows in such a harsh landscape in such twisted shapes doesn’t lend itself to commerce.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
Feels like a metaphor for chronic illlness and disability
this too is a practice of somatics, a practice of being present in the rich web of relationships, including the more-than-human relationships, that hold me.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
What’s different about viewing doing these tasks not as something for you but building relationships with the trees?
notice this tree I have seen without seeing so many countless times.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
What have you seen without seeing? How can you have time imyour day where you are intentionally seeing something, taking in whay it looks like sounds like smells like tastes like
It isn’t enough to keep our focus on the singular human body, on our own breath and our own relaxation. All life is possible through relationships, the ecotone of self and other, cells within the self, an individual within the whole.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
Any of these will help me widen my experience of this present moment and find my way home to my body.
Abigail Rose Clarke • Returning Home to Our Bodies
What do we do when widening the experience is not a good goal? I was going to say that many sick people would likely have a bad experience with widening their experience to include more input. This is hard for sick people because the body is so loud ~ it’s using every possible avenue to overload the senses to bring attention to something it believes is most important and often it is (I believe, though trauma specialists may disagree bc if the psychologizimg of these illnesses}. Perhaps it’s not so much an intent of widening but being able to go into a different room where you might still hear what’s going on in the room you were in but it’s dulled, you’re saying “i hear you and I’m here with you but I need to take some space” I do feel the idea that one is TAKING space is inaccurate for this, it’s you saying to your body that it deserves more room to exist and using your time and attention you now have the ability to give it more space. More space for processing sensory stimuli.