DANCEMEDITATION

I lay belly down on the deck of my cabin, rolling my thighs on warming wood, smelling the day. I watched a small brown bird hop from blade to blade in the grass. All of sudden my breath opened deep. I felt my body melt into the wood, and my back absorb the blue sky peeling away the fog cover. All the days spent witness dancing in workshop in recent years, where I learned to watch people without ‘leaving my body’, suddenly clicked in. I’ve worked diligently over time to stay in my body and see, stay connected to my breath and see. This morning it blossomed naturally,  unbidden and un-labored. I was seeing, breathing, feeling my body.

In the past, I’ve so often seen through a haze of my preoccupations. I’ve been afraid of letting time pass, of letting it slow, of letting it stop, sit beside me, and open the tight little packet in my chest.

Today the bees still toddled from dandelion to dandelion, but there were the front edges of autumn — choke cherries veined with burnt red, the sun leaning down at angle, and the first migrating ‘v’ of birds. Time so full. My body filling with it all.

She stopped by one evening last winter after boxing at Gold’s, for a cheery chat. She told me all about her beloved rescue dog, a pitbull. I must meet her new guy. She’d finally managed the NYC magic combo for happiness — good body, good apartment, good dog, good man. She’d searched for it for years.

She had been taking SSRI’s for more than a decade. I could hardly remember what she’d been like when the weather of her unmediated personality dipped into the subtle space between us. I knew she felt better, but her drug regimen blunted my senses. I realized I could never bridge that subtle gap, because her quiet tentacles, mangled by Prozac, couldn’t clasp mine. Being with her was almost as bad, or worse in some ways, than internet socializing. There she was, sitting in the room with me, but our subterranean connection was all cotton candy — looks big but disappears in a lick.

Yes, she felt better, but obviously not all of the time because she ‘took her own life’, as the phrase goes. She took it where?

For me, real life exists mostly in raw person. In that rich, sticky sauce of immediate flesh; the smells, sounds, tastes, touches, looks, invisibilities, inscrutibilities. I wonder when, exactly, she really left…

by DDMcPherson (excerpt from new novel)

She let her breath sink oily and heavy into the bottom of her pelvis, then drew it up, hand-over-hand, along the center of her body. It made its quiet way into her head. where it spread, tickling the inside of her skull. Her breath touched its tendrils gingerly along this membrane, fine veiny lines of sensation, filaments or root hairs.

Her breath seeped out, drained down her neck and throat as if drinking itself. It whoosed down the tube of middle-ness, down, down and down into a deeper, dimmer space, behind the stomach, behind the fat, slick ropes and globs of guts, the underbrush of organs, those shades. She swam through snaky reeds, following her exhale that was emptier than common everyday breaths. It reached into a basement of itself. Empty. Beyond the urge to suck in.

She lay fallow. Hollow, dry. Then, not wanting to keep on endlessly breathing, she roused from stillness anyway. She lifted the gate a tad, let air ease in, like a secret, like an Unknown. It drew her embers from beneath ashes, took the tiny heat curled in her tailbone, tugged, tugged, as if digging up a resisting root, and swelled with sudden freedom upward, the warmth billowing on a rise of air.
Up the center, up and up the column, up into the winged lungs that fluttered, happy about breath returning sweetened with dark earth and volcanic fire,  thick with organ murmur. Breath scattered into alveoli like puppies running on the heath. The chest, from front to back, shouted, “Hello!”, a trumpet of sensation echoing from rim to rim. Finally came a fluting through the throat. Fine notes, swollen with oxygen.

This was a true breath, a felt breath, not a mechanism, but a poem, not survival, but a flourishing. Breath delights in this castle, she knew, in the ornaments, the halls of splendor, the trick wall in the library that opens to a dark back corridor. She followed that story, the spiraling stone stairs. We were breathing there together last night, laughing, trembling, turned in on ourselves. It was an uncountable place, unspeakable. I was lost for a long time. I loved it. I’ll love it again.

Tags: breathing