Semipermeable Midwinter Update
Card: The Hanged Man Reversed
Guidance: “Nothing that is real shows up completely” -Bayo Akomolafe
Sometimes learning bodywork feels like the art of putting adults who resist rest yet seek it passionately to sleep, or onto the long horizontal line that leads to it. Maybe massage, like fiction, is an art of helping others allow the pretenses of their identities to slacken and subside. “Asking questions of furniture,” like Bayo Akomolafe says, can also help ease us beyond ourselves. In the decade of the fugitive. The melancholy of not being a star, or a roof, or an eagle. Paying attention to the material, social conditions of sleep. A new book by Eugene Lim that I’m excited to read.
Outside during a break from a class on sensing others’ electrical energy, I watched an eagle fighting a hawk for a much smaller bird’s chick. Humans nearby stopped their walks to ask each other questions about birds. A way of looking “akin to a literature review.” In the photo I took I see traces of this looking as lines extending from a vertical wood ballast where a raptor perches.
Some days bodywork feels like a form of echolocation. Finding the pattern each person makes inside their body. A feeling sometimes of motion sickness, or sea sickness. Mantra: “I can breathe underwater.”
The feeling in my body when Asia Dorsey talks about bringing her microbiome to new places—instead of saging and cleansing, tending and extending our microbial communities.
I finished (maybe) a long story about a child named Billy who’s assembled out of scraps and broken bits of skyscrapers after the collapse of capitalism. I talk about it, and lots else, with Stacey Levine here. Stacey’s writing has always been a place where I find a small tree with a fantastic canopy, a hallway that enfolds a circular room accessible only to me, an articulate stream, a kitchen tended by a chef in a red hat, an orange bowl filled with warm light.
I hope your plants, cats, puppies, rabbits, child-assemblages, emancipatory art projects and/or public conveyances, tree houses, rituals, loose pants, and naps are doing well. Please tell the shadows that inhabit the west-facing walls from 4–4:17pm that I say hi. Remembering that along with light we’re riding a wave through space.
A balm if not a cure for burnout: with every exhalation, feel in your body as if you are a waterfall, sheets of water sliding down and off of you in an exuberant, ceaseless mobility. Move this way through and out of long university & corporate hallways—and difficult and transitory seasons.