I woke from a dream some time early last year with “Gebo” circling in my head like a white moth of memory. Naturally, I typed in a search for any place named Gebo and behold, it is a ghost town in Wyoming where 20,000 people used to live, work, laugh, and love. Apparently, now what remains of the once teeming mining town is a few standing buildings and a cemetery where the majority of graves host infants and children.
Gebo is also one name for the Norse rune of exchange. It’s shape is an X. The crossing lines suggest the transmission of energy for energy, a gift for a debt, giving and receiving, like a hug, or like our well known ‘x’ as a mark for a kiss. This X marks the spot. It marks an essential nature of a well functioning relationship.
Gebo, WY was named after a money-minded entrepreneur and not after the Norse rune for a gift. Perhaps, Gebo, WY is nearly wiped from our memory as a substantial location in human history regardless of it’s standing as the largest town in the country at it’s height in the early 1900s, due to it’s lack of true exchange. As with most mining towns, community was based on the inherent ‘taking’ culture and not on giving. People swarmed in to make money, to mine precious earth, and not on the vital guidelines of human trade culture: to give and create as much, if not more than we receive and consume.
How in our lives are we taking from our relationships and forming shadows through lack of exchange? Scan yourself, your relationships, and your community for any lack in reciprocity. You must start first with your own body. Use a simple inquiry to begin: are you hydrated, nourished, rested? Drink water. Give yourself healing vegetables and herbs to eat. Are you comfortable? Stretch if you must and feel in-between your joints, ligaments and fascia. Sense into your bones, into your spine and pelvis. Are you rooted and at home in your body? Do you feel yourself guarding or pulling away from anywhere in yourself? Are there pockets of memory? Don’t run from the memory. Where does it lead you? To someone? To an instance you shared? To a place? Was there an exchange, a true exchange? Or was there a lack of reciprocity? Do you need to forgive? Do you need to be forgiven? What do you need to release your grasp on? What do you need to hold up to the light?
Did you find channels of love and inspiration? Memories of laughter and salubrious conversation? Whose faces do you see standing around you, living or in the afterlife, lifting you up to your highest potential and supporting you as you reach for the fruits of your labors? Whose lives do you see weaved together like a beautiful basket to mutually carry each other towards a bountiful and benevolent future?
These searches within ourselves can help identify marks on our body maps that need to be excavated, regenerated, or commemorated. Sometimes, these places emote fear and pain, but all the more reason to heal them. We can journey physically and psychically to places of need and give back in nourishing words, medicines, and acts of kindness. Most often, the scariest things you’ll face will be the most potent medicine. Sometimes, regardless of the outcome you must walk towards the dragon’s lair with a deep sense of trust in yourself and in the journey. Most times, we are all learning how to give and receive more honestly and fully. Remembering and honoring the affirmative qualities of our self and those of our collective can serve as one of the most powerful tools in our voyage. This is our shield, our boundary, our ability to get closer to the goal without suffering a fatal wound, a partition we can take a moment behind to regather before we continue on.
In my own body, I have experienced great loss in the last year. Daily, I am searching myself for any place that needs healing, needs to be ripped open and experienced. I was betrayed by a friend, I was manipulated by another, and then when I was in the middle of a physical and emotional transition, I lost my father to cardiovascular disease. In times of trauma, it is all too easy to dig holes and root away our feelings so that we can appear strong and capable in the world, so that we can just plainly function. I’d like to believe that I did a rare job of experiencing every emotion as it rose in me and rode it out like a wave. I did a fair job at it, allowing myself to weep whenever moments of memory or reflection nudged me on. I crocheted doormats for my grief out of rope and jute and torn fabric, making space for the sorrow to move through and out of me. I listened to songs on repeat that forced me to cry every time they played. Through it all, there was a great deal of love and community that surrounded me and held me like a child in it’s embrace. My friends, coworkers, family, and even plain acquaintances held me up when all I really wanted to do was dig my head into a hole like an ostrich. I had to toss what no longer served me to the wind, bulldoze the abandoned buildings, and level out my body for a new foundation to build upon. I am in the process of exterminating pests, filling in the compost pile, and planting seeds I wish to watch germinate, grow, and nourish myself and community.
Someone asked me what the gift was of my father’s passing. This is an uncomfortable question, but like most meaningful and sincere questions it had me working out an authentic answer. I have to pilgrimage time and time again to my body, first. Then, time and time again to my father’s home. It is a like a ghost town, a reflection of his body, an apparition of his life. My family is called there now in his wake to exterminate pests, throw out the refuse, sort what’s left behind, and make meaning of our relationships to him and each other. We have been ushered into a momentous time of exchange and reconciliation. The meaning-making of life-altering circumstance is a fertile time for redirection. Now, he is our ancestor. He lay down paths and wisdom to follow. What stories live on of him as time spins us forward?
Without saying too much about my father, I can say that there are patterns, cycles, and stories we are coiled into together. He is ever-present in me. I am made from his stories, his truths, his jokes, his walk, his keen eye on the world. I couldn’t escape him if I tried. We cannot escape our pasts just as we cannot remove ourselves from our lineage, our resilient fore-bearers, the multitudes of faces, hands, and feet that walked and worked this earth before us. Some of the stories we don’t want to hear. We don’t want to be kin to the injustices and horrific pasts. We are a product of atrocity, but don’t forget, we are the product of survival, love, and creativity as well. We can weave fertile myth around the truths to form lessons and paint fantastic pictures of our heroes and heroines.
The lasting image of my father is of a rather groovy man, who loved his family, was inspired by patterns in the natural world, wavelengths of sounds and rhythms. A man who loved animals, to laugh, and to see every object, creature, and plant as a unique and singular entity, something to be admired. Every landscape was something to be praised.
The opening statement of my thesis on Ephemeral Movement in 2013 was a memory. I’m standing in the driveway watching my father scatter seeds in the yard. Time passes and that patch of earth is covered in a vibrant and joyous congregation of black-eyed susans. If there is something you want to see in the world, scatter the seed and tend to the growth. If you want to see flowers, plant them. If you want to dance in the moonlight, get out and do it. If you want to walk from one coast to the other, start walking. If you feel a yearning inside, a truth that can’t be denied, use action to manifest it in the world.
If there is one overarching gift my father left me in his wake, it is an undeniable need to seize my truth and reconfigure my life as a work of art, directed with enthusiasm, and fueled by compassion. To funnel the Mars energy, the hero, the masculine vitality; to show up and work through difficult passages with commitment towards the end goal. To see the target clearly, pull back the bow, and let the arrow fly. This is my exchange with my father; the years he supported me, raised me by example, and always edged me towards my gifts. This life’s work, Ephemeral Movement, is only a beginning, a path, a series of questions that continue to nudge me towards locations in my body and in the world that need to be filled with new movement. It is an exchange with a locus, a conversation with bioregion, history, the present, and the future.
Gebo, WY marks a place on the map I’m lured like a fish to hook my lip on. I will journey there because the call was sent. Just like I will journey into the halls and rooms of my fathers home. If you are afraid of apparitions, you may tarry at the edge of a ghost town or a haunted house or the memories in your body and mind. Perhaps, it is a fear of possession or a lack-there-of. Maybe, you’ve seen things that were difficult to behold in the liminal spaces. But, if I’ve learned anything from my run-in’s with the thin places where our rationalized reality crosses with that of the unknown, it’s that with a strong sense of self and boundary, we can transform experiences of discomfort into understanding and release. We can use the protection of the shield we wove in our community, step out into the dawn with our clarity and purpose, and walk into the world with an open heart, ready to give and receive. We can be pulled towards an emptiness or void so that we may occupy it with admiration, if only for a moment, so we can dance with the spirits of children past, family who has left, and for the spirit of the land we stand on.
This project is fueled by my overwhelming urge to move in exchange with location in a new intelligence. It is aimed to evolve and therefore, difficult to pin down with words. The idea is to unravel, rewind and unravel again the ligament of what’s possible and to uncover the journey. It is with a humble vulnerability that I offer it up and out into the world.
Ephemeral Movement 
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