Ephemeral Movement

Tag: creative writing

  • My Body is an Ancestor

    Originally written in 2022 after a body mapping exercise involving creative drawing and collage in response to prompts on a full-size outline of my body. I recommend listening to The Buzzard by Old Blind Dogs while reading.

    My body is a structure un-swirling from spinal waterfalls, winding rivers, a tidal gateway of toes stood barefoot on the edge of an ancient cairn where someone quite like me once lingered; a time filled with mist that softens the distance from here to there. Home is a place with many latitudes, waves break on familiar shores like buoys to distant dreams. Sea-glass, kelp, cliffside rock tumbling, shadowed wing, and dewey mint, a flower filled with rain, a whispering wind. Home is a question, a hope; am I safe? 

    My body is lost and found like grains of sand on the beach, waves crashing coral, churning, forgotten and remembered again. A timeline expands like rough, spun yarn, twisted and tangled in roots, over branches, wrapped up into precarious nests where I am eager to curl up in the warmth of a feathered familiar, my body like the barbed hooks of wool holding on to whatever it can grab. How far back would I have to go to feel belonging? Or how many layers would I have to peel back to belong? 

    Curiosity swings the door on hinge, in a burst, to answer the knock and song, a pulsing, rhythmic opening to a core where voices join in a clamorous joy. Are we in a communal hall celebrating or under a tree in reverence where the old churches used to be?

    I am magma erupting, oceanic whale dances, my gills a life-vest from drowning, born to swallow emotions until I am my own sea, impossible to sink. Extending fin, or shoulder, or chin to trace the curves of womb; my mother, my mother’s mother, my father’s belly—a humor emergent, a loneliness, better to bury than sweep. Dirt beneath nail and the glitter of mica on my fingertips, the cool soil a tender kiss on my palms and knees. The roundness of moss a pillow made of another world, softness of undergrowth decay. A tenderness to be consumed, to be held in an embrace. To be held in a way that feels like home.

    My body is a map, a multidimensional treasure hunt that leads me to myself where my breath brings me home again and again and again. 

  • Endurance

    Sometimes I struggle with anger. Fury that multiplies and rises like a firework that once set is a ricochet of clattering. I get so frustrated by all the little things and I can’t hold back any longer. I explode. I believe it’s important to be authentic and to let ourselves feel what we are feeling, to let it out. But and also, I believe in the cultivated safe space of a mother, the learned patience to let it go, to not let my emotions spin me out into bursts of rage, particularly if my little one is any where around.

    Sometimes I blame it on my liver and all the abuse I put it through in the years of attempting to drown out the feelings that needed to rise like fire all the same. Like a hot pit of coals with dried brush tossed on top taking an already heated situation and bursting it into flames. I simmer and seethe.

    Sometimes I blame it on my hormones. It’s the cortisol spikes in my progesterone phase. I meant to reduce all stress to a minimum and now everything is happening all at once and I’m weeping and cramping and feeling like I can’t ever take good enough care of myself. I’m so tired. I just want to stop.

    Sometimes I blame it on the culture. The patriarchy. The capitalism. The generations of pain that spread out in their own wildfires taking so many bodies and families and stories with it. I want to save the future from it. I want everyone to just stop.

    Sometimes I blame it on epigenetics, the blood in my veins, the rip I still feel from when my ancestors left where-ever was the homeland in an attempt to make somewhere else home and they couldn’t run away from themselves, their history, their pain but instead drag a trail of ashes and embers burning everything up just the same.

    I crave landscapes that saturate some indescribably parched piece of my soul. I crave the stories and the wisdom that live in those places.

    All the time I crave water. Gulping it down, dousing myself, standing in the shower waiting patiently for when I finally feel supple again. I spritz my face with rose water and rub in a serum thinking maybe this can help stop the evaporation. I spread balms across my skin. I add trace minerals into my water bottle and hope this might fully hydrate my mouth. I drink and spritz and swim and gulp and sigh and wait and swallow and I still feel the desert at my core. The little creature in me eager to be in its right environment.

    When it rains in Colorado, I could melt. All of me spreads out and every pore in my body takes a deep inhale. I could cry but can’t waste the tears. I am cooled.

    It’s a misting rain and I feel closer to home than I’ve ever felt like standing in a boreal forest. I swear I can smell salt on the air. Suddenly, the trees feel more familiar like I’ve known them for longer than time and the bird song echoes out in a net that holds me tenderly. The breeze kissing my brow and I feel calm again.

    Sometimes, a lot of the time, I think about leaving. I think about living somewhere else. And I know wherever I go, it’s still just me. And these gentle reprieves help me endure. I don’t want to live a life enduring. No one does. No one should. Unless enduring means persistence and less of the suffering. And so I shift my perspective, I use the word with a different lilt.

    Suddenly, enduring is supple. Enduring is always present. Enduring is sensual, alive, and forgiving.