Weathering Book Slow Read Week #4
C3 The Resourceful Body: Dance, baby, dance!
Oh I have an exciting thing to share with you this week, friends! If you are a paid supporter then I’m giving you a first viewing of the short film I choreographed and directed with my pal and collaborator Rob back in the autumn. The film is very much in conversation with this chapter, as I am sure you will come to see. I hope it will provoke something for you…
But before that, let's spend some time in chapter 3 as we leave the weighty first 2 behind and switch to embodiment. Weathering isn’t an overtly political book, by which I mean it doesn’t discuss politics. But there is a quiet politics at the heart of it. I think that’s fair to say. Politics of the body, for one. And that’s no small thing, because it is our bodies we live in and experience the world. The US president (i don't like to use his name) is giving it a lot of Drill, baby, Drill! energy these days (even while we’re distracted with other things like tariff wars!) and for that reason my message this week is Dance, baby, dance! Or better still? Rock, baby, Rock! This, a necessary radical movement away from these extractive times we live in (but more on that later maybe!) Can you keep your head, ‘when all about you are losing theirs’ asks Rudyard Kipling? Yes, you can do this through dancing a dance of relief, release and resistance. You can dance as an incantation or invocation. You can dance with others and for others. You can dance for love.
In this chapter we’re back in the Dark Peak, which is to say, back on the dark grey deltaic gritstone of the northern national park, and we’re exploring what it means to build body literacy as well as live in what I would call the ‘impossible axis of being’ by which I mean living in the present of the body’s experience, while also feeling back into the past and thinking forward to the future, AND living at both depth and breadth in order to navigate a fulfilling life. Into this complexity, many of us are also trying to work out how to love the earth better, to not be a human body taking up all the space and all the resources, to take responsibility for the harms we have inflicted on those around us. This is, I remind you, a 3D life. A life of sorrow and joy, a life of ease and resistance. A life of actions and consequences.
Let me say this too: when you are freer in your own body, you are much more likely to support and work for the freedom of other bodies wherever and whoever (and whatever species!) they may be!
While I am taking you through some group work in the book, you don’t need to be outside on rocks to connect with these ideas (though it is more fun!) So, let’s start wherever we are and bring some movement to our slow read questions.
1. Stand up, feet hip-width apart and arms stretched out to the sides. A big, solid stance. Grounded and dynamic. Now rotate your torso, allowing your arms, legs, hips to gently respond so that you get a feel of your ‘kinosphere’ around you (the space you take up) as you make slow sweeping circles. Stretch and lean towards your fingertips on either side and then stretch your arms upwards and down. In short, explore the x and y axis from your body without moving your feet. While you do this, see how it feels to pay attention to the space around your body in this way and check in with yourself by asking ‘how is my body today?’ Listen for the answer, however it comes.
This is a basic daily question we should all be asking when it comes to building body literacy that will serve us through the often long (but too few) days we will have with our bodies. To build a resourced body capable of going the distance, we need to develop some sense of how it speaks to us, and what it’s saying. I introduce this idea in the book in this chapter and the next while caving, but here are some more specific questions that start laying the foundations of new body literacy, which will support better body awareness and resourcefulness. This is how we build bodies fit for the work (the Big Animal Work) that needs to be done. There are no right or wrong answers, but try and locate areas of your body beyond the space between your ears. It will help to evoke memories for each scenario and see what twitches to life:
Where do you feel dread?
Where do you carry stress?
Where do you love from?
Where is your intuition located?
Let me tell you, it’s a (wonderful) slippery slope from asking these questions to dancing like an animal online with a bunch of strangers. And this itself might become a gateway to dancing in woods, on rocks, in rivers in public. Beware!
2. How do you feel about the thought of moving freely and creatively in public outside the normal and established ‘guard rails’ of something like walking or running or yoga? Would you give it a go? What would stop you?
This chapter is all about recognising the body-based relationship we can all have with the natural world, wherever we are. And to build a relationship through our body, that will serve the good times and bad. In the age of therapy-speak we hear a lot about ‘dissociation’ and that’s important because it’s what a lot of us are doing a lot of the time in order to cope. The many ways that we numb ourselves from feeling stuff can be truly, miraculously adaptive, and rightfully protective. But we also need to learn the opposite: how to associate back to ourselves, each other and the world. Because there is a lot still to love and fight for, and not all of that can be done while we’re numbed out. Learning to associate is a key part of what we might call ‘healing’ and though I’m not pretending that it’s easy, it is important for living a full, engaged and human(e) life. Perhaps you can feel the energy and latent joy in this chapter?
This chapter is an encouragement to be the human animal you are – fleshy and vulnerable - but also to recognise the ways we are also, all of us, a little bit rock too! How amazing to have bones and teeth not dissimilar to limestone, and I didn’t even get started on kidney stones! Isn’t it weird the way that our body can make rock stuff, almost geological artifacts, in this way?
I don’t need to tell you whether to be reassured by being a short lived creature on an ancient, deep-time planet, or whether to be terrified by that, all I know is that rocks have something that helps us learn how to travel between both truths. Perhaps you already intuit what I mean? How can we not dance with this dilemma.
3. Linda Hogan says “to enter stone, be water” what meaning does this have for you currently? In what ways are seemingly immoveable things asking you to be flexible and flowing?
All of this rock-body-listening-movement-dance stuff I call ‘Geosomatics’ and one my areas of interest is how we connect with substance as a necessary skill for the times we live in. It takes substance to endure and push through many of the things we’re asked to live through, right?
CREATIVE ACTIVITY: Exploring Substance through Movement
For this task, I’m going to ask you to shut yourself away somewhere private for a bit – take as long as you want. A bedroom will do, but if you do have access to an outdoor space then go there for this! Also, you’re going to need a big rock and if you want to use some suggested music (see below) then headphones. The rock needs to be big enough to hold, and big enough to feel its presence in your hands. Something between 1-5kg I would suggest! Get one from the garden or go and find one from further afield (you can always return it :) Try reading the instructions first and then you can go back and do it without looking.
1. Sitting down or standing, find a comfortable neutral position and sit or stand with your stone between both hands. Connect with its texture and it’s weight. Notice the pull it exerts on your arm muscles, and small hand muscles to hold it. Bounce it up and down to ‘test its weight’ and stay mindfully focused on its heft and gravity.
2. When you’re ready pass the rock between your hands (carefully so as not to drop it on your feet!) play with the rhythm of passing it back and forth. Notice any adjustments your body has to make to accommodate the rocks weight and movement and see how your own rhythm can fall into step with the moving rock. Feel into the parts of your body that has to respond to the task of moving the rock.
3. Be bold and creative, let your movement take on a bit of musicality as you move the rock. You could keep passing it side to side, or turn with the rock, raise it above your head, let it touch the floor as you’re pulled into a forward fold etc. Use the rock as a prop. All the while paying attention to how the rock guides your movement. See if you can connect with a sense of your own weight and gravity. Let yourself be pulled around by the rock, like a rock. Let yourself be pulled by gravity to the floor. Feel the swing of your body weight not trying to be light or dainty but full of heft! If it’s comfortable, release your breath as you move by sighing outwards.
4. When you’re done dancing moving take some time to be still as a still rock and notice the feelings settling through your body. How does it feel? How do you reflect on this moving with rock engaging with the rock’s weight and your own? Where do your thoughts take you? Write it down in a journal.
Here is a link to a playlist I have made on Spotify called STONE SONGS. I recommend doing the above with some of the instrumental music I have selected!
There is a lot we can learn from listening to ourselves and our needs and hurts and joys through movement, and a lot we can learn through listening to the earth through our bodies. This is a big interest of mine! A lot of my work is oriented around how we listen and why amd to whom. Moving on rock is a way of listening in multiple directions, into the body of the earth and into the secrets of deep time. How do we hear what needs to be heard in an ailing and broken world? How do we do that and feel some sort of joy while we’re at it? I have some answers, but Weathering is all about you finding out for yourself. And don’t worry if it feels odd and abstract, and if you don’t know whether you’re doing it right - there are no rules. Listening with your body is unique and personal.
Let me suggest for you this final question to ponder, which gets to the heart of what I mean by Geosomatics and what it means to ‘somatise’ the geological – “greying our wisdom rather than just greening it” as I put it in my first Zine #1 exploring the link between our extraction of planet earth and the burn out of our tender human bodies:
4. If I lean into my rockness how will I experience my life differently? What difference could it make to this thing/feeling/situation I find myself in?
On location:
EXTRA MATERIAL for Paid Supporters this week:
Be one of the first people to watch Everything Happens for a Season - a short film I choreographed and directed at the end of last year with my friend and collaborator, artist Rob St John