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I hope that my essay honors the islands and asks all of us to reconsider our tourist activities throughout the United States and the land that has been stolen, abused, and exploited for the benefit of only some humans. May we all make new movements of reparation and justice and healing.)

Woods

The following day, the final day I dance, my inner world has shifted again. Our retreat is ending, my eldest leaves for her first year of college soon, my middle daughter will start middle school and my youngest is not far behind her. I’m wringing and clanging inside with accusatory voices. “You have not accomplished enough in your dance career!” “You may never make the work you do flourish beyond the small impact you have had!” I’ve learned to refer to these as “demon voices.” In response, my small self, compacting inside from the pressure of these voices, responds back with cowering questions: “Have I done enough to love and guide my eldest daughter?” Loving her, loving them, has occupied a majority of my time as I carved out time to pursue my dance career. “Will there be more nurturing and loving and growing, as each one of them moves out of the house?”

My larger inner being grabs the smaller turbulent part of me and pulls it through the condo door and toward the Koloa Heritage Trail. I run past the hotels near our condo and a small wedding on the beach near the start of the trail. I wonder at the beautiful beginning of a marriage, garnished in bright orange, purple, and white Hawaiian leis, in contrast to the darker sense of mid-life and ending chapters I felt this morning, clothed in a faded, sweaty sun visor, a stinky sun-protection long-sleeved shirt, and pink striped Adidas shorts, somewhat ridiculously reminiscent of the 1980s.

This time, rather than the first day when I followed the main trail up to the top of the rocky cliff, I turn away from the ocean. I follow a path on the lower back side of the cliffs, into a woodsy narrow stretch of twenty-to-thirty-foot tall pine trees with tufts of fine feather-duster needles at the ends of a profusion of skinny branches that jut out from tan toned, knobby, and scaly-barked trunks. (I wonder if they are also not native.) Within the tangle of pine trees, surrounded by low unfamiliar shrubs, the path opens onto an irregular round space among the pines and a mass of twenty-foot tall light-green leafed, slender trees bordering the beginning of what appears to be private farmland. After a plane passes overhead, I hear various bird calls and the outburst of joyous cheering from the wedding party nearby. The ground is bouncy, covered by a thick layer of lengthy pine needles. I do not remove my shoes, but I close my eyes, inhale and lift my sternum, guiding my face to the light and the air of this place. I begin to move through the patches of sun and shadow on the ground.

I am determined not to leave these woods until the demon voices subside! Months later, as if channeling the spirit of this space between the tangled thoughts of my moving body among the contrast of dark and light in this forest clearing, the dancer, Micaela Gonzales, in the performance of the work that evolved from these Kauai improvisations, given a certain amount of choice, spontaneously charged upstage to stand face to face with the singer before transitioning slowly downstage. (12:44-13:05) The singer, Amelia Love Clearheart, improvising to the choreographed dance, chants a renewing breath of sound into Micaela before she moves back into the center of the stage, closes her eyes, inhales and lifts her sternum as I did in the beginning of my first improvisation with the air of the woods. Micaela demanded, without knowledge of my own demon voices, some other voice––a voice in vibration, movement pattern, and overcoming to arise from the tangled woods––to arise from this moment I surrendered the questioning mind and danced my heart-body intention for ease.

I record two improvisations in these woods. Between the recordings and the lingering chaotic, internal voices that continue to demand my attention, I catch a flash of insight. A tawny diurnal owl flies across the top of the green leafed mass of slender trees. I have been asking for and waiting to see an owl for eight months: to receive a “second sight” in the real time flight of a symbolic message that had come to me in the image of an owl, around the time of a painful and disappointing low-audience turnout for two extraordinary new works about grief and transformation. My interpretation at that time was that the owl communicated the coming of external abundance. Markers for a “successful” career perhaps: maybe, finally, more audience and financial support for the work. Or, what is becoming more important between the shadow and light of the woods, as I honor the silent wings moving my small body into the future: to prosper in spiritual wisdom. I open within myself a greater capacity for spacious peace through this moment of confusing middles mixed with pain-felt endings and shadowy beginnings. In the woods the clutch of invasive, voiced species reverse their squeeze, as the larger wholeness of my inner being overpowers them, expanding into new forms of becoming through an art and practice of movement in the woods of time. I move to know that I am evolution in creation shaping the art of my life.

I do not walk out of the woods with full illumination about the movements I make and whether it matters to the art industry and dominant cultural milieu I live and work in. But I feel a glimmer of understanding that my life has revealed through the motions of dance and bodily exploration a deeper, ancient-future-now purpose in the art and practice of movement. A meaning and a message I embody through overcoming my pain, through being a creative life-artist and through movements I have learned to make as parent to my daughters’ well-being and rhythms of becoming. Movement is life ongoing. To move consciously in participation for ecological health in our places, work-spaces, and relationships is to dance the love within, toward others, and from the Earth. The ending of one part of my life’s journey, moving in relationship with my children in the physical house of my love, was simultaneously emerging into a deepening place of finally coming home within me to a greater interconnected spiritual awareness. I now know that to move and co-create with others and the Earth generates over and over again the sustaining source of life that I was seeking in the woods. The voice of that source is love and moves within to unblock the stuck places and to flow through our body-selves toward wholeness. A radial love moving inward and outward, an art of life through movement, never ending in beginning again and again and again. I am transformational power in evolution, ever unfolding more life through love.

Ocean

I walk out into the clear sky. The old, dying voices have not entirely abated, but slowly they transform as I run again with the Pacific Ocean enfolding the sky in the full noon day-light providing meaning for why I dance.

I climb down a small cliff toward the ocean and move within the architecturally captivating archways, interstices, and porous surfaces of a rock and sand face sculpted by the great ocean artist. I walk out onto the lava rock and dance between tidal pools and splashes of waves. Sometimes my front-body faces the ocean horizon and sometimes I turn to feel the ocean’s expansion coming through my backspace as I move with the Earth’s eternal shape-shifting face.

Through sand and rock and ocean, wave upon wave upon wave, I open to love’s expansive horizon moving through me. In my body-listening I hear the song of evolution that I am, rolling wave upon wave upon wave through time, healing the past for a renewed Earth body. Not survival to be the fittest––violent in my regard as an individual ruggedness. But a new and renewing creation, wearing away, being shaped again, reminded by the non-native palms of this island, that I too can root and become Earth body in every place. I open to turning and (re)turning within the ocean inside me. Let the stones wear away into smaller particles of past matter, to become sand adrift in newer currents of inner appreciation for my dancing. I let pearls emerge from the aphrodisiac mix within the luminescent shell of my skin. Embracing the wild, the noisy, the spontaneous eruptions from the deep weight of ocean meeting the rising, forming, shifting and expanding landscape of my being. This is what I embodied along the island coast of Kauai through my moving body: to be ever-becoming and one with all that is shifting and arising inside-out, toward an art of self, relationships, and Earth place through creativity in motion for more beauty, more being, more love.

I am Earth evolution. I stand and feel the new horizon ahead. I feel the rhythms of love flowing through my body and calling me to share with others the transformational, healing and evolutionary possibilities in the art and practice of movement with Earth.

Woods 1 Video

Woods 2 Video

Ocean Video

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

I hope that my essay honors the islands and asks all of us to reconsider our tourist activities throughout the United States and the land that has been stolen, abused, and exploited for the benefit of only some humans.

May we all make new movements of reparation and justice and healing.)

Palms

The sun is brilliant and inviting on the fifth morning, but I am begrudgingly reluctant to move into the creative act that is calling me to trust my art and practice of movement. I drag myself out to run along the ocean and through bordering landscaped neighborhoods. I know that to move is to choose to participate consciously in the possibility of overcoming my limited self to make way for more well-being and rhythms of bodily becoming. A long, rolling reach of tightly shorn grass lengthens my gaze toward the ocean and I am pulled to stop running. To listen. To step off a narrow path and move with this broad space of grass meeting ocean: a presentation for a limitless blue sky. With wind and awareness through eyes and skin, I feel the speaking of thirteen irregularly spaced, singular standing palms. The fronds are wispy and remind me of “princess palms,” as they were called when we lived in Florida. (I have learned there is only one native palm to the islands: the Loulu Palm. Most palms were brought to the Hawaiian islands by early Polynesian settlers.) I move with their stately being, as if each one has a message for my body to hear and transpose from the wind, which receives and passes on the shape and rhythm of their speaking. During the past days, my internal being felt compressed within the turning of feelings, my insight limited by the low ceiling within my lonely cranium. But at this moment the rooted grace of the non-native palms is beckoning me to remove my shoes. And I dance barefoot for the first time. Loneliness––a reverberation of the noisy, unbecoming ruminations I’ve been stuck in these past days––slides down my spine into the ground. The command of the palms’ communing presence sends a spiral of possibility up my spine. For moments I touch the sky again. These once non-native beings, so iconic to these Hawaiian Islands, teach me that I too can reach through a ground bass root, elongate into the rhythms of place to know I am earth in any stretch of space. That I dance land. And we are evolution.

Sand

I kick up and toss sparkling water and sand with my bare feet. Sunlight plays and sparkles along the white waves as they emerge from the dark blue ocean and meet the sandy beach, as well as farther out where the wind whips up the water. It is bright, hot, and radiant on the north end of the island on my penultimate day of improvisational dance in Kauai. When I was here four years earlier with my husband, during early March, the north was rainy and cool while the south was the opposite. Two moods in one island season of being: we too can hold opposites within and dance between Earth poles to discover more rhythms of insight and tempos of becoming!

I run down the beach, almost to where the Napali Coast cliffs descend straight into the ocean, disrupting a full beach passage around to the west rim of the island. A sandy spot and a sailboat bobbing across the ocean horizon call me to move in this location. I stand tall on the highest sand ledge above the ocean. I think and feel myself as the commander of my own ship. I play, hop, splash, and explore where the ocean rolls visibly with the golden sand. A renewed light returns and a strong wind blows. The ocean current turns stones into sand, fragments of my past and pain turning toward learning and growing. I turn my sails to the deep to feel for the ever-shifting sand formations of beauty in being alive. Within the currents of the dark, watery deep and the light, atmospheric air, I am ever-evolving.

To be continued…

Palms Video

Sand Video

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

I hope that my essay honors the islands and asks all of us to reconsider our tourist activities throughout the United States and the land that has been stolen, abused, and exploited for the benefit of only some humans.

May we all make new movements of reparation and justice and healing.)

Sky, Lava Rock, Palms, Sand, Woods, Ocean

I am listening to the loud roaring of the ocean waves off the south shore of Kauai crash against the black and tan and umber of lava rock at the edges of the island. I wonder if the ocean ever hushes here. Can one discern during this warm and rainy June a change in the ebb and flood of tidal sounds, as the poet Mary Oliver suggests, in her decades-long experience listening to the changing tones in the tidal sounds of Maine? I cannot. For my listening life I have grown accustomed to the misty quiet of the Pacific Northwest, the gentle lapping Salish Sea against the gray edges of pebbles, small rocks, and beach wood. Here in Kauai, the ocean and land create a constant vibration of “white noise,” punctuated by irregular bellows of waves pressing horizontally against cliffs, rushing vertically under the pressure, followed by the ferocious crashing, spreading, splash on top of lava rock. The relentless, resounding sounds of waves against rock press from the inside of my skin. Some moments I think I may long to retreat to the quiet, seemingly less demanding, interior of the island. I wonder about ancient Hawaiians shaking their heads and fists at rigid condos, full of vacationing people, built along the volcanic teeth edges where the tongue of the ocean meets the land. Only a short walk along this southern coast of the island lies, among lava rock, the remains of an ancient Hawaiian temple, Kihahouna Heiau, testament to a sacred relationship with the ocean’s thunderous voice.

What must this place of oceanic power mean for one’s body-listening each night and every morning? There is no escaping the oceanic pressure, opening an inner expansion in my body-listening over the days that follow: I am becoming and moving in the waves of Earth body evolution.

Sky

On our first day I run along a path next to the beach and up along cliff edges jutting out from woodsy swathes that border cultivated inlands. I am delighted to find myself running along the Koloa Heritage Trail––a place my husband and I had driven to, from the north end, four years earlier when we were celebrating my fortieth birthday. I am determined to come home from Kauai with videos of my improvisational movements arising from various places within this island. Backlit by sun, on the edge of a cliff, I move with the exhilaration of the first morning run along the south shore; the sky stretches through my dreams and holds visions of reaching greater heights through movement art creations in its luminous embrace of my body dancing.

Could a composed dance of sky, land, ocean, and sound come into being through me? What would this place open within? How would it evolve me; wear away any hardened resistance in my forming expansion between wave upon wave upon wave?

I hear new whispering in the wind on my skin; in the susurration of non-native palms humming their solitary elegant songs through the air shared between them; in the quick, magical sighting of a diurnal owl in the woods during my final day of immersion in what I call an art and practice of movement with this land.

On that first day, I could not imagine that while on this beautiful retreat for the first time with our three daughters, that day by day old voices of self-defeat and doubt would join the noisy roaring ocean. It seemed the dynamic sounds of the ocean crashing in me upheaved the fragments of shattered boulders, from the bottom of deep, submerged spaces that I had broken them upon. At home, in the gray, drizzly Pacific Northwest––periodically disrupted by sunlight merging with emerald-evergreen––I have been hefting boulders from my being. For years, hefting them down the range of my shoulders. Down my back. Off my spirit. Watching them break. And smooth into smaller stones of time’s past-oppressive-heritage.

I am freeing my white body to reconnect back thousands of years to Old Europe; to a time of love-creation-power in an earth-dance-lineage. By my second day in Kauai, stones, broken and worn down from thousand-year-old boulders, were tossed up inside me, releasing a roiling tumult of old doubt and deprecation, threatening to diminish the efforts I am making to co-create with the nurturing, primordial forces of this Hawaiian island. I could not maintain the joyous feeling from that first day I moved on the cliff that shimmered with light, casting in the video a vision of another world. The feeling, as beautiful and expansive as the sky stretching above the light glimmering over ocean wave after wave, was caught in a riptide. Pulled and turning with a changing tide I could not discern right away.

There was a sense though, a new knowing in my body, of a horizon coming into view, hinted at from the first day I moved and danced upon the cliff in the shimmering skylight. As I moved with this land, through old feelings of unresolved pain in the deep, dark spaces of my body, I could sense that my days on this island were turning for more healing. I am evolving.

Lava Rock

In spite of the roaring sounds reverberating endlessly between the walls of our condo, a familiar bodily comfort in overcast clouds stretches over the second and third day. The atmosphere and the anticipation of rain are familiar to me: melancholy with overcast skies has been an old dance partner to my defeatist thoughts. In the next improvisational session, I move these feelings on a stage of lava rock. The ocean behind me, eyes downward cast, I make friends with the rough and hardened places that hold my steps as I move inches, sometimes feet, up and down and over the rocky land that once oozed out from the rising depths of the Earth, from beneath the weight of ocean. This relatively recent land formation, from molten flow within dark spaces, reminds me that eruptions from inside emotions, pressing through the weighted water-source of life, gives birth to more creation: more worlds of meaning and wellbeing and human dancing in steps measured by the ways they risk for new syncopated ground. I am evolution.

Two days more pass. We swim and walk long stretches of quiet, secret beaches, drink water seeping through a cliff face, swim near sea turtles and along coral edges with fish a multitude of shapes and color. The sun returns for full-day rounds.

To be continued…

Sky Video

Lava Rock Video

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

I share that essay with you not only as a piece of my story, but as an offering — and as an invitation.

Because the essay is not really about me. It is about what happens when we stop. When we turn toward. When we let the soles of our feet, or the length of our exhale, or the texture of bark beneath a palm, speak to us about what it means to be a body alive in a body of Earth.

The Practice I’m Asking of You

Not a grand practice. Not a yoga class or a wilderness retreat. Just this:

Put something down. Close something. Step somewhere.

If you are inside, move toward a window, or a door, or a patch of floor where light is falling differently than it was an hour ago. If you are outside, slow your pace until you are almost not moving at all.

Then: breathe.

Not a performed breath. Not the breath of someone trying to relax. Just the actual, biological, ancient-future-now breath that is already happening inside you — the one David Abram reminds us shares its root with the Sanskrit word atman, meaning the soul which is the air, the air which is the soul.

Let that breath move you — even slightly. Let your ribs shift. Let your shoulders respond. Let your weight redistribute toward the ground beneath you, through whatever floor or soil or pavement is holding you right now.

You are already in relationship. Your exhale is the tree’s inhale. Something out there is breathing you back.

What I’m Really Asking

I know many of us carry a kind of stiffness — not just in our bodies, but in our relationship with the idea of practice itself. The word can feel like another obligation. Another thing we are not doing well enough.

This is not that.

What I wrote about in “Ecology of Wonder” — the barefoot trail, the nurse stump, the octopus splayed in its strange and beautiful death on the rock — none of it was planned. All of it arose from an intention to pay attention. To slow down enough that the land could speak, and I could hear it.

You do not need Cortes Island. You do not need bare feet on a root-crossed trail. You need only a willingness to notice what is already here, what is already moving in you and around you, what is already offering itself as meaning if you turn toward it with a body that is present rather than performing.

A Few Prompts, If You’d Like Them

These are loose. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

For embodied awareness: Sit or stand somewhere — indoors or out — and close your eyes for one minute. Feel the weight of your body pressing into whatever is beneath you. Notice: where are you holding? Where are you soft? Without trying to change anything, breathe into the held places. Let the ground receive more of your weight. When you open your eyes, stay with whatever arises. Don’t rush toward interpretation. Just be with it.

For the more-than-human: Go outside, or look out a window, and find one living thing that is not human. A tree. A bird. A patch of moss. A cloud moving. A plant on your desk. A parallelogram of sunlight on your floor. Stay with it for longer than feels comfortable. Notice what shifts in you when you allow something non-human to hold your attention completely.

For spiritual contemplation: Ask yourself — not conceptually, but in your body — where do I feel most alive? Not happiest. Not most successful. Most alive. What place, what movement, what quality of light or air or rhythm corresponds with that aliveness? What does your body know about the sacred that your mind hasn’t caught up with yet?

One More Thing

In the essay, I write about being on that old stump and pressing my chest upward — breathing in an embodiment of strength for the journey into the unknown future. I was not performing strength. I was discovering that it was already there, beneath the fear, beneath the years of hardening, beneath the story of separation I had been given and had given myself.

That strength is in you, too. Not as an achievement. As a returning.

The body remembers more than we think. And the Earth is waiting — not impatiently, not with judgment — but with the steady, rooted patience of something that has been breathing long before we arrived and will breathe long after we are gone.

Move with it today. Even for a moment.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

I’d love to know what arises for you — in the comments, or in your own quiet knowing. What did your body say when you stopped long enough to listen?

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

In this last improvisation next to the small pond tucked away in the woods, I finally say, “Enough!,” to the rutted ways of moving that have diminished my love for being alive. On a slight incline, quirky and quick, my hand becomes a crown over my head, my spine spirals in every direction with blades of grass and fern, my pelvis drops heavily toward the ground, my feet flicker and hands sparkle, pulsing with the wild woods and the many branches of life.

The solo I created from my improvisations on Cortes Island began with asking the dancer, Maeve Haselton, to embody the movements arising from the nurse stump improvisation. Slow, measured, awakening, extending, surrendering, heart-opening, listening for the way, unfolding more being.

Pausing for a moment center stage, Maeve grounds this place of becoming into their being, then forward-facing, they move downstage to begin again, movements they embodied from the final improvisation I did next to the hidden pond. In the choreographic process, while working on this section with Maeve, I asked them to keep making revolutions back to the opening movements of this section. To move from the beginning movements, reach a new endpoint and begin again in new directions and rhythms, unfolding the new ending; and then, back toward again. To move, to shake-up the rhythms and patterns that came before, ever unfolding, never once is the beginning the same. The ending of this dance does not stop, as Maeve’s larger movements become their interior landscape, more attuned to the heartbeat of Earth dancing, wondrously ongoing through time. The deepening breath of the human-mover, one with the movement of being and the “moving, vivacious many.” At the end of this dance we created, Maeve’s dancing with improvisational sounds of the viola and drums enfold into the silence, and the perceived stillness. The still-of-the-move in the resting sound ready to unfold again. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

Body-being an ecology of wonder.

***

The conscious and unconscious movements of our human Earth-bodies contain stories. One story I now choose to re-member stretches an arm all the way back to ancient times when we lived from the Earth, and not as severed minds and bodies separate from or seeking to control the “more-than-human.” Another story lives today in our body-being that speaks of these mistakes and harm and anger and pain of forgetting our ecology in love with wonder. And our body has another arm that reaches for visions of stories to be told of our future ecology in restored health with the mysterious life-death-life dance through our participation in the living, breathing, moving “inexhaustible weirdness and mystery” of our collective EarthBody.

Final Improvisation by the pond and hidden Buddha:

Final Performance––Dancer Maeve Haselton; Choreography Karin Stevens:

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

We must move, beginning with our breath, turning and returning within the whole and the holy life-death cycle of Earth-body-being! It is urgent and essential that we revitalize our bodily sensory awareness for more life-giving movement for the ongoing challenges of healing the divisions within our body-selves and the subsequent fractures and harm that humans have created in the collective EarthBody. In the words of poet Mary Oliver, humans “––so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained––are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.” The air we breathe is the Earth’s breath and the interchange between ourselves, the grasses, the trees, and the “more-than-human” soaring, bounding, creeping and swimming movers who are suffering because we have separated ourselves from the Big Love Movement of the collective, breathing EarthBody.

The new movements that we make function as vital lungs and heart for the transformative process of rebirthing human culture through re-patterning our nervous systems, extending our minds, and reconnecting with the “moving, the vivacious many.” For respiring, reimagining and restoring well-being beyond the impending collapse of environments and accelerating species extinctions, including the threat to our own. For expansion of love within, through, and from this Earth-being-movement-source that we are. For acknowledging the damage that has already been done and the grief that we must exhale. All of this begins in our intentional living, loving, moving breath with atmosphere––a word, Abram teaches in The Spell of the Sensuous, “displays its origin in the source of the Sanskrit word atman, which means… the soul which is the air, the air which is the soul.” Air is our sacred, universal awareness of wholeness. It is not only Rainer Maria Rilke’s “intensified sky” within the landscape of our human bodies, “hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” Within is also Abram’s emphasis that through our forgetting of the air, the consequences of climate change howl and surge throughout our collective lives. Inhale. Exhale. Move. Again. And again. The right and the left, up and down, breath and heart, mind and emotions, overcoming and reconnecting our hemispheric human potential to divide the whole into separate parts: knowledge and mystery, science and spirit, the inner and the outer.

***

During the Ecology of Wonder workshop David Abram encouraged us to hear a story from the land. To receive meaning through our “face to place” movements with the woods, beaches, and creatures of Cortes Island. Was the male deer I encountered as I ran singing around a bend along a trail, practically running into the buck as it stood, waiting for my approach, speaking to me about regeneration? Were its dark, penetrating eyes and majestic ten point antlers asking me to embody a spiritual authority in what I was learning and becoming that summer? Was the arresting, entrancing owl sitting midday at our human level, twenty feet from the trail, with its back to us, speaking about seeing beyond, into the mystery from the light of day?

And what of the afternoon I actually walked with the intention to receive a story from the land? It was the only afternoon we were given off from the five day-long workshop that I could explore with my two younger daughters while also giving their dad some alone time. Our movements through the woods and to the beach included the anxious and disruptive energy of my youngest daughter, who was having a hard time all week, feeling her inability to control any of the new experiences she was having. Breathing through my frustration, with the intention to move toward compassion for this human tendency, I pressed her into my side-body as we walked under the trees, coaxing her into her body and into step with the unfolding moment.

Exiting the woods, we were greeted by a bright yellow church bench along the path’s edge above the narrow rim of the beach. A sign invited us to sit down and learn the story of the bench. My middle daughter and I sat. My youngest, now more freely engaged with her surroundings, continued on a few hundred feet toward where the beach meets the rise of a steep cliff.

In the story of the bench, we learned that a nearby neighbor, living in one of the homes near the location of this bench, had acquired it from an old church torn down on one of the Canadian islands. During a visit from a friend in crisis, they painted the old church bench a vibrant, sunflower yellow through conversations in communion with the friend’s pain. Shortly after the friend departed the island, the neighbor learned of the friend’s suicide. My daughter and I sat in our silence with this story; with the gentle lapping of the salty, gray-blue water upon the rocky shore, reflecting an overcast sky; with the nourishing rest we received sitting on the bright yellow church bench, between this place beneath the arch-shade of trees and the vaster mystery of suffering and death.

Piercing into this moment, my youngest daughter came back in great distress. She could not find the trail leading out from where the beach met the high cliff. A trail that would complete a circular journey back to our cabin at Hollyhock retreat center.

Before I could calm my youngest daughter’s increasing fear and help her move through her upsetting lack of control, my attention was drawn toward something displayed on a rock much larger than any I had seen on this beach. I walked toward this rock a few feet from the tide’s edge. It was about four feet high, with a diameter of three feet. Spread out over the smooth top of the rock was an octopus. It was too large to be a Pacific Red, its body stretched across the rock more than two feet, but it was too small to be a full grown Giant Pacific octopus. The colors of brick-red were fading to white with edges of purple. The octopus was dead. A yellow jacket or two zig-zagged with fervor from tentacle to tentacle around the spiral of this deathly design.

At first I was angry and wondered at the human who could sacrifice and waste a beautiful creature for this artistic display. I thought about the tides. I observed the tide marks and knew it could not have risen high enough to leave stranded this remarkably intelligent being who is known to occasionally walk the intertidal zone. My daughters and I circled and leaned into the rock, counted the arms of the octopus, one was missing. Did this octopus suffer? They live such short lives. Their intelligence is vast. Do they ask of life like we do, “Why the difficulties?” Or do they simply open their arms with a wild embrace for the living dance? My daughters and I peered closely at the meaning in this moment. We were calm. We felt graced by something weird and beautiful. And then we easily found our way through to the trail leading back to our temporary island home.

To prove it wasn’t a mystical phantom, I ran back the next day. The flesh of this creature was not wasted, as a bird or an animal had consumed an arm or two. The contrast of brick-red against the gray rock was now more ghostly white, haunting me for my remaining days on the island.

Was this collaboration between octopus and land an invitation to participate more fully in the mysterious physical and mystical processes of the Earth? The wondrous weirdness and beauty of life and death stretching out in glorious design, like the octopus on the rock, communicating surrender to living with fluidity and grounding in earthly places from which we come into sacred being, over and over again.

I crawl up onto a bold rock to die to myself. And to release any efforts to control my way through the meaning of this present moment in our lives. To join with something larger moving through us.

***

To be continued…

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma

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I walk barefoot on the trails, in a Northwest Canadian forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. I want to feel my feet more in rhythm with the ground. I want this understanding that is arising from this renewing ground to become embodied more thoroughly in me. My feet follow multidirectional angles directed by bare toe knuckles and metatarsal bones of Douglas fir and cedar roots rising in various places along the paths. My right foot turns deeply inward touching the outer rim of my pinkie-side against a root. My body responds by turning backwards to the trail as I shift weight onto this foot and feel the O Horizon: the leaves and pine needles that have given their life to nourish the ground, my body-being and the trees that rise from this offering of leaves and needles for rich and nutrient-filled soil––called humus, from the Latin where we also get the words human and humility. To be “grounded” is more than the current pop-psychology use of the word, it also means to be humble; something I am trying to re-member in my body, as movement from the ground. The ball of my left foot presses into a soft triangular space between more closely-spaced knobby roots. I transform with these out-of-the-ordinary steps, directed by foot placings which give way to a rooted dance in small steps of continuous change. My shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands articulate in motion through the air, responding to the ever-changing directions of my lower body. I feel my tailbone, my head, my back body, and my front extending, four additional distal reaches moving with my four limbs, reaching out and stepping back into gravity through the possibilities of endless transfer and flow from this place between life and death. In the now of this movement practice I feel, without yet knowing the words, that my personal path is part of something greater. My being enfolding into the mystery from the ground-of-being. My life unfolding in an endless artful offering back to the land.

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One morning, I move from the trail into the trees. To be within the breath shared between the trees and me. The air, another being, calling me off the designated path. Speaking through my inhale and exhale.

The breath of movement––the whispers of air moving into more-being––turns skull-cervical-vertebrae-ribs-sacrum-then-feet-me toward a limitless unmarked path of soft ground blessed by the offering of pine needles and the mystery of moving into receiving. I had been running along the trails of Hollyhock retreat center on Cortes Island. But in this moment I no longer follow the path I had mentally set out for myself this morning. I am hearing an impulse to move into the unknown within the darker shade of tree arms weaving an upper enclosure. The air feels dense with possibility and discovery. Suddenly I feel the desire to video an improvisation with this place. I had not come here with the intention of making another dance. Rather I had come to learn from the cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, in his Falling Awake: An Ecology of Wonder workshop. Between listening to Abram and the wild old-growth forest on Cortes Island, movements were forming in me.

I walk around sword ferns and fallen trunks and branches into the thick of the evergreen trees, set the camera against a mossy rock, and climb onto a weathered tan stump. I am careful and clumsy, trying not to disturb the natural process of the mossy, decaying, life-giving remains. A dance commences over and through wispy filigree in delicate pine needle of three-foot little trunks and branches of western hemlock rising from a stump that might have been a grand Douglas fir. A sturdier grasp of another thicker trunk, rising tens of feet into the air from this nurse stump, becomes my dance partner. From a lunge stance, I arch my spine, face to the sky, leaning sternum-heart into this young vertical being, who rises from the process of death below my feet. Then, standing on one leg, I grasp this tree with hand and being, to lean my torso way out beyond this vertical axis, to extend forward both arms from the trunk, to stretch one leg backward into the enlivening air.

The preceding forty-plus years of my life are like this stump beneath my feet. The new dances I am co-creating in relationship with earth places are nursed from the decomposition of a story in my body, a personal and a collective story, that is dying for our Earth-body to rise anew. In recent years, I have painstakingly and ponderously relearned to make movements practiced with deeper sensory awareness, reforming me again and again every day. Listening for the impulse. For the daily, momentary process that transforms movement patterns of pain and fear. That opens more space for complexity, expansion, and contraction; back-toward an evolutionary, regenerative love.

When stagnant in difficult emotions, I move. When insight feels distant and blocked, I move.

My practice begins with the movement of breath.

In the present moment, with the air moving through me in these Cortes Island woods, rutted pathways in the declining story of thoughts and feelings within my body are eroding away for good. The dominant culture of our time, which is reaching its apocalypse in national and global climate disasters, mass migration and extinctions, religious wars and racial justice uprisings, set many hundreds of generations including mine on a dead-end course, unable to actualize well-being, relationships, a sense of self, a purpose as sacred, ever deepening movements with one another and all that is. This hegemonic Western conception of minds severed from bodies, dominating and controlling each other and the living, breathing Earth, is reaching its end. And my journey out of this dominant cultural misdirection is reaching its completion. This summer on another island exploration of body and place, the wheel of my body-evolution is turning toward understanding my participation in the global, current-movement of cultural metamorphosis. With the wind of breath and the new rhythms of this current-movement, I am becoming an evolved species for the future. I am speaking dance for a collective turning.

On the old stump, I press my chest upward, palms downward into its decaying, life-giving force. Elbow, head, wrists wind through and around the emerging life in process. Reaching, scooping, tenuously balancing with the air of this opening body-mind-space. A wildness emerging into what Abram refers to as an “inexhaustible weirdness and mystery” in this Earth-becoming. I am breathing in an embodiment of strength for the journey into the unknown future. Opening to the strong headwinds of continual change in the face of radical uncertainty.

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To be continued…

Stump Improvisation 2019

Walking the path of love through the moving body, on a sacred, living Earth.

Thank you for journeying with me,

Karin Najma