At Kelly’s the next morning I sit and gaze at her Hilma af Klint poster. (Group IV, No. 7, The Ten Largest, Adulthood.) Today is my thirty-first birthday. Kelly is asking me how I feel. She has synesthesia, so I point at the red-orange, clover-like shapes on the left side of the poster and tell her that my birthday feels like that particular hue. She mmm’s in response. Then, remembering last night, I tell her about my blotches. Would you ever try to paint them? she asks.

I don’t readily connect with visual art. It usually feels too inert to move its way into my body. But for a moment now I lose my breath, because suddenly I see echoes of my blotches in Hilma’s painting. My arms prickle with goose bumps. Here is another woman from another century, who was determined or insane enough to devote her life to documenting and communicating her wild, elusive internal visions.

And here they are. I sit and stare at Hilma’s blotches and feel what good art always makes me feel: that somewhere, deep in the core of myself, I am not alone.

Grayzyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 2 is what brings my blotches to me. I’m at Equinox, a chamber music and dance festival that friends and I put together every year. Bacewicz is another madwoman from another century, a master of compositional craft. My brain grasps clumsily at her complex weaving of tones and melodies. But I am a dancer, and I understand bodies, so I let the music pour into mine by watching the musicians’ faces and arms and torsos. The most beautiful part is that they don’t know they are dancing.

During Regamey Quintet, five people armed with bows and strings sit in a half-circle around each other. Something floats there between the five of them. It blooms with tension. It morphs, changes color. The humans furiously stoke and tend it, working their arms and lungs. Not one of the hundred-plus brains in the audience could define this thing, could put a container around it—but every single person can feel it.

It billows, and Emily arches her back and lifts her torso ever so slightly off her seat. It shrinks and fades, and Johnny bends forward with his clarinet to cradle the most delicate embers.

This thing we are all addicted to, I can describe it only as a dogged quest to uncover the truth. For a moment we’re all in on it. We’re breathing it. Maybe I once believed that truth lived up in the sky, black and white and immovable, written in a book or pronounced upon me by a chatbot. How silly. Truth is felt.

At some point, the bows lift from the strings. I become aware of the quietly pulsing headache, the dark shape of the water bottle to my left that I mustn’t forget, the dishes upstairs that will need to be cleaned up.

Chairs creak and the bodies start to drift off, looking for it again.

Photos by Caroline Bittencourt

1/8
Thinking about shame.
Why do we feel it? Do other animals feel shame?
Why does the imprint of shame stay buried so long in a body?
(Hot neck gut drop)
Why are women made to feel ashamed of our bodies?
Why are men made to feel ashamed of “womanlike” qualities?
Why do we shame ourselves, or others, for our softness?

1/9
I saw a quote on Twain’s bandcamp that said:
patience is courage.

1/10
Reading Patti smith, and experiencing what my friend calls the “M Train effect.” This morning I was brewing coffee and I realized how much I was looking forward to pouring in the cream. I was excited to watch the way it swirls. (The way it swirled yesterday; the way it did the day before; the way it will tomorrow, if I’m lucky.) Lol. Maybe this is what it means to be happy.

1/19
I’ve been on a roller coaster and couldn’t clear my head. But now it’s clear, for a moment. Very very grateful for the power of time.
I think time is magic. I spent so much of my childhood terrified of the end of the world, the sudden death of a loved one, the big black chasm; I dreaded the foreverness of hell, the eerie emptiness of a perfect separate heaven. The idea that time will somehow drop out, cut off, end. This fear, that we will lose time, is paralyzing.
Nature, and the passing of time, teach me to believe in cycles—to believe that death always circles back into life again, the way decaying leaves break down and then feed the next generation of trees. A wave curls and curves, up and down. With a Mona Lisa smile on her shrouded face, Time conceals and then reveals what we have been waiting for.

To trust in time is to access power. (Two seconds on the internet makes me feel like our whole society is about to collapse, but the more I read from other eras, the more I suspect that everyone??? has felt, in some way or another, that they were living on the brink of the end of the world. Yes, civilizations crash— yes, AND.) I want to claim the power to dream far ahead into the future, past my own finite time, past the grasping overreaches of all these fucking greedy, destructive forces-- further down the unspooling ribbon, a thriving and regenerating Earth nurtured by my composting remains. To trust without a doubt that losses and deaths inevitably cycle back. We can align ourselves with the calling of the light, be part of the life-giving force, for however long we have here. Time is our gift: Hold on! Keep the faith! She says. 

How horrible it would be to squander Time, to rush it, to bemoan the end of it, to burn it out. 

1/20

I am taking a songwriting seminar and was assigned to rewrite an old favorite song, so here is my reimagining of “you are my sunshine.”

Be kind to yourselves, everyone

We decided that we would write a hymn together. One that would mix our disciplines of piano, voice, and dance, to incorporate the whole body. We wanted to explore what a song of praise would look, sound, and feel like from a woman’s perspective.

“With all my flesh and fire” premiered last month at Equinox Festival, an annual Copenhagen-based chamber music and dance festival devoted to elevating lesser-heard voices in the classical music world.

Kelly and I chatted last week to recap our process. We discussed synesthesia and creativity, body image and shame, politics and our grandmothers. I’m sharing excerpts from our conversations here in three sections: 1. The creative process; 2. Dealing with fear; 3. Tying it into the real world.

“all this time I’ve known no peace
all this fight and no release
forgive me all the words unsaid
the breaths I’ve held at bay

formed within the mother’s grace 
to guide my hands and bless my ways
let me rage and fill my home
with all my flesh and fire”

PART ONE: the creative process

“D-flat major is my favorite color”

Elenora Morris: Early in the process you started sending me music ideas, and I remember when you sent me the hymn. My eyes welled up. I could feel the soul in it immediately. What was the process of coming up with it?

Kelly Lenahan: I knew I wanted the whole piece to be in D-flat major. I have synesthesia, which is generally a combination of any two senses, but I have it in the form of having visuals with sound. So when I hear anything from music to noises in the street—in my mind’s eye I see shape and color. D-flat major is my favorite color. It’s this deep navy blue. I don’t know if it’s my favorite color because it’s my favorite key, or it’s my favorite key because it’s my favorite color…

I wanted our hymn to sound traditional, but the words would not be traditional. This melody came into my head one day. I was really wary at first, because I’ve heard a hell of a lot of hymns in my life, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t plagiarizing something. But when I felt confident that it was a unique melody, I started to flush out a chord progression. The first pass through is very traditional, one chord four chord, five seven one. I re-harmonized the second verse, starting with the minor six—I really love when hymns do that.

So the melody came first, and then the chords, and then the words just sort of fell out of me, starting with the last two lines: let me rage and fill my home with all my flesh and fire.

We had been talking about rewriting Bible stories from a female perspective, and how to counteract this idea of Christian womanhood that we’d been taught, which is meekness, quietness, not taking up space, being subservient to the man. What would it look like to be the opposite of those things? I liked the idea of still including the home in that picture—but woman as this towering, enormous force of nature and energy. And I also wanted to include this flesh idea, because it’s another big thing that we both experienced growing up religious: this idea that your body is the capsule of sin, and the flesh is your downfall. No, let me live in this body, and love this body! The picture that I have in my head is a mythical creature in her home, radiating and alight with all of who she is. After that it was just, who is this person? What does she feel?

The other musical thing that I wanted to play with was this amen chord progression which is in almost every single hymn (the major four chord to major one chord). I made a backing track that used this D-flat drone—it’s the octave and the fifth—and then occasionally I put the fourth tone of the scale in it to create some tension, which is hinting at that “amen” cadence, but I never let it stay for long. I wanted to hint at a resolution—our own amen. Whatever that means. Our own “and so it is finished,” or this idea of Selah—this untranslatable word that we would read at the end of Psalms. I hinted at this progression, but didn’t allow us to have it until the very very, very end.

Before the hymn, there was a soundscape of musical chaos that looked in my head like a Jackson Pollock painting: like somebody had just chucked every single color willy-nilly at a canvas—no form, no shape, it’s just a visual mess. Then, when the hymn starts and we finally get the tonic chord, the picture simplifies. The colors coalesce, and everything falls into this world of blue: clear, sharp and focused.

EM: When you sent me the music and those lyrics—it sounded like something ancient.

KL: I think pretty soon after that, you texted me that you had sung it out at Quaker meeting, and that shifted something deep in my being.

EM: At Quaker meeting you just sit in silence and wait for a message. And looking back now it feels sort of bold, but I had your hymn in my head so strongly, and I felt an intense pull to stand up and sing it. So I did. And a couple people afterwards came up extremely moved, and asked me, what was that old hymn? And they were so surprised to hear that actually, my friend Kelly wrote it just about a month ago.

KL: It became very real for me. Our private correspondence, this music that I had sent you, had been put into the world in New York City. And in that exact moment I realized OK, this is a real thing that exists outside of our little telecommunication channel. It busted through a ceiling of fear.

EM: It was real!

KL: What about you, what was the process of starting to come up with concepts for the choreography?

EM: I thought a lot about the space that we were creating. The layout of the room, and the piano in the middle of the space. I got this image, early on, of the piano as the altar at the front of a church. And also as this big body: it’s almost living and breathing, it’s vibrating, it’s making sounds, it’s taking up so much room, and our bodies beside it look smaller and softer in comparison. So the choreography had to revolve around it. Is it our friend? Is it an obstacle?

I got the image of one of us crouching under the piano, as if trapped. As well as the image of someone sitting and facing the piano from far away, like sitting in a pew in church.

I tend to think of movement through words and sensations. I actually really like dancing to poetry, in the same way one would dance to music. At some point, in the early spring, we were talking a lot about the Sinner’s Prayer, and how we both compulsively said it as kids, because we were worrying, did it work? Am I saved? How can I tell? So I decided to choreograph the Sinner’s Prayer, and came up with that phrase that became the central choreography of the piece. You danced it too, and it came back throughout. It was just simple arm gestures. But I wanted it to have the repetitive rhythm of a prayer that you say over and over and know by heart.

KL: I found it so interesting the day we realized the different ways that our brains were creating—you were choreographing with words and sensations, and I was composing with shapes and color. Once we realized that, even though our processes were very different, we were able to understand each other and communicate in a new way.

But I remember when you came to me with the concept of the sinner’s prayer. I loved it because it embodies the idea of a private conversation in a public space. Nobody in the audience is going to think, oh, that’s the sinner’s prayer, but watching you do it and listening to you breathe really brought back that feeling—did this work? Am I going to go to Hell? What’s gonna happen?

The sinner’s prayer is this outcry, I am wrong, please fix me. I felt like our piece was this process—throughout the whole year, but also in the work itself—of figuring out, maybe we’re not wrong. We’re just humans, and we’re not construction projects.

EM: We are whole.

“no right or wrong, just possibility”

EM: You started the piece curled up under the piano in a fetal position. There were a couple ways to read it: you could’ve been a baby in a mother’s womb, or a sleeping child—but there was this heavy massive weight hovering over you.

KL: After I got out from under the piano, the way that I approached the keys felt childlike too. Just the other day I was watching a dad hold his one-year-old baby on top of the piano bench, and she was putting her little fingers on the keys… that was something I wanted to try to embody. What would it feel like to approach this instrument as if I had never seen it before? To follow a sense of curiosity, instead of a sense of obligation?

EM: In the moment when you first touched the piano keys, I did something similar where I closed my eyes and just breathed, and felt my body from the inside out. Which is kind of scary to do onstage when there are people watching you. But, I needed to feel like, oh! This is my body, and oh! it can dance, and it feels so good to move—and approach my instrument in the same open, childlike way.

KL: We also talked about how as a classical dancer, you’re trained not to show breathing or let your breathing be audible. So it felt important to let ourselves make noise.

EM: We agreed on that early on: we wanted our breath to be heard, and we wanted our breathing to be part of the piece…

KL: And our voices, because of what that represents.

three is a magic number

EM: The piece eventually organized itself in a triptych. First was the sinner’s prayer. And then there was a transition where I opened up the lid of the piano, which felt like breaking into the altar. In the rehearsals I held my breath until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I imagined that I was coming to the front of the church with utter terror and fear and trembling, and just like, taking an axe to the altar and saying, I can’t breathe! Open it up! This is for everyone!

Next, the second section, was pure discovery and impulse. You’re discovering the piano, and I’m discovering my body and movement, and it became this frenzy that ended with me grabbing you and spinning you around. I called it the water section.

KL: This water image kept coming up, what did that mean for you?

EM: I think it’s my dance language. If I had to distill it down, when I’m dancing, I feel I’m becoming water. And I’ve always felt that way when I hear your music, too. I was also thinking about an inauguration through water—baptism, or birth—but true to form, the meaning was very fluid and flexible. What about you?

KL: I was really inspired by all the bells around my apartment. There are three or four church steeples that you can throw a rock at from my window. And they’ll all go off at the same time, and they all play different little tunes at slightly different pitches, so it creates this amazing flow of reverberation and cacophony. That was the driving image for me. And also this feeling of, what’s coming? What are these bells signifying?

EM: This whole section was always the most fluid and intuitive. Every time we did it, it felt different.

KL: Sometimes I felt tempted to compose out exactly what I was going to do; but that voice didn’t feel like mine. It was scary to improvise every time, but it also felt so right. And that’s water too: just allowing yourself to be kind of taken.

And then the third section, we broke it open.

EM: After we finally made physical contact—I screamed. It felt like breaking open the piano, round two. Now we were opening up our voices. And all of this anger, and the struggle, the fear that’s been bottling up for so long, is freed. There were a couple times we did it where we started laughing too, because it felt so absurd, just to scream like that. And the laughter felt important too. All this LIFE, this pure feeling and emotion and instinct and drive that’s inside of us, that we’ve kept bottled up in a clean, prim little box to be “good” women.

KL: And then we both stepped away from the familiar.

EM: You left the piano and danced the sinner’s prayer. And I crouched down and improvised on the piano. Which was the scariest part for me.

KL: Also for me.

EM: We were both really encouraging to each other.

KL: But so interesting that we both held that fear about what we were doing, while simultaneously telling the other person, why are you worried about this?

EM: I think we are so highly trained in our respective fields, that we can also recognize the value of not being trained. My experience watching you dance was that it felt very intuitive and beautiful. Because just by having a body, everyone knows how to breathe, everyone knows how to move, and that’s so much of what dancing is.

KL: I felt that way about your piano playing too—even the times where you hit a note that wasn’t in the Pentatonic scale or whatever. And I noticed that you even closed your eyes during this section in the actual performance. Is that something you had done much prior?

EM: In our rehearsals I always looked at my hand, but for the show I closed my eyes and put my ear to my hand. Actually, it came from the last rehearsal, when I had been so nervous because Joachim, world-class flutist, was sitting there watching, and I was like, oh my god, he is going to think this is so dumb. And I hit a note that sounded really flat to me. And afterwards, he came up to me and said, “That moment where you hit the ‘wrong’ note was beautiful. Don’t be afraid of that happening.” And that gave me a lot of courage. You had already been telling me that, but to hear it from him too, because the whole time I was worried that other musicians would think it was a little embarrassing. I suddenly felt more freedom. So in the performance I thought, okay, I’m just going to close my eyes and put my ear to my hand and not even think about trying to fit it into a scale.

KL: It was beautiful. The surrender to it.

And then the hymn starts.

An interesting part of this process was how certain bits just “fell out of us” at random times. The hymn lyrics just “fell out” of me one day. And the ending to the piece. We just did it. Without really discussing. It just happened, and we were both like, yep. That’s it.

“here, in the middle of the circle, is home”

EM: During our workshop in Brooklyn you played me Bobby McFerrin’s 23rd Psalm, where he replaces the “he” pronouns with “she” pronouns. Hearing those words, “she restores my soul, she guides me in paths of righteousness, she prepares a table before me…” felt like it was healing something deep in me. And you planted a seed, because the next day halfway through our run-through, I just started talking, saying some of those words from the twenty-third psalm. And then I felt this sudden moment of care, where I decided to braid your hair.

KL: It went hand-in-hand, this idea of like, she restores my soul—and you even made your own line, “she pours me a glass of water.”

EM: I was thinking of a story Bella told me, that whenever she was sad or upset as a kid, her mom would always give her a glass of water. That was the first line of defense for any problem: let’s just make sure you’re hydrated. I just love that. The most important, baseline thing is, let’s take care of your body in this moment, and then we’ll go from there.

We didn’t reference God explicitly in the piece, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how we talk about God in the patriarchal west. The idea is this authoritarian God, this centralized figure who looks down from above, with love but also with surveillance. I remember my family had a CD growing up that would play in the car and the lyrics were, “I cannot see God but he always sees me, nothing can be hid from God.” This song made its way into my psyche so early, and I felt haunted by the idea of these eyes on me, keeping me in check, watching over me like, you better not do anything bad!

But what if those eyes aren’t there? What if it’s a circle? And we’re in this room together, and we’re caring for each other, and God is decentralized—God is in your mother and father and friends and siblings, God is in you—and it feels flatter, and wider, and more circular.

KL: It was beautiful to then explore this circular idea with each other. In the first two parts of the triptych, there was a sense that we were alienated: we saw each other, but there was something between us—

EM: We were looking at each other like looking in a mirror, but we weren’t actually relating.

KL: But after the scream, when you braided my hair and we started singing, it feels like—I love this circular idea.

EM: We were making the new world. Here is this new way of being that we are going to inhabit. And I’m going to take off this long dress that’s too heavy, and I’m going to braid your hair, and we’re going to sing. It felt like home.

KL: That was the first time that I played a resolved D flat major chord. We emerged musically and personally out of this chaos of angst or indecision, and we found our tonal center, and our voices, and each other. And then our work was done. And we rested on the thing we had to fight against.

EM: The piano.

KL: What did the piano represent to you in the end?

EM: I guess it felt like a mother’s body.

KL: That gave me some chills.

EM: In the final moments of the hymn, I stood in front of the piano and did the movements from the sinner’s prayer, but without the tension in my body—it felt more like breathing. And I faced straight forward—which a woman never does in ballet. You always angle your body to make the most pleasing shapes. And of course growing up, I never saw a woman standing in front of the altar in church—that would be sacrilegious. But I just stood right in front of the piano and danced and sang, with this big warm body behind me that felt like it was supporting me. And then I sat down with you, and together we leaned on it.

KL: It felt like a pillow, like a soft place to land. That was also the first time I sat down. There was this implied exhale. We can rest.

EM: We made it to this point. And here, in the middle of the circle, is home. It’s not far away, it’s not one day when we are perfect—it’s here.

PART TWO: body image and dealing with fear

“everyone could hate it so much that no one wants to talk to us again”

EM: There was a point where we did a little partnered dance at the piano, and I kept trying to hide my height. I’m so much taller than you, and we filmed it a couple times to try to figure out the arm movements, and I kept thinking, it’s not right, it’s not right. And then eventually I realized, oh, it’s actually because I think I look too big, and I’m trying to make myself look smaller, but that’s making the movements look contrived. And then as soon as I just embraced that I’m a full head taller than you, we leaned our heads back against each other, and our heads suddenly made a perfect puzzle piece.

KL: It fit!

EM: We fit perfectly together!

KL: That was a dynamic that I didn’t expect to come up: my insecurities about my body on the stage, especially in the parts where I was dancing. I remembered feeling so much shame and I felt like I should bring it up, but it felt so silly. Why am I having body insecurities?

EM: That was actually so healing for me to hear. Because from my perspective hearing you say that, I thought, how absurd! Your body is YOU, how can it not be beautiful? And for me to have that reaction and think, oh, when I’m dancing, other people might see me that way too—like, they might not see a problem with me.

KL: I remember being surprised when you reciprocated those feelings.

EM: My favorite was the day Sam posted a two-second clip of our rehearsal on an Instagram reel—and we confessed to each other later that night that we had both, separately, spent like thirty minutes watching it over and over.

KL: And zooming in…

EM: If that’s not real, I don’t know what is.

KL: From the beginning of this process we wordlessly established this open channel of sharing—we had to have full openness, or it wasn’t going to work. Body insecurities can feel so shameful, because they’re so lonely. But both admitting that we stopped that video to look at the shape of our shoulders—it just becomes funny. It shoots through all of the shame, and all of the seriousness.

EM: The emperor has no clothes.

KL: And we’re all experiencing this.

EM: Hello, fear. I think we even named it, didn’t we?

KL: Bert.

EM: Okay, Bert is here, and the piece actually wouldn’t even be good without Bert—because this is sort of what we are fighting against, if we need an enemy. The fear is what we are fighting against.

KL: I remember thinking, what if people laugh? What if people hate it? What if people think it’s silly? And then I realized: everyone could hate it so much that no one wants to talk to us again—and it’s STILL worth doing. We STILL need to say what we need to say.

EM: Yeah. I remember the first morning in Brooklyn, we were eating bagels in the park, and you said something like, this is our piece. A private conversation in a public place.

That image came back to me later that week, when I left our rehearsal to use the bathroom, and when I returned I could hear you playing from the hallway, and—you know when you hear something you’re not supposed to hear? Standing in the hallway, listening to you in your space, my heart swelled. And I thought, okay, Kelly and I are creating this warm space together. And people are allowed to be in the doorway, listening. But it’s just the two of us in here, together. It helped me more fully walk INTO what we were doing.

“If I’m not battling against myself, where am I?”

KL: Throughout this process I felt the side effects of our classical training kicking in. The idea that everything needs to be at a certain level to be worth saying. Perfectly packaged, in gold wrapping, with a diamond bow. I had to work through the idea that there isn’t a pre-prescribed path for this. There is no, “here’s your piece, practice until it’s at this level!”

EM: And then someone tells you if it’s good or not…

KL: It took a level of courage that I’m now very happy we had to find, to advocate for ourselves as creators. Here is what we’re gonna do, we’re breaking out of our traditional roles, it’s going to be a soundscape and we might sing…It took a lot to be able to say, we believe in this, even when I don’t think I trusted myself at that point. Every inner demon in me was like what am I doing? I can’t do this.

But throughout the process I was also able to see all of that over-perfectionism clearly for what it was. Because that guest wasn’t invited to the party. Anything that we wanna say is worth saying, because we wanna say it.

EM: Yeah, that is so radical! So radical.

On a related note on the dance side, my experience of ballet from the very beginning was always that it should feel like a struggle. It should feel hard. It’s almost satisfying BECAUSE it’s hard, because there is this sense that you’re conquering your body, and you’re making your body into something better. And that is the goal: to control how your body naturally moves and wants to work, to tame or transcend it and make it “cleaner.”

Which is so aligned also with the idea of original sin. This idea that the human body is flawed, and the body is sinful, and we need to conquer it until we can get rid of it in heaven.

KL: I was just gonna say!

EM: My colleagues at the ballet would always say, we are never going to reach perfection, but we are also never going to stop fighting for it.

A lot of leaving ballet for me was about grappling with that voice and taking a radically different approach to life: what if I’m not “wrong?” What if I don’t need to devote my life to making myself “better” than what I am?

All that to say, our process was one of my first entries back into performing as a dancer since leaving ballet…and I would get so scared in our rehearsals, Kelly, because it felt so easy. It felt natural, and it felt easy, and that was terrifying. Because I thought, if I’m not fighting against myself, if I’m not battling against myself, where am I? What am I? And the piece, and the release that it was, felt simultaneously so good and so scary. Because there was no standard to compare it to and nothing to hide behind: it was just us. Just your body, and my body.

3. tying it all together

POLITICS AND CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

EM: Shall we talk about current events? Since moving back to the States and sort of re-confronting the communities I was raised in, it has been haunting me, this thought that I could just grow out my hair, put myself back in the closet, go to some church somewhere and find a man and get married and build a nuclear family, and in some weird way that would be so easy. That’s the role I know how to play—I know how to silence myself and say “yes.” It’s the role that is laid out from childhood for so many women. It would involve shutting away so many parts of myself, but it would be so easy.

KL: Because that path is so clear. But it also involves a lot of submission. I love my life as a free woman in this day and age, but it’s hard, because all the power of decision falls on you.

EM: It’s resisting the power structures. I'm living a life now where I have to remind myself, when I feel the anxiety of not fitting into the ideals I was raised with—I remind myself that there are so many people envisioning a different world. But yeah, I feel a baseline tension. Even the fact that after leaving ballet, I’m not pursuing a career-oriented life: I'm not aligning as a woman assuming the role of wife and mother, but I’m also not aligning as the career-driven woman under capitalism. No, I feel so strongly that my life’s purpose is to make art and build community—be part of that circular world that we are envisioning.

KL: Yeah, it makes sense it’s hard, because we’re trying to build from the ground up: new ways of being a woman, new ways of spirituality.

EM: I experienced a lot of unexpected sorrow last week after seeing the online reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death, specifically from my Christian acquaintances. I was shaken by how many people I know were loudly and publicly denouncing his death, when I so rarely hear the Christian community speak up about violence in America or abroad. It opened up an old question about whose lives Christians see as worthy of protecting. Here is this white man who supposedly stands for “Christian” values, but what about the children affected by school shootings? Or the thousands of kids that have died so brutally in Gaza the last two years? Or the immigrant families that are being targeted and torn apart right now?

KL: I did too. I felt disappointed because—I think we've talked about this. There are aspects of Christianity that I still find very beautiful: Jesus as a person and what he represents, what he did in his works in his life. But to see how far that has been taken in what I feel is an objectively wrong direction.

EM: Jesus was so uninterested in the religious and political elite of his day—he hung out with the sex workers and the homeless and the sick.

But I’m convinced that this also ties back to this concept of original sin, which I think gained traction around the time Constantine started using Christianity for the political needs of the Roman Empire. This concept that children are born fundamentally broken and bad, and we need to fix them. This idea trickles up to the whole authoritarian state we have: the idea that people are inherently wrong, and we need a harsh father figure to keep order and keep everyone contained and policed, and the people worth protecting are the ones who’ve been “fixed.” Whenever I enter back into Christian spaces now I’m always taken aback by the basic language of “believers” and “non-believers.” It immediately sets up a hierarchy that implies, believers are your family and they’re the people who make up your community, the people you understand—but “non-believers” is one step away from “non-human.” There’s like a vague idea—

KL: They’re dangerous!

EM: They’re dangerous. I remember as a child having a vague idea that they are people too, and they deserve to be alive, but…any discussion of rights or justice—it was implied that it was for believers, and believers were the ones being victimized or oppressed. And later in life I learned how much political power the Christian community in America actually has. And this believer and nonbeliever, us and them language is such an effective tool to divide us, to keep us from building functioning community with those different from us.

LISTEN TO THE UNHEARD VOICES

EM: This is the only thing we haven’t touched on yet, and something that came up a lot for me throughout the year. Our creative process felt somehow very connected to my ancestors—specifically the women who’ve come before me. I thought a lot, and had a lot of dreams over the past year, about my mom’s mom—Gloria. She’s the epitome in my mind of the mother figure. She used to host these Sunday dinners for the whole extended family every week, and cooked these amazing comforting meals, and basically raised some of my cousins, and was always nurturing everyone’s bodies. She was such a strong matriarch figure. And she died when I was still pretty young, but I feel haunted by the fact that I never had a real conversation with her, and I felt like I never got to see—I don’t know who she was. I don’t know what she thought about, I don’t know what she prayed for, I don’t know what she was sad about or what she grieved in her life—I don’t know all these sides of her. Everyone talks about how strong Grandma was, but I think so much of what people perceived as strength was that she kept things in. She kept things inside. And she gave, and she gave, and she gave. And she held this family together, as so many women do, and put her body on the line for the family. But what were her dreams? I don’t know.

And it feels somehow like a responsibility. Because here is me in 2025, a 30-year-old unmarried openly queer woman, who is publishing writing and making music and performing my own art and getting a platform to do all these things. And I also know our bodies aren’t as separate as we make them out to be—we are so interconnected, and I know things get passed on, and not just anatomy and genes—and I’ve just had many moments throughout this process when I wonder, am I saying something that’s not coming just from me?

KL: I don’t know much about my great-grandmother, but she was also a pianist in New York. And she could only perform insofar as it fit in with the other more important roles she was prescribed to take, as wife and mother. Sometimes I also wonder, if she was alive today, what would she have done?

EM: If these women could’ve built a world for their larger communities, outside of their domestic homes, what would it have looked like?

This feels like a rare moment in human history. The amount of freedom and privilege and opportunity we have. Our grandmothers couldn’t have their own credit cards—it wasn’t that long ago that women could vote or buy property.

KL: All of this gives me a sense of urgency and power. We almost have to say what we want to say, because we CAN say what we want to say. We’re almost obligated to, for this window of time, however brief.

EM: A few days after our Brooklyn workshop, I went to this open music and dance jam. There were a wide range of ages there, and I love dancing with older people, especially because it’s so rare in the ballet world. At one point in the jam I found myself dancing near three much older women. Someone had brought a chair out into the space, and they were sort of gathered around it, and one woman was sitting on it, and I just sat down on the floor beside the chair. And one of the women started to sing. It was the kind of singing that immediately gives you chills. It felt very raw, and I sensed there was a lot behind it. I felt I was witnessing something sacred. Hearing the feeling in her voice, I thought, what has she seen in her life? This powerful, moaning sound coming from her: what joy or sorrow has she carried, what has she seen? She’s probably a mother. What has she seen?

And I just felt so quieted in that moment. I knew I needed to step back, and just witness it.

I sort of turned toward the window, and kept listening to her sing. And then the other two older women who were sitting near me—two hands just reached straight over my head and into my field of vision and out towards the windows. And I just started to weep. These two withered, beautiful hands reaching over my head and out—it almost felt like out from me—as I was just sitting there quietly listening—and I just felt so clearly: this is part of my work, as an artist. I need to listen to what’s come before. I need to listen to the voices that haven’t been heard.

Over and over at night I become her. She has long hair. She wears dresses and her face looks foreign in the mirror under careful makeup. She cleans his house and carries and bears his babies, lying on her back. She speaks with a quiet voice. Does what Charlie Kirk preached.

Then there is a strange scratching outside. I go to look and it is an old hag who is slowly lighting the house on fire. She stands in the middle of the English ivy, in front of the rhododendrons, and sets off fireworks, and then collapses.

I am afraid of her, but I run to help her and as I hold her in my arms, her body becomes soft and small and sweet-smelling, like a child’s.

When I wake up I go for a walk. A bee lands on my right cheekbone and it is like being kissed by a minuscule lightning bolt—my cheek vibrates, all through its fleshy padding, from soft peach-fuzzed skin down to the damp rounded lip and into the wet cave of my mouth, where sparks dance for a full five minutes.

“In the age of the computer, the conquest of the female body is still a precondition for the accumulation of labor and wealth.” A system that reduces women to wombs. A system of Profit propped up on the crushed bodies of colonial subjects, descendants of African slaves, immigrants displaced by globalization. (Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch).

Dreaming and waking I see the beautiful people, who dare to claim their homes, their land, their earth their skin, who dare to transgress the lines, even when the state says your body does not belong to you—Oh you beautiful, beautiful people, fly, fly, fly together. We are a flock.

A painting i found in the trash and fell in love with

Featherlike evergreens dip their fingers into the rays of Sun. Like water the light slants and filters through to my face, dropping tiny white beads on my eyelashes.

I go to a concert. In the middle of the chancel at the Unitarian church, Ganavya sings like she is praying. Her voice is the most beautiful instrument I’ve ever heard: intuitive, flexible, intricate, powerful. She sings about being far away from home. But it is not until I hear her, that I realize where a pang of empty longing used to exist in my ribcage, now feels like a warm, humming orb. Home is not far away. Home is inside of me.

(notes 9/26: get weirder, get weirder, get smaller, get weirder. Do what AI can’t do. Dream.)

Friday: My sister and I lay on a red museum beanbag and watch civilizations rise and fall like waves, then watch pigeons windsurfing in a flock over the golden hour. We laugh with delight, at the pigeons’ delight. Dozens of them, turning somehow in unison, guided by invisible forces. Fly, fly, fly together flock.

I nap in her lap under the trees on the highline, listening to voices in many languages pass by.

Turn my palms and my eyes away from the god of Profit

and open my rib cage allegiance to the god of Change

and breathe through into my fingertips the god of Wonder the god of Delight the god of Surprise

all shouting in hordes up into the Sun:

New ways are coming! New ways are coming!

and open my eyes to the dancing of the Light—what do I owe you for that god?

How much do you ask for the light?

How much do I owe you, oh you wonderful beautiful god?

(Content warning: this post expresses admiration for The Nutcracker. I know, I know—puke!)

It’s that season again. I step outside into the December chill, and immediately feel magic in the air—the magic that I used to associate with The Nutcracker (as one of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s old ads used to put it, Christmas IS The Nutcracker—) but that I’ve come to suspect is maybe something more mysterious and fundamental: the turning of the seasons. The close of a year. The ice-cold embrace of darkness, that makes the inside of my body start to feel like a candle; a hub of warmth and quietude.

Flurries were falling this morning. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk I had a sudden, intense urge to listen to the Waltz of the Snowflakes. (Gross!!) I already know this music intimately: I started dancing ballet as a child and later embarked on a 10-year professional ballet career. Nutcracker in December is just part of the deal, and a couple years ago, I couldn’t wait for the day I’d be finished with it. But today, I miss it. So I keyed the ultra-familiar score up on my Spotify and just listened as I walked.

Choreography started to slide through my head in various iterations—combinations of steps from various Nutcrackers danced in Pittsburgh, Boston, Toronto, and Copenhagen, mixed and melded together, along with a weird mixture of nostalgia, warmth, and sorrow at all the memories buried underneath. I allowed the muscle memories to sink back down through my subconscious, and simply set my focus on the music.

Despite dancing to this theme more times than I can count, I don’t think I’ve ever simply listened to it, all on its own. It is glorious. The notes filled my body with the delight of sensorial recognition: a flurry of ice and wind and snow, inside my chest, nerves, fingertips. The sense of dancing feels as vivid as ever, but this time nobody else can see it: it’s all happening, quietly, on the inside of me.

Next I put on Waltz of the Flowers, and pay attention to the warmth of the oboes, flutes and clarinets, unfolding like soft and fragrant magenta-pink petals. The memories rise up again. I am a child in company rehearsals in Pittsburgh, watching in awe as the “grown-ups” dance to this music, and promising myself that one day I will be one of them. Then I’m running across the stage to launch into a jumping rond de jambe en l’air, as close to flying as I’ll ever get, dancing Dewdrop. But the part that sends the biggest pang through my chest is the four counts near the end, where all the women in the corps run into one long line and take each other’s hands. Left, right. Exhausted, breathing, interconnected.

If I could do it all again, I can’t help thinking, I would be kinder to myself. Maybe if I hadn’t been such a perfectionist, I wouldn’t have had as successful of a career, but that seems so much less important to me now. I would’ve loved my body, instead of hating her, punishing her, taking her for granted. I would’ve been so much more aware of the magic of holding hands with my colleagues and moving together as one. I would’ve taken breaks every day, just to listen to the music. But hindsight is easy.

Finally, I put on the Grand Pas de Deux. I’ve heard this theme more times than I can count, on repeat for twenty-plus shows every year since I was a child. Still, every time, this theme haunts me. Eight descending notes, exquisitely excruciating in their simplicity.

After the anticipatory Christmas party, the fantasy mouse and toy battle, the sparkly sweet candy divertissements, the grand pas feels like a sudden and intense shift from the whole rest of the score. It’s like at the crux of the story, as the harp plucks away the last few drops of sugar, Tchaikovsky finally abandons the childlike fantasy and reveals his heart.

I don’t know much about Tchaikovsky’s life, but I’ve heard stories about his mother’s early death, his lifelong depression, his closeted homosexuality. This piece feels like a glimpse into the soul beneath all the musical genius. At the crescendo the theme is almost like a scream: pleading, asking, reaching, reaching, but always falling again, back to the tonic. It’s so grand and beautiful, but there’s no way around it: Tchaikovsky can’t hide it anymore. After all the magic—sorrow.

I recognize something Tchaikovsky is trying to say. There is something dark at the core of this story, something like the cold embrace of December itself. You climb and climb and climb to the mountaintop, and build the perfect ending to the fantasy story. And that’s when the chasm feels bottomless.

Oh, Nutcracker. You will continue to haunt me, and you will always be close to my heart. But that’s the way of things: sometimes the beautiful core can only be seen in hindsight.

Brooklyn is quiet and cold today. A woman is speaking colorful, musical Spanish into her cell phone outside the corner deli. A figure sits in a wheelchair, bundled in hat and scarf. I take off my headphones, the music ends, and I encounter the sweet beauty of silence. The candle burns inside my chest. Thank you ballet, thank you Nutcracker, and thank you that I can’t go back. I can only move forward. There is more than enough magic to be found, here and now. I’ll be sure not to miss it.

I can’t quite put a finger on it, but life feels mysteriously sparkly lately. Darkness has closed in. November is the time when leaves die and spirits fly.

I’ve stepped off social media post-election, and been spending lots of time with my imagination. Learning, what matters to me? Letting myself dream, and play, despite all the forces that say dreaming and playing are wasteful and dangerous and frivolous.

I have lots here for you today: some ramblings of the week (“air” & “what are you doing?”), a link to a beautiful call to action by my latest role model (“dwell”), and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, my dream for the kind of world I want to live in.

air

The reason I left professional ballet was not boredom, or burnout, or injury. When I sat on the hilltop and my world shattered open, I don’t have to do this anymore didn’t mean that I didn’t have to dance anymore.

I loved dancing, then. I still do.

     Passing between train cars
     Push, slide open, step to the next door, 
     Push, slide open
     to the left, the water ripples and ripples . . . 

My sister left nursing on a postpartum hospital ward, a job that she adored, to be with two babies of her own. I only get one chance to see them grow up, she said to me. I miss working, of course I do, but Ellie, I love my life.

Two years ago I stepped off a speeding train of blinding, anxious ambition, one that I boarded as a child. Next level, next premiere, a never-ending climb up an infinite ladder. So why do I keep fighting the same battle? The urge to rush ahead, away from the boring, wide-open now. The heavy, fearful need to become something better than myself.

And then, the moments hit when I am so radically free, I almost can’t breathe. I am a body: seeing, tasting, moving. This earth around me is my home. I sit on a bench, watching the wind move entire trees in a dance, as dry leaves go shimmering by. And then this same wind hits my skin—and my joy breaks open.

My joy, and my heartbreak—but I think these two things are one and the same.

     . . . to the left 
     the water ripples and ripples. . .

How beautiful and strange and wondrous is this world. I once was blind. But now I see.

How broken and cruel and dark is this world. I thought I knew all the rules. And then I woke up from a dream.

 . . . I am on a train, again
Feeling homesick for a time when I had no home,
I sat in my seat, flying, awake, in the middle of the night
Writing feverishly
Fully alone, set free, cut cord
That drowning is what I sometimes feel 
And, oddly, long for
As Rumi wrote,
"Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison walls.Escape."

 . . . I picture the axe, glass shattering
Splinters of wood, torn planks
Air pours in.

And I shiver, and I want to moan, feeling this air,
Until I realize that this is what life is:
Air on my skin.

The facade shatters.

what are you doing?

I caught up with someone on the phone recently. She wanted to know how it’s been since leaving ballet, if I’m still dancing (yes), and if I’m performing anywhere (no), and if I’m going to college (no). So, you’re just bumming around in New York, she asked? The phantom shame hit again. (what are you doing with your life? The anxiety-voice pesters me like a hammer. What are you doing?) I have such a hard time verbalizing the gut instinct I felt, to do life differently the second time around. I needed to strip down and bury myself like a seed in bare soil, and grow from nothing but sun and water and time. A new lease on life. This time, from the inside out. How does it feel to be alive?

Now, I’m sprouting leaves in New York, supporting myself with a few jobs that I find stimulating, and walking into doorways as they open. I’m building a life that feels quietly, internally sparkly. But I’m not on a career path. I’m not looking ahead. I’m living in the moment, following a warmth that waits in my chest each morning. Yeah, I am bumming around in New York, I answer her.

My favorite day of the month, I get to host a space where my friends and I dance together—exploring, playing, being. Last week, we moved in lavishly slow motion. Do less, feel more: what happens, when time takes on a new texture?

We only get one chance to live.

It’s always right here, my sister and I used to tell each other. Open your eyes. It’s always right here, close to you, around you, inside of you:

Magic.

dwell

I’m thinking about my Grandma’s garden. Her weekly Sunday dinners, with the extended family gathered around the dining room table. I would be at the kid’s table next door, but I remember hearing raised voices wafting through the walls sometimes, when the adults would start talking politics. Us kids, we told each other stories: a story about an overgrown baby, stories about flying peanut butter sandwiches.

I’m thinking about Flaccus; the house whose bones my friends now all say was magical (and I knew was magical). My favorite was the backyard. My parents tended it faithfully. We watched it change through the seasons. Dad clipped and nurtured and engineered and nursed. Mom gloried in wild things, planted the flowers she loved anywhere and everywhere, and just let them grow.

I recently discovered the Utah naturalist, educator, and author named Terry Tempest Williams, and spent a lot of time hanging out (spiritually) with her this past week while reading her novel Refuge. Terry is becoming a role model to me. She is a white woman and writer who looks a bit like me. She, too, grew up in the dominant religion of her area (her, Mormon, me Christian.) She dwells so intentionally on the land she calls home, and holds the concept of the sacred very close. She manages to balance owning the heritage of her religion, while rejecting the ways her religion has been used to ravage the earth and oppress the “other.” Her spirit of witness, compassion, and fierce, passionate defense of the living world is one that I hope to spend my life learning to embody.

What does it mean to “dwell” in America today? Having only recently been “born again” into this world, I still have so much to learn about what it means to dwell here. The way our society treats our Earth, especially, breaks my heart, because this is the way I used to treat my own body. Extracting her energy, valuing her only by her output, committing the violences of bottomless greed and disregard toward her. My heart, like the heart of America, holds violent ambition and self-centered greed. But it also holds tenderness, and compassion, and empathy, and awe. When I spent time working on farms, I learned that farming is not about “extraction.” The harvest is the secondary job. A farmer’s job, first and foremost, is stewardship. The harvest is only as good as the soil. The care and nurture of the soil is an investment in the future of all life.

My body is my home. This earth is our home.

So how do we dwell here?

In an amazing address that Terry Tempest Williams gave at the Bioneers Conference in 2019, she shared these words from medicine woman Evangi Gray:

“To dwell is to see things as they are. And then, you stay and fight for those things that you see for your community. It is a privilege.”

How do I fight for America today? How do I fight for a city like New York, where people live on top of each other and trees grow from square openings in the concrete?

(here’s Terry’s whole speech from the Bioneers Conference if you’re interested. This made me cry. It felt so piercingly relevant to everything on my heart these days.)

I envision a world where…

When Terry Tempest Williams asked her elder Willie Greyeyes, an Indigenous county commissioner in San Juan, Utah, what to do with all her anger about the military and extraction industries’ ravaging of the state of Utah, he gave her this advice:

“Terry, it can no longer be about anger. It has to be about healing. Going to the source of our pain. And recognizing it. Owning it. Apologizing for it. Embracing it. With a commitment to change.”

In my last few essays I explored some raw feelings of anger that I’ve experienced since moving back to the States, confronting the ideologies of my past, and watching Trump get reelected. I see a country that is fragmented, up in arms, drowning in empty wealth and hollow intellectualism, disconnected from ourselves and from each other, and grasping for leadership in all the wrong places. In a swell of energy like a wave, one night last week, I sat down and titled a page in my journal “I envision a world where…” And then I just wrote, pen spilling onto paper, for a couple hours.

Here’s what I wrote. (I didn’t edit this list afterwards: the words all came out in a single rush, maybe more from my heart-brain or my gut-brain than from my head brain.)

I’m curious if any of my dreams align with yours. If dreams are equally as contagious as all the cynicism we pass around. Sparks fly from one heart to another. What catches?

I envision a world where:

-Time is valued as a form of wealth greater than money. time to play, sing, think. Rest, watch the world go by, be in nature.

-Awe is the core human state. The age of information has given us so much knowledge, but how amazing to return to the magic of wonder! Questions become far more attractive than answers. Curiosity is more cherished than mastery. Dreams become as valued as textbooks. What does the creative, intuitive, unquantifiable side of our consciousness have to teach us?

-Mothers are the center and bedrock of society. Mothers are the touchpoint that keeps us centered, grounding and connecting us all in one great circle (interconnected web of matriarchy, instead of top-down domination of patriarchy). Toxic masculinity dissolves as men everywhere embrace the ability to experience emotions, express creativity, be sensitive, rely on one another, and use power for the good of everyone around them, both human and more-than-human. The feminine is our guiding light: we treasure the body’s wisdom as much as the mind’s. We listen for the unspoken. We honor the mothers, and the caretakers, all around us. We look a little closer to see what’s behind the imposing, the loud, the “objective,” the very impressive.

-Material goods are precious, handled with care, cherished, fixed when they are broken. Not needing to consume more than we need, we experience the superior wealth of satisfaction. Satisfaction in our capacity for creativity and resilience; satisfaction in having and caring for beautiful things; satisfaction in learning and/or supporting excellent craftsmanship. . . The joy of treasuring sweaters passed down from our grandparents. . . The joy of buying a single album, and listening to it over and over, until it is as much a fixture in your life as the comforter on your bed, or the table on which your food rests.

-Food is recognized as a gift from the earth, part of a great, generous and mysterious cycle of which we are an inextricable part. Everyone gets the chance to experience the satisfaction of eating food grown from soil we can touch with our own hands, in community gardens. We support and get to know our local farmers, incredible people who work hard to grow our food. We pay them the respect and compensation they deserve. We learn to enjoy the pleasures of vegetables and fruits and grains, and see meats as the lavish, extravagant gifts that they are, and offer up our gratitude, recognizing their true cost when we consume them. Food is the source of our most basic joy and connection, and as such it is holy, and sharing it together is our greatest joy.

-Screens: we collectively exit social media and re-dedicate ourselves to the physical world. We are free from the shackles of a two-dimensional reality that splits us apart and traps us in a world of individual identity. We are free from handing over our minds and creative capacities to money-hungry companies in exchange for ever-increasing addiction. We become indigenous to PLACE again: the messy, full, multi-dimensional landscape we walk through every day. (robin wall kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass)

We enjoy living for how it FEELS to live, and not for how our lives would appear on a screen to others. We find friends, by striking up conversations and making real-time connections with people in our networks. We navigate roads by learning the layout of our cities, and asking neighbors for directions. We organize and share events in our community, by visiting local cafes and libraries, hanging posters, joining clubs. We find news by talking to neighbors, subscribing to local publications. We remain updated on world issues, but we focus our energies on the world that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.

-All generations get a chance to interact. Children are not segregated from the rest of society, and a crying child in public is not seen as a nuisance: we all recognize that caring for children is not only the responsibility of their parents, but of a whole society. They are our future. Our elders are not tucked away in homes. They, too, are a central part of life, keeping us grounded, handing us hard-won wisdom, reminding us of the precious gift of our bodies. They are precious and highly honored members of our society. Children and elders keep us connected with our tenderness, with our wonder, with our patience, with our capacity for compassion and empathy.

-Art is not another commodity to be bought and sold. Art is not merely entertainment. Art is not about Perfection. Art, as an expressive act, is a sacred human right. Our collective focus shifts away from art as a static product, and towards art-making as a living expression. Art-making is first and foremost universal, a source of joy, catharsis, connection, exploration, and innovation, the birthright of all humans on earth no matter who they are. Communities meet regularly to make and appreciate art together: music jams, poetry slams, theater, choirs, maker spaces, etc etc

What kind of world do you envision?

Instead of discouraging me because of how far away it feels, writing this list and claiming my dream-big-values for myself actually turned out to be empowering. I’ve stepped off social media myself, and started focusing on the people I see every day: the regulars at my cafe; my grounded, hardworking food service coworkers; my loyal, close friends. I’m looking for intentional, intergenerational communities (which are SO hard to find in this city, but I’m attending Friends Meeting and I’m intrigued—any Quaker readers here?) I’ve started making a daily practice of spending time sitting in awe (time with nature and poetry!) I’m trying to walk slower on the street, and savor bites of my food, and enjoy the priceless gift of my time whenever possible. I connected with an organization that delivers weekly produce from local farms directly to my YMCA. My favorite, closest to my heart: whenever I can, I practice dancing with people, for no other reason than the radical, lavishly ephemeral act of dancing itself.

I’m figuring out what kind of a world I want to help build. I think I’m part of a generation that feels trapped in a disintegrating America and an increasingly fragile, ravaged Earth—but looking around me, away from my screen, a little closer beneath the harsh surface of a dirty city, I start to realize how many people are already, quietly, building a world together like the one of my dream. I am not alone. We are not alone.

still, small voices everywhere

native peoples,

indigenous to place

open hearted peoples,

holding each other’s hands

a network, a world-wide-web,

human and more-than-human.

If you made it all the way here, I am honored you would engage with so many of my thoughts and dreams. Thank you for the lavish gift of your time. Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope you spend time sharing food with people you love today.

There’s a story stuck in my hip.

For years now, the right side of my pelvis has been a mass of chronically tight and tense muscle. In my professional dancing days, the trickle-down from the tension, a tight right knee and persistently twitching ankle, sent me regularly to the ballet company’s physiotherapist, in an effort to keep the pain from affecting my performance. And the tension was no better at home: whether I was standing in the kitchen frying an egg, or lying on the couch reading a book, I would invariably become aware that my right hip was balled up as tightly as a boxer’s fist, holding onto something for dear life. Try as I might, I’ve never been able to get it to relax. I’ve tried everything in my repertoire. Accupuncture, massage, constant stretching, strengthening, breathing exercises, meditation.

Lately, it’s been getting harder to ignore. A few days ago, on an especially tense hip day, I rolled out my mat in the tiny space behind my couch and put on a yoga video. As I moved through stretches, the line of tension pulled like an overly taut string; a rubber band linked between the ends of my right toes and the tip-top of my right ear, caught and twisted into hopeless knots at the hip. At the end of the class, the teacher offered an invitation that I hadn’t heard before: “Find a part of your body that feels peaceful, and listen to what it has to say.”

My hip felt decidedly un-peaceful, just then, but I decided to try it. I cradled my hands gently around my side, closed my eyes, and just listened to the twitching, clenched mass. What do you have to say, I asked? Then I listened.

I recently read an article about listening, on the Substack How To Go Home, (I’m a big fan of this other Ellie’s work and highly recommend a follow!) More accurately, the article was about the art of reading: how and why an act that used to be considered a mystical, whole-body experience, taken on by monks in medieval times, has transformed and morphed over time into a logical, scholastic exercise, after the advents of the Enlightenment, the printing press and eventually, digital screens. Ellie writes about reconnecting with the lost art of reading—not as a pursuit of cognitive knowledge, but as a way to touch a deeper, more mysterious wisdom—as she puts it, a way of accessing the “god in the text,” or the living, breathing spirit that resides in any true work of art. She prescribes the practice of lectio divina as a way to experience the god in the text:

“Here’s the key: do not analyze the text! Do not try to be clever. Simply allow it to enter you and flow through, like a river, until you’re attuned to its basic movement. Notice if any moments or images hit you with particular energy or clarity, but do not try to unpick them…Whenever you reach a passage that feels particularly resonant, slow down. Stay with it…and be curious about any sensations or images or movements that arise.”

I’ve been practicing Ellie’s version of lectio divina with a book of Rumi’s poetry for the past couple weeks. It felt suddenly natural to approach the balled-up tension in my hip in the same way. I didn’t try to pick apart, to understand. I didn’t try to fix. I just opened my mind, and waited.

It didn’t take long at all. Memories came flooding up to the surface like bubbles. I was in Canada at my first ballet job. The ballet master was on me about my hip rotation, known in ballet as turnout; the way ballet dancers rotate our legs 90 degrees outward at the hip so that our movements are clearly visible and aesthetically pleasing to an audience perspective. Turnout, especially the 90 degree kind, is physiologically unnatural for most bodies, and one of the most difficult technical elements of ballet, one I always struggled with. You have to fix this, I heard the ballet master tell me. My job was at stake. I felt myself, facing the mirror with two hands at the barre, bending my knees and rising up onto my toes over and over, trying to twist my knees and heels into position. I was an apprentice with the company, and I wasn’t going to get the job. I was failing, out of control. I felt myself clutching at my hips with all my grit-tooth strength, forcing muscles as hard as I could, trying to use pure effort to shape my body into the positions that would grant me the belonging that I so desperately wanted, the approval that I didn’t realize I would never be able to find, until I gave it to myself first. In my apartment in New York, twitches reverberated through my body like harp strings. My conscious brain hadn’t visited Canada in ages; but my hip had been carrying it around for ten years.

Maybe an hour later, a quiet came over my body. It was finished. What felt like a reservoir of bubbles was finally empty. I stood up and gently started to make dinner. My hip has been relaxed ever since.

I’ve read my share about how emotions can get trapped inside your body, and experienced the catharsis of physical release before, but I’ve never experienced it so succinctly or vividly. The whole experience has me thinking about memory.

Where do memories live inside our bodies? There are brain memories, the kind that you have to reconstruct by listing details and impressions until the full picture comes back to you (weren’t we lying on your old blue couch? Was it October? Oh yeah, that’s when we watched Beetlejuice!) There are the kind of memories that come to you unbidden, unlocked by a familiar smell or the way that train whistle sounds just like the one you used to hear from your backyard as a kid. And then there are memories that need to be unearthed, handled with care and patience, dug up from your body like treasures.

The wound-memories are the trickiest. It’s so counter-intuitive. I see pain and I want to make it better. But the wanting itself seems to be a physical block to the necessary release. My years and years of exercises and techniques and “solutions” did nothing for my angry hip. How often do I attack my own wounds, try to rush to a resolution, when often what a wound needs is to be treated like a beautiful work of art: to be approached with awe, held with humility, and simply heard? When I grew up in the Evangelical church, I understood “witnessing” to mean an act of imposition: sharing the good news of Jesus with other people, in the hopes that they would be convinced to convert. But now I understand witnessing as something much more radical: literally the meaning of the word. Witnessing. Just opening mind and heart to someone else, listening. Nothing more.

I think about the tense hips and balled up fists and clenched jaws hiding in the bodies all around me, too: the invisible wounds trapped inside human bodies and more-than-human bodies alike. The clear-cut forests. The plastic-choked waters. I wonder what would happen, if we were willing to stop trying to attack our surroundings with solutions—stop—open our eyes and ears—and simply listen to the world that surrounds each of us. What would happen? Would we all break apart? Would we scream and cry? Would we start to heal?

To leave you, here’s a poem I wrote a few years back, when my body had another story to tell me. This time, the story wasn’t trapped in my hip: it was trapped in my heart.

I wake up
My good, good body holds a bubble in her chest
It’s pressed against my lungs, my gut, only half aware 
a slight nagging pull on my shoulder where
I sit in my sheets and try to greet the day
It’s tangled and grey
My good, good body tells me it’s time
I want to cradle this sleep but the tapes in my mind
Have begun to whir. I climb out and place
My good, good feet on the ragged floor
Through the frame of the bedroom door
Water on my face and hands, water sliding down my throat, water down the drain.

Later, I sit in the courtyard, 
watching the trees wave their arms.
The bubbles grow again, soft fingers on my sternum,
Upturned questions, like children’s faces.
After a while, my throat
wraps itself gentle around their fear
and they rise like mist and burst open,
Unbidden 
bits of song, flung into sound and air:

          You 
are not broken.

          You 
are good, good.

          You 
are not wrong.

          You 
are not broken.

Water on my eyes, water on my cheeks, 
water lifted up into the wind.

Side note: I just have to share another paragraph from Ellie Robins’ article about deep reading, because I loved it so much. Ellie has devoted her life to literature; I devoted the first part of my life to dance. We both received the best possible training in our respective fields. But the way Ellie feels about the act of reading is exactly the way I feel about the act of dancing. I want to copy her statement word for word and simply replace “reading” with “dancing:”

People think reading is for brainboxes and that you need some extensive intellectual framework in order to enjoy a great book. This is dangerous, elitist bullshit of the highest order, and it has kept human culture’s deepest solace and joy and source of wisdom out of the reach of many people who have needed it badly, and could have understood it perfectly by simple dint of having hearts beating in their chests. Not to mention, it’s a grave insult to the gods in the books.

Go forth and read, and dance, and paint, and sing, and make music—against all odds! Set free the gods in the books!

What was it, again? There is something I forgot to remember.

.

.

.

Later, I close down my phone and open up the emptiness. It is a soft, grey-blue colored shell. I climb inside the cup and close its mouth over my head. Listen to the sound of nothing.

.

.

.

instructions:

.

.

.

(breathe in)

.

.

.

(breathe out)

.

.

.

Night comes in through the cracked-open window. He tiptoes into my candlelight, chuckling mischievously, and delivers me a story—a bedtime story.

Once upon a time, a woman discovers a tiny doorway behind her pillow. It’s very small, just a penny-sized hole in her mattress, but if she holds her eye just right, she can look through it. She holds out her hand near the opening, and feels crisp, cool air on her fingers.

After a few hours or ten seconds, either the door has widened, or she has shrunk. She slips her whole body through: head, then shoulders; hips, then knees. She’s a toothpaste tube of silk pajamas and then finally hair down to bare feet all slide into the forest under her mattress. She hits the ground headfirst and rolls. She hears running water, and crickets. The moss is soft under her toes. Pine needles stick to her skin.

She gets up to walk.

She walks.

Then she runs.

She finds herself unthinkably light. Is she jumping? Five or ten feet stretches go by, without her toes touching ground. She glances down and realizes, with a gasp, that she is flying.

Below her, city blocks and highways wink and sparkle and grow smaller and smaller. After a while, she can see a red house, far, far below. Sheep dot a grey field like flecks of dust. The sun is setting. She mixes with amber colors in the sky.

When morning comes, she holds her secret close.

The thing that makes her happiest about it is this: the doorway was there, all along.