Prayer Flag

MUSING

What do you do when the path you've been walking isn't there anymore? I'm not talking about getting lost, though that could happen easily, I mean before getting lost: what do we do when we can't see the path, when there isn't one, yet? Phrased that way, and at the beginning of what has the tone of a missive, it sounds dramatic. It could be, dramatic, it is also seems to be one of the tenants of existence - it's very common, it comes with breakfast. 

Here, deep in the woods, it seems there's no more path. There was a vista, I turned and looked to see from where I came, up ahead more forest. How do we choose? How do we make our way when the way hasn't been made or isn't clear? 

I'd like to pause in the place before we have the answer, where there is the just question, hanging there on a branch, a buoy that once marked a way. It might not even be helpful to know where I am going, perhaps that's what caused the confusion, the seeming impossibility of here to there? What we have is this and inside this is everything and nothing. 

The last 3 weeks I've been traveling. It feels like more, years I've been traveling, but comprehensively the last 3 weeks, table in the car, inside houses and yoga studios, sometimes sheds and porches, back roads and open windows, giving Cranio sessions, ages 10 - 89. This work always feels like a privilege.  To be invited into homes to engage in discourse with our bodies, the woods of bodies.  

In Craniosacral sessions we find a space that feels outside of time. It might be the only space we truly have: our bodies.  And this space feels both deeply familiar and strange. Just like always. I'm not even sure how Craniosacral Therapy works, there is touch, attention to bones, a gentle manipulation of fluid, of time, and somehow it does work, I've seen it, almost a thousand times. 

And what I think I've learned is that when I can't see, when something aches, when something presses it's good practice to pause, exactly where I stand, not just over there, here, where I realized it, right here under this rock. And I try to listen for something that I do not know. How do I see something I've never seen before? How do I do something I've never done before? How do I cross an expanse where I've never been?

I don't have very many pictures from travels this time, more impressions - a yellow butterfly that lands for a moment on a purple crown of clover. 

This musing was written in response to something that arrived in a session and something that arrived in a day, I leave it here, frayed like a prayer flag tied to a tree. 

 

Lots of love, 

Molly