MUSING
Transition is a suitable topic for this month’s musing. Seasonal transition. I think we know that the thinning of layers, the traveling up from depths, is not just something that happens to the plants, trees and worms. It is occurring inside us. It is, I think, one of the gifts of living in a place that has seasons: we’ve bundled up and layered in and we too get to emerge, to unfurl, we are not separate.
As spring emerges through the thinning layers
so do I.
It has been a long winter, we can all agree to that, and it is hard not to get a little bit impatient with all the blankets. Add to that, before spring is beautiful, it is ugly, it reveals the residue of what’s been hidden, there’s angst and anxiety, exposure, discomfort.
So what is being offered right now? I wrote a little about this the last time I included a musing in the clinic announcement. I will probably always write about this - there is something in the transition that allows us to see what has been and feel the shade of what might be, what we know has been before and will, in all likelihood, though we can’t be certain, come again - the lilac tree at the back of yard.
So, in a time of transition we receive a reminder of impermanence and fly in a piece of longing on memory. Those are stations where I spend a lot of time. And still, even if the platform is familiar and there are some things we can depend on [I hope] something feels different, unseen, hidden. The emphasis here is on feeling. The cold air on my skin, damp clothes. This knowing that change is underfoot might make it easier to immerse oneself - to head down the steps in the dark without a coat or shoes because we know this place only exists for a moment. So we might encounter a being-in because of brevity, because we know this will not last. Fascinating how they require each other.
Still, it’s difficult. Transition is difficult. To emerge is difficult. There is the presence of physical and emotional discomfort and there is the response to that presence. We are probably not emerging to a place that will be free of those difficulties. Rather we emerge to an awareness of them, those that were there when we arrived and the response placed atop. Possibly within that awareness there is a place where our existence and all the hopes we have for this existence can share space with difficulty, a place where there is room not only to receive the world but to create it.
Liberation is tricky soil, the embodied experience is hard work, every day. Important then to be be kind to the being, yourself, who trembles as the breeze blows through. And then there are those stories that remain in the body even while we know. This is what sessions are, we spend time resting in the basin of the boat, not in turbulent waters but floating while the body remembers and renews, finds again.
For this month’s clinic poster I chose a drawing and notes made by Leonardo Da Vinci. The description is Recto: The mesentery of the bowel and its blood supply, with notes. Verso: The brachial plexus c.1508. I chose this to show that we’ve been asking questions about our experience for a very long time. And there is some very recent, present day news about new organ called the interstitium. It’s been here all along. We might see the context a little differently, in Cranio, I think, we've sensed the presence. If you're curious there is more about the interstitium here.
Lots of love,
Molly