Tea & Sung Memory
My writing from the first two weeks of The Visceral Self
I’m participating in Jeannine Ouellette’s The Visceral Self writing course. Here’s the poems and other thoughts I’ve written so far.
black tea, I decided (after Many Oliver's Freshen the Flowers, She Said) So, I gathered the small iron pot and the perfect spoon bright canister hush of leaves opened the lid to sweet dark florals petrichor today's rain the coldest sort muddying the snow put leaves in the pot, for the cold iron was waiting, a crackle of dryness then the lush pour stippled metal heated fingers blooms of visible air wet each leaf in a pool, and opened them all - keemun, yunnan, assam, darjeeling, ceylon, and more whose names I don't know grape scent and memories of autumn's wet leaves as we break into spring counted pills while steeping each one to be rolled from softening tongue to throat gave the leaves time expanding to let them take their own choice of flavours, the sweet, the floral, the suspended motes of their dust. poured the purple darkening as day dawned it took perhaps three minutes the first sip an unintended sigh
My relationship with my body is a tango. There are moments of sheer engaged passion of communication and movement, but there are also sharp and rough and surprising moments too. Coming from teaching yoga and embodied voice practices then becoming suddenly disabled through a chronic illness almost a decade ago has required a deeper listening to my body than I ever imagined. I must follow my body's lead so we can dance passionately through this world and my creative work together.
I started thinking about the middle space between my body and the world a few years ago when I read "When the Body Says No" by Gabor Maté. He notes that many people with autoimmune issues have a lack of good boundaries. I realized I was never taught good boundaries in my family and that mine are quite diffuse so I've been working on clarifying them not just at a social level, but also energetically and viscerally.
I feel everything. I am empathic and highly sensitive. Those traits are a gift when it comes to creating art, but they make it challenging to be out in the world. As I learn how to create, shift, and be flexible with my boundaries, I've found that time in nature has become more electrified. In nature I can safely expand my edges and learn from the earth and other beings.
I live a necessarily small life because my chronic illness means I am housebound. When I leave the house I need to be more conscious of my boundaries—my energy boundaries so I don't become depleted, my social boundaries so I don't take on others' states of being. and my sensory boundaries so my nervous system isn't overwhelmed. Boundaries are still a work in progress for me but the work is very worthwhile.
Scent of rosin, from instruments, from the shoes of dancers, from the pines outside the tall narrow windows. Pines taller than the building, pines so tall. The light spills in bright through the windows, reflects off the white walls, the smooth white floor, the ballet barres along the walls like the pines outside laid on their side and stripped of their branches—sanded and varnished to a shine, then shined further by years of dancers' hands gripping, shifting, touching.
Our small belongings lay in tiny piles along the walls, altars of the mundane. We are the things in the room. The room itself is a thing, the grand piano another body, its curves like our bodies' curves. Each black piece of clothing wrapped around hips and legs and arms and breasts and bellies an echo of the piano, strung together in song.
Twelve of us in a circle, barefoot, rooted, bent kneed and grounded. We sway and breathe. Richard sits at the piano—alert, his deep voice resonates the wide walls, the high ceiling. We have sounded ourselves from root to brow, we have rolled on the floor and are loose yet strong. Our hands dance before us, a ripple, an imitation, a mirroring. We are undulant, rooted like kelp anchored to the sea floor, like the pines outside the window in a strong wind. We dance each others' voices, each others bodies, the web between us an unseen yet tangible thing.
We sing around the circle, each solo resonant in others' bodies, each movement mirrored and found in the web between us. The piano's strings sympathetic to our voices, our songs echoed quietly in its resonant body. The solo is passed to me and Hildegard's O Ecclesia moves from my belly up into my throat and mouth, spills golden over my lips. The song starts pristine then grows wild as I move it through each resonant part of myself, the nasal reediness of sphenoid, the warm purr of heart, the bellowing yawp of diaphragm, the hollow cave of pelvis. The chant is a wild unmoored thing, resounds along walls and windows, along trees laid on their sides, along curved bodies, along moving arms and fingers
My legs are the wide bases of those pines outside the windows. Rooted deep, finding fissures in the rock of this mountain. My thighs shift with each rooting, muscles sliding across bone. They ache in a knowing sort of strength, a trusting sort of suspension. My hands dance the lines of my voice, strum across the web we've spun, press on the shape of each pitch hung in bright air. My mouth a widening vessel that pours forth vibration, tongue and teeth in concert, the staccato t's and widening ohs and ahs of Latin. I envelop us incanting to the beloved, to sapphire eyes, to the mountains, all myrrh and incense, to the multitude of waves in the room.
Singing used to be what I did. I sang to myself daily, sung to others often, and was sung to regularly. Singing is a lost piece of me that I am slowly beginning to explore in the gentlest of ways. Singing is a highly physical act, and it now drains me. I've had almost a decade to deal with the grief of this but I still miss the voice I had before I got too sick to sing.
I sometimes catch myself whisper singing to music while I embroider. Sometimes this singing is unvoiced, my throat moving with the pitches. It remembers the shifts even without the vibrations. I've occasionally sung a line or two of music to my husband when I am trying to remember the name of a song. We find the song together and then listen, him dancing, me swaying in the softest sort of dance.
Today I rolled on the floor, widening my breath and throat— preparatory work for singing. And the sound came: a stuttering deepness, my throat and tongue remembered sung sensations and gently brought slight sounds forth. I stopped when the timer rang, saved some of my limited energy for the rest of the day, content with that small beginning, those tiny sounds.