What Makes You Soften?

When was the last time someone looked into your face and noticed a change?  The kind of change that drew them closer to you and made your connection to them stronger?  This is the story of what is behind the important people in my life noticing that change in me.

I am slowly emerging from a month long dance hiatus.  I got to the point where the classes and the practice felt more like a burden than anything, so in an effort to keep this important part of my life intact, I decided to take a break.  No classes.  Minimal practice, and overall forgiving myself for taking a break because it felt like I needed it.

About a week ago, I pulled my zils out from the back of my desk drawer and spent a few minutes just running through some basic patterns.  The next day, I did a basic drill pattern a few times, and the day after that, I ran through a video to learn a new combination.  That evening, I went to a live music and dancing social event; a monthly event which I had missed for the past several months in a row.  I felt a little rusty and creaky, to be honest, but I did dance.  And I tried to forgive myself for the sloppy technique.

As this has been creeping back into my life, I have noticed something else.  I feel softer.  The shifts and changes of every day tend to land on me with more gentle edges, unlike the angularities of chaos I had been feeling for the last little while.  It's not just the lengthening and occasionally warming days, although that is a big part of this growing softness.  It is the return of dancing, expression through movement and intention of the body.  It sands down the rough places and makes me flexible, in all senses of that word.

As I reflect on the break from and return to dancing, I am grateful to recognize this thing in my life that brings softness.  I think we all have something that makes us more open to the world in general.  A hobby, a passion, a person -- there is something in our lives, that when we allow space for it, makes us soften.  I feel like we are too well trained to be hard -- suspicious, protective, rigid.  There is a time and a place for these things, to be sure, but it is not all the time.  Our softness, openness and vulnerability are what connect us to each other.

So I am asking you this week:  what makes you soften?

ISO the Walkable Life

I can walk to work.  This may not seem like much, but it has changed my life for the better within a week.  Instead of enclosing myself in a rolling metal box and traveling along roads with other rolling metal boxes, now I step out my front door and walk.  I move at the pace of reflection, slow enough to pay attention to what is around me, or to focus inward on whatever is coming up in my day. 

As my world has shifted in this way, I find it increasingly frustrating to actually get into the car and go somewhere.  It is still necessary to use the car now that I am living in a city with minimal public transportation.  Maybe not necessary, if I'm honest, but significantly easier.  I am trying to find more and more ways to make my life walkable. 

More than the physical benefits of walking,  I want to increase the intangible benefits.  When I walk, I have time to completely separate from whatever was holding my attention at home (boxes to unpack, dirty dishes, piles of laundry) and make a calm transition into being at work.  I have more liminal space to let my mind wander through whatever creative projects I have going on right now.  I move through the world on a human scale, able to see and greet people I come across.  And, when I get back home after walking from work, I inevitably have a moment of warm gratitude for my home, my commute, and my life as it is right now. 

As I have been thinking of ways to walk more, I am also reflecting on the history of our use of technology, and how it has changed what we think of as human scale.  As we developed more and faster ways of moving our bodies from here to there (bicycle, car, airplane, rocket, tesseract) we became able to see distance differently.  In my grandparents' time, a long distance relationship meant you had a town or two between you.  Now, that could be as much as a continent. 

And, with the new technology, we have also created new kinds of class barriers.  You see that very clearly with the car in particular.  Having a car, or regular access to a car, opens up opportunities for schooling, jobs, and even everyday errands in myriad ways.  And the deliberate choice to not have a car is in itself a form of privilege.  The privilege of living in a city or a neighborhood where everything you need is within walking distance.  The privilege of good enough health to walk, and the ability to purchase adequate shoes and clothes to walk outside.  The privilege of having walking routes that are safe. 

All of these things live in my mind as I walk to work, or to the store, or to the bank, or to my favorite coffee shop.  Privilege.  Class and economic barriers.  Human scale.  It all lives together with everything else I am doing in my life to create and cultivate balance. 

Lapsarian

This year, I am slated to renew my massage therapy license.  Both of them.  I am licensed in Illinois, where I lived for twenty years, and in Kentucky, my home state which I returned to last year.  When I moved back to Kentucky last year, I had a plan in mind.  I would go back to Chicago every month or so (excluding the worst winter months) and I would see whatever clients I could there, visit friends, and generally enjoy my life as a multi-city massage professional. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and for a time, it was a good life.  I absolutely love those liminal spaces that only exist in traveling, such as the time spent in a car going from one city to the next.  I appreciated feeling like I was still part of my friends' lives, especially as I still had more friends to find in Kentucky, where my solitude was often extended enough to become loneliness.  And while my work in Kentucky was minimal and spread out, when I went back to Chicago, I could pack my schedule with a week's worth of clients in a day or two.  I could remember what it was like to be busy and comfortably tired at the end of a day. 

Then winter came, and I put my trips to Chicago on hold for a while.  The winter up there was one of the reasons why I left.  Not the top reason, but definitely in the top ten.  During those months, I made some new contacts in Kentucky, started a more focused avenue for marketing, and generally settled more into my life here. 

And now as the redbud trees are blooming and even Chicago is starting to see little green shoots of things come up, I have a decision to make.  Do I renew my Illinois license?  Is this two-city massage life really going to work for me?  I am looking in my calendar for a few days where I could go up to Chicago and see clients, now that it is (nearly) reliably snowstorm-free there.  I am not finding the days.  Truth be told, I'm not looking all that hard. 

This morning, I took a walk in one of my favorite parks.  Today has the kind of sunshine that makes the trees outlined against the sky look fake.  It is a light so clear that my eyes can barely process it.  I have this free time in the middle of the day because things are still building in my Kentucky practice, and I don't start teaching for another couple of weeks yet.  Tomorrow, I have a full book of clients.  And the day after that?  More space to spend time preparing for the classes I'll be teaching, and to continue working on writing projects I recently re-discovered. 

All this is to say, I will let my Illinois license lapse.  I was holding on to the familiar and safe by keeping it.  Through the winter months, I have given myself the chance to absolutely trust fall into Kentucky.  It feels like home here, with people I love and a practice that is slowly picking up steam.  Even as the Ohio River Valley allergy season begins, I breathe better here, so I'm staying. 

Of course I will be visiting Chicago when I can, but I plan to focus on what's really important when I go there -- my friends.  And dancing.  Lots and lots of dancing. 

Cross Country Drive

Last week I cleaned out the files on an old laptop, and I found a bunch of writing that I thought was lost forever.  It took me a while to remember the time, place and situation that inspired some of it, but the feeling of the poem below came back instantly.  It was written after the last day of a cross-country drive (from Chicago to L.A.) that started a year of living in California.  I was trying to capture that moment where movement -- any kind of movement -- punches through and gives you a way to express what feels inexpressible.

Movement, dance, touch, massage -- all these body-based activities can support and encourage communication.  I see that as a side effect of the work I do, which is why you will find cards and pens in my office to record any ideas that came to you during your massage.

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Bed Diving

Barstow is a ghost town in training.

It rolls up after the desert 

dry concrete roads and boarded up strip malls

sun-bleached sky searing your eyes.

At the hotel, fatigue pulls away for a moment

bares the anger just behind.

We go bed-diving,

leap across the space from the door to the bed

let the springs flip and roll our bodies onto the floor.

The cross-country drive — nearly over —

coated us with fine gray dust.

We bed-dive through it,

and when we can barely breathe for laughing

we lie side-by-side, holding hands
fall asleep hard and deep, still in our sweat-stained clothes.