Anatomy Trains

In these October days, the sun goes white, while the sky darkens, taking the sea with it into a cobalt blue.  Probably the last day I will be able to sail this year, I set off downriver beam reached to a westerly.  “She was sailing herself, from the river to the bay, I could feel the breast of swell beneath my feet …” - this song has been working in my head all summer, but I can’t find the best next lines.
The trees are at their height of fire, so that even the islands were aflame.  By the time I was free of the arms of the river, it had backed around to the southeast, and I shaved the White Islands and skirted around Outer Heron and its ledges.  I said hello to Damariscove, but then climbed up the easterly to Pemaquid to see how Tammy’s house was progressing, then eased across John’s Bay to Crow Island.  I beat my way up the Thread of Life, and then laid off around Pumpkin to reach up the river again to the mooring.  A world to a world in six hours.
It’s all sparkle in the fall, glinting off each wavelet, cat’s paws of wind on the water - the threat of winter and the last sigh of summer all at once.  I am glad I went - today is gloom and drizzle, and I mjust back to work.

The other debt to Ida I wanted to repay was to get some research started.  I am not a researcher; I am not even a clinician - I suppose I am a spokesperson or some such these days.  But it was great to see all the research in the fascial field that Robert Schleip and Diane Lee and Helene Langevin have been doing, along with the ringers from outside - the incomparable Donald Ingber, the startling imagery of Dr Guimberteau, and the easy humor of Serge Gracovetsky.

Wherever it goes from here - and you will see lots about this in the magazines, the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, in the next edition of the Anatomy Trains book, and on our website - something has been started.  Again, I had little to do with it except for an initial spark, but there were those waiting in the wings, like Tom Findlay and Robert, who made this fly.

And fly it did.

www.fascia2007.com

This last week was a fulcrum in the debt that I owe to one Ida Rolf, who provided me with a vision of significant work to do some 34 years ago. Some have said that I am a drag on her mission, diluting the work with the changes I have proposed to the recipe, and by offering courses that blur the line between her work and other related therapies. Others, happily, see my work as a contribution to the understanding of Structural Integration.

Within my own world, neither these sins nor my advances are particularly noteworthy. The work is developing quietly on a number of fronts, with or without me. But I wanted to catalyze two things, as return favors to my mentor and teacher, however brief my encounter with her. For one, I wanted to see an umbrella professional organization that would draw in the various schools, some of which started before Ida died, some of which have sprung up in these last few years. When Marilyn (Beech) accosted me in Montana in 2002, I was willing to give IASI a go, though I held little hope for its success in the face of the egos involved.

Its success - largely due to Marilyn, but I will take a little credit for the initial presentation to the community - was measured this weekend with the second convention in Cambridge, MA. With 350 of the 900+ members in attendance (around 50 of them KMI grads), including teachers from most of the schools (the Guild for Structural Integration, a once-important school, is sadly and noticeably absent), the IASI has brought in the whole community into one professional body, one with power and possibility. The speakers and panels were generally good; the breakout sessions less so, but the conversation in the halls was great.

The exam that accompanied this convention - psychometrically valid for use in legislation and accreditation - was good but strange. I turned back about 30 of the 120 questions as having no good answer or (more often) too many. The exam was not easy, was constructed to require a lot of thought, and made presumptions about how the work was being taught that I don’t think we can yet make. In the middle of it, I found myself thinking, “My friends made up this exam?” I cannot comment on the content, but it will provide good grist for the mill of people objecting to this or saying we should have more of that. In combination with more cross-pollination among the faculties and administrations, I can see a way that finally the historical separation among practitioners of this work could be bridged and progress made in getting us a seat at the table.

We have for many years been stuck in our own navel-gazing, internicene conflicts, and unsurety as to where to go. Though there is still some talk of avoiding regulation with exemption or head-in-the-sand strategies, more and more we begin to live in the real world where the undoubted contribution of Rolf’s work can shine where it can - in fascially based postural compensation.

For my own part, the 48 hours of the conference were proof that one can live on pure attention and coffee alone. I felt like a hummingbird, wings beating 100x / second, going from blossom to blossom, either taking nectar or giving it to/from so many people I rarely get to see. So many great people in this crowd! By the time I got home from this kind of performance, I was a wreck - too many people, too many expectations, too many encounters, so I am a blob for a couple fo days catching up on sleep and solitude.

Just before I introduced Judith Aston to start the conference, one pill with a downturned mouth stung me like a scorpion from something insulting that I had done to her 18 years previous! Another student of mine was looking daggers at me until I confronted her to lance the boil. Last meeting, someone similar took me to task for something I did 27 years earlier. How the human mind hangs on! How our sins live on!

In turn, I was also carrying a lot of garbage for a senior Rolfing instructor who showed up for this, from earlier times when we were both immature - and he had seemingly dropped it utterly so that my residual angst was for nothing.

I hope I have changed in the intervening, but probably not much. You pays your money and makes your choices and the chips fall. In this case, the balance is strongly ‘Yes!’ and this one debt to Ida is paid.

Harvest as a word sounds like a superlative - finest, fullest, harvest. This year it has been fine and full indeed, as this season’s dry sunny days have pulled the brussels sprouts, beets, broccoli and beans out of the rich soil of Julia’s old garden. It’s our first year for limas and brussies, these latter grow so oddly, like bubonic tumours filling the armpits of the cabbagy fronds.

Annie has worked hard to make the small plot maximally productive, and September’s full moon is a time of reward. If you don’t have zucchinis (courgettes) lying around your counter these days, that is almost definitive of not having any friends.

Yesterday it was time to get the carrots out before they get woody. Annie has a new long spatular tool that avoids them breaking off, and we ended up with a mounded basket of very long carrots. We lugged it to the sink, dumped them in, and swirled them like a washing machine. The water turned opaque brown with the soil, but up from it came each orange carrot, some with strange mandrake shapes, ready for the vegetable brush treatment and into the freezer bags.

With Misty over at the table doing her college homework, and the music alternating between Jack Johnson’s jazzy lilt, Jerry Douglas’s dobro behind Alison, and some style brisée lute, one could almost imagine a calm domestic scene, so I let myself bathe in that feeling for the hour or so it takes to turn every carrot clean, shiny, and in the bag. Nothing like your own grown food.

But peace is short-lived these days. Because one of those bags, plus some apples, will come with me to see my guts through Boston for a harvest of another sort. After 30 years in the making, we (I guess I mean the heirs of Ida Rolf) are having the first Fascial Research Conference down in Boston this week, and I am totally nervous about it. Though I started this project with Marilyn Beech of IASI, it was soon out of our hands and now I am a small potato in a very large field that includes too many PhD’s to count, as well as osteopaths and docs galore. I have been retained on one panel, and I am well out of my depth.

My book is full of 5-syllable words, but really I am just a poet of the scientific metaphor, and the actual rigors, by-laws, and vocabulary of science are quite beyond me. I will be expected to be up to date on the research and the people doing it, but what with various domestic crises in the business and in the family, I am winging it once again. I speak so often in front of people, few can credit that I get stage fright almost to the point of being sick most times beforehand, but this one is worse than usual.

But the harvest of the ideas has me very excited - seeds planted so long ago by Ida, so long in the growing through drought and wind, and now so full and ripe in the fruition.  With Vleeming, Lee, Huijing, Khalsa, Ingber, Langevin, Gracovetsky, Grinnell. Willard, Hinz, and Gabbiani, it is a worldwide fusion cuisine of fascial research, so we’ll see what further seeds it plants (or manure it makes, just as likely).

It’s always something, isn’t it?  You have a hangnail, or an ingrown hair, or your ankle is wingeing each time you walk, or you have a pimple on your ass - there’s always something.

The other day I got stung by a hornet.  They flew into my B&B in Vancouver when I turned the light on to read in the pre-dawn darkness. (When I get stuck in a book - I was rereading on of Le Carré’s masterpieces - I am addicted.)  I got up to pee, and must laid down on the poor thing, and it stung me twice.  I had a few moments of intense pain, but the poor thing crawled off the bed onto the night table and died.

But now they itch - right where I can’t reach on my back.

To balance a day spent lugging books, going around around the stairs of my tall house from the aerie to the cellar, I set outside in the last of the winter sun. The shore called, and I got in a rowboat, went out to the oyster boys for a natter. When - not often on a day after Thanksgiving - I felt the heat of the sun on my back, I pulled against the wind to Carlisle, the only place I felt safe walking in the woods on this last afternoon of the deer season. The geese are overhead - high now as the cold deepens - but the gulls are still around, and an unperturbed seal bobbed up by a lobster pot in my wake. The osprey are gone, but their nest awaits them for next spring. Mate for life, they do.

Pulled for home in the shimmering track of the sun, a lane of gold across the surried surface, scaring a heron off the rocks with a squawk with an outstretched neck and then levered into flight, and then the neck retraction into aloof disregard.

Then it’s up into the field where the neighbor’s dogs are poking through the horseshit. They bark at my like I’m the intruder, but of course they give way to let me pass - they know the hierarchy. As I take the crest for the view of the russet sunset, I surprise about 30 mallards in the little farm pond, drawn by Quan’s cracked corn. Only one remains, a female who can’t fly out for some reason.

I stop a minute in the gathering stillness of twilight, and see something moving along the surface of the water. At first I think it must be ducklings, but it’s too late in the year for such little ones, and as I watch it forms into a muskrat. Fascinated - I have lived for four years across the street from this pond - this puddle really - and never have I see a muskrat in it - stock still, I watch him circle the edge toward the duck, disappear, and then the duck comes flying up again, sratled. What can the muskrat want with the duck? It’s the size of a large squirrel, with a strong muscular tail - it is over by me now - spiky fur on his back, but otherwise sleek - but no way could he tangle with a duck.

At home in the dark, I try to look up muskrat iin Ted Andrews’ wonderful Animal Speaks, but oddly it isn’t there. Clearly, the muskrat had a message for me - no one else has seen him and he came right over, but what is it?

Later:

A friend found some information on muskrats :

Identifying animal tracks of the Muskrat indicates resilience, detachment and adaptability. “Muskrats have many attributes such as inhabiting both land and water, able to adapt to surroundings, being relatively waterproof, and having a knack for going about their business undetected. Given this, when we cross paths with the Muskrat we are encouraged to tap into our own ingenuity and adaptability when dealing with our present circumstances - realizing that everything has a potential for positive outcome (no matter how bleak appearances may be).”

So, at the moment, appearances are bleak on my ability to save the Clarks Cove farmland from development when the generational changes come.� I was enjoying the land and thinking about all the people and animals that depend on it when I spotted the muskrat.� Glad to hear that if I tap into ingenuity and adapt, a good outcome is possible.� � The muskrat specifically put the single female duck into the air, without hurting her.� So will I.� Stay tuned.

Sunday - especially the first Sunday I am home in weeks in the autumn - is anything but a day of rest. Quan has a list of things undone that require a second pair of hands or strong legs, and though she starts by taking me off the computer with, “Can you just help me with…?”, the list inevitably expands like a Hoberman sphere, and goes on and on, well into the dying afternoon of these increasingly short days. Finally, we stop from exhaustion, not from satisfaction - because the list for this rural farm - like the list for my somatic education enterprise - goes on forever.

But after an hour of mild fretting, I settle in. There is something very satisfying about the destructive power of a sharp chainsaw, and though I cannot understand anything else about President Bush, I get, on this wan afternoon, his satisfaction with brush cutting. It is pleasantly mindless, and produces a palpable result - in this case, more light for the garden next spring. It also produces wood, which I slice into stove-size pieces, and we truck it around to stack under the eaves. The branches mount up in the burn pile - it’s a yearly thing, a burn pile or two - always fun on a damp spring day to reduce it to a pile of ashes - I usually miscalculate and have to stay into the night to make sure it doesn’t stray.
But the garden has been covered with digested compost, rototilled, and mulched with rinsed seaweed to restore minerals. I am not a farmer or gardener, so all I supplied was the muscle power, but I am impressed.

Fall is the time of putting away here.� � Annie and I trigged the old scow to the mushroom mooring around low tide, and I leave Quan’s warm side to trudge through the gravel to the shore in the cold, now that it’s about high.� I feel like my father, in knee boots, and old coat and pants, sneaking a cigarette.� I am about his kind of errand in any case.� The oars rock loudly in the total stillness - no, there’s a plane.� I have an efficient new little LED light on my forehead, red leaves your night eyes.� The scow is riding now to it’s anchor, the mushroom now floating some 12 feet free her, and gun her toward the shore. When the mushroom hits and drags, I cut the trigging line and leave her with a bouy, though she’s likely just where I want her in the intertidal zone, where I can find her in the morning.

On the way back I stop to give the horses a treat of grain, but they are afraid of my forehead with its strange red light.

This ia an email to my family after the recent hurricane:

By the time you read this (our internet is down) it will all be past, but that was quite a night. I don’t think we’ve had such a decisive wind since the hurricane of ‘56. The waves were washing over the floats, which were rocking like a carnival ride. Flotsam - none of it so large as to create a problem - scudded across the cove. Crests ran under the Glory Hole, splashing up to the undercarriage. From east through south to west, the wind tattered cloth, darkened the water in a strangely tropical light, and threw the rain sideways at everyone who tromped the pier to look to the condition of their boats. Not that you would want to venture forth in a dinghy to reach it if there was a problem. Aside from one dinghy swamped and lot of chafing and wracking, everything seems to have survived basically intact.

I hope Flye Point and Pemaquid Lake and all of you and yourn are fine.

Love Tom

Later:

That was the cart before the horse, the eggs all in one basket, or some such proverb:

I wrote that email this noon, having been out to my boat this early morning, presided over by a large bald eagle that was clearly afloat in the breeze, unable to land, being slowly pushed upriver from its home on Hodgson’s Island, two down from Peters. Aboard, I saw my lines were not chafing, and I presumed it would die down this afternoon as predicted. I bailed Marisco - I’d hauled everything else onto the dock - looked around, and judged that we’d come through alright as I wrote above.

I had put up the computer, and was starting a fire in the sauna (it had been a long day and night) when Tim Green peeled around the drive: “Tammie Norie’s broken loose from her mooring and heading for shore. Better come quick”. I leapt into the back of his pickup and we sprinted for the shore. In the westerly, with the luck of the Irish, she had fetched up between the fishermen’s float and the pier. She was about broadside to the wind, and pounding against the end of the float. As we looked it over, the runway started to crack and wrack under the pressure. We got a strong docking line, and Tim got it tied around the bowsprit. Tim got his arm and ribs hurt in the process - the hospital says it’s a crushed forearm, something about the median nerve, but he was back down on the dock by seven, so I guess we’ll see tomorrow how serious it is.

Neighbor Dirk and his son Carl showed up at this time, and we got the bowline around some of the pilings at the end of the pier, and begin to cinch it up an inch at a time, trying to bring the bow into the wind. I had the idea to get it along the front of the pier, but we couldn’t possibly do that with the wind rising to 40-50 at all times, with gusts to 60 and 70 - never seen it like that - you could barely stand.

The runway continued to wrack as the Tammie Norrie exerted pressure on the windward moorings of the dock. Frantic calls to her owners Joel and Mike were finally answered, and the secret of starting her up revealed, and I scampered back and forth along the high side of the runway - the phone wouldn’t work on the boat, but I kept needing new information. Spume was rising off the water in the gusts, and the pier, with the addition of Tammie Norie, still largely broad to the wind, slamming against the dock and pulling on the pier, rocked with each set of waves or new blast that hit us. It was so tenuous and moving so far eastward that I thought for a time I was going to have to decide between saving the pier or saving Tammie Norie, and I sent everyone not necessary to the task off the pier incase she went.

As the sun set, Dirk went to get work lights, while Carl and I set the anchor - a nearly hopeless gesture to try to stop Tammie from going aground if we should have to let her go, or if she just went. The gusts were so fierce, you just gritted your teeth and held on to something until they were done.

Tim Brewer had arrived, Quan showed up with welcome hot soup, which we could eat peacefully in the pumphouse watching the carnage outside. Mike and Joel (and as it turned out, Bill) were racing down from Wilton, and made it just after dark - the tide had turned and the sun had set, so there was some abatement to the wind, but it was still 40 gusting to 50, it was hard to stand on the end of the pier without one hand for the ship - but I was so glad that things had basically held steady until Mike got there - I didn’t want to make what seemed like crazy decisions about his boat.

Mike’s plan was the same as mine: ease it off the pier, backing it down the fishermen’s dock until it was on its turning point, pulling in the stern and gunning her out of there dead to wind. With a series of hand signals - yelling upwind was ludicrous - we did exactly that - let her drop back, foot by foot, pulled her stern in, and gunned her free as we cast off the sprit line and Joel hauled like hell on it to keep it from fouling the propellor - everything was carried so fast in the wind.

And then it was over. Carter Newell and I ran a dinghy out to them for the morning, and the wind was down to 30 by this time, so I am praying they on their anchor and Tycha on her mooring will be ok for the night, or so says the eagle. Now I am back here and it’s only 7 o’clock new time - so it was only 4 hours, though it felt like 8.

This time we escaped with little damage - a bit of minor gouging in the starboard flank of Tammy Norrie, and we will have to charge Mike to reconstitute the runway and whatever damage to the pier and Timmy’s arm, but it could have been so much worse - gusts and a fierce chop on that lee shore of boulders would have made short work of her. I must say on days like today I feel the weight of being responsible for all this gear - houses, pier, boats - especially given how ant-like we all felt in the face of this massive show of natural force.

But this time we were lucky. Lucky Tim was there when it happened, lucky I could reach Mike, lucky we had neighborly help.

Love T

The title for the email comes from a poem - even though it is still October, this one took all the leaves it could:

LEAVES

Where I live – there’s heresy in trees,

An orange apostasy amid the green denominations.

At first it’s just a single branch

In some dank corner of the lowlands –

A nickering doubt in the clicking of crickets

That gets a nod from the goldenrod,

A pang of white-haired dread in a dark night’s frost -

And suddenly a failure of the faith in the eternal power of Summer

Bursts forth among the congregation of the Leaves.

Is this cold October wind the Grand Inquisitor,

Keening his charges? – ” Renegade, recant ” he gusts, and

With ” Blasphemy “, shushes voices of dissent

And bears down upon the forests from thin ascetic clouds.

And the trees – they are divided.

The pious pines keep their green habits

Telling nervous rosaries on the round brown cones,

Looking down demurely, shaking their cowled heads

In shame and fear and secret horrified delight,

While the others lift their hands to heaven –

Half the woods afire with licks of flame,

Orange, yellow, red – copper purple, even -

Beseeching beeches, moaning oaks,

Begging birches bilious with fear,

Bark like flagellated skin,

The quiet sumac in a sudden glory of Transfiguration

Martyred maples – all rooted to the stake

All given to the Holy Fire.

At last and all too soon the flames die out,

And with a healing cry of rain

The black-clad char, November storm

Tears the tatters from the ashen trees

And leave a world of winter silence.

Only the pines risk a whispered rush of prayer

As they await – with perfect faith

But no proof - the rekindling miracle of spring.

And do you stand with those

Who keep their color green, who stay the course,

Who stand and wait the winter out?

Or will you join the ones who flame,

So brief, so bright, so unexpected

And confounding – but who must die,

Numb and having left the world unchanged

But for a carpet of brown husks

Pressed into the soil of another year?

In Maine, a spring fog and an autumn fog are different - the spring ones lie heavy like a blanket on a sleeping teenager, while you can feel the fall ones just want to clear like a 7-year old on Christmas morning.

I am down bailing boats and can barely see the trees on the shore above the dock. The lobstermen’s diesels are growling invisibly on the river. Then, from the top of the trees, sunbeams start playing with the silhouettes of the leaves, and it goes from a Turner to a Weston, and finally, with a burst of light, that chases the chill, to Wyeth - the October country of brushstrokes as fine as etching.