Anatomy Trains

Distress is the state of having a different view of what you think the world should be from what your senses are telling you the world is, and my situation with my neighbour is distressing.  She has upped and given her house not to her daughter but to the son of her boyfriend.  The boyfriend was a sweet old codger, but the son is a skulking little weasel.  He will get the land when she sheds her body and meanwhile he wants to use it for a large fishing pier, though she thinks he is just rebuilding what was once there, a small personal dock.

The neighborhood is objecting the large pier, but he has poisoned her against us all.  She’s an old coot, opinionated and spiteful, but we all love her for her independence and her spunk - she’ll be out there most of the day at 92, chopping at a stump, whittling it down until nothing is left.

She thinks Quan and I are after her land, but we have enough trouble with our own, we just liked having someone elderly in the neighborhood, made it variable and fun.  Quan took extra food down to her, and I carried her wood and shot the shit, gossiping away about current peccadillos and strange events of 50 years ago when she was in her prime and I was but a stripling, cadging her doughnuts.

But I haven’t spoken to her since June, when this thing came up.  Today, though, as I chopped and lopped the bruch to make room for the dock to go on land at the top of the ways for the winter, I saw her flag - raised every day and taken down every night, despite her deafness and macular degeneration - today it had been raised upside down, the universal naval signal for distress.  The flag is torn, and seeing it buckle and furl upside down was so sad.
Should I believe her and see what’s up?  Break the silence? Or leave her without confrontation in her last days?  I think we should all go see her together, and confront this wrong, but we haven’t built up the collective courage yet.

Woke this morning as usual at 5 o’clock, and as usual stumbled to the loo to to pee.  What was unusual was the silence, but I didn’t realize until a few light switches and a faucet that hissed like a snake what it was - the electricity was out.  The house, usually alive with machinery, was as a mausoleum.  I worked on my book by battery on the computer until it ran out, and then ran in the early morning mist.

Mid-October, the height of the leaves this year, and it is still balmy, balmy enough for fog.  Around my three-mile run, the houses are all dark, but the sun awakens, blasting the fog up in slow motion, setting the leaves alight - the sun is Agent Orange, the leaves are napalm, the world is at silent war.

No, it’s peace.  Coming back home, we discover from clocks that it’s been off since 12:30, and the freezer is starting to melt.  Fuss with the rigamarole of wires and switches, and the generator chugs into life.  The house breathes again, and all our conveniences are there, but only at the cost of burning gas, disappearing dinosaurs, and carbon footprints slouching toward Bethlehem.

The New York bodyworkers didn’t like it when I warned last weekend of the coming economic storm.  It was sobering in the middle of an otherwise elatory weekend.  We therapists float on the froth of the affluent society - the whole cappuccino will be off the counter when the foecal matter connects with the atmospheric conditioning device.  We’ll be bartering for sessions, as the economic sieve shakes us all down.  Food and energy will cost most of our salary.  The strong will survive?  No, not the strong, but the most adaptable.   How adaptable has our profession made us?

Even the boat needs the shore - the batteries have run down while I was in NY, and the bilge pump can’t run.  I’ve been keeping the boat pumped out by hand, but I have the battery on shore on the battery charger, and after the lights have been back on for an hour or two, I take the battery back out and start the boat, the possession I prize for not using fossil fuel - it has an engine, but I use it little, is in fact connected inevitably to the system grid. We’re all co-dependent.

This weekend, during the whirlwind of classes we did for the Breathing Project, a yoga studio in NY, I came across a postcard for Naked Yoga.  (www.NakedYogaNYC.com)

Only in New York, perhaps.  I did not consider going - it’s like: I was going to get a tattoo, but then the canvas sagged.  I think naked yoga might be beyond me as an age prospect, but I was interested that the benefit being advertised brings money to ’sex health and education’ projects, and that the teachers were versed in Tantra.

Quan and I, in our younger hotter years, got a lot out of studying Tantra, and my ideas for Kinesthetic Literacy would definitely include a sex-ed piece.  On Chesil Beach, an amazingly tender but brutally accurate novella by Ian McEwen, points to the striking need.

So hats off (and everything else, I guess) to the Naked Yogis.  It makes a refreshing change form the Puritanism I find in the Vedantists, whose stretchier-then-thou positioning can lead to spiritual materialism (I can do Lord of the Dance better than you-ou).  Or how little do you eat, or how pure.  I am more with the Tantrikas - embrace life! Eat it up, digest it for poetry, shit out the toxicity and search for another appetizing meal to cook.

I doubt that God made such a diverse and tasty world with the intention that we should renounce it.

The website makes clear that this is not puerile or an excuse for hanky-panky - the idea really is that yoga without clothes is a liberating act.

I can’t help it - I wonder who is going to be in front of me, and who behind me when we are doing downward dog.

At the risk of harping on the same subject, one of the reasons that the substantially new event of a hand-held computer - currently in my life in the form of an iPhone - is so successful is measured in how many places you can get with just two clicks, two motions.  It opens with two clicks, I can get to the music or mail or the internet with two clicks from wherever it opens, can find any song or any phone number within two clicks - an astonishing range of changes is available within two clicks of anywhere.  I haven’t yet opened a manual, as everything is so intuitive.  And this is just the first one.

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.