SHEDDING...

SHEDDING… ‘The act of shedding, separating, or casting off or out;’

There is a big eucalyptus tree in our neighbour’s garden, growing next to, and partly hiding, what used to be a radio tower. Over the two and a half years we’ve been living here we had seen the tree grow increasingly weaker. Some of the branches were completely dead and the rest of it looked weak, dry, brittle and lifeless, even in spring. It felt as if something was sitting on top of this tree’s power, like the frog in the fairy tale that sits on the source of the spring. Then this spring I noticed there was ivy growing up its bark, green and lush, forging its way upwards in rapid speed, living off the last sap of this tree ; a lot of crows and doves of the neighbourhood came to break off dead branches and build their nests with it- useful and yet sad. Every day I looked out and felt I was witnessing a slow death. I was not sure whether the ivy was the source of this slow dying process, but it’s suffocating and weakening growth couldn’t be good for the tree, so one day in spring I ventured to the neighbours, introduced myself and asked whether they would mind cutting the ivy so the eucalyptus might have a chance. They were friendly and concerned themselves about the tree, and half an hour later they cut down the ivy by its roots.
Then the rain started – over weeks we had rain, storms and strong winds. And then one day we saw big pieces of the bark come off, in the middle of a storm, flaking, flapping and then falling! Within days most of the bark had shed! The tree was alive and shedding it’s skin!! The most amazing thing is that it is now as green as ever and looks actually alive and kicking. I am not sure whether it was the ivy, the draught of the year before last, a lack of something in the soil that weakened it, but it is back in it’s juice and I believe the shedding was an important part of this enlivening process! What helped we don’t know: water, wind and storm, the release of the ivy, the attention given or simply time?

And then there are the snakes….
When a snake starts the process of shedding its colour begins to dull down and she might become very still and even stop feeding. A fluid is produced under the old skin, which will eventually help the old skin to be shed. Before the actual shedding of its skin, snakes become almost blind because their eyes are covered by a scale that is actually shed too in the process of shedding and the fluid is clouding her sight. During this time snakes feel particularly vulnerable and hence, more unpredictable and sometimes aggressive. Then there is the rubbing: the snake rubs her skin against something, a branch or stone to break the skin. The snake then passes between rough objects until she can move out of it, leaving her old skin behind: inside out, crumpled and in a heap, with her new skin glistening. The actual shedding might only take a few minutes, while the whole process takes between seven and ten days.

So, like everything else, shedding moves in phases. We say we ‘need to shed our skin’, our old lives, jobs, attitudes, things we don’t need anymore. We shed layers that have become useless and restricting for the new layers of our soul to come through. We know instinctively that we need to shed SOMETHING in order to make space for something new and to reveal something new about ourselves, like a new sparkling skin, a deeper, clearer layer of our soul…
It is comforting to see that sometimes, JUST BEFORE this crucial moment of shedding, all might look very difficult: we might feel edgy and unpredictable as a snake; we might seek solitude and feel almost blinded by this confusing process; we might feel dry, scared, itchy or even as if we are dying. And it is good to keep in mind that indeed SOMETHING is dying! And like a birthing process we have really no choice of reversing the process if we want to live: we NEED to shed to reveal the new! This new self cannot show through, nor shine underneath the old; so we need to find the right environment through which we can move, against which we can rub, that will help us to slide and glide out of this old skin- if we are lucky it will be even graceful and ultimately quick at the last stage. Once shed, it seems easy to slither away from this heap of old skin; it moves back into the earth, becomes useful only as fertiliser or as an item for a collector.



Here two poem about shedding, one from Iwano Arashi and one from me.

Shedding

Brushing a cat who sheds
mountains:
It's an endless task, but
she becomes quite beautiful --
upon completion.
Iwano-Arashi

*******************

Slowly, like icicles dripping
years of winter melt
and morph into something like home.

A phantom, almost lost
like treasure hidden under a heap of coals
I remember a place, somewhere
of belonging.

When I return
riding with my hand in the water over a glittering sea,
I step from the plank
onto my old country
in my new, shimmering skin.

PS: You can see some beautiful pictures and videos of snakes on this site:
http://www.arkive.org/species/ARK/reptiles/Coronella_austriaca/ARK005125.html?offset=0pt

VISIONS...

‘If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work; but, rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea’.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery



Ok, so I’ve have begun somewhere, but how to keep moving forward with joy and gusto?
Often these days I get lost in the jungle of the many projects I am trying to pursue: there is Wildwing, my practice, which with just over two moths is really just a baby; my performance work with its kernel of new ideas; the house in need to be finished decorating; my relationship and friendships needing attention, love and care; my body not getting younger and yes, it’s keeping me here on the planet alive and breathing, so really it’s in need of attention; and the big question how to earn money in the best way at this moment…
With all this buzzing through my mind and heart I often can’t see the trees for the wood, can’t see the bigger picture anymore.
So, Vision, how to keep the BIGGER VISION alive in such times?
How to keep things in proportion?
I worked hard all week, hunched over my laptop, digging myself through emails, researching, and finally creating a blog… on Friday my back hurt, my neck was stiff and I felt miserable and lonely- what’s the point of all this hard work?

My friend Chloe’s 5 Rhythm Dance under the Capricorn full moon brought it all out in sweat and dance- we were invited to let compassion in and let lose the boulders we’d been pushing up the hill all week, all month; and to have compassion with ourselves first of all… and wow, what a wild, ecstatic letting go and letting lose that was there waiting to happen!! Compassion had me see my little one pulling at my tired self’s sleeve, ‘come play, come I show you something great, come lets have some air, some fun!’- I had ignored her all week! But she is the link to the bigger vision and vision is linked to longings, dreams, that which we deeply desire.
The dance let me feel my bigger vision again, which is really one of community, of big projects that embrace big groups of people, collaborative performance projects, Wildwing as a retreat centre, an open house, close friends and a lively relationship… a vision that gets fired by joy, a sense of adventure, by the spirit of the sun, the South, by expansion, play…
It’s the other side of hard-working Capricorn! Yes, I can work hard, always have been, but this was a reminder of letting my wild nature feed my work, feed my visions, otherwise will I dry out, become grumpy, miserable and tired and my vision is all but a murky sauce! It’s the longing for immensity of the sea that will help me to build the ship with others!

Vision: allowing ourselves to see what might be possible, like looking into a clear mirror, envisioning something that is not there yet; allowing a vision to come to us, through us…
Traditionally, in times of big transformations and passage, one would go on a vision quest. Often for days, sitting out in nature, waiting patiently or impatiently for ‘something’ to show itself, for something to come through. Something big, bigger. Something that would infuse one with a sense of purpose, with something bigger than one’s ego….

I think it is powerful to open to bigger visions and scary too; what if we fail? What if the vision is so big we can never imagine really moving through to the end with it? Rumi writes:
‘Looking up gives light, but at first it makes you dizzy. ‘
It’s this dizziness we must risk and maybe it’s none of our business during this first stage to judge or filter! Maybe in this first stage of creating we must allow ourselves to think, envision and dream as big, bold, multi-coloured and multi-dimensional as we can, let through what wants to come. Lift the ceiling higher and if we lose the roof, so be it, it’s great to be under the naked sky! (Try the difference between yoga inside and outside and you know what I mean!)

AND… a BIG vision, anything big starts off small, like Joseph D Compton says:
‘an avalanche begins with a snowflake.’
Or James Allen:
‘The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul, a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities’.
So, lets allow ourselves to dream, to envision what might be!



I am off now to dye my hair blonde! After getting seats offered on the London tube and recently being told I might be 44, I decided it’s time to let go of the ‘80% grey’! I had a taste of it and know I can survive it and part of me quite liked it, but it’s too early… maybe in ten years I’ll wear grey proudly…
I was born blonde, a fair, curly girl, so lets see what happens as a blonde to me! Whether this colour with it’s scary two-page safety instruction will do the trick we will see ( they say if the bottle is shaken it might explode if I don’t snip off the end IMMEDIATELY!!), it’s pretty nerve-wrecking, but no risk no fun…so here I go…

Once again Beginnings...

While pondering about beginning a blog and if so how to start, I thought ‘beginnings’ seems a worthwhile theme to start with. Rilke writes:

‘Always at the commencement of work that first innocence must be re-achieved, you must return to that unsophisticated spot where the angel discovered you when he brought you the first binding message… if the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not with tears, but with your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner!’

I find his words immensely comforting; reminding me to be humble, to relax into my own heart, to leave the need for cleverness and sophistication out of the equation at least for now, to embrace rawness, newness, not-quite-knowing, uncertainty.
I don’t like feeling like a beginner, who does? Why don’t we? Is it the fear that we might ridicule ourselves with unpolished things? The fear that really there is nothing worthwhile we could say, make or create? A fear of the void, of silence, hollowness, a fear of the pause- or ultimately of death?
It reminds me of a book I read a long time ago about the Leboyer birthing method that became familiar in the 1970s. Leboyer described that when a baby is born instead of allowing the umbilical cord to finish pulsating and for the baby to take its own time to find its first breath, people around mother and baby panic and cut the cord as quickly as possible… as well as smack the baby to get that first ‘proper scream’! He promoted to wait, to allow this pause before the first breath, for the cord to stop pulsing before it is cut… for all involved to be with this magical moment - and maybe to encourage this process with a gentle massage of the baby, but never with a smack! The photographs accompanying the text were astonishing: the screaming faces of babies held upside down seemed to be in such pain, and those other babies looking like little Buddhas, once they found their breaths and the tummies of their mums. Can we trust enough to wait when we begin something? Wait until we find our breath, let the angel find us? Can we entice, welcome the unknown? Who can give this encouraging massage that helps us to take this step, this breath? And is there ever a time when we need a smack on the bottom, because really we can’t find that breath on our own? I guess most of us have come into this world with a smack on the bottom, being applauded once we’ve screamed out little lungs out! Maybe hung upside down, disorientated, scared. Maybe it takes us a long time to develop this trust into our first breaths, into the life force, the creative force to move through us, the trust that the breath will come through if we just show up, begin, listen, wait…Deepak Chopra quotes Franz Kafka on this state of waiting:
’You need not leave the room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstacy at your feet.’
Now that’s a good promise for this stage of waiting! I know Chopra put the quote in the context of meditation. Of becoming still and present. For me that’s something I feel very drawn to but also find incredibly difficult, but I am happy to report that this is the first week I succeeded to sit every day for 15 minutes trying to meditate; I feel definitely like an absolute beginner with this and how difficult it is to still my mind is frustrating and even upsetting- making me realise how rarely I am truly PRESENT- not pondering next steps, lists, ideas, dreams... Well, this IS a beginning though!

Last week I performed a scratch of a new piece ‘Towards the Heart of the Sea’ as part of
‘The Ship of Fools’, a cross-disciplinary arts event at LIMBO Arts, Margate.
‘TOWARDS THE HEART OF THE SEA’ is inspired by the stranded boats of Dungeness, Derek Jarman’s work and the shamanic tradition of spirit boat journeys. It s a lament and calling, an exploration of the liminal, the place where the old is gone and the new not yet in sight, between embarking and disembarking, dreaming and action, life and passing. Between abstract and concrete the piece utilises movement, sound-collage, experimental singing with a simple glass harmonica, text and video-projections.
The performance was a good experience, over 20 people showed up in the middle of the afternoon. I loved the fact that most had not seen much performance art – refreshing! An interesting discussion evolved afterwards about the piece, the devising process, performance and place etc, leaving me feeling inspired, appreciated and seen. A good beginning I thought for a piece that I envision growing into a much bigger shape!

Here are some text snippets used in the piece, the middle bits are from Derek Jarman’s film BLUE.

In the beginning was the sea
In the beginning there was breath
In the beginning we were surrounded by sea, swimming blissfully
In the beginning we moved freely between the worlds

Deep love, drifting on the tide forever…

And when she set foot on land, every step hurt as if she walked on knives.

Our names will be forgotten in time.
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
and be scattered like the mist that is chased by the rays of the sun.
For our time is the passing of a shadow
and our lives will run like sparks through the stubbles.

So
Kiss me again
Kiss me
Kiss me again
and again
Never enough
Greedy lips
Speedwell eyes
Blue skies