Oak & I

The following pictures and thoughts are taken from my final project “Oak and I” for the BMC practitioner program. The theme was “Distal initiation of movement”, i.e. how to start movement in the periphery of our body (fingers, toes, head, tail) and where does that take us?

The project consisted of a book with photos and poems and a 20 minutes showing.

Location and partner: big oak tree on Hampshire College campus, Amherst, MA., near soccer field.

How it evolved:

my father had just died and there I was, no family,

means (to me?) less support, less boundaries,

and then this lust for life emerging from inside,

this knowing of “enough supporting postures”.

Let me reach out and find support externally.

And here I read:

“…we don’t live on the ground enough, and thus we lose … distal initiations”

(Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in an interview in CQ5:2, Winter 1980 with Lisa Nelson and Nancy Stark Smith = Sensing Feeling and Action, Body-Mind Centering^® - Books, page 58).

My explorations took me to questions

• of support and where do we expect support to come from. There was a moment when I happily thought that this generous tree is offering me branches wherever I need them. But then I realized that it is more that I just adapt to reality and content myself with whatever is offered. There were definitely places where there were no branches. Yet I was all content. Why would it be so much more difficult to be content with whatever branches people offer and not ask them to grow new ones?
• of balance. What is distal and what is proximal after all? What is outer and what is inner? What is up and what is down? It all became indifferent at times – but then gravity helped to find grounds (and once I fell). Gravity is a partner we can always count on.
• of who I was and who my relatives were. After days and days in the tree, we became so familiar. Birds landed right next to me, woodpeckers dove for food deeply into the oak's branches, squirrels filled their bellies for the near winter and looked at me in unconcerned surprise. I felt connected to everyone and everything.
• And many more:

touch

tasting input

starfish on tree

extremities

changing roots

eyes