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CHAPTER THREE

Part Three

Complex bodymind realtionality as method

Sustainability is one of the ten principles of disability justice defined by Sins Invalid in 2005. Part of Sins Invalid's mission statement says, "Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based movement building and performance project that celebrates disabled people, centering and led by disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority and queer, trans, and non-binary disabled people" (2005). Sins Invalid defines sustainability as, "We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation" (2005).

I begin collaborating with my everyday unseen maps to help my everyday unseen needs lead my creativity. I think on the mechanics of my embodiminded and creative sustainability: complex relationality. If one part uses too much, goes too fast, takes too much without consideration of the joined parts, every part is impacted. This ongoing interconnected bodymind practitioner flux affect and effect is shown in my everyday unseen mapping: Heart. Cognition. Organs. Muscles. Sensation. Pain. Emotion. I need beyond balance. I need beyond what I have learned of "good" body and balance where most physiological variables are seen as controllable. Seemingly experienced as predictable. I am not predictable.

When I look at this assemblage, I am reminded of the image of Allan Wexler's Coffee Seeks Its Own Level (1990). Based on Blaise Pascal's Principle that water seeks its own level, where pressure is always searching to be evenly transmitted throughout a liquid. Four white coffee cups with saucers. Each cup has rubber tubing running from them and the tubes connect with one singular four-way join in the middle. Each cup is filled with coffee. Four people sit at a table and drink from the cups. As the pressure is seeking a level, the coffee rushes, swells and spills with each small individual movement. Rushing, swelling and spilling. Seeking its own level. My invisible bodymind, my creative environment, is the cups. The coffee. The pressure. The connected tubes. The saucers filling up with spillage. The stains on the tablecloth. The hands picking up and putting back down. The uncoordinated lifting and the realisation of a more joint relationship of movement but continuing without (Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Layered arrangements of crumpled blankets in pastel colours have watercolours that have expanded beyond their individual forms—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red-are in the centre. Each colour represents a different bodymind experience. The coloured forms have thin and thick abstract lines traced over them. Each line represents a lived experience of bodymind creativity. A photograph of Allan Wexler’s Coffee Seeks Its Own Level (1990) is positioned over the blankets and drawn lines. The photograph shows four white coffee cups with saucers. Each cup has rubber tubing running from it, with the tubes connecting to a single four-way join in the middle. Each cup is filled with coffee. Four people sit at a table drinking from the cups. As the pressure seeks a level, the coffee rushes, swells, and spills with each small, individual movement. There are wet coffee stains on the white tablecloth.

Figure 1

My level is most found when...
Laying down.
In the dark.
Sensory comfortable.
No reading.
No writing.
No talking.
No people.
No practice.

I want to give myself care and I want to create.
I seek... a responsive sustainable practice equaliser.

Embodiminded sustainability and creativity assemblages could move and function like autopoiesis. Self-producing, self-maintaining, self-repairing and self-relational organisms. Creation of processes, thresholds, maintenance is informed by the organisms themselves. An ongoing sustainable reciprocity of organisms and environment. What if embodiminded sustainability begins with the seeking of its own level as what informs the ecology's actions? That the movement, spillage, swelling is what guides. There is nothing wrong with spillage, swelling. Nothing wrong with relational complexity in environments. And what if the organisms of this environment work within its complexity? An autopoietic reciprocity.

I am my own creative environment. 
I want to give myself care and I want to create.
I want to create in ways that move with and support my everyday unseen asymmetries. 
I want to give myself care by taking their lead and tending to them.

Arseli Dokumaci writes that moments of agency for people with illnesses and disabilities "are possibilities of actions that emerge from the reciprocity between the properties of the organism and those of the environment" (2023, p.6).  And Robert McRuer writes that "[..]surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick" (2006, p.193).

Exhausted, messy, forgotten, slow, rapid, pointy, clumsy, unsure processing.
Exhausted, messy, forgotten, slow, rapid, pointy, clumsy, unsure thinking.
My cognition feels and moves like biological weather.
Buzzing. Detached. Curious. Missing. Heavy. Slower.

Centering myself and my everyday unseens opens my creative experiences for me.

Makes me feel safer with my creativity as I palimpsest possible movements over my constant unpredictable invisible bodymind movements of which I also used to be terrified.
I now embrace what my complex relationality needs.
I move with it like weather.
Bodymind weather. 

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