CHAPTER THREE
Part Two
I bring practice to be in the middle with me
I bring practice into the middle to be with me. Into the middle of my invisible bodymind.
I have spent almost a year taking everything out of the middle.
I never thought about what I might bring back to be with me.
And the first thing I want to bring back is practice.
As I write this... I hope that one day I can ask other people...
"What will you bring back to be in the middle with you?"
"If you are occupying your centre... what do you want to bring in with you to the middle?"
I am occupying my centre.
What do I want to bring in with me to the middle?
What do I want to surface and allow and nurture and tend to and follow as expression within my creativity?
I centre the practitioner.
I don't centre the practice.
I don't centre the discipline.
I centre the practitioner.
I am in the middle with my invisible bodymind.
My creativity is the shape of a heaped blanket.
Made from skin.
In my bed.
My everyday unseen creativity is small and it feels right.
It is small and it is heavy.
Heavier than a small shape should be.
And it feels right.
I stay with the relational, interconnected, interdependent multitudinal of the practitioner.
I afford myself as practitioner long exposures.
I afford myself as practitioner long exposures.
I notice... attune to... with... my invisible bodymind everyday unseens.
I stay with and follow my everyday unseen assemblages.
Attuning through care.
I expand.
I don't want to disturb the way invisible bodymind creativity or the everyday unseens move. I don't want to bring them towards me or towards visible material centric places. I want to be close with them and I want to be tender here. I want to go to them.
If I could be creating from invisible bodymind and everyday unseens... where might creativity create from?
I lay in place and follow and trace.
Like soft ethnographical flow diagrams... but more like those of wild foxes than of people
I want to meet myself where I am in this bed.
Bed.
Bedroom.
Home.
Homemade.
Quiet.
Dark.
Rest. Restlessness.
Complex calming of heart rate.
Slowness.
Slow pace.
I stay with and slowly trace.
Follow over and over.
A slow surveying.
I trace movements and moments of my invisible bodymind.
I trace the unseen relationships of my everyday unseens.
As a follower... my movements mirror the loose, sloppy, rhizomatic.
Sometimes it feels like following. Sometimes it feels like falling.
I trace and am graciously lost in the inbetweens of what I don't know.
Laying down.
Staying down.
Base place.
Receiving the world from positions of comfort.
Receiving the world from positions of vulnerability.
Perceiving the world from positions of comfort.
Perceiving the world from positions of vulnerability.
Grounded on ground that is bed height.
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.
I am staying with and attuning with rhythms of raw, multiple, impulsive, spontaneous, generative, unstable, collapsing complex motions and reactions and responses.
My invisible bodymind creative motions are messy. Inconsistent. Unpredictable. Always changing. Always affecting. Always in effect. Dynamically and chaotically so.
My creative everyday unseens are also writhing multitudes.
Loose muscles. Energyless muscles. Restless muscles.
No materiality. No material. Material takes from the physical.
I am abstract conceptual immaterial expressions. I am more dematerial. Digital remembering. Digital deference.
Phones remembering. Phones holding on to the dematerial for me. Outsourcing the future to my little hand computer.
Everything of me... my bodymind... is delicate. Moving and changing and unfinished and falling and becoming and multi-directional. Echoes of echoes layer up my millisecond experience of being a bodymind. Everyday unpredictability. Just move with. No planning. Things from the ground. But the ground is always moving. Amorphous. Soft and porous. And being this way is safe for me. Elastic. Fluid. Forgiving.
Sometimes the complexity of following is overwhelming and makes me tired and sad and I stop tracing and knowing the complexity for a few days or a few weeks. Attuning with my invisible bodymind and creativity does not mean a balanced harmony as my bodymind is not harmonious. It can be hard staying with an invisible bodymind for a long time. Attuning can be painful. But it's honest. No hiding sick.
Pooling thoughts. Pooling feelings. Pooling blood.
Sinking asynchronous words.
Sinking asynchronous hearing of words.
Sinking asynchronous misunderstandings.
Hazy and racy.
Doubt and wanting.
No hiding.
I stay with and listen to the stories of my blood.
Stay with and watch the stories of my easy-to-rush heart.
I stay with and feel the stories of my bodymind sometimes not feeling like a body.
Listen to the stories of my bone marrow energyless limbs so I can learn the term "bone marrow energylessness' (Figure 1).
Figure 1
I like how this kind of tracing-as-attuning affords many bodymind tenses within noticing.
I like that it can hold bodymind spatial and temporal dimensions of noticing.
These gentle mappings... gently expanding attunement assemblages with invisible bodymind practitioner as a middle... share with me how moving from the practitioner bodymind needs, wants, everyday unseen reality is so very important.
"[...] the radical presentation of disability is a resource, and a creative source of culture, that moves disability out of the realm of victimized people, or as an insurmountable barrier [...] the experience of disability provides the opportunity to enter into networks that recognize strengths of different abilities and that include considering resilience, survival, vulnerability, body knowledge, and performativity as resources" (Devlieger et al., 2013, p.19).
Attuning to my neurodivergence, bodymind, multi-systemic disorders, bedbound, housebound truths as landscapes... topographies... a place and base of self and creativity... grounding my needs as the ground itself makes me feel... well the feeling is peaceful. And the next feeling is excited. And the next feeling is curious. And the next feeling is trace again. Make the aperture longer. Again. Again. Again. Assemblages of attunement are teaching me.
Creativity moves through these and with these places... and it agrees with me not to use more than we have. We are both now protective over this ground.
I want to give myself care and I want to create.
I want to give myself care and I want to create.
I want to give myself care and I want to create.
What has happened... what I have learned with the relational following of my invisible bodymind is how many tiny unseen actions, movements make up affects and effects of my disabilities.
It is the same with creating
So many tiny unseen actions... movements can build up and cause days, weeks, months and years of bodymind damage.
These are the places I will create from and create with.
My bodymind and creativity need to be in constant conversation all the time.
For many months. For many years. Always.
Everyday unseen creativity and expression and practices need to support my bodymind.
My bodymind needs to be supported with how I move in these expressions and creativity.
They need each other's care and tenderness and delicateness; embodiminded reciprocity.
I am learning a safe space of reciprocity for my creativity.
One that is fluid, sensitive and gently responsive to acute changeabilities.
Arseli Dokumaci says she looks at the changing affordances of disability as an ecology (2023).
My assemblages are ecologies.
Assemblages of attunement as ecologies.
Assemblages of attunement are environment and organism.
I really want to learn and explore ways of environment and organism reciprocity.
Ecologically, I guess what I am talking about with invisible bodymind and creativity is some kind of embodiminded sustainability.