Soft

If my practice is a yolk, softness is the albumin around the yolk. An embryonic fluid. Or sometimes oxygen like. Inflatable packing cushions. An airbag that is always in some breathing state of sensitive inflation-deflation; a sickness slack. Fluid inflatable armour for unstable sick-movements and for receiving, insulating against, hard stable movement from the world. I am protected from the damages of immediacy.

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Soft protects my slow. Slow grows soft as a companion. Soft emerges from slow because to move slowly, and stay true to slow, I need to softly attend to changing, modifying, disassembling and disrupting anything that stops me from being and remaining slow. Softness becomes, activates, on behalf of slowness.

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Folding soft into all of my thresholds and boundaries is a soft breaking. I have only ever been shown that to move past and through obstructions requires fast pace and a concentrated moment of overwhelming force. Breaking things to move past them or through them may cause injury and does nothing for my understanding and possible rebuilding. Soft breaking is a gentle disintegration.

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Disintegration breaks things down into their individual molecules. It gently explodes tightly bound assemblages and offers them as vulnerable, fragile aggregations. I can sit on the ground in the safe place of soft joins at a crumbling border and dissect what was once an overpowering whole to understand it deeply as something more than an opposing force. And.. so… soft disruption is also a kind of opening. The breaking down becomes an intimate space where I find my meaning in my bodymind ruptures. Soft takes care of me at these borders of 'want' and 'can't'. Soft is where care is.

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I am staying in my soft energy, my sick energy and discovering honest and full ways to make from here when someone on the radio describes another as a Force of Nature. And I think right away, I know what people are wanting to communicate about someone when they describe them as this. Full of vitality that is an otherworldly spirit. A kind of energy and will that is un-human like... or more inbetween human and nature. That they can't be stopped. I am using much less or no force.

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This softness... this padded sick-doing... is not also a kind of feat? You won't be able to see it because you can't see me in the world softly and gently dissolving normative-natures out of my way. My nature is not going to look full of vitality. When I think of all the folding and growth in collapsed and collapsing and continually collapsible and rebuilt and rebuilding  environments that are internal... that's a force of nature. Continuing as an othered invisible nature is forceful. Continuing in and demanding different force forms is so completely full of life. Over and over and over.

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'I am tired of hardness and stable forms. I am fragile unstable uncertain forms.' I hand write this and pin it on my wall.

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I don’t like using the word strength anymore.