Flow

You can be a dam or a river. I am learning this. A blockade or an open door.

I clip black paper to the board and sit on the floor in front of it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how everything turns into something else. Nothing is fixed for long -- there is a shifting. Each thing is transformed and changed into another thing; everything is always in the process of becoming something different. Even if I can't see it, even if it happens infinitesimally slowly, it's happening. Forests become clouds, then rain, then oceans. Sunlight becomes food, becomes our bodies, becomes our movement. Just try and show me something that doesn't change. You will not find it. This is the way of things: life is intrinsically generous. It gives all of itself away, nodding, smiling, knowing that we can only ever borrow resources, that ownership is an illusion. This is flow. It comforts me.

My legs are crossed, my open hips supported by pillows. I look at it, at the paper -- it is as wide as a window -- until I can see nothing but black.

Problems seem to come when we resist all this. When instead of being a river, we decide that something should stop with us. We can help flow, or hinder it. Maybe we don't know that we do it, maybe we do, but we do it all the same. We hoard. Money, power, status, ideas, feelings. We say, "no, these things will not move or change. These are mine." Whether we say it with greed or righteousness or with despair, it makes no difference, we claim ownership forever in any case. We refuse to let the tumbling stones of time and necessity change them into some new form. We resist hard, humbling balance; the bigger picture. We close all the doors. We say KEEP OUT and HANDS OFF and SACRED and SPECIAL. We build barbed fences and walls and hide behind them, hide from that interminable flow, because change feels like loss, and sometimes it is, and loss makes us want to hoard what's left.

Pressure builds in hoarded things. This is when things explode. Poison stews in stagnant water. This is when things leak and hurt.

I have spread colours on the dust sheet. Soft pastels -- pale blues and pinks, deep reds, oranges, greens -- but I do not look at them. I close my eyes and feel what hurts. I find the echo of that black window inside me, where nothing grows and nothing moves.

I have been very frightened this week. Frightened and low. There has been illness -- my own and in people I love. Threat. Uncertainty. Deep stress. The man I love more than my heart knows what to do with and the place that feels like home to me: both are out of reach and far away, in distance and in time. Under the pain and unease of it, I made my body a blockade. A rigid, bitter, hard-edged no, no, no, and fear slammed against the dam of me, bruising, drowning.

I forget that we must be as generous with our fear as we are with all other things -- that we must recognise that we don't own it, that it isn't our special property. We must let it in and out again. Unless we want to risk that pressure-build, that poison, we must allow our bodies to transform it into something else. It is my body that turns air into blood, sight, energy, and it is my body that can turn thoughts and feelings into something else, too. I had known I was in trouble when I realised that I had spent the week not moving much at all -- not just physically but mentally, like sitting in a bath with the taps on and the plug in. Passivity is another kind of hoarding.

I open my eyes and reach for my headphones. I find a song I know will move me and I think: "I'm ready now. I'm ready to let you in."

On Fridays, I set aside the whole afternoon for play. However much work I have, however tired I feel, I make no excuses. It is important because it always shakes me out of my hoarding, my stagnancy. Much transformation happens in play, much turning of one thing into another. Dance does it, too, as can cooking, cleaning, crafting, painting, writing, running. I'm sure you will think of your own things: things that use your body -- that powerful vessel of change.

We can feel in a tight-closed, shut up body and hold it there, a dam, or we can feel it in a body that is open, moving, wide-armed, skin-clean: a river.

My disabled body doesn't let me dance on my feet, but there are many ways to dance.

Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. I let the first orchestral notes fill my body and move my fingers. I reach for light blue. The music comes into me and leaves as movement and colour. I sway. I let my fingers, my arms, leap, pirouette, crouch low, make noise, be whisper-soft. A new sound, a new colour. I scrape and swirl and lift and scribble. I do not think, only move, choose, move again. I do not care about it being good. Why the fuck should I care! Why should I hold anything back or be that uptight, that full of only myself. The music comes in and I let it join me, let myself feel it, heart throbbing, eyes streaming, mouth open and wide and full of grief and delight.

I make marks until the music stops, and I sit back and look at what I have allowed, joy and heartache bold on the page. I see that this is what can come from us if we don't get in the way. If we're brave enough to feel it all without holding it to us, if we can stop being so serious and controlling, all the endless time.

Fear still fills me, but it doesn't stay long. I will welcome it. I will not hold it. I will let it flow into movement, colour. I will let all things change.

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