Taking next steps out with the book I’ve been working on for about three years now. Getting closer to stepping out, discovering layers of shame that leave me frozen, in freeze. All I know how to do is to bring it to my somatic practice where I spend time “discharging” and to my art. Moving between concrete stories being there and other times it’s all purely sensation or just too large, too many layers of trauma—mine, ours, ancient and new, made in love and hate, sorrow at the gate.

Writing about shame hasn’t been easy so I used a way of pendulating between walking on a path holding sensations of pain, taking notes and then writing. Integrating my own way of InBodyNature practice with a ritual I found of CAConrad’s (blessings to you CA). It was good to get out of the same literal path and creative habits, surrendering to being lost in it all for longer than comfortable.

(when reading the following poem: consider the pronouns of we/ours/us as describing the multiplicity that lives within any I. Perhaps you’ll hear one of you there as well.)

At this Intersection

When the light goes on again is our body still here, is yours?

Slower over all passions

Feet still heart

Hips still hot

Keep touching it

Rolling it in your hands

Are your senses wet

Slower, slower still

The way is clear

And yet we will not leave us there

It’s embarrassing

To be seen as something less than

Shame on us

Less than human

Making it’s own violence and hatred here

Eating away at a better human inside

The taste rotten

Shame staying

Don’t touch it

Shame on and on

Not better humans

Shame on us on you

Shame on shame pendulating between no longer us

Tick tock tick tock

Staying not us

not even better

human shame in you

touching shame in us

Shame made visible

Painful, it’s uncomfortable, it’s embarrassing to be seen as something

To be seen as something

Banished to our body

Dragging in snow changing the way we walk

Pendulating tick tock tick toch

Trying to get to third fourth leg that makes life more stable

How to sense for what lives between

two legs, two eyes, two breast, between anus and vagina

Places once there now, gone

How does one know the unseen parts?

We want to drown in liquor, in fantasies and hallucinations

Of you touching us

Feeling the touch of you in our selves makes violence and hatred inside

Now outside yet the place still here in our body

Where others are we are lost with no hope

This rush to want ground in deep mound

Beware of the life eaters!

We don’t want to disturb our hills

Do not disturb the hills

Parts unseen touching that which is bigger than something else

We haven’t touched before

What right do we have to climb these places that do not belong to us?

Where we have comfort of wealth, failure, sickness to hold onto

We want to stay

Being nothing

Yet we don’t like this not being good enough

Ahgg

We are afraid

Not understanding presumed protection from fire to save our houses

Trees of no value

Wreckage of life eaters thrown about

There are obvious two paths where others have walked

We will not go there

The middle seemingly too dangerous

Uncertain which way to move forward

Between

Our legs

We stood and waited

Such a long distance

Do they have a right?

And yet they can still enter

We thought we got rid of all of them, the doors

And yet knocking on the door continues

Our bones and mind don’t move as quickly as all this rushing about

How will we ever be able to read you or us?