Musing:
Happy New Year, my friends. I’m glad that we have more than one day to offer this greeting. A single day isn’t long enough. Not these days. And change arrives in unrecognizable forms. During the ice storm that came through just before Christmas- remember that? sliding over sidewalks on the last shopping day. That night I lost power in my house for a couple of hours. A tree snapped under the weight of the ice and fell on a line. I was brushing my teeth at the time the transformer blew, it sounded like a gunshot, I saw a flash of light outside the window and the house went dark. One reality was replaced with another. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Except call CMP. Minutes later a fire truck rolled down our dead end street and I could see a fireman walking the road with a flashlight, his voice sounded different in the darkness. He found the tree limb and confirmed what I already knew: all we could was wait. Who’d called the fireman? The piece that interests me about this story is how easily what we know can be replaced, highlighting how much we didn’t know, how much we’d forgotten to notice. What’s all this that was here all the time? Now there’s just blankets and sleep. I drifted off and was woken by a truck outside my window. A bucket truck rising toward the limp limb. It felt like a dream, everything that was happening - what world do we live in that someone arrives to care for these things? Incredible. What systems, what sophistication! They knocked the limb down and I watched it fall into the street. The truck drove off and 10 minutes later the lights clicked back on, the heat returned, the washer started washing where it had left off. The limb was still there in the road the next day, everything else had fallen back into place.
I wonder if it weren’t storming out today as I write - more than storming - blizzarding - if I would have chosen this subject as my musing. I had intended to write to you all with my New Year’s greeting a little closer to New Year’s day but the days filled in with… life.. There were other thoughts, they’re not gone, but in the tangle they’ve taken a different seat. All this might speak to the influence of environment on our being - it’s not just me and you but the room we are in. With this storm I’m remembering the one that preceded it. I’m remembering the fear of the cold when the heat and lights went out, staring into an unknown, the familiar stripped, the snap of anxiety. These things stay or return. Talk about sophistication! Our systems know. What intelligence!! And though we share an environment each one of us will have a different experience. Part of the process of healing, of awareness, is recognizing your own experience and taking care of the being that is feeling - your you or as Mary Oliver says: “the soft animal of your body”…
What response? what is being asked, what is being prayed, what is being rejected, what sought… as the sheet of white drops outside and is replaced by dark, the silhouette of bare limbs, these questions are seen but not answered. Yet, the space of time seems to ask something of me, if only my attention and then to orient myself within it. More often I have other ideas - a timeline, a schedule, something that pushes, requires pushing. Just before the new year I had an insight into just how much of all that pushing started with me. And it was effecting everything. The last thing on the list was the thing I wanted to do most. How did that happen?
The mystery of Cranio Sacral Therapy is that it teaches us about stillness. And from inside stillness there is a reorganization. What isn’t here is untied, unwound, a boat released down the river without regret. And stillness is that pause that helps us to see that living is living in relation to - the wind, the lamp, the person across the table. In that stillness in the space of a session I am reminded of the environment of myself, the equilibrium there, the calibration, the creation of time in my own time. And then we go out again and feel the snow on our face and my body answers.
I’m available for Clinic sessions on Fri Jan 19 + Sat Jan 20, next month it’s Sat Feb 10 + Friday Feb 16. Also by appointment on just about any other day with a little planning.
I truly wish for you many moments of joy and ease in this new year.
lots of love,
Molly