How to do 'snake'.

when grief stretches its legs as part of the season, how we show up.

My short walk is over, I’m back at the threshold of the woods near my car, but I want one more moment with the river.  I see it up ahead, the little footbridge that serves as a gate to this golden autumnal world I escaped into.  I walk with ambition towards the old mill rock to the side of the bridge, overlooking the water, then stop mid-step, riveted:  A snake is peering over the edge of the rock, completely still, looking into the moving water below. 

I back up slowly, not wanting to be the human that messes up this moment, and – engaging my butoh training - take a long minute to lower myself to a squat.  After a few minutes of holding my breath in an uncomfortable position, it dawns on me that this snake was up to something before I stumbled over, and continues without fanfare.  She (lets say) is leaning over the rock, holding her head and upper spine suspended.  I have no idea why she’s here, the rock sits in the shade and holds no warmth. Maybe we are here for similar reasons.

A red maple leaf falls on her tail.  Another golden beech lands gently over her midline.  I watch, somehow committed now to being here as long as she is.  Maybe I think I can out-sit a snake, maybe I have been longing to slow down for weeks, and this is my moment to practice.  Maybe I just want to arrive somewhere, fully.  Unanswered emails sit like ghosts on my back, herbal formulas I should have sent two days ago murmur in the car, and the question that consumes me most: how to help with the devastations that have piled up just like the huge pine trees in my aunts yard in Georgia.  The stories from my friends and family in the South bring me to tears, but the stories from Sudan bring me to my knees. 

All these things keep crowding into this moment that is simply stone, soft water, and a snake sitting still.  I slowly come back to my place, and am humbled by the fact that this practice never really gets any easier or faster…this practice of trying to move at the speed of a landscape.  Snake is still completely still, head held high as the river is still moving, water yielding effortlessly. 

What are you thinking?  What are you feeling?  What is your reference point?  Who have you eaten?  What do you know intimately?

I want to know some other ways of being besides this particular frantic, bumbling human thing we all who can read this are doing.  So I continue to sit, but I notice I can’t sit as still as this snake.  I scratch.  I sneeze once.  I shift my hips around on the root I’ve found to perch on.  I have my phone in my bag and several times have to smack away the impulse to grab it and snap some pictures.  The score is this: Sit.  Just be still.  Can you do it?  Can you just do this one thing with your life, and let it be enough?

once, the camera wins out…

I begin to let my eyes take in more than just snake.  I scan the water, noticing the illusion of repetition above and below.  I see the pale grey roots of a Maple winding down towards the water. I realize - embarrassingly late - that I’m perched on one of them, and suddenly sense the tree whose shade we sit under. I notice the sound of the breeze before it hits my skin.  I try not to make anything too important or poetic, I try to just do ‘snake’. 

The nearby church bells tell me it’s been half an hour.  When snake finally flicks her tongue out, I feel my own flutter inside my mouth. When she unceremoniously lowers her head back to the rock and begins to wag her chin and undulate into a slither, it’s as if my spine is hers. My heartbeat quickens slightly, my belly lights up with sensation as she slides over the mossy stone.  This is her reference point.  She knows every contour of this place in every contour of her skin.  She shows me the weave of root between rock and a snake’s way down old millstone steps.  She slides over the roots that reach for water as my thighs tingle.  I see the landscape shift as she moves through the grass and soft dry leaves until she disappears completely into the hidden folds of the red maple, who has undoubtedly been watching us both.  

Much later, I am in dance studio with some fellow improvisers.  We speak of what it feels like to watch each other dancing, of the physical experience we have when we actively witness each other.  There is a hum of agreement when a man speaks of the palpable exhilaration he feels while watching.

The intelligence of how to be in this world is kept in its physical fabric: how we touch, feel, pause by, pass through, smell and listen. This will always be true, because reciprocity is not an idea, it is what shapes this living world we can never be separate from.

“I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves, I do not know where else I belong.”
-Ada Limón

If you too long to practice trying to move at the speed of a landscape, you might like to know about this offering that begins with samhain and cycles through the year.