Emergently-Abled

When most people see my brother, they will often first notice his disability. They might find a label like intellectually disabled. Often, their primary curiosity is about what makes him other and then him as a person. I wonder often about if we first asked what unique abilities someone like my brother has instead of first tracking his disabilities. 

Hey, check out my new catalog! Yah, look what color dock lines do you like here?

When I see my brother, I am relieved. On one hand, because I’m about to receive a big nervous-system-regulating bear hug and on the other hand, because I am seen and loved.

What is your cousin’s girlfriend’s name? Oh, Emily!

From when I was little, I knew that my brother knew things that others around me didn’t know. On so many occasions, he knew how to transmute our family’s conflict and chaos to levity, laughter and joy. Growing up, some hell might’ve been going down around us but he’d whisk me off for some adventure. Once it was playing in the mud outside. I loved playing in the mud with him just as much as making sure we were all cleaned up afterwards. My brother’s instinct to protect, care for and love his little sister was not impaired. 

What’d you have for dinner? Ravioli? Ooooooooo yum!

When part of who we are is marginalized from the societal center, we can be more easily tapped into the collective emergent edge. We can see and exude what those more in the center have a harder time accessing. We can be aware of what’s missing as it’s part of what we know and have to give that’s missing.

In a way what we call intellectual disability now, to me, contains in it an emergent ability for what we need to grow collectively to our edge. Including and integrating who and what part is excluded and marginalized is part of being fully with where we are so that we can move forward emergently. 

Please tell me how you make that sausage bread again!

In my brother’s disability, he is emergently-abled in his shameless big-hearted embodiment that centers the warm intelligence of the heart over the cold intelligence of the brain. Our over-reliance on cold intelligence hasn’t brought our collective consciousness to a place that can adequately address climate change, gruesome systemic oppression, dehumanizing technology, isolation and other pandemics.

Will you come home more often when I have a boat? Will you be there at my wedding?

Is there a part of you that is divergent from the mainstream or a system that you’re a part of that has medicine or a message to lead us towards our evolutive collective edge?

How can you make space for that part to be more fully seen and acknowledged? Perhaps first just for yourself.

Amò is neopolitan for love (Part 2)

Link to Part One

Link to Part Three

After my friend and I left Sorrento, to my surprise, you called me everyday. Until one day you didn’t. So I texted you “Grazie per tutto, addio!” “Thanks for everything, goodbye!” You called immediately and invited me to “turna a Surriento” for a week, “like the song,” you said. You’d rent us a villa you said. “OK!,” I said.

That fall, I was working on an organic farm outside of Forli. You showed up to help out in the vegetable garden with your Gucci belt on. We rode horses after mucking the stalls. You were terrified and I, as I often did, just acted as if you could do it all without a shred of doubt for your capacity. You loved Valentina. She came when you called her from the pasture. I can still hear you calling, “Vaaaallllleeennnntiiiiiiiiiinaaaaaaaaa!” 

You came to visit again and were weeping when I said, “Welp, I guess this is the end!” You said, “Daiii vieni a Sorrento!” “Come on, come to Sorrento.” I said that I would do no such thing, I’m a serious woman. “I’m not going to just move across the Atlantic ocean for some man.” “Just take a look, just in case!,” you appealed.

I googled “study abroad Sorrento” and had an ideal job, even if you weren’t in the picture, within 24hrs transforming a local language school into a full-fledged study abroad center. And within the year of me living and working there, we did. I’d miss many evenings in the piazza with you, working overtime writing Marine Biology and Volcanology syllabi. You never chastised me for working too much, you told your friends that I was a ragazza molto in gamba. Capable, smart, determined.

I can still smell the sun as I recollect my time with you there, sotto il sole sorrentino. I’m glad to have the sun damage on my shin, like a tattoo, reminding me. We would park the scooter in the olive grove and then climb down to where there were just towels and bodies soaking up the sun, and a tiny shed offering ice cold cans of beer. I never liked the beach or staying in the sun but I liked laying on the sun-drenched windstrewn cliffs there with you.

We lived in a lemon grove near your best friend. We’d scooter down the cobblestone path with walled vineyards on either side. On the way to work, we’d hurriedly get espresso and donuts. On hard days, in your characteristic infinite tenderness, you’d bring me gnocchi alla sorrentina for lunch. 

You’d park your scooter outside the window when I made dinner and dramatically declare, “I feel like one of those men that have a wife at home with dinner waiting for him!” I’d reply, “Amò, amore mio, take out the trash, clean the toilet and do the dishes!” Amò is neapolitan for Love. 

stability is always relative

Stability is always relative. Duh. The Big One knows this. The Little One is too busy drafting escape plans to know this. She does not bow to any fate. Heck no. She does not surrender to destiny. She steers the bloody ship! It’s safer to be the brains of the origin system than develop her own.

Precocity is not cute. 

Stability is always relative. Yikes! Like what, we’re always susceptible to uncertainty, volatility, complexity and ambiguity?

Change. 

Vulnerable to the other’s defense, rejection, assault, lust and deification? 

Danger. 

Whew!

“Look, it’s better the devil you know,” the Little One sighs with faux-wise self-satisfaction.

Stability is always relative. Hmmm. Especially if abandonment is a thing. But no one can abandon you. Except maybe your parents. Not other people, no. They can only leave you. Because of your fangs. Their snaggletooth. Your toward. Their away.

Gulp.

They left me first! It doesn’t matter. Bow to the fate of it. Yours and theirs. Y’alls. 

OK. How do you leave? No one knows how. There are no rules. There is no manual. No set of tenets can contain the infinite situational and character nuances. Maybe try to stand facing forward both separately and together. Try to leave in time to not eradicate respect and gratitude. Both that kind that is earned and that which is intrinsic in the not-yet-realized quantum influence.

I hate you! 

…Ugh, I am that, too…

I love you. Thank you. 

Thank you for traveling with me so darn far! Wow! It’s been an honor and privilege to see and feel the star-stunning miracle that you are. Thank you for being part of my never-ending death praxis. I will smile at you from that just-right loving distance  

Stability is always relative. No one and nothing can take your weight away from you though. Especially when you’ve taken your place and your weight is behind instead of in front or on top of you. So compost the pain. Grieve the loss. Make art. Recollect your weight. Let go of the icky sticky loyalties. Incorporate your experience into the breadth of your existence.

Better guilty for leaving than thwarting your freakish green fuse. 

Integrate your parts. Yah, that real nightmarish one too. Again and again. That’s it. Keep going now. What a beautiful system of becoming you’re creating. Don’t forget to hold dear the fractal beings in your emergent belonging and appreciate something extra those who have been able to stick around.

Don’t look. Close your eyes. Sit down! Be quiet! Plug your ears! 

No.

Stability is always relative. Staying awake, aware and feeling keeps me present down here. My expression moves me and my people forward. And if I must look up, I bow to the stars that brought me here.

answering the call

When the call is answered

There is a death to the seeking

To the feverish fleeing

To the indiscriminate receiving

Don’t misinterpret the discomfort of this freedom

And grab for more

Insight and believing

Instead, lean in

To just enjoy

This sensual wide-bodied piece of completion.

Where the dares have been recollected

Where the convergence has occurred

Where the lost wildness has been found

It’s time then to come forward

Into the spiral

Into the haze

Continue forward

In the tumult

In the responsibility

Continue forward

In the imposible idiosyncracies!

Keep going

With room, too, for the rejection

The blame and blunders

The foils, faults and flaws

Keep going

Not forgetting to pause for decay, separation and integration

Keep going

Keep renewing where your mutant individuation

Meets your invaluable belonging

Where your impatient I can’t wait anymore!

Meets your slowly earned wisdom

As you keep on loving, living and creating

Keep sanding, sharpening and softening what is your contributive best

What of you is needed when and where?

Cowboy or wrangler?

Accompanist, conductor or arranger?

-

In the death of a person, place or thing

There is a peace

Can you stay with it?

Can you hold it?

Can you stand with it?

Right next to it?

Listening humbly and respectfully?

Can you stay there?

Can you hold wonder and awe?

Stay in a way embodying undemanding play?

Beware of the backwards tilt!

The kind that’s not contained in a rocking chair

Swaying you back and not forward

The nostalgic seduction of old wounding!

Whether your liability is entanglement or seclusion

Stay low in gratitude by thanking the trees each day

Give cheap distraction the cold shoulder

Gather your soul’s weight

And then stand there with it now

Hands on your hips

Everyone right there with you

Shoulders back

Head up high

Proceeding as if success was your fate.

“The shame feels like grief now.”

A participant said this in a recent constellation workshop.

There’s a lot in this statement. It’s no small thing to get from one to the other.

The left and the right. The North and the South. The spiritual and the psychological. The psychodynamic and the cognitive behavioral. The avoidant and the anxious. The neglected and the abused. The enmeshed and the lonely. The angry and the sad. The corporate and the blue collar. The too high and the too low. The zealous and the immobile.

Regardless, the vector of shame to grief to movement unites us all. When we feel stuck and unable to move or move erratically in circles, there is sometimes shame wanting space to transmute into grief. When held in a collective field of curiosity and respect, beyond duality and dyad, we can often more easily be with what needs to be seen and witnessed. We can find more capacity to somatically acknowledge what is. The “what is” can sometimes be what was or what has happened but is “what is” because its effect is still here now.

In a different way, if we do not fully receive, account and celebrate (integrate) where we are now, how far we’ve come, what we’ve gathered, sometimes this thwarts movement as well. A group with a field consciousness, can give permission to take full ownership of our resources, successes, and gifts.

Sometimes shame is about what we’ve done. Sometimes it’s about what we’ve let be done to us. Sometimes it’s survivor shame or bystander shame. Sometimes it’s about being complicit in systemic oppression. Sometimes it’s about not contributing to what feels our fullest. Sometimes it’s long-term procrastination on our most authentic expression.

When we bring spacious presence to narrative content, we might find relief beyond terror, clinging and escaping. Spacious presence allows what’s on loop in us to slow down to a manageable piece or image, distilled into the elemental and be seen, accepted and integrated.

—

How do we build this spacious presence?

We practice non-judgement of others and compassion for ourselves. We explore within where we are judging others. “They’re a mess.” “They’re insensitive.” Where am I a mess? Insensitive? We remember where they’re at. “They’re new at this.” “They’re only 23.” “They’ve suffered severe discrimination and marginalization.” We can use our projections as prompts for making art, exploring a moment where we were that too or portraying where and how we see it in the collective. We can also own our choices and emotions. If we’re sick and tired of being used and abused, we can jam out to cathartic music or write a passionate slam poetry piece. If we can’t stand everyone on their cell phones everywhere and always, we can write a snarky public service announcement.

When we cause harm in a relationship, we can remember that being a human in love and relationship inevitably involves making mistakes. If we have the courage to own the mistakes, the injury can become a source of mutual healing and freedom. We can still discern when someone’s behavior towards us or values in the world are not a good fit for us. We can still hold ourselves to a serious standard of growing capacity for both loving others and being with more life to build and sustain our contribution.

An effective parent takes a lot of responsibility for their child’s behavior. They respect their stage of development. They remember that a toddler’s constant “No.” is them learning their boundaries and developing the ego required to survive. They remember that their teenager’s brain isn’t fully formed until it’s in its mid 20s. If not developmental, effective parents recognize that the child might be acting out something unconscious in the family system or lineage. They look within themselves and in the family and societal environment to what could be contributing to the behavior, as opposed to reacting and blaming the child. Sometimes one member of a family or system will hold more than their fair share of the anger, sadness, anxiety or disgust.

The more we practice non-judgment of others and compassion for ourselves, the more we embody the spaciousness where transmutation can occur. And then our profession, modality or role is always secondary and iterative. First, we are humans practicing love and kindness. Second, we are whatever we’re up to that day. First, we are the space, and second, we hold space for something to occur. First, we are the canvas and then we are the paint. First we are safe and then we facilitate a safe space. First we are the blank page and then the author who writes upon it.

The micro and macro. The dirt and water. The vapor and tinder. The soul-centric middle.

The Part That Can Say No

The Part That Can Say No to the predator and the Part That Cannot Say No to the predator had a conversation.

They discussed what they needed from one another. The predator was still there. Because they are still here. We practice and exercise our width with them in the room, too. The predator was acknowledged and they were reassured, “We see you. You’re still here.”

The room chuckled and softened.

The Big One was sitting in a chair close-by, alongside the parts, silently accompanying them, listening with respect to them.

Slowly, the Part That Cannot Say No started feeling bigger as they acknowledged their resources of curiosity and sensitivity.

The room relaxed.

The Part That Can Say No became less afraid and more at play. And next, the Part That Can Say No ever so gingerly stretched out their legs in a protective wide v-shape position.

The room breathed.

What’s going on for you now?

“My movement says it all.” The Part That Can Say No replied.

We left it there.

Unyolk

An oocyte is a cell in an ovary which may undergo meiotic division to form an egg. Primary oocytes are formed between three and eight months of gestation in the human embryo and remain arrested in prophase of meiotic division I until the female becomes sexually mature.

The youngest and eldest of seven sister healers.

We are cells in our mothers’ ovaries when our mothers are embryos in our grandmothers’ uteruses.

A new studio space for healing and community - before, a pentecostal church.

We are inside our grandmothers and mothers as early as three months of our mothers being in utero of our grandmothers.

January 1955.

Blink! The original awe. Pride. Immense pride to be born of these women, of this lineage.

Essential dignity. Soul. Conception. Realization.

One month in, mom’s dad dies along with the company. Money, not the most essential resource.

Division, desperation, and despair - a full-bodied lamentation from the twelfth house of grief and mystery. Feeling and knowing converge.

Some are laughing. Some are crying. Like when I was three and came down crying. They were laughing. Joni Mitchel said “Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.”

40 more breaths. An epsom salt bath.

One by one, my four grandparents sweep up from under me. Horizontally. They’ve given me all they’ve got. “Just get to work. We have nothing else to say. We’re behind you fully. The connection is complete. Now stay attuned.”

Emerge. Embody. Emanate.

Together forever and yet holding steady in the “I am here. And you are there.”

Unyolk.

Craftily Lit

“We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.” -Martín Pretchel

The group of 22 adolescent orphans never knew a life of non-longing and neither did their parents or grandparents and farther back even. The longing grew stronger through the generations. Some oppressions and injustices were balanced and healed but the longing never was. It seemed that there was a larger missing piece that allowed the oppressive systems to keep sprouting up. The longing was for a culture.

Can we find true belonging outside of an intact culture? They would debate this everyday. Some would say why bother, it isn’t real, let’s not pretend and delude ourselves. Others would insist that we have to do something, albeit imperfectly. They would discuss the elements of what an intact culture consists of. Although there would be great variance in their debate, they would usually agree that a culture is led by percipient elders. Elders that have experienced and integrated multiple dimensions of their being through life’s ongoing uncertainty, grief and renewal. Elders who experienced more and more of their parts within themselves and without through the Other. Elders who could stay playful with the youth about their fears and reactivity.  Elders committed to reverence and revelry. Elders who left the position of their childhood and stepped into their place as initiated adults. Elders who were part of bringing the youth into the fold both delicately and fiercely. 

What the adolescents fantasized about was for an elder to take them in the night. 

Without permission. Without total safety.

Bringing them in touch with the life force so they could step into their undeniable place.

Through initiation.

Risking their life to belong.

In an essential once-and-for-good rite of passage.

The stories of an old time where a culture was still intact were miraculously still passed down. A time when the elders were so life-loving that a child’s first aspiration was to prepare to be a good elder. When a person’s place was taken, the young initiates had to continually court the elder masters of their craft while they trained as apprentices and then artisans. The elders were often persnickety and sharp and also doting, witty and sincere. The young initiates thought they knew more than they did but they also inspired and challenged the elders to apply what they know to what the youth felt coming down the road.

What qualities from an intact culture can we apply without an intact culture? And worse, in the midst of climate catastrophe and soul-sucking artificial intelligence? We can commit unwaveringly to our soul’s craft and contribution. We can discern well between messages of movement-based awareness and freeze-provoking fear mongering. We can stay low and slow in ever-expanding grounded gratitude. We can take pleasure and delight in even tiny exchanges of life and nature. We can practice turning away again and again from what’s not good for us. We can center the voice, perception and needs of the most marginalized for the largest collective evolution. We can insist on leaning on one another through simple presence and not too much elusive enigmatic abstraction. We can aim to increase our capacity to know just enough, see wider and wider perspectives, feel with greater inclusivity of all human feeling and think with increasingly sound luminosity.