Melting the Edge
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
Homecoming
Spread out and softened into warmth, humid remembering, flesh sinks into earth. Meet me where I am at home, give me space to unfold into the ripples and tremulous cadences of my own becoming. Heat on skin, pressure on softening muscles, breeze moves surface slow. Blessing myself in my attention.
Melting the Edge
We have been dancing for hours. Around me, bodies curve and flow in the muted light. My body feels fluid, muscles loosened, my breath moving out of me in deep exhalations, attuned to the subtle pulsation of life.
This is our solstice ritual, the bone deep ancestral resonance of humans dancing around a circle together.1 It is the first time that I have danced in-person with other people since the pandemic. Until my body arrived in the room today, I didn’t realize how hungry I’ve been for this practice, for the immense gift of moving emotions in embodied expression alongside other bodies who are immersed in their own process also.
The facilitators have turned down the lights, so we are dancing in darkness apart from a pool of light suffusing the central altar. My friend, Teresa, has invited me to bring my oracle deck to share with the other participants. I have scattered the oracle cards around the central altar, small rectangles of color peeking out around the branches of evergreen fir, the smooth shape of an antler, a bowl of clear crystals refracting the light.
Occasionally, people pause in their dance to sit at the edge of the altar and pick up a card. They rest in stillness as other bodies move around them, digesting the feeling of the poem.
A warm glow blossoms in my belly as I watch people engaging with the cards, the complex layering of relationships that created the oracle deck tendriling outwards into other people’s stories.
At the beginning of the ritual, descending into the darkness, Teresa invites us to call in all our sources of support. I am surprised by an immense wave of emotions: gratitude, awe, the recognition of so many supportive presences with whom I have been nurturing relationship. The living field of potency that grows around our calling in ripples around my sensing as if the air is filled with threads.
Tears are streaming down my face by the time I come to the altar. I am moving in stillness, rooting into the earth, attuned to the subtle nuances of both inner and outer sensation.
And that is when I notice the card—directly across from me, as if it is looking at me. Homecoming. A wash of pinks and grays, frosted by white. The very oracle card that I have been working with in my writing, drawing on it as inspiration for the essay that I left off writing yesterday.
I have been trying to write the memory of a year ago, during those first months in the RV trailer in my mom’s backyard, when my daily walks to the river allowed me to witness the full process of the water’s transition from frozen to solid.
Freeze as a way of accessing solidity
Hard armored protection
When the warmth isn’t there.
Walking on ice, bracing for a fissure
I do not trust the ground to hold
Without cracking beneath my feet.
A culture built on a freeze response
Isn’t prepared for the warmth that cracks the ice,
Plunging us into the water below.
What we are walking on is not fully the ground.
Apprenticing to the thaw, each day I watched the blanket of winter ice receding to the riverbank. The remaining ice became smaller and smaller, differentiating into chunks and fragments, pressing up against each other until one day when I reached the water’s edge, I was awed by small islands of ice crystals compressed into transparent jewels, refracting the light.
In my journal at the time, I wrote down the question: “what happens when a system starts coming out of freeze, when the protections start melting?”
I was beginning to feel the response to that question within my own nervous system, a subtle thawing of the ability to feel loved by the world around me. It would happen sometimes when I was out walking, like the hovering of a lover near me. An exquisite sensitivity to my skin, a sense of love coming towards me.
One evening, standing on the hill overlooking the water, I spoke these sensations into a poem:2
Subtle murmurings. Lapping dark.
Thawing water pulses edge of ice.
The cold air enters me, spreading chilling flesh.
What if I meet this body as a stranger?
This animal skin that listens, senses melting into air.
Tuned inside out to touch the earth.
I'm afraid of continuing.
Afraid of staying in the dance.
The intimacy of duration,
of returning again and again
once having touched the flow.
I want to kiss and run away.
The poetry swirls and eddies,
sustains and contracts, fading.
I must rest in the textures
not just the expansion,
not just the peak.
A cold air chills my bones.
Slow, melting, the ice remains,
it both is and is not the water.
Fluid caressing freeze,
melting the edge that is not the edge.
A year later, face to face with the homecoming card, standing still in the darkness while the other bodies swirl around me, I feel it again.
The miracle of my nervous system that can limit my ability to perceive love as the primordial foundation of reality.
The melting, the thawing, a felt sense glimpsing of the field of all that holds me.
A field that is always there. Whether or not I can feel it.
This is the material of reality. The belonging underneath all of the body memories of rupture and abandonment, the protective strategies woven together into a shape of self.
What my ancestors called the web of wyrd, the relational weaving. Holy Mother. Absolute Nature. Primordial Nourishment. The erotic pulse of life.
A movement offering from Rooted and Rising, facilitated by Teresa Reid and Ajay Rajani
The final texture of eco-somatic support is Creativity, the generative unfurling towards vitality that can begin to emerge from the support of all the other textures.