opening the pages

Wake in the night and do not furrow into sleep again until you have heard these stories. This is the season of spring, of seeds unfolding, and the landscape invites me to still, enter the quiet alertness of the company I seek--this earth, all of its tremblings. No anthology as large as this one, well, besides the Universe.

Turn the page. In this new branch of time and space I am studying the body (again) but this time on purpose, with hands. Massage, bodywork, touch. What is touch? What is it to touch the story of the word yes? What is it to touch the story of the word no?

Inside of our bodies we have a felt-sense of the difference between these two. When I speak the word no to my youngest daughter it is full of ivory husks, the tools of tone coming from my body like a mother elephant giving warning by rearing her head to indicate danger. I say no, no, no, no, no, repeating the offense of the word until surly she cannot forget its pointed end. When I say the word yes it is definitive, without the accents of style. It is what it is. It is a state of meditation, a temple of worship where saints and angles are humming the strings of the Universe into weaves of light.

I will not tell the story of the word no tonight. But I have heard its story. I hear it all the time. Hello News!

I am turning the page again, opening the flaps in time where the body reveals its mysteries. To time travel, place the hands on the body. Quiet. Be still. Become present. Then the stories of different times and places begin to rise. All of the stories want to be heard, reaching forth by way of spring's returned light and rise in temperature. The body is an opening of pages, a scattering of lyric gestures set forth on the wind, floating up into the open sky. To catch the body again (after the flighty influence of the word no) one must fall into the open night, knowing and trusting the ground below, but not focusing on what is known.

To ground the body, to plant it again, to unfurl into the light, one must hear the body's stories and insert the word yes in place of all the nos. This is what bodywork does, or can do. This is why I am opening the pages of the body, again. Again.