Category Archives: the body

Apr3

entering

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EDITED FEET (31 of 55)Photo:  Pam White;  Sculpture:  Gillian Jagger; Image from the dance The Traveler by Paula Josa-Jones

The Way In

By Linda Hogan

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

Linda Hogan, “The Way In” from Rounding the Human Corners. Copyright © 2008 by Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. www.coffeehousepress.org

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Feb14

dreams of the body

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The Humpbacks

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

– Mary Oliver

Feb9

letting the wild out (in)

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Screen Shot 2014-02-09 at 9.02.06 AMDorothea Tanning

“Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame.  The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl.  I am tame, you are tame.  There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change.”

Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Reading this early this morning, I thought, “not quite.”  Residing for a month here in this holy (wholly) artists’ space, I am letting the wild out, letting the wild in.  It is a freedom from other eyes, even my own, a place of opening the floodgates to what may seem to ordinary eyes, madness, even possession.  Maybe it is more available without words, though I think not.  I know some wild writers, some feral painters, and so do you.

I know that I come quickly back to tameness, but there is a fierce pride in thrusting hands, feet, hips and mind into the tumult.

Jan28

diving in

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I remember my first session of Authentic Movement.  Dropping into the vast stillness and finding there eruption a commotion, a chaos, a disturbance of movement.  Sometimes it was stillness like lying at the bottom of the sea -dark and empty –  no sound, no sight.

Other times, the movement was irresistible, scary, intoxicating. Wild ropes of movement woven like ganglia into the spaces between the cells, knitted into the ligaments, sewn into the fibers of muscle, soaked into the bones to the marrow.  Movement like the capaill uisce – the ferocious water horses in The Scorpio Races – that will rise our of the depths and devour you whole; pull you down to the sea floor and leave you dismembered.  Other times, the movement could be exquisitely tender, delicate, sensuous .

Over the twenty-five or so years that I have been practicing and teaching Authentic Movement, I have found no other way of opening to source, to grounding inspiration in the body that is so simple and profound. I come back to it time and again because it keeps me honest, tethers inner to outer, opens me to the unexpected.

I work with individuals and also teach workshops.  To learn more or schedule a session, Email Paula.