✨📣 Listen to me read you this essay ✨📣
Feeling wildly nostalgic this morning.
I came across video footage from a solo I performed in a Birmingham warehouse about a decade of summers ago.
Back then, I was listening to Waxahatchee’s American Weekend non-stop, reconciling my vexing relationship with the town I grew up in, and the treachery of running around with Alabama boys.
I was reading Salvation on Sand Mountain, a book about snake-handling parishioners in the Appalachian foothills, and thinking about how holding the live wire of a venomous snake could make you feel like God was running through you.
The dance I was watching this morning was about alla that.
I miss performing so much. I miss making dances with other people and putting together scrappy DIY art shows. I miss meeting people in the electric portal of live performance. It’s a place where I feel God run through me.
I’m thinking about the Leo new moon today, and what this moment is teaching us about being seen.
Being seen big.
Feeling safe enough to be all the way, all the way seen as the fiery blaze of light and awe and big passion that we all are, however diminished it may feel.
I’m following the breadcrumbs offered up by the Vimeo oracle, suggesting videos from the warehouse days of yore.
That version of me is someone I really admire. Newly out of college, snagged by the fresh grief of dad’s death, taking big boisterous chances on her impulses and desires. Stuck in Birmingham in a bizarre limbo, but determined to make an interesting go of it. Throwing freak art shows with friends, with not much more than grit and the zippy verve of youth’s f*ck it, let’s do it spirit.
She is someone really unafraid to be seen. And not necessarily to be in the spotlight, because I remember that always feeling scary as hell, but more as a byproduct of taking actions sourced from the center of white hot desire. To make bold, messy choices like biting into summer stone fruit. Juice all the way down.
A Leo moon, to me, is all at once about daring to be seen more vividly and also but wait is it actually safe to be seen shining out here?
It’s an emotions checkpoint. Is the nervous system going to let me come out and show em?
I’ve always bristled at the phrase just be yourself.
Aside from the kind of simplistic corniness, it feels pretty dismissive of why one might not feel all the way situated in the authentic center of themselves.
It doesn’t acknowledge that for a lot of people, being seen as your whole ass messy, shiny self doesn’t feel like the safe option. We learn pretty early on that some aspect of our most vibrant, true expression is really not okay in this house, in this classroom, on this playground.
Back when we were kids and only knew how to be moving from the center of ourselves, we at some point, no doubt, came up against the reality that our wild little spirits are actually fodder for jokes and admonishments. Not safe, not safe, not safe to be yourself.
I have been revisiting my inner memory bank, and locating times in my life when I felt the most free. Drawing the marrow forth from those periods, to suffuse its medicine into the present time.
Memory combing as self-resourcing.
I can, in fact, borrow vitality from my past and future selves.
Hez talks about the time loom.
It's one of my favorite phrases he’s given me throughout our friendship.
What if our life is more like a loom of time and space fibers spun with unimaginable intelligence?
What if we can reweave ourselves over and over again and we can pull together threads from disparate eras of our life, and braid them together in new ways to heal and fortify ourselves?
It's an abstract concept that really requires a whole essay unto itself, but basically, you know, time isn’t fixed or linear, and maybe our past and future selves are living out tangential realities like the loom’s warp field, and all of these realities can be called upon to support ourselves.
I’m grateful for the medicine of my scrappy dancemaker self circa 2013, so thoroughly down to experiment, make messes, make noise, and hold the potentially venomous live wire of being seen. Truly a gateway to the miraculous.
May this New Moon pour a nourishing honey of safety upon the parts of you that are less enthused about being seen. May the permission slip be self-signed to cast a bolder, bigger vision of yourself into the world. May you be turned all the way on by your life.
Big ripe blessings and potent seed setting to YOU my pal,
🤍M
Just popping in to tell you how much I relate!