The Drop, the Splash and the Ripple

See With the Body Eye Pt 4

This moment

You are at your desk and your hands, shoulders and eyes feel so tired. You roll your shoulders back and squint at the screen, did it always seem so blurry? Your partner comes in bringing a cup of tea wondering when you’ll be free to help with a small household task. The cat stretches lazily by the door and requests, with an exceptionally sweet ‘raaorll’, that she would like to be let out, to prowl her inscrutable night paths.

So many requests in a day, from our loved ones, from the wild world, from our bodies: are these things truly separate, anyway?

Our requests for aid, for freedom, for connection, for movement and for love are entirely natural, infinitely nuanced and secreted within the most mundane of everyday activities. To spot the influence of the tender heart of our beloved in the angle of a tea mug handle’s placement is to discover a fairy door to the kingdom of Grace. There, we may find that the royal throne is only one of the props in an endless game of musical chairs, where somehow giving up our seat with good humour, while paradoxically giving our all to the frantic dash, is the opportunity to laugh and drink from the side lines with all the other creatures. Here, we watch just a few craven humans cling to their driver’s seats, thrones and presidencies, not realising the whole point of the game was to stay in motion with the others and to end up laughing so much we could barely stand and may even spill our cup of punch.

We stopped moving in harmony with the earth, each other and the seasons for a panoply of conflicting reasons that any number of books, popular podcasts or Substacks will attempt to list. Some say it’s agrarianism, Civilisation, or the Fall, Monotheism, perhaps the Industrial Revolution, the rise or the decline of Christianity, the mind-body split, the ascendancy of the left hemisphere way of attending to the world, Colonialism…

No prescriptions, no commands, no shaming will you find here. I simply have a question and a suggestion. The question is always the same: what ails you?¹ The suggestion is always this: trusting your intuition and experience, make changes, then see what the effects are. This call and response, no different from the creative urge², the scientific method³, or indeed, from prayer⁴, is at the heart of my life and is the chief sustainer of any sanity and health I still possess.

Water is the highest good

⁵ I have three shapes for us: one contained, one enlivening, one outreaching. These images are here to help us think about the ways in which we tend to move and engage in embodied activity and to help us notice where we have space or a longing for other ways of moving about in the world.

I am not particularly interested in the specific benefits of one exercise, sport or martial art over another, nor of that instrumentalist mindset being applied like an unwieldy valve to the delight-geyser that is spontaneous and free physical movement. Let us instead today provisionally divide movement up intuitively based on physicality and conviviality.

Imagine three seemingly discrete moments in one everyday event; a drop of rain falling into a lake.

The Drop

This is movement done primarily by the hands, or led by hand-work, with other movement supporting or sustaining the joyful creative work of the hands. What springs to mind immediately is craft: making gifts for others, preparing food, sewing, woodwork, painting, drawing, writing by hand, knot-work, crochet, knitting, whittling, smithing, leatherwork, playing musical instruments, calligraphy, pottery, braiding our loved-one’s hair…

The Drop enlivens, absorbs, engrosses, settles the nervous system, concentrates the mind, soothes the heart, regulates the emotions. We are primarily moving alone and our desire to move is only one part of a greater desire, which is to be creative, attentive or touching, whether with materials, our creative pursuits, or in deeply bonding behaviours such as cutting or plaiting another’s hair.

Becoming proficient in craft can help prevent the dumbing-down of human skill that accompanies a sedentary screen-based life. It provides a rest for the discursive mind and a way of learning and remembering things that is not fact-based but practice-based. Body memory is real. I can think I have forgotten a craft, but as soon as I pick up my crochet hook and yarn, my fingers know how to create a treble stitch, as my word-mind looks on, momentarily relieved of its duty to make everything happen.

The Splash

This refers mainly to solo actions, such as individual taichi or sport practice, stretching, yoga, chi kung, gardening, walks, gym routines and runs. We might be dancing around our kitchen or collecting pebbles on the beach. We are sweeping the garden path, cleaning the car, or walking to the corner shop for milk rather than ordering groceries online. Here we are overtly engaging our whole bodies rather than just our hands, and the movement itself is given priority over what is being made. All the actions of the splash could be done with others, true. But the splash is where our drop of intent to move has spread out from our mind and hands and has motivated our whole being. We are not sat down in a chair, we are moving. We are looking around us and noticing our effect in the world as we move through space. You might find you already do more of these movements than you realise. You may find, as I do, that using them as ‘rewards’ between screen-based activities is an enjoyable little trick to stop inertia and stiffness. I had no idea vacuuming could be so enjoyable until I started writing a book…

Solvitur ambulando requires that we eventually get off our arses…

The Ripple

This sphere of movement connects our own living being to others, both humans and the more than human world, (possibly even to what is beyond this world). Our drop and splash touch down and make ripples in the shared lake of experience of all that is not-self, all the myriad beings we share time and space with.

Here I will include all social forms of rambling, climbing, swimming, horseback riding, barn dances, community gardening, group forms of martial arts, contact improvisation. Perhaps we are learning to gather and forage in the wild, practice bushcraft or new skills. I’ll also include religious practices such as the Stations of The Cross, or kneeling and standing to pray, such as in many Christian liturgies and in Salat in Islam, prostrations in Buddhism and walking in Zen. Communal pilgrimage, whether the Camino de Santiago, Hajj or a day walking in the footsteps of our local saint, especially when we are thrown into the unbidden hospitality of others rather than following a micro-managed tour itinerary.

The splash is all the embodied life that was once the bulk of human activity, and still is for some intact cultures. It’s those things you still do and walk back home full of joy and gratitude, or just good aches and a box of delicious leftovers. ⁶

For me, this is the heart-medicine almost all modern cultures seem to be lacking. Governments and health professionals recommend individual activity, and it does improve statistics on a few limited metrics, such as joint mobility or preventing falls, as provided by rowing machines and taichi, respectively, for instance.

But I notice that my society has been hollowed-out of traditional forms of meaningful communal movement such as social dancing,⁷ large-scale festivities, pilgrimage, public religious ceremony, community events. Those opportunities for young and old, rich and poor to be together and to rub up alongside each other, literally, are almost non-existent in post-lockdown, 2020s southern England, where I live. Perhaps it is similar where you are. I am not saying there was a perfect time in the past, a mythical lake covered in exquisite interpenetrating ripples, if you like. But perhaps under the benign influence of Lean Logic, I would suggest that many ailments of the body of society would lift, if social joy, movement and shared purpose made a comeback.

No amount of individualised exercise can salve the windburned heart modernity has scorched. It cannot be healed by a life-hack, optimisation or positive-affirmations. We will need to join hands.

Where in your life are the activities with others? Do we dance, sing, harmonise or ramble with others, or are we always alone (or in a couple-bubble)? And regarding the more than human world, where are our movements in connection with nature? Do we climb trees, go fishing, watch birds, swim in open water, hunt for fossils? Perhaps we are saturated with human connection after all, and the ripples we long to create and be moved by are made by swans, or mountains, or moths. Perhaps we are so lonely that this list just brings on a sense of sadness. If so, I am sorry. I hope a way forward into connexion can open, even just a chink, very soon.

The Lake

Now, we could count the drops, the splashes, the ripples in our lives. We could note our preferred way of moving, see what we avoid. Maybe we can attempt to stretch a little towards what our body and heart-mind long for us. We can move towards others. We can engage humour and foolishness, and do those things we always wanted to do, but had given up hope of trying. For me, for instance, that’s learning traditional songs I can sing with others rather than only the songs I have written myself. I have avoided that my whole life, but now that several loved ones play such good tunes on whistle and mandolin, I feel a deep calling to be able to sing along, not just to call the tune. And one day finally, if I get the chance to settle and make a home again, I’d love to join a local choir - of almost any kind - and be part of the swell of sound that only a gathering of people singing together can make.

There are beautiful lakes made up of all the individual drops of movement that people make. Here, a pilgrimage lake. There, a festival lake. Over here, a cheese-rolling lake!

After all, we are not meant to take ourselves so very seriously.

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Excuse traffic noise this week, it was recorded on a Friday, with cars going past outside.

This week’s good thing: Quinn by Em Strang. I devoured this book in a few days last week, unable to put it down at bedtime, despite early mornings ahead teaching. Reviewers have called it ‘harrowing’ and ‘devastating’ and it is certainly full of vivid descriptions of mental anguish and harsh life events, including years in prison. But I came away from this book thrilled by Strang’s unique use of language, excited by what a book can do, and convinced more than ever of the powers of forgiveness and transformation. Neither of those two vital things are easy to achieve and they are just as hard to describe or evoke on the page. Em Strang uses fierce, strong, poetic language and a terrific story to do just that. This is a must-read.

1. Questions, questions, questions.

2. What is unfinished or unsatisfactory about this work of art I am making? When I make certain changes, noticing the new gestalt, a way forward becomes clear.

3. What is the result of this experiment? Compiling all the data and assessing it within valid, sometimes overlapping contexts, (safety, efficacy, desirability, iatrogenic effects, ethics, toxicity, cost…) the next experiment or conclusion becomes possible.

4. Great Mystery, help me overcome my stuckness and pettiness today, and instead attend to the essential, to the Beloved and to life with all my heart. […] Great Mystery, the chestnut blossom is so abundant, the magpie chicks have fledged, the bay leaves are turning darker, the old hinge screws will make good rust for black ink…

5. ‘Water is the highest good’, Tao Te Ching ch 8.

6. Here I would sometimes also include ordinary paid work, if it is physically active, convivial, beneficial to our and others’ lives, and if the worker herself deems it to be good work.

7. But look!