Borderless Being

I’ve taken up the practice of libation, something that I did sparingly once and religiously long before. Now, I meet a need imprinted, whether in wine, milk, honey or water, and pour its reply onto the dry soil. I say a prayer in the garden and wait for a want. I am exploring needs and wants as a bond, experiencing their differences and similarities, and noticing how they accentuate each other’s desires.

Inside, I play “Come on home” by the Lijadu Sisters on repeat. I sense divergent emotions coalescing into my bridged shoulders, close to my ears, and pooling there. I recall that I can play with this existing shape by allowing myself to feel its unconscious form. I intensify its subtle sensation and expand its shape by pushing my shoulders even closer to my ears. As I quiver and let out a sigh, I sense a conversation.

I think of Peter Levine’s words in his book, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, and how he describes titration as “carefully touching into the smallest “drop” of survival-based arousal, and other difficult sensations, to prevent re-traumatisation” (2010).

Titration has become an interdisciplinary practice in my life of temperate transformation. Cooling relief. By not overruling my capacity, I discover ways of renegotiating forgotten possibilities of relating, sensing, being and knowing within myself.

When I experience resistance, I trace its pattern and think about the many times when I had pushed through, the times when I had ironed out my doubts until they lay flat in my mind. The times when I had muted the beating of my heart, washed out the taste of something off from my mouth and falsified assurance. I allow its noisy falsetto to bounce up my chest and plummet into my stomach, gathering speed until it finally twists into my side. I experience being winded but I don’t speed up, I slow down.

I lift a finger and let its movement be a signal of response.

“Here”.

I indulge in pause, noticing how much I am able to observe without immediate interpretation. I play with postponing meaning-making. I generate spaciousness to experience knowledge through my body, and the language of its shape while delaying my conditioned desire to conceptualise sculptures of rigid definition.

Carl Mika, a Māori philosopher, invites us to view language as a being that “worlds the world”. In doing this, we cultivate openness to the multiple experiences of existence within the world, instead of “wording the world” as we have become conditioned to (2017).

Stories are living entities in “worlding the world” that move through existence.

When I interrupt ingrained narratives that occupy my mind, I prohibit the use of my imagination as a means of subjugation. I celebrate the unknowable, that which refuses capture and the freedom of its deviance. I clear the table for a wanderer and its strange stories, stories that I haven’t thought of, stories that surprise.

In these moments, I realise I am handmade, formed of all touch.

A borderless being.

Sources

Levine, P. A., & Mate, G. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (1st ed.). North Atlantic Books.

Mika, C. (2017). Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy (1st ed.). Routledge.