Movement
Tender Transitions Poetry Week
What do we think of when we think of movement?
Maybe we think of exercise, of moving our bodies about—yes, that’s one form of movement.
But what about the sort of existential, life movements we practice and carry and yes, often choose in different seasons of our existence?
We are here, considering transitions, and right now, I really feel it.
I’m not huge into astrology (someone who is, point me to the good, equitable resources rooted in kinship and community), but read a recent monthly horoscope for Virgo, and it was all about this work of going inward to pay attention to what’s changing, to my own questions.
I definitely feel that in September, whether it’s because it’s my birthday month or because it’s this liminal space of movement from summer to autumn. Either way, I lean in, and recognize that somewhere, somehow, I’m moving, I’m asking questions, I’m exploring the universe around me.
It is a time when I long for kinship and a sense of grounding.
So, what transitions are you working through?
What does movement feel like, look like, sound like? Engage with all your senses today, asking them what they have to teach you.
Movement
Whether we like to admit it or not we are always moving toward— is it back to ourselves, or away? is it toward love or something else? Are we cycling or walking a line? We may feel we’ve stopped, or that we are stuck in a loop, but no, there is always a choice here or there to be made, and we are always making one, somehow. So the movement continues, and we are drawn in by it, cycled in to it, and as we move, we get to softly, tenderly, ask exactly where (or who) it is we intend to move toward today.
I wrote my poem before I read the meditation, but I can't separate the movement of my body from the movement of life all around me, so maybe it works anyway. ;)
--
Get out, get out
and walk
(or bike, or sit blinking in the sunlight)
and shed your fears like snakeskin.
There are birds to see,
and ants,
and trees,
and the round face of the moon
beaming down at you.
Get out, get out
of your head
and move.
I am always entering or exiting something.
Even in the simplicity of the doorway to my home.
My day, an ongoing dance from dawn to dusk.
Some steps easeful, a relaxed flow. Other times
I stumble, having to pull myself up again.
.
Now and then, between the coming and going,
there have been long challenging hallways.
From a loss, a death, an illness… darker places
that feel like limbo, like nothing’s happening.
Except for the grief, frustration and confusion.
An underworld time of vulnerability, of letting go.
Shedding of the skin is a slow time of transfiguration.
.
After the hallway and before the moving on
a deeper wisdom does unfurl like a delicate fern.
Insight begins from an emptiness, a womb of not knowing.
A movement through the unfamiliar and undefined.
Then a labor, birthing, an arrival of a new awareness.