Ecology of Wonder
By Karin Stevens
I’ve been dancing for as long as I can remember. It began in both cultivated and wild spaces around the home I grew up in on a Seattle hillside above the Salish Sea. But boxes and classrooms and a cultural story of separation invaded the wonder and magic and discovery of moving with the turning world. By middle school the rhythms of my bones and soft tissues had become hardened and controlled by my efforts to move with the surrounding culture and the classical ballet technique I approached with a militaristic fortitude learned from my father. My physical alignment was disrupted; my “true north” as I once heard a yoga teacher say, was thrown off by the places locked down inside me that took decades to liberate. For years I was resistant and feared listening to the stirrings of my heart, to the spirit of my inner child who moved in a beloved relationship with earth and sky and trees, and to the whispers of the ancient-future calling me toward renewing the Earth-body story. Many times throughout my life I have tried to quit dancing, sensing that something was not right in the anxious strivings of my dance steps in movement with my educational, religious, and family culture. Yet, no matter how many times as a teen and then as an adult I tried to pursue something “intellectually higher,” I could never ignore the overwhelming inner pull to keep dancing. By my mid-twenties, it had become clear that dance was the lens through which I viewed the world in order to explore and create meaning and understanding. I was becoming a choreographic artist. In my thirties and early forties, through years of pursuing recognition as a dance artist, while also tending to wounds from my childhood that often festered in a debilitating self-questioning of my life’s purpose, movement and body-based awareness practices became the way through which to heal my pain and make sense of my life in relationship with the problems of this cultural time.
***
I walk barefoot on the trails, in a Northwest Canadian forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. I want to feel my feet more in rhythm with the ground. I want this understanding that is arising from this renewing ground to become embodied more thoroughly in me. My feet follow multidirectional angles directed by bare toe knuckles and metatarsal bones of Douglas fir and Cedar roots rising in various places along the paths. My right foot turns deeply inward touching the outer rim of my pinkie-side against a root. My body responds by turning backwards to the trail as I shift weight onto this foot and feel the O Horizon: the leaves and pine needles that have given their life to nourish the ground, my body-being and the trees that rise from this offering of leaves and needles for rich and nutrient-filled soil––called humus, from the Latin where we also get the words human and humility. To be “grounded” is more than the current pop-psychology use of the word, it also means to be humble; something I am trying to re-member in my body, as movement from the ground. The ball of my left foot presses into a soft triangular space between more closely-spaced knobby roots. I transform with these out-of-the-ordinary steps, directed by foot placings which give way to a rooted dance in small steps of continuous change. My shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands articulate in motion through the air, responding to the ever-changing directions of my lower body. I feel my tailbone, my head, my back body, and my front extending, four additional distal reaches moving with my four limbs, reaching out and stepping back into gravity through the possibilities of endless transfer and flow from this place between life and death. In the now of this movement practice I feel, without yet knowing the words, that my personal path is part of something greater. My being enfolding into the mystery from the ground-of-being. My life unfolding in an endless artful offering back to the land.
***
One morning, I move from the trail into the trees. To be within the breath shared between the trees and me. The air, another being, calling me off the designated path. Speaking through my inhale and exhale.
The breath of movement––the whispers of air moving into more-being––turns skull-cervical-vertebrae-ribs-sacrum-then-feet-me toward a limitless unmarked path of soft ground blessed by the offering of pine needles and the mystery of moving into receiving. I had been running along the trails of Hollyhock retreat center on Cortes Island. But in this moment I no longer follow the path I had mentally set out for myself this morning. I am hearing an impulse to move into the unknown within the darker shade of tree arms weaving an upper enclosure. The air feels dense with possibility and discovery. Suddenly I feel the desire to video an improvisation with this place. I had not come here with the intention of making another dance. Rather I had come to learn from the cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, in his Falling Awake: An Ecology of Wonder workshop. Between listening to Abram and the wild old-growth forest on Cortes Island, movements were forming in me.
I walk around sword ferns and fallen trunks and branches into the thick of the evergreen trees, set the camera against a mossy rock, and climb onto a weathered tan stump. I am careful and clumsy, trying not to disturb the natural process of the mossy, decaying, life-giving remains. A dance commences over and through wispy filigree in delicate pine needle of three-foot little trunks and branches of Western Hemlock rising from a stump that might have been a grand Douglas fir. A sturdier grasp of another thicker trunk, rising tens of feet into the air from this nurse stump, becomes my dance partner. From a lunge stance, I arch my spine, face to the sky, leaning sternum-heart into this young vertical being, who rises from the process of death below my feet. Then, standing on one leg, I grasp this tree with hand and being, to lean my torso way out beyond this vertical axis, to extend forward both arms from the trunk, to stretch one leg backward into the enlivening air.
The preceding forty-plus years of my life are like this stump beneath my feet. The new dances I am co-creating in relationship with earth places are nursed from the decomposition of a story in my body, a personal and a collective story, that is dying for our Earth-body to rise anew. In recent years, I have painstakingly and ponderously relearned to make movements practiced with deeper sensory awareness, reforming me again and again every day. Listening for the impulse. For the daily, momentary process that transforms movement patterns of pain and fear. That opens more space for complexity, expansion, and contraction; back-toward an evolutionary, regenerative love.
When stagnant in difficult emotions, I move. When insight feels distant and blocked, I move.
My practice begins with the movement of breath.
In the present moment, with the air moving through me in these Cortes Island woods, rutted pathways in the declining story of thoughts and feelings within my body are eroding away for good. The dominant culture of our time, which is reaching its apocalypse in national and global climate disasters, mass migration and extinctions, religious wars and racial justice uprisings, set many hundreds of generations including mine on a dead-end course, unable to actualize well-being, relationships, a sense of self, a purpose as sacred, ever deepening movements with one another and all that is. This hegemonic Western conception of minds severed from bodies, dominating and controlling each other and the living, breathing Earth, is reaching its end. And my journey out of this dominant cultural misdirection is reaching its completion. This summer on another island exploration of body and place, the wheel of my body-evolution is turning toward understanding my participation in the global, current-movement of cultural metamorphosis. With the wind of breath and the new rhythms of this current-movement, I am becoming an evolved species for the future. I am speaking dance for a collective turning.
On the old stump, I press my chest upward, palms downward into its decaying, life-giving force. Elbow, head, wrists wind through and around the emerging life in process. Reaching, scooping, tenuously balancing with the air of this opening body-mind-space. A wildness emerging into what Abram refers to as an “inexhaustible weirdness and mystery” in this Earth-becoming. I am breathing in an embodiment of strength for the journey into the unknown future. Opening to the strong headwinds of continual change in the face of radical uncertainty.
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David Abram speaks of a great sea change to civilization. He encourages us to experience the centrality of the body in relation to the primary value of Earth places. He speaks of developing one's sense of wildness unfolding; for a “new humility in relation to other earth-born entities“ he refers to as the “more-than-human.” The most meaningful to me is his emphatic call for a “dramatically transformed sense of the sacred struggling to be born at this teetering moment in the world’s unfolding.” For me, practicing a daily awareness of the sacred struggle to be born is an evolutionary process and an ancient-future-now relationship with the source of life. We can refer to this source as God, the unified field, the ground of being, the web of life, the fabric of the universe. It is not an idea of source as separate from ourselves and this present world, nor as a controllable life force according to our individualistic whims. I call it participation in the Big Love Movement. Abram asks, “How can this transformed awareness settle deeply into our muscles and bones? And how can it come most powerfully to expression in our lives?” I ask, how can we participate consciously in relationships with Earth places, energies, and rhythms as the evolutionary process of more-being-in-love, ever unfolding a more diverse, complex, and beautiful art of our interconnected Earth-body-lives through the Big Love Movement?
We must move, beginning with our breath, turning and returning within the whole and the holy life-death cycle of Earth-body-being! It is urgent and essential that we revitalize our bodily sensory awareness for more life-giving movement for the ongoing challenges of healing the divisions within our body-selves and the subsequent fractures and harm that humans have created in the collective EarthBody. In the words of poet Mary Oliver, humans “––so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained––are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.” The air we breathe is the Earth’s breath and the interchange between ourselves, the grasses, the trees, and the “more-than-human” soaring, bounding, creeping and swimming movers who are suffering because we have separated ourselves from the Big Love Movement of the collective, breathing EarthBody.
The new movements that we make function as vital lungs and heart for the transformative process of rebirthing human culture through re-patterning our nervous systems, extending our minds, and reconnecting with the “moving, the vivacious many.” For respiring, reimagining and restoring well-being beyond the impending collapse of environments and accelerating species extinctions, including the threat of our own. For expansion of love within, through, and from this Earth-being-movement-source that we are. For acknowledging the damage that has already been done and the grief that we must exhale. All of this begins in our intentional living, loving, moving breath with atmosphere––a word, Abram teaches in The Spell of the Sensuous, “displays its origin in the source of the Sanskrit word atman, which means … the soul which is the air, the air which is the soul.” Air is our sacred, universal awareness of wholeness. It is not only Rainer Maria Rilke’s “intensified sky” within the landscape of our human bodies, “hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” Within is also Abram’s emphasis that through our forgetting of the air, the consequences of climate change howl and surge throughout our collective lives. Inhale. Exhale. Move. Again. And again. The right and the left, up and down, breath and heart, mind and emotions, overcoming and reconnecting our hemispheric human potential to divide the whole into separate parts: knowledge and mystery, science and spirit, the inner and the outer.
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During the Ecology of Wonder workshop, David Abram encouraged us to hear a story from the land. To receive meaning through our “face to place” movements with the woods, beaches, and creatures of Cortes Island. Was the male deer I encountered as I ran singing around a bend along a trail, practically running into the buck as it stood, waiting for my approach, speaking to me about regeneration? Were its dark, penetrating eyes and majestic ten point antlers asking me to embody a spiritual authority in what I was learning and becoming that summer? Was the arresting, entrancing owl sitting midday at our human level, twenty feet from the trail, with its back to us, speaking about seeing beyond, into the mystery from the light of day?
And what of the afternoon I actually walked with the intention to receive a story from the land? It was the only afternoon we were given off from the five day-long workshop that I could explore with my two younger daughters while also giving their dad some alone time. Our movements through the woods and to the beach included the anxious and disruptive energy of my youngest daughter, who was having a hard time all week, feeling her inability to control any of the new experiences she was having. Breathing through my frustration, with the intention to move toward compassion for this human tendency, I pressed her into my side-body as we walked under the trees, coaxing her into her body and into step with the unfolding moment.
Exiting the woods, we were greeted by a bright yellow church bench along the path’s edge above the narrow rim of the beach. A sign invited us to sit down and learn the story of the bench. My middle daughter and I sat. My youngest, now more freely engaged with her surroundings, continued on a few hundred feet toward where the beach meets the rise of a steep cliff.
In the story of the bench, we learned that a nearby neighbor, living in one of the homes near the location of this bench, had acquired it from an old church torn down on one of the Canadian islands. During a visit from a friend in crisis, they painted the old church bench a vibrant, sunflower yellow through conversations in communion with the friend’s pain. Shortly after the friend departed the island, the neighbor learned of the friend’s suicide. My daughter and I sat in our silence with this story; with the gentle lapping of the salty, gray-blue water upon the rocky shore, reflecting an overcast sky; with the nourishing rest we received sitting on the bright yellow church bench, between this place beneath the arch-shade of trees and the vaster mystery of suffering and death.
Piercing into this moment, my youngest daughter came back in great distress. She could not find the trail leading out from where the beach met the high cliff. A trail that would complete a circular journey back to our cabin at Hollyhock retreat center.
Before I could calm my youngest daughter’s increasing fear and help her move through her upsetting lack of control, my attention was drawn toward something displayed on a rock much larger than any I had seen on this beach. I walked toward this rock a few feet from the tide's edge. It was about four feet high, with a diameter of three feet. Spread out over the smooth top of the rock was an octopus. It was too large to be a Pacific Red, its body stretched across the rock more than two feet, but it was too small to be a full grown Giant Pacific octopus. The colors of brick-red were fading to white with edges of purple. The octopus was dead. A yellow jacket or two zig-zagged with fervor from tentacle to tentacle around the spiral of this deathly design.
At first I was angry and wondered at the human who could sacrifice and waste a beautiful creature for this artistic display. I thought about the tides. I observed the tide marks and knew it could not have risen high enough to leave stranded this remarkably intelligent being who is known to occasionally walk the intertidal zone. My daughters and I circled and leaned into the rock, counted the arms of the octopus, one was missing. Did this octopus suffer? They live such short lives. Their intelligence is vast. Do they ask of life like we do, “Why the difficulties?” Or do they simply open their arms with a wild embrace for the living dance? My daughters and I peered closely at the meaning in this moment. We were calm. We felt graced by something weird and beautiful. And then we easily found our way through to the trail leading back to our temporary island home.
To prove it wasn’t a mystical phantom, I ran back the next day. The flesh of this creature was not wasted, as a bird or an animal had consumed an arm or two. The contrast of brick-red against the gray rock was now more ghostly white, haunting me for my remaining days on the island.
Was this collaboration between octopus and land an invitation to participate more fully in the mysterious physical and mystical processes of the Earth? The wondrous weirdness and beauty of life and death stretching out in glorious design, like the octopus on the rock, communicating surrender to living with fluidity and grounding in earthly places from which we come into sacred being, over and over again.
I crawl up onto a bold rock to die to myself. And to release any efforts to control my way through the meaning of this present moment in our lives. To join with something larger moving through us.
***
There was a distinct difference in energy and movements in the final improvisation I recorded on Cortes Island––in fact, it was the last improvisation I did that summer before I began the choreographic process for the four distinct place-dances that I created through the fall and presented in January 2020. On another run through the woods I happened upon a Buddha statue next to a hidden pond, which inspired much laughter during the workshop from various participants who had set out to find the Buddha by the pond and lost their way.
In this last improvisation next to the small pond tucked away in the woods, I finally say, “Enough!,” to the rutted ways of moving that have diminished my love for being alive. On a slight incline, quirky and quick, my hand becomes a crown over my head, my spine spirals in every direction with blades of grass and fern, my pelvis drops heavily toward the ground, my feet flicker and hands sparkle, pulsing with the wild woods and the many branches of life.
The solo I created from my improvisations on Cortes Island began with asking the dancer, Maeve Haselton, to embody the movements arising from the nurse stump improvisation. Slow, measured, awakening, extending, surrendering, heart-opening, listening for the way, unfolding more being.
dancer: Maeve Haselton; photo credit: Michelle Smith-Lewis
Pausing for a moment center stage, Maeve grounds this place of becoming into their being, then forward-facing, they move downstage to begin again, movements they embodied from the final improvisation I did next to the hidden pond. In the choreographic process, while working on this section with Maeve, I asked them to keep making revolutions back to the opening movements of this section. To move from the beginning movements, reach a new endpoint and begin again in new directions and rhythms, unfolding the new ending; and then, back toward again. To move, to shake-up the rhythms and patterns that came before, ever unfolding, never once is the beginning the same. The ending of this dance does not stop, as Maeve’s larger movements become their interior landscape, more attuned to the heartbeat of Earth dancing, wondrously ongoing through time. The deepening breath of the human-mover, one with the movement of being and the “moving, vivacious many.” At the end of this dance, we created, Maeve’s dancing with improvisational sounds of the viola and drums enfold into the silence, and the perceived stillness. The stillness and the silence ready to unfold again. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
Body-being an ecology of wonder.
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The conscious and unconscious movements of our human Earth-bodies contain stories. One story I now choose to re-member stretches an arm all the way back to ancient times when we lived from the Earth, and not as severed minds and bodies separate from or seeking to control the “more-than-human.” Another story lives today in our body-being that speaks of the mistakes and harm and anger and pain of forgetting our ecology in love with wonder. And our body has another arm that reaches for visions of stories to be told of our future ecology in restored health with the mysterious life-death-life dance through our participation in the living, breathing, moving “inexhaustible weirdness and mystery” of our collective EarthBody.
dancer: Maeve Haselton; viola: Heather Bentley; photo credit: Michelle Smith-Lewis
Stump Improvisation
Final Improvisation
Final Performance work / Dancer- Maeve Haselton
Karin Stevens is a facilitator in The Art & Practice of Movement. For six years she has been assisting others on their own evolutionary and healing journeys through movement in individual and group sessions. With over 25 years in embodied movement and spiritual practices she brings robust wisdom and deep sensitivity to her work. A Seattle-based choreographer, movement artist and transformationalist, she believes in the power of movement to bring us back into health and spiritual ecology within ourselves, with each other, and through our natural and built environments.
