Sky, Lava Rock, Palms, Sand, Woods, Ocean

By Karin Stevens

I am listening to the loud roaring of the ocean waves off the south shore of Kauai as they crash against the black and tan and umber of lava rock at the edges of the island. I wonder if the ocean ever hushes here. Can one discern during this warm and rainy June a change in the ebb and flood of tidal sounds, as the poet Mary Oliver suggests in her decades-long experience listening to the changing tones in the tidal sounds of Maine? I cannot. For my listening life I have grown accustomed to the misty quiet of the Pacific Northwest, the gentle lapping Salish Sea against the gray edges of pebbles, small rocks, and beach wood. Here in Kauai, the ocean and land create a constant vibration of “white noise,” punctuated by irregular bellows of waves pressing horizontally against cliffs, rushing vertically under the pressure, followed by the ferocious crashing, spreading, splash on top of lava rock. The relentless, resounding sounds of waves against rock press from the inside of my skin. Some moments I think I may long to retreat to the quiet, seemingly less demanding, interior of the island. I wonder about ancient Hawaiians shaking their heads and fists at rigid condos, full of vacationing people, built along the volcanic teeth edges where the tongue of the ocean meets the land. Only a short walk along this southern coast of the island lies, among lava rock, the remains of an ancient Hawaiian temple, Kihahouna Heiau, testament to a sacred relationship with the ocean’s thunderous voice. 

What must this place of oceanic power mean for one’s body-listening each night and every morning? There is no escaping the oceanic pressure, opening an inner expansion in my body-listening over the days that follow: I am becoming and moving in the waves of Earth body evolution.

Sky

On our first day I run along a path next to the beach and up along cliff edges jutting out from woodsy swathes that border cultivated inlands. I am delighted to find myself running along the Koloa Heritage Trail––a place my husband and I had driven to, from the north end, four years earlier when we were celebrating my fortieth birthday. I am determined to come home from Kauai with videos of my improvisational movements arising from various places within this island. Backlit by sun, on the edge of a cliff, I move with the exhilaration of the first morning run along the south shore; the sky stretches through my dreams and holds visions of reaching greater heights through movement art creations in its luminous embrace of my body dancing.  

Could a composed dance of sky, land, ocean, and sound come into being through me? What would this place open within? How would it evolve me; wear away any hardened resistance in my forming expansion between wave upon wave upon wave?  

I hear new whispering in the wind on my skin; in the susurration of non-native palms humming their solitary elegant songs through the air shared between them; in the quick, magical sighting of a diurnal owl in the woods during my final day of immersion in what I call an art and practice of movement with this land. 

On that first day, I could not imagine that while on this beautiful retreat for the first time with our three daughters, that day by day old voices of self-defeat and doubt would join the noisy roaring ocean. It seemed the dynamic sounds of the ocean crashing in me upheaved the fragments of shattered boulders, from the bottom of deep, submerged spaces that I had broken them upon. At home, in the gray, drizzly Pacific Northwest––periodically disrupted by sunlight merging with emerald-evergreen––I have been hefting boulders from my being. For years, hefting them down the range of my shoulders. Down my back. Off my spirit. Watching them break. And smooth into smaller stones of time’s past-oppressive-heritage. 

I am freeing my white body to reconnect back thousands of years to Old Europe; to a time of love-creation-power in an earth-dance-lineage. By my second day in Kauai, stones, broken and worn down from thousand-year-old boulders, were tossed up inside me, releasing a roiling tumult of old doubt and deprecation, threatening to diminish the efforts I am making to co-create with the nurturing, primordial forces of this Hawaiian island. I could not maintain the joyous feeling from that first day I moved on the cliff that shimmered with light, casting in the video a vision of another world. The feeling, as beautiful and expansive as the sky stretching above the light glimmering over ocean wave after wave, was caught in a riptide. Pulled and turning with a changing tide I could not discern right away. 

There was a sense though, a new knowing in my body, of a horizon coming into view, hinted at from the first day I moved and danced upon the cliff in the shimmering skylight. As I moved with this land, through old feelings of unresolved pain in the deep, dark spaces of my body, I could sense that my days on this island were turning for more healing. I am evolving. 

Lava Rock

In spite of the roaring sounds reverberating endlessly between the walls of our condo, a familiar bodily comfort in overcast clouds stretches over the second and third day. The atmosphere and the anticipation of rain are familiar to me: melancholy with overcast skies has been an old dance partner to my defeatist thoughts. In the next improvisational session, I move these feelings on a stage of lava rock. The ocean behind me, eyes downward cast, I make friends with the rough and hardened places that hold my steps as I move inches, sometimes feet, up and down and over the rocky land that once oozed out from the rising depths of the Earth, from beneath the weight of ocean. This relatively recent land formation, from molten flow within dark spaces, reminds me that eruptions from inside emotions, pressing through the weighted water-source of life, gives birth to more creation: more worlds of meaning and wellbeing and human dancing in steps measured by the ways they risk for new syncopated ground. I am evolution. 

Two days more pass. We swim and walk long stretches of quiet, secret beaches, drink water seeping through a cliff face, swim near sea turtles and along coral edges with fish in a multitude of shapes and color. The sun returns for full-day rounds. 

Palms

The sun is brilliant and inviting on the fifth morning, but I am begrudgingly reluctant to move into the creative act that is calling me to trust my art and practice of movement. I drag myself out to run along the ocean and through bordering landscaped neighborhoods. I know that to move is to choose to participate consciously in the possibility of overcoming my limited self to make way for more well-being and rhythms of bodily becoming. A long, rolling reach of tightly shorn grass lengthens my gaze toward the ocean and I am pulled to stop running. To listen. To step off a narrow path and move with this broad space of grass meeting ocean: a presentation for a limitless blue sky.  With wind and awareness through eyes and skin, I feel the speaking of thirteen irregularly spaced, singular standing palms. The fronds are wispy and remind me of “princess palms,” as they were called when we lived in Florida. (I have learned there is only one native palm to the islands: the Loulu Palm. Most palms were brought to the Hawaiian islands by early Polynesian settlers.) I move with their stately being, as if each one has a message for my body to hear and transpose from the wind, which receives and passes on the shape and rhythm of their speaking. During the past days, my internal being felt compressed within the turning of feelings, my insight limited by the low ceiling within my lonely cranium. But at this moment the rooted grace of the non-native palms is beckoning me to remove my shoes. And I dance barefoot for the first time. Loneliness––a reverberation of the noisy, unbecoming ruminations I've been stuck in these past days––slides down my spine into the ground. The command of the palms’ communing presence sends a spiral of possibility up my spine. For moments I touch the sky again. These once non-native beings, so iconic to these Hawaiian Islands, teach me that I too can reach through a ground bass root, elongate into the rhythms of place to know I am earth in any stretch of space. That I dance land. And we are evolution.

Sand

I kick up and toss sparkling water and sand with my bare feet. Sunlight plays and sparkles along the white waves as they emerge from the dark blue ocean and meet the sandy beach, as well as farther out where the wind whips up the water. It is bright, hot, and radiant on the north end of the island on my penultimate day of improvisational dance in Kauai. When I was here four years earlier with my husband, during early March, the north was rainy and cool while the south was the opposite. Two moods in one island season of being: we too can hold opposites within and dance between Earth poles to discover more rhythms of insight and tempos of becoming!

I run down the beach, almost to where the Napali Coast cliffs descend straight into the ocean, disrupting a full beach passage around to the west rim of the island. A sandy spot and a sailboat bobbing across the ocean horizon call me to move in this location. I stand tall on the highest sand ledge above the ocean.  I think and feel myself as the commander of my own ship. I play, hop, splash, and explore where the ocean rolls visibly with the golden sand. A renewed light returns and a strong wind blows. The ocean current turns stones into sand, fragments of my past and pain turning toward learning and growing. I turn my sails to the deep to feel for the ever-shifting sand formations of beauty in being alive. Within the currents of the dark, watery deep and the light, atmospheric air, I am ever-evolving.

Woods

The following day, the final day I dance, my inner world has shifted again. Our retreat is ending, my eldest leaves for her first year of college soon, my middle daughter will start middle school and my youngest is not far behind her. I’m wringing and clanging inside with accusatory voices. “You have not accomplished enough in your dance career!”  “You may never make the work you do flourish beyond the small impact you have had!” I’ve learned to refer to these as “demon voices.” In response, my small self, compacting inside from the pressure of these voices, responds back with cowering questions: “Have I done enough to love and guide my eldest daughter?” Loving her, loving them, has occupied a majority of my time as I carved out time to pursue my dance career. “Will there be more nurturing and loving and growing, as each one of them moves out of the house?”  

My larger inner being grabs the smaller turbulent side of me and pulls it through the condo door and toward the Koloa Heritage Trail. I run past the hotels near our condo and a small wedding on the beach near the start of the trail. I wonder at the beautiful beginning of a marriage, garnished in bright orange, purple, and white Hawaiian leis, in contrast to the darker sense of mid-life and ending chapters I felt this morning, clothed in a faded, sweaty sun visor, a stinky sun-protection long-sleeved shirt, and pink striped Adidas shorts, somewhat ridiculously reminiscent of the 1980s.  

This time, rather than the first day when I followed the main trail up to the top of the rocky cliff, I turn away from the ocean. I follow a path on the lower back side of the cliffs, into a woodsy narrow stretch of twenty-to-thirty-foot tall pine trees with tufts of fine feather-duster needles at the ends of a profusion of skinny branches that jut out from tan toned, knobby, and scaly-barked trunks. (I wonder if they are also not native.) Within the tangle of pine trees, surrounded by low unfamiliar shrubs, the path opens onto an irregular round space among the pines and a mass of twenty-foot tall light-green leafed, slender trees bordering the beginning of what appears to be private farmland. After a plane passes overhead, I hear various bird calls and the outburst of joyous cheering from the wedding party nearby. The ground is bouncy, covered by a thick layer of lengthy pine needles. I do not remove my shoes, but I close my eyes, inhale and lift my sternum, guiding my face to the light and the air of this place. I begin to move through the patches of sun and shadow on the ground.

I am determined not to leave these woods until the demon voices subside! Months later, as if channeling the spirit of this space between the tangled thoughts of my moving body among the contrast of dark and light in this forest clearing, the dancer, Micaela Gonzales, in the performance of the work that evolved from these Kauai improvisations, given a certain amount of choice, spontaneously charged upstage to stand face to face with the singer before transitioning slowly downstage. (12:44-13:05) The singer, Amelia Love Clearheart, improvising to the choreographed dance, chants a renewing breath of sound into Micaela before she moves back into the center of the stage, closes her eyes, inhales and lifts her sternum as I did in the beginning of my first improvisation with the air of the woods. Micaela demanded, without knowledge of my own demon voices, some other voice––a voice in vibration, movement pattern, and overcoming to arise from the tangled woods––to arise from this moment I surrendered the questioning mind and danced my heart-body intention for ease.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

I record two improvisations in these woods. Between the recordings and the lingering chaotic, internal voices that continue to demand my attention, I catch a flash of insight. A tawny diurnal owl flies across the top of the green leafed mass of slender trees. I have been asking for and waiting to see an owl for eight months: to receive a “second sight” in the real time flight of a symbolic message that had come to me in the image of an owl, around the time of a painful and disappointing low-audience turnout for two extraordinary new works about grief and transformation. My interpretation at that time was that the owl communicated the coming of external abundance. Markers for a “successful” career perhaps: maybe, finally, more audience and financial support for the work. Or, what is becoming more important between the shadow and light of the woods, as I honor the silent wings moving my small body into the future: to prosper in spiritual wisdom. I open within myself a greater capacity for spacious peace through this moment of confusing middles mixed with pain-felt endings and shadowy beginnings. In the woods the clutch of invasive, voiced species reverse their squeeze, as the larger wholeness of my inner being overpowers them, expanding into new forms of becoming through an art and practice of movement in the woods of time. I move to know that I am evolution in creation shaping the art of my life. 

I do not walk out of the woods with full illumination about the movements I make and whether it matters to the art industry and dominant cultural milieu I live and work in. But I feel a glimmer of understanding that my life has revealed through the motions of dance and bodily exploration a deeper, ancient-future-now purpose in the art and practice of movement. A meaning and a message I embody through overcoming my pain, through being a creative life-artist and through movements I have learned to make as parent to my daughters’ well-being and rhythms of becoming. Movement is life ongoing. To move consciously in participation for ecological health in our places, work-spaces, and relationships is to dance the love within, toward others, and from the Earth. The ending of one part of my life’s journey, moving in relationship with my children in the physical house of my love, was simultaneously emerging into a deepening place of finally coming home within me to a greater interconnected spiritual awareness. I now know that to move and co-create with others and the Earth generates over and over again the sustaining source of life that I was seeking in the woods. The voice of that source is love and moves within to unblock the stuck places and to flow through our body-selves toward wholeness. A radial love moving inward and outward, an art of life through movement, never ending in beginning again and again and again. I am transformational power in evolution, ever unfolding more life through love. 

Ocean

I walk out into the clear sky. The old, dying voices have not entirely abated, but slowly they transform as I run again with the Pacific Ocean enfolding the sky in the full noon day-light providing meaning for why I dance. 

I climb down a small cliff toward the ocean and move within the architecturally captivating archways, interstices, and porous surfaces of a rock and sand face sculpted by the great ocean artist. I walk out onto the lava rock and dance between tidal pools and splashes of waves. Sometimes my front-body faces the ocean horizon and sometimes I turn to feel the ocean’s expansion coming through my backspace as I move with the Earth’s eternal shape-shifting face.

Through sand and rock and ocean, wave upon wave upon wave, I open to love’s expansive horizon moving through me. In my body-listening I hear the song of evolution that I am, rolling wave upon wave upon wave through time, healing the past for a renewed Earth body. Not survival to be the fittest––violent in my regard as an individual ruggedness. But a new and renewing creation, wearing away, being shaped again, reminded by the non-native palms of this island, that I too can root and become Earth body in every place. I open to turning and (re)turning within the ocean inside me. Let the stones wear away into smaller particles of past matter, to become sand adrift in newer currents of inner appreciation for my dancing. I let pearls emerge from the aphrodisiac mix within the luminescent shell of my skin. Embracing the wild, the noisy, the spontaneous eruptions from the deep weight of ocean meeting the rising, forming, shifting and expanding landscape of my being. This is what I embodied along the island coast of Kauai through my moving body: to be ever-becoming and one with all that is shifting and arising inside-out, toward an art of self, relationships, and Earth place through creativity in motion for more beauty, more being, more love.  

I am Earth evolution. 

I stand and feel the new horizon ahead. I feel the rhythms of love flowing through my body and calling me to share with others the transformational, healing and evolutionary possibilities in the art and practice of movement with Earth. 

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.