Girls Like Us _ ISSUE #07 _ BODY
September 2015
02. Describe what you do in 5 lines.
sometimes plan & prepare
other times mitigate or mis-align
mostly distill, unwind and unpack
also lots of thinking about
what it is that we’re doing
03. Could you send us a sketch / drawing / mapping your practice?
04. What do your parents think you do?
m: they’ve stopped asking
c: try to bend people’s minds
05. How did you discover your healing powers or special gift – were you initiated (if so, how)? Who taught you the craft?
C: As a kid, I had a vision of this exact window in the house that we moved into before we lived there. Seances as teenager, and most recently recently initiated by Rosemary Gladstar, a real life faerie living in the mountains of Central Vermont.
m: I’m pretty sure my mom’s a witch. But Rosemary welcomed us into her community of healers who speak the language of plants. We lived amongst the wild woodland plants at Sage Mountain, where we absorbed the forces of the dense, calm forest. It’s really a place where people go to immerse themselves in all sorts of plant dialects.
06. What are your materials?
moonshine, intuition, boundary-flexing, a decidedly not serious sensibility, conversations with strangers, reading.
07. Do you have a special work outfit?
C: I have outfits that make me do special work
M: sometimes there are outfits that make work more special
09. What does it mean to heal?
We understand healing as a conversation between entities & humans- there’s a give and a take and not necessarily an achievable goal- it’s more of a process. To discover, to watch, to sit quietly, to stop talking & listen to the stories of others, give what you have and make space for that which you do not know.
10. How do you procrastinate?
C: Do you procrastinate?
M: Sometimes I think I walk to procrastinate, other times I think it helps to get something done. Which seems more like part of the process of making it happen towards the same end. What don’t you do to procrastinate?
C: I guess the question is what does it mean to procrastinate?
M: Finding a circuitous route or acting out what someone decided you are should be enacting (probably you?)?
C: So the concept involves the belief that productivity is an end goal? To reject the notion of doing for the sake of doing might mean doing because of doing. Does procrastination exist if we reject the notion of the body as purely a productive model?
M: Just don’t do it.
14. How does the body forget?
M: I do not think the body forgets. I think muscle memory is a strong bank. Unless it gets broken into or the locking mechanism is changed. Organs get twisted around…
C: Is remembering is the default function of the body? I hope my body doesn’t file memories and trauma. I’d like to believe in the notion of willful action, that forgetting and remembering exist symbolically/symbiotically.
M: But isn’t it amazing how bodies store energy? Like if you’ve got a knot in your back, it’s probably because you were sitting funny or walking heavy on one foot. Even if the brain forgets, the body remembers.
15. Which of your senses do you trust the least?
C: Can one trust their sense of ones own senses? Or is it better to be naturally dis-trustworthy of yourself?
M: What is trust anyway? We all have different frames and references for sense, and trust. My nose is sensitive, I value it most, but I don’t like sweet, sugary, or buttery smells that most folks like. I can lose my sense of time in sour scents like loamy humus. Maybe I least trust my sense of digestion.
16. What era in time would you have liked to have lived?
To have been in the first algal pool, reaching toward the sun as a microorganism, or sometime before recorded language & history, when humans were less esoteric and entities were a bit more self-organized and the confines of the home meant huddling under a bundle of oak twigs lashed together with willow, or in time to be commiserating with Joan of Arc, to dismantle the circumstances which brought her to the stake. When was that, during the 1400’s?
17. How do you exercise?
C: I lose myself. Fall off my bike or carrying strange shapes home in too many bags.
M: with my hands, in the garden, walking the same path twice
18. What were you doing 10 years ago?
C: living in a farm town, making coffee and thinking about a big city, by myself.
M: getting lost in dark rooms, searching for something bigger than me and taking notes along the way
19. What is the best remedy / ritual / herb / potion / spell:
– against giving up?
C: A formulation for bring otherness into your life-
a cup of kava kava root
– three spilanthes flowers
– flowers with thorns or animals that bite
– brutal honesty from someone in your past
– a spell knotted into a string and burned
Combine all ingredients, ideas and misgivings at will. Breathe deep and extend beyond the point of not being able to do it any longer.
M: Harvesting stinging nettles is a great activity to cultivate persistence. Grab a basket and head to a spot near a river close to the edge of woods. They’re hairy and tall, and have toothed-leaves and a square stem. The first few stings are sharp, but if you endure this inferior moment and let histamine, serotonin and formic acid into your blood stream, you hold the power to stimulate the fluid that coats your joints. These minerals get in the way of how your body usually transmits pain to your brain, often inducing an ethereal and empowering vitality. An incredible ritual for arthritis or inflammation. Also going on a walk is a great remedy for anything.
20. Care to share a secret recipe?
21. How does our body connect us to others?
How does it not? Maybe all processes of the body are responses to what’s happening with other bodies- of water, sound, air or animal / human. Even when you’re sleeping and those other bodies are moving around you… we can feel what’s happening around us if we pay attention, physical, emotional psycho – spatial or energetic
22. How do you see the future?
By looking into the past. Closing eyes and opening your mind.