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Duets with Trees: Eco-somatic
Pathways into the Reciprocity of
Perception
By Raffaele Rufo, PhD (www.raffaelerufo.com)
Essay submitted to Emergence Magazine in July 2021
Abstract
Addressing the ecological crisis as a crisis of embodiment, this essay
explores how we can displace the assumed separation between human and
arboreal life to embrace the possibility of relating with trees as intimate
companions of movement and becoming. The essay is based on the author’s
embodied research and includes text and photos from his movement
practice in nature. Duets with trees are proposed as eco-somatic pathways
through which the readers as listeners and participants can experiment with
a directly felt sense of the more-than-human. Audio-recorded explorations
are mobilized as practical resources for engaging the perceptual window
between body and earth with a spirit of co-creation and empowerment. The
essay argues that an intimate encounter with trees cannot be constructed.
What we can do is work on slow processes of listening and attunement by
opening our senses and imagination to arboreal livingness and
responsiveness. Reciprocity emerges as the awareness of an animistic shift
of perception: we are not only sensing and witnessing trees; we are also
being sensed and witnessed by them. When we recognize and value the
profound need to dance underpinning our return to nature, we discover that
trees are more wounded than we are and that they are not there only to
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heal us. They are there also to find out about our history of separation and
alienation and to receive our healing. Earth-body practices can nurture
mutual healing and instigate ecological consciousness by seeking a
reciprocity that bears witness to the wounds of civilization while suspending
the will to transcend them through sensorial experience.
Sensory deprivation
There was a long and narrow balcony outside the hospital room sheltering
me and my child during his bone marrow transplant. Every day at sunset I
used to dance for an hour across the balcony with a face mask and a
protective gear on. It was spring and the weather was getting warmer. But
my son could not set foot outside the room. Separation from the world was
prescribed to protect his depressed immune system. Isolated from other
humans, and in a state of sensory deprivation, I was induced to bring my
attention to the presence of the trees around the hospital. What began as an
experience of seeing the trees from a balcony on the fourth floor led to
noticing how I was also, at the same time, being seen by them. I began to
observe how their leaves had a presence that could be felt inside my body.
It felt like not only being seen, but also being touched by the trees in a more
carnal and intimate exchange. As a dance artist I was not new to how
engaging and embracing the sensitivity and responsiveness of the body can
help us become aware and participate in the porosity and permeability of the
life world. However, it was only two years after my son’s transplant, with the
beginning of the Covid pandemic, that I began to find the determination and
discover the pathways for digging deeper into the reciprocity of perception
between human and more-than-human living forms.
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From tango to ecological consciousness
Before the Covid outbreak I used to dance tango two or three times a week
in crowded public spaces. This involved engaging in an intimate experience
of sensing and expressing my feelings with other humans, often strangers.
In my dance research I have experimented with letting go of the basic
conditions underpinning the tango duet: the setting of the dancehall, the
specific genre of music and the separation of the roles of leading and
following between the partners. When the focus is shifted away from the
form of the dance and towards the improvisational experience of listening to
each other through movement and touch, it becomes possible to challenge
the assumption that the living source of the dance is located in two separate
spheres of perception: the perceiving self and the perceivable other. The
spaces between inside and outside come to the foreground as responsive
players in the duet.
How is the dancer’s ability and readiness to listen and respond to her
partners related to ecological consciousness? Going through the distancing
and isolation imposed by the Covid pandemic made this question very hard
to avoid. As a mechanism to survive the first long Coronavirus lockdown, I
followed the everyday impulse to search for places in my small town near
Milan where I could feel more alive, connected, and creative. I ‘just’ had to
listen and respond to the embodied presence of the grass and the river, of
the trees and the birds, of the wind, the rain, the sun and of all the other
non-human elements of the ecosystem I had forgotten or previously taken
for granted. I had never felt addressed by nature as a sensuous dance
partner.
As in the experience of taking care of my child during his bone marrow
transplant, the search for sensoriality in the encounter with the natural
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environment during the Covid pandemic has followed the denial of a direct
intimate contact with other humans. In both cases, the transplant and the
pandemic, such a denial was justified, more or less willingly, by prioritizing
the dangerous effects of contagion over other aspects of direct sensory
participation. The image of contagion lends itself to a consideration of the
risks involved in an intimate exchange with the world. However, a deeper
understanding of contagion requires making visible the invisible value of
being touched and moved, both physically and emotionally, by the embodied
presence of what is other to us. The cultures of global technological
capitalism do not offer us the resources we need to deal with both sides of
the coin. We are normalizing the disconnection from our bodies and from
each other’s bodily experience. At the same time, we are endangering our
coexistence with other species of life on which we depend for our sustenance
and survival. The crisis of embodiment uncovered by the Covid pandemic
cannot be disentangled from the long-standing ecological crisis that
preceded it. The dominion of mind over the body underpinning contemporary
lifestyles and mainstream sociocultural models cannot be disentangled from
the human drive to dominate over all other earthly life forms.
Like many other dancers faced with a profound sense of uncertainty,
isolation, and disempowerment during the Covid emergency, I am called to
seek new ways for mobilizing dance as a counter-cultural force capable of
inspiring ethical and sustainable living between humans and with other
forms of life on this planet. The more people learn from their kinaesthetic
senses – from bodily experience, the easier it becomes to challenge the
assumption that each of us exists as a solitary individual, isolated from
communal encounters with the world. Dance can contribute to the
development of ecological consciousness by restoring our relationship with
the human body as a part of nature. It can do so by offering us pathways for
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engaging in a direct and intimate sensory and imaginative connection with
the natural environment. This requires reclaiming the regulatory and
transformative power of embodiment in our lives so that we can reclaim our
fundamental bond with the earth as our home. We can start by experiencing
our body somatically, that is, as an internally sensed living process of
awareness. Such a simple step can help us deepen our ability to attune and
empathize with other forms of life we have progressively learned to exclude
from our perceptual field.
A change of perspective
During the first Covid lockdown, in a moment of deep disconnection from the
world, I discovered the power of climbing as a meeting with trees and as a
new possible meeting with myself. In climbing the same tree, every day, for
three months, I found myself witnessing the unfolding of a state of calm and
deeper presence. Through touch, smell, movement and sight my attention
was drawn not only to my breath, my weight, my core, my limbs, and the
pull of gravity but also to the perceivable qualities of the tree as a living
creature. I gradually began to realize that climbing is not just about the
physical act of moving from the bottom to the top of a tree. It is an
exchange. As I climb, I am demanding something from the tree and the tree
is demanding something back. It is demanding my sensitivity to its
embodied presence and to its embeddedness in our shared ecosystem. How
can I engage with these demands? How can I embrace the complexity of this
exchange as a dance with the tree?
Engaging the nexus between dance and ecological consciousness requires
developing new pathways for engaging in more depth with the power of
nature to resonate with our somatic movement processes and to befriend
the perceptual states that facilitate this resonance. We need to genuinely
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engage with the ways in which our body has an impact on the embodied
presence of the tree and with the ways in which, at the same time, the tree
touches us and influences our sense of self and movement. Old categories of
action and thinking, like climbing, are not grounded in the ecology of
perception. Rather, they reflect the dualistic anthropocentric model of
approaching nature without letting nature have a say in the exchange. When
I say that I am climbing a tree, the tree is the object of my climbing, not a
player of an interspecies encounter. From the narrow perspective of
mainstream contemporary culture, climbing is reduced to the mechanical,
goal-oriented, and human-centric image of a body moving up through the
apparently inert materiality of the tree. At the same time, the body is
reduced to an instrument controlled by mental cognition and deprived of
spirituality. Dance can be engaged as a channel for uncovering the felt sense
of reciprocity between humans and trees.
Dancing with trees
I invite readers to engage in the movement explorations that follow as
participants in a perceptual journey of co-creation with the natural
environment. Listen to the recorded narration and engage a direct sensory
experience of the duets with trees first. Then to go back to the written text.
My goal is to facilitate a process of displacing the given separation between
human and arboreal life while opening the possibility of relating with trees as
companions of movement and becoming. Follow your impulses as they
arrive, moment by moment, without feeling obliged to do what is suggested
by my guidelines all the time. Break the rule if you need to do so. The time
you may need to go through the explorations might be longer than the time
you are afforded by my recorded voice. Dare to follow what your body
needs.
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An intimate encounter with trees cannot be constructed. What we can do is
work on slow processes of attunement by opening our senses and our
imagination to the livingness of trees and their responsiveness to our
embodied presence. Each exploration provides readers with a practice
framework to engage and embrace an animist style of perception which
promotes immersion and participation. Duets with trees are proposed as
experiences of improvisational awareness. Improvisation works as a channel
to find ways of being present in the moment and for refining our sense of
presence in each subsequent moment. When associated with the notion of
contagion introduced above, the improvisational experience of dancing with
trees also encompasses the danger of something unexpected or even
destabilizing occurring during the exchange. Duets with trees are an
opportunity to challenge our moving and thinking patterns while nurturing a
deeper sense of surprise and aliveness.
The first proposed exploration (‘wandering in nature somatically’) engages
the experience of waiting to feel addressed by a particular place and relating
spatially with trees and the other elements of the ecosystem. In the second
exploration (‘lying under the tree’) I invite readers/participants to observe
their internal movement impulses through breath and contact with the earth
while noticing how they are being witnessed by a tree. The third exploration
(‘grounding with the tree’) facilitates a gradual shift from seeing to touching
by focusing on weight and gravity and engaging in a small duet dance in
physical contact with the trunk. Finally, in the fourth exploration (‘shaping
into the branches’) readers/participants are guided to work on and with a
comfortable branch where they can yield their weight and their thoughts to
engage in a fleshier duet with the tree. Throughout this journey, verbal
language is approached as a way of connecting with the more-than-human
world. If improvisational movement opens a perceptual window into the
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ancient reciprocity between body and earth, words can help us cross that
window with a sense of realization and empowerment.
Wandering in nature somatically
Have you ever considered how your sensory perception changes when you
cross the door of your house or of your workplace and step into the outside
world? Next time you cross that threshold, I invite you to let go of any
specific destination. Let go of any set of directions you usually rely on. Give
your body a chance to be a key player in this experience. There is no need
to go too far from where you are. Once you are out, in the public realm,
before you decide where to go, wait to be moved by the impulses you
receive from the living beings and systems around you. Let yourself be
touched by what happens in that very moment. It can be the reflection of
light blinding your eyes or the appearance of shadows on the ground. It can
be the color of the sky, a hole in the street, the chatter of people, the noises
from a building site, the engine of a car, the singing of birds, the sound of
your breath or an approaching crossroad.
Once you are out, in the public realm, I invite you to wander until you feel
you have reached a place that calls you to meet trees in an intimate
exchange. Give yourself the time to get lost, to go back to where you came
from, to try another way. You cannot know in advance what will move you,
but you can refrain from automatically behaving the way you always do.
Waiting to be moved might feel awkward, especially when you realize other
people might be looking at you. I invite you to meet this awkwardness as a
chance to honor the somatic intelligence of your body. The ancient Greeks
used the word soma to refer to the organic, physical body and to its internal
regulatory processes. However, for the Greeks the physical body could not
be engaged and understood in isolation from the psyche, that is, from the
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livingness of the soul. So, I invite you to experience wandering as a playful
and courageous participation in the unfolding breath of life.
Where will I go to meet nature today? I start by jumping on my bike, as I
often do. As I start riding in the streets of my small town, an encrypted map
of possible destinations surfaces from below conscious awareness. This is a
map that speaks secretly with my pushing legs. It speaks through the
memories stored in my body: traces of the places I have visited and of the
resonances I have experienced. These memories are not abstract categories
filling the mind but embodied pathways into the impressions of the present
moment. I ride my bicycle towards a mosaic of new sensory stimulations. I
move towards new ways of making sense of past encounters with nature.
This morning, and it is not for the first time, I followed a desire to witness
the ever-changing calm of flowing water.
Waiting to be moved (photo by Raffaele Rufo, 2020).
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There is a small river crossing my town. The red-brick bridge crossing the
river marks the boundaries of the ancient Roman heart of the town. How
many times have I crossed that bridge! Every time I do, I am called to stop
and listen. I feel addressed by the rhythmic sound created by the water
pushing through air and through rocks to find its way forward. Time slows
down. A soft breeze touches my skin. From the bridge I notice two white
ducks dwelling on the riverbank alongside each other. I have a feeling they
are observing what is going on around them, in stillness. Apparently doing
nothing, they seem to be waiting for something to happen. They look very
present, attentive to their feathered bodies and to the ever-possible shift
from stillness to swimming. I observe them and sometimes I utter sounds
that mirror their voice. Are they influenced by my presence? The simple
encounter with the bridge, the river, and the ducks, repeated over and over
again, has helped me interiorize an important lesson. There is no right place
to dwell in nature or right tree to dance with. What can be found is a
pathway towards a heightened sensibility to the ways in which nature is
always addressing us.
Once you have reached your meeting place with the trees, I invite you to
play a simple movement game. This game begins with walking around and
exploring the space you are in. As you keep walking, bring your attention to
the changing distance between your body and the other elements populating
this place. Keep walking and become a witness of the mesh of life in which
you are embedded. This might include trees, broken branches, pieces of
bark, leaves of grass, flowers, roots, and stones. Bring attention also to the
air, the soil, the sun, the clouds and any other living system enfolding you.
As you keep walking, notice the space emerging in front of you, behind you,
to the sides, above and beneath you. This process of noticing might trigger
an acceleration in your steps. Walk around with some speed. Explore the in-
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between spaces opening up as you move: between the elements around you
and between your body and these elements. Run into these spaces. Then go
back to walking. You do not know when you will shift from running to
walking and from walking to running again. Let this shift unfold from your
felt sense of being touched by what is happening moment after moment.
As you keep moving, follow the inspiration to touch things. The physical
contact with non-human matter might take you into stillness. When you find
stillness, stay there, and explore your internal state. You can close your eyes
for a while. Play with shaping your body into the vibrant materiality of the
elements you are touching. Feed the bodily awareness of how you feel in
this tactile exchange. Now open your eyes. You might notice something
addressing you from a distance. You can choose whether you want to go
there or take that call somewhere else. Keep playing with the perceptual
shifts between running, walking and stillness. Notice how your perception of
the world changes when you shift across these three somatic modes of
attention. Notice how your perception of the world changes when you are far
or close to the things that grab your attention. Stay focused until this game
feeds your senses and your imagination.
As you explore the space you are in, notice your resistance to let go of the
will to control the movements you make and their directions. Notice how you
are holding tension in your tissues and in your thoughts. Notice how,
gradually, as you listen to your body, the will to control what happens can
become an open-ended encounter with the livingness of nature. If you pay
attention for long enough to how the body is present and to how other
elements are present to your body, you might start to feel an intimate
connection with the involuntary experience of breathing. You might start to
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feel immersed into breathing as an involuntary process of connecting with
trees. Can you notice and embrace this somatic shift? This might take time.
As you go through moments of running, walking and stillness, I invite you to
whisper some words that describe your internal adventure of exploring this
space. It might not be easy to language your felt sense of movement while
you are still in movement. What words come to you as you are witnessing
the porosity of the space between your body and nature? Dare to speak
these words out. Notice what happens in you and around you when you
speak. Sense the possible continuum between movements, breath, words,
and the meaning of this experience. Stay in this game until you find silence
again in the depth of stillness.
Lying under the tree
One day I was riding my bike to the park near home. As I crossed the gate
and began to wander the dirt track, I felt attracted by a large bed of leaves
resting on the grass and by a powerful landscape of trees lurking from the
distance. So, I stopped, and got off the bike to start taking photographs. I
was almost forgetting, but a sense of resistance reminded me: “Always
begin by finding a more intimate contact with the earth”. I put the camera
away and lied under a hornbeam tree. Suddenly the possibility of a sensuous
interplay with the surrounding environment became tangible. I was not
alone in the park anymore. I was embedded in a larger and welcoming sense
of presence, of shapes, colors, and voices. I was awakened in thoughts,
feelings, and movements. What had triggered my reaction as a spectacle
was now enveloping me as a thicker web of relationships: the air, the fallen
leaves, the smell of autumn, the songs of the birds, the pointy shells of
chestnuts, the grass, and the moisture and ... my body! Yes, my body.
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Raffaele Rufo, Witnessed by the tree (Photo by Valentina Vitolo, 2020).
Humans and trees can dance with each other because we are both living
forms of this same living earth. Because we are both earthbound. We are
bound to this body and to the larger body of the earth. It is the pull of
gravity that binds us. In doing so, gravity defines the conditions of our
sensibility and of our sentience. So why this contemporary aversion to
moving down to the ground and meet the skin of the earth with the whole
body? Is it the fear of recognising that we, too, are earth?
It makes sense to begin a duet with the tree by lying under it. This earthly
space is a space in-between, neither body nor tree, both body and tree.
Lying under the tree is a mode of embodiment where human perception is
met by a radically different way of sensing and responding. Trees are slower
creatures, much slower than humans. To connect with their movement, we
need to embrace the stillness which they so beautifully embody. The key to
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this sensory attunement is breathing. What is breathing if not an endless
duet of giving and taking, of inner and outer, of needing and being needed?
A duet with the tree begins with letting go of unnecessary tensions. To gain
the trust of our partner we need to prove our good intentions. We need to
let the earth scan our body. I invite you to find a welcoming tree you can
spend some time with. I invite you to lie down comfortably on your back
under the crown of the tree. What do you see when you look up? The tree is
watching you, isn’t it? So, you can close your eyes. You are in good hands.
Yield your weight and your thoughts into the ground. Listen to your breath.
Can you hear the earth breathing? Observe the points of contact between
body and earth. Some parts of the body are touching the earth directly;
others are not. Where do you sense your heart beating? Is it the chest? The
belly? The hands? The arms? The legs? Then bend the knees and soften the
pelvis into the earth. Play little games of pressure with the feet. Notice the
smallest impulses populating your inner landscape. Just stay where you are.
Stay vulnerable. This is a process of waiting.
A leaf falls off the tree and touches my face. My eyes open all of the sudden.
A tiny insect crawls across my neck, and then another one tickles my ear. A
bird lands on the branch above my head and suddenly takes off again.
Another leaf falls from a tree behind me, to meet her destiny on the ground.
Breath goes in and breath goes out. The body is inflated and then it is
deflated. To stay here is to become a witness. What moves around is
witnessing me too. It is in this silence, when I do not speak, that the world
can speak. How is the tree speaking to me now?
Trust your intuition to tell you when it is time to depart from this intimate
encounter. Take the time you need to unfold into standing again. Stand back
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and observe the rich mesh of vegetal life gathered under this tree. How
many things had gone unnoticed before! Layers of broken branches, pieces
of bark, bits of leaves of different kinds and colors, pebbles, worms and
insects, moisture, and dried matter. The tree is not there on its own. From
the closeup, this underlife feels so elegantly entangled.
What will be left of this secret duet when you will be gone? A body print. The
trace of your body on the soil. A trace of gravity. A trace of consciousness.
Listen. Dwell with those words that can speak of a deeply felt, silent dance
with a tree. Try to engage your voice to reconnect with the power of the
experience you just had. Let your imagination speak, like a magician
performing a spell.
Grounding with the tree
Like trees, human bodies are the meeting point between earth and sky. As
the trunk pulls upward, the roots are pulling downward. As the roots pull
downward, the trunk is pulling upward. This constant tension between
different forces defines the movement of becoming. We too as humans can
feel that, to expand we need to condense first and that, to condense, we
need to expand first. One movement is based on the other. For any act, any
idea, any relationship to have any chance of resonating with the larger
potentialities of life, it must be grounded in a terrain that can sustain its
unfolding trajectory. Grounding is growing creatively out of the constraints
that define our sensibility and our sentience. Grounding is dancing with
gravity to become the meeting point between freedom and necessity.
Grounding is bringing awareness to the empowering effects of being bound
to this earth.
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Raffaele Rufo, Small dance with the tree (Photo by Valentina Vitolo, 2020).
Trees are masters of grounding. To learn this art, we need to awaken our
senses and our imagination to the possibility of a more-than-human
perceptual interchange. I invite you to stand under the branches of a tree,
on the outer edges of its crown. I invite you to face the trunk from a
distance, in stillness. Observe the tree with the whole body. Let the presence
of the tree work as a mirror of your body. Take your time. Then, when you
are ready, start walking around the tree, under the outer edges of its
branches. As you walk, attend to your breathing. Can you hear breath being
inhaled and exhaled? If you capture yourself breathing while you are
walking, then pause. Shift your attention to the space between your body
and the trunk. This might take some time. Do not anticipate that shift.
Meeting the tree is a process of negotiating the space between the human
body and the tree body. From where you are, I invite you to start walking
towards the trunk on a diagonal path. Do you feel like going straight to
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touch the trunk? How does the perception of the space between your body
and the tree change as you walk towards the trunk? What is the level of
physical proximity that makes you feel a sense of reciprocity with the tree?
Is the tree responding to you getting closer? If you feel you are getting too
close, if you notice there is a tension, or even a repulsion coming from the
tree, then feel free to pause and move back. It might take some time before
you have a sense of standing at the right distance. When that happens, you
can start grounding with this tree.
Now that you feel welcomed by this tree, you can close your eyes to find a
deep state of comfort and peace. Place the palm of one hand below the
belly. Place the other hand behind your back, on the sacrum bone. Soften
your pelvis. Soften your knees. Meet the earth with the different parts of the
feet. Observe how your feet are being touched by the earth you are standing
on. Attend to how your weight is being poured into the ground and out of
the ground as you are standing. Notice the expansion of the space between
the two hands you placed on the body as breath goes out. Notice the
condensation of the space between the two hands as breath goes in. It is
likely that at this stage the question of the distance between you and the
trunk has shifted to the background of your attention. If so, open your eyes,
very slowly. What do you see? The tree is watching you, isn’t it? Inhale the
external presence of the tree: the height of the trunk, the shapes of the
branches, the texture of the bark, the thickness of the wood, the color of the
leaves. Then exhale what you have interiorized. Observe how your inner
awareness meets the awareness of the tree in a perceptual space that is
neither inside nor outside, that is both inside and outside.
The tree is now welcoming me to move even closer. I feel like reaching out.
I feel like touching its skin. We are nearly body to body, nearly touching
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each other for the first time. These feet finding depth into the earth, they
are my feet. But as I touch the trunk with my hands, I am also feeling the
feet of the tree, its roots. The tree is pouring its weight into the ground as I
am pouring mine. Every move I make, I make it from the ground and from
this touch. The more I stay in touch with the trunk, the more our reciprocity
becomes intimate and respectful. The more touch becomes a contact, the
more I feel how I am also being touched by the tree. My pressure on the
bark is met by the pressure of the tree. My release of pressure is met by its
release. There is very little muscular tension involved. The tree and I are
moving in a shared relationship with gravity. We are having a small dance
with each other. This is a dance of not doing much, a dance of witnessing
movement arising from the changing pressure between our bodies and the
ground on which we both stand.
I invite you to have a small dance with the tree. I invite you to yield your
weight into the trunk, to lean into it in different ways. I invite you to try
different points of contact: the chest, the shoulders, the head, the arms.
Play with increasing and decreasing tactile pressure on the bark. Move
around the trunk without losing physical contact. Don’t think you have to
move in a particular direction or in a particular way, just let it happen.
Slowly, very slowly, turn your back to the trunk without losing contact.
Observe the meeting between your pelvis and the bark. Allow your pelvis to
rotate on one side. Observe how the pressure of your pelvis into the bark
makes your body turn. Notice how the body reorganizes itself at every step.
Expand your arms and your neck and look up at this beautiful tree. Become
small again. Keep moving around. Change the levels of your dance: go
higher and go lower. Engage with different points of contact at the same
time. Grounding is becoming dancing.
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Shaping into the branches
Have you ever abandoned your body on the surface of a branch, in a state of
suspension between earth and sky? When you sit, lie, or stand on a branch,
your movement depends on the presence of the tree. You can feel how the
tree is demanding something of you. The tree demands your sensitivity to its
structure and to its shapes. It demands your responsiveness to its breath
and to its touch. It demands that you listen to its height and width, to its
softness and firmness, to its individuality and its participation in the larger
ecosystem. The more you accept these demands, the more you can have an
intimate sense of your body and of your movement as part of something
bigger. Responding to these demands requires embracing the complexity of
a more-than-human encounter. Shaping into the branches is a pathway for
engaging the reciprocity with the tree by engaging the intelligence of your
sensory organs and of your bodily systems.
Raffaele Rufo, The branch is my cradle (Photo by Valentina Vitolo, 2020).
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I invite you to find a comfortable branch you can sit on. You might need to
overcome the resistance to lift your feet from the soil, even when the branch
is very low. Find a point of contact with the branch. Caress the bark. Listen
and wait for an impulse to move. Use touch and pressure as a leverage to
climb up. Notice the contact between your sitting bones and the branch.
Experiment with different sitting positions. Play with folding the pelvis
inward and downward and then outward and upward. You can lean on other
branches nearby. If possible, drop the weight of your legs off the branch so
you can swing them. The free arms will help you feel safe. Notice the
playfulness of this moment. Look out into the larger space around you.
Connect what you see with your felt sense of movement. Exhale: haaaaa!
I now invite you to lie on the branch on your belly. Release your weight into
the branch with the face, the chest, the legs, and other body parts. Sense
the texture of the bark and the knots of the wood. Notice if there are twigs
shooting off from the branch. This shaping cannot occur until your body is
willing to be shaped by the tree. You might need more resistance of some
parts of the body to yield other parts into the branch. Observe what this
yielding tells you about the presence of this tree. Play with sensing your
center of gravity in relationship with the branch. Wrap your body around the
branch. Observe how you depend on it to hold your position. The tree is
sharing the burden of gravity with you. Do you feel supported? Would you
fall if you let go of the grasp? Drop a leg towards the ground. Drop an arm
towards the ground. Feel the suspension.
As you lie on your stomach, I invite you to rotate your pelvis to one side,
and then to the other, very gently. Play with turning until you find yourself
lying on your back. Explore this space on the branch as the only space you
have, as the space of your body, of your becoming body. All limbs are in
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contact with the branch now. Extend the arms and the legs to follow the
extension of the branch. Expand until you touch the trunk. Explore the
possibility of touching other branches with your hands and feet. Observe
how the branch you are lying on is always connected with the trunk and how
your limbs are always connected with your core. How much tension is too
much when shaping your bones into the wood? How much softness can you
achieve while offering the tree a structure to feel you?
Now bend your knees. Find comfort in the intimate contact between the
spine and the branch. Play with different points of pressure: the feet, the
sacrum bone, the pelvis, the vertebrae behind the chest, the back of the
skull. Notice how your shape changes when you change the points of
pressure on the branch. Start turning the pelvis very gently from one side to
the other. Notice how the increased pressure of one part of the pelvis on the
branch generates the rotation of the whole body to the side. As one side of
your body seeks balance on the branch, allow the other side to feel the
possibility of imbalance. Experiment with the tipping points: the points
where, if you follow through the rotation, you fall. Are you afraid of falling?
Feel how gravity is pulling you down. Then find your stability again.
Gradually, allow this gentle dynamic of yielding and resisting to take you
into falling. Climb up on the branch again. Lie on your back again. Rotate to
the sides and explore the tipping points again. Let your movement potential
be released into falling again. Notice the shivers of your body when you
approach the moment of falling. Work on the thin line between fear and
pleasure.
Shaping is touching and being touched. Shaping is softness and tension.
Shaping is knowing that I am shaping the body and not knowing how my
body is being shaped. It is one thing and the other at the same time,
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without contradiction. Shaping is becoming what my body is living. As I
approach the end of this journey, I notice how becoming smaller makes me
feel more comfortable. The branch is expanding, and my body is condensing
into it. I try to meet the sensation of being cuddled by the tree. The branch
is my cradle. As soon as I say this, I start observing whether I can be a
cradle for this branch. The branch is here for me. I am here for the branch.
We are healing each other.
Healing the trauma of separation
Meeting with trees is like dancing a tango. Before each dance you feel like a
stranger to your partner. Each duet opens a perceptual pathway to reach a
state of play and intimacy that I did not think was possible before. What
begins with a sense of resistance and separation becomes an opportunity for
reciprocity and healing. Like in a tango dance, befriending the reciprocity of
perception between human and arboreal life requires relinquishing the
mental will to control the experience of moving together. Reciprocity can be
approached as an improvisational practice of noticing and honoring the
embodied presence of trees and the embeddedness of the human body in
the more-than-human mesh of life. Bringing attention to how the
impressions received from the outside world meet internal impulses in the
unfolding of movement can feed a sense of pleasure and discovery. In turn,
embracing the uncertainty of not knowing what will come next has a healing
power. Like in a tango dance, duets with trees begin when the body is
allowed to speak the somatic language of patience and generosity. A dance
can heal because healing is not an end in itself. The dance is what matters.
The encounter is what matters.
Reciprocity heals by taking us through a fundamental shift of perception. As
we sense and witness the somatic unfolding of our earthly life and of the
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livingness of the earth, we can discover the possibility of being sensed and
witnessed by more-than-human living systems and intelligences. Duets with
trees expose the porosity and permeability of bodily boundaries. Trees are
sensing us while we are sensing them. We are called to suspend the belief in
the anthropocentric dualities between active and passive, internal and
external, physical and spiritual. In this sensuous state of suspension, it
becomes possible to hear the echoes of our alienation from the body and
from each other. At the same time, we are reminded of our ancient solidarity
with the earth. The possibility of reciprocity reveals the trauma of
separation. As humans we aspire to a consciousness of the whole, but we
need to realize we cannot arrive at that consciousness as separate thinking
selves. Trees are mirrors of our fragile condition. When the immediate
sensory power of the duets fades away, we are called to ask how we can be
a mirror of their history of ecological destruction and exploitation. How do
we allow trees to speak of their pain through our embodied memories and
desires, habits, and preconceptions? How do we seek a reciprocity that
extends to a mutual healing by engaging the wounds of modern civilization
rather than trying to transcend them?
Reciprocity heals through exposure and vulnerability on both ends of the
encounter. Trees are present to us with their history of suffering and
alienation. They are not there only to heal and save us. They are there also
to find out about our history of suffering and alienation and to receive our
healing. Duets with trees reveal how difficult it is to expose our vulnerability
in a world that rejects intimacy. When we recognize and value our profound
need to dance, we discover that the tree is more wounded than we are. This
is where the meeting between the somatic and the ecological can instigate a
meaningful cultural change. This is where earth-body practices can nurture
our love for the more-than-human and ground our ecological thinking.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my wife, dancer, and Feldenkrais practitioner Valentina Vitolo
for the photographs of my moving body in nature. I would also like to thank
my kids Samuel and Charlotte for keeping my relationship with trees playful.
My gratitude goes also to my friend and performing arts mentor Robert
Draffin for inspiring and motivating me to nurture the creative aspect of the
inquiry.