My favorite definition of “remember” comes from the epigraph of El Libro de Los Abrazos by Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano. It reads: “RECORDAR: Del latín re-cordís, volver a pasar por el corazón.” Which translates: “TO REMEMBER: From Latin re-cordis, to pass through the heart once again.”
To pass through the heart once again. As we dance, our movement circulates breath and blood throughout the body; with each beat of our muscular center, the living memory of what it means to be incarnate passes through our heart once again. Thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, memories, colors, images, love, loss, pain, pleasure, longing, the very essence of what it means to be alive in a body gets stirred. Movement practice, for me, is less about learning new material and more about remembering what is already living in our cells and simply must be reawakened by passing through our beating hearts once again. We could say remembering is listening; remembering is sensitizing; remembering is opening, feeling, letting ourselves be moved by life, by the world, by each other, by our longing to live while we’re alive, a returning to our wild interconnected nature, a hunger for freedom for all.

For me, one of the deepest remembrances stirred through the dance is our ecological nature, our inter-being, the way we are a part of a vast living web of connection that transcends time and space and species, the anima mundi, the soul of the world – the way we are made of relational webs and there really is no such thing as an individual if individual means an island alone. That, if individuality exists, it is a confluence of relationship, billions of years of evolution living in our cells, thousands of years of ancestry, of history, of poetry, of fungi, lichen, single-celled organisms, whales, of all the specific moments that had to unfold so that we could be born as we are – it’s pretty wild if you follow the thread of mystery that unfurls when we contemplate where we come from and what we are made of. Perhaps another definition of consciousness could be: a vitalized awareness that lives in the bloodstream and passes through the heart, again and again, constantly remembering anew just how mysterious and miraculous we are and life is and how our freedom is bound up in our capacity to care deeply for the miracle and for each other (who are part of the miracle). Call this remembering of the miracle love: the kind of love that courageously stays relational through fear, through suffering, through the unthinkable, which is all around us, especially now; the kind of love that does not forget the miracle, a love that sees through eyes of wonder, recognizing again and again how improbable it is that we are here at all, a kind of love that feels in the bones the ways life has continued (in all its life-death-life cycles) for.a long long time and depends on us to act in ways that affirm life, that celebrate the miracle, that recognize our responsibility in tending the future. The culture of hyperindividualism embedded within consumer capitalism has made us more lonely and forgetful of our belonging than ever before. Individualism, disguised as freedom, removes us from the pulse of life, the heartbeat, the roots that feed us, our wild interwoven origin. The dance, in its way, returns us to that wild origin, at least for moments at a time, because it requires relatedness and connection; relationality is definitional to dance; dance is a conversation; there is no dance that happens in isolation. Watch the wind, the grasses, the rivers, the sea, the children, the trees in every season, the birds, the underground fungal networks, the very breath in our lungs, it is impossible to name anything from the natural world that is removed from relationality or the need to be sensitized to the pulse of life happening all around. The dance can remember unto us the connective breath that weaves the world and makes clear that we are all woven together.
It feels important to say that remembering, the passing of blood through the heart and into the limbs, organs, tissues, muscles, mind and bones is not always comfortable, not always easy or easeful – the way that if the fingers or toes grow frozen and numb in bitter temperatures, it is painful when the blood flow begins to return, when that part of us that was numb begins to warm and waken again. One of the reasons for any somatic practice is to remember how to feel deeply, to intentionally give blood and oxygen to the parts of us that have gone numb, to re-sensitize ourselves to the tremendous instruments of sensation we are, made of billions of nerve cells designed to feel the world both within and without. When we move with intention and attention, we uncover what is already living in the tissues of our being and allow it to move and circulate to wider awareness. Movement practice allows us to apply ideas and concepts to the physical, sensational realm of the body – to converse with the ideas not only as mental constructs but as substance that we can feel. We play, we listen, we move, we feel, we notice what gets stirred, we practice calling our attention to what is happening, we follow the movement and ride the changing weather and waves that unfold, we begin to distinguish the movement of our conditioning from the movement of our longing for freedom. We allow many different gods, forces, energies, emotions, questions to inhabit us, to move through, to use us as instruments of feeling, and we begin to make meaning in our own way: not a meaning of insular self-importance, but a meaning that connects us to the living world, to each other, to the vast web of energies that animate life, in which we are used as a mouthpiece through which to sing as a confluence of relationship. As we grow more connected to our hearts in the dance, allowing life, in all its dimensionality and dynamism, to pass through the heart once again, we are able to encounter our lives more deeply, more intimately, more directly, more fully, more resourced to respond to life with all the love and creativity we’ve got.
References: Conversation partners and inspiration
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy. Chico, CA, AK Press, 2017.
Galeano, Eduardo. El Libro de los Abrazos. Madrid, siglo xxi de espana editores, s.a., 1989.
Hillman, James. the thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Putnam, CT, Spring Publications, 1992
Interview with Sophie Strand on For The Wild, transcript found here
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