This is a voice memo after hearing the beautiful words of Ursula K. Le Guin from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want,
because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a
basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of
your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again–if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
(read the complete story…or listen…but do)
I’ve been thinking myself as a container, a bag, a carrier of information that became a book called Stalking Wild Psoas. It felt to me like I was dreamed, the book was dreamed – it transcended my thinking into not something I needed to express, but something that needed to be held. And so the field of my presence, the way I worked with it, was to set aside my life and offer myself as this space of holding, a container, a bag, a womb in which gestated a book that when I read it today I I know it’s moving through my tissue in language but is bringing an energy that is not mine, but ours. …
It was at that moment of holding that I had the impulse to explore the Internet to see who else was holding a container or speaking to whatever I was gestating, whatever was gestating in me I should say. And Bayo Akomolafe showed up as did Resmaa Menakem’s work. Bayo spoke to an aspect of my book – this being moved – being other – dissolving – becoming porous – being able to be devoured – to be utilized. So that even as a carrier there was no skin that separated me from other – there was no boundary per se. And oh that’s what’s interesting about a container that is alive ! …the porousness of the womb both protects and yet echoes memories …love ..and presence …and a direct kind of knowing that is millions, maybe billions, of years old through tissue, through cells, through all these things that we want to articulate – but actually – is a field of dimensional BEING.
It is fascinating to play with boundaries and in Stalking Wild there is an essay on boundaries because as my defenses softened, I noticed the porousness of being and what a beautiful capacity my organism has to be called – to hear the call… to respond through tissue, through movement, through fluid. It is not about changing our thinking, although that too – story is important. But the actual dissolving of insistence I believe is found within the tissue and found within a way of moving that literally deconstructs the framework of what human is believed to be… so much more…
