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ENTERING THE TEXT: ORIGINS

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

—Edward Albee, The Zoo Story

Stories of place in our time are often stories of migration. I am a dancer and writer who moved from the Midwest to the Northeast. Between uprooting and growing new roots, I criss-crossed the United States and circled the globe. Where I’ve lived and traveled affects the way I construct my view of the world and how I map it out for others, detail by detail. In our age of mass information, I am one of many who think it is useful for the reader to know something of those doing the writing, what they care about, and how they have come to their point of view. In my life, college teaching has been both source and resource for my work, and performance has been crucial to my way of understanding landscapes. And by landscape, I mean the natural and cultural rhythms of a place, including its soil and topography, plants and animals, air and water, people and their various creations.

OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS

I wrote my first stories in a group led by Doug Anderson. A Vietnam medie, he had watched whole villages destroyed, held dying soldiers in his arms, seen children blown to bits. In his presence you didn’t bother to write fluff. He encouraged me to be more specific, to make my Images more concrete.

I was raised on a farm in the heartlands of Illinois. Childhood amid that fecund terrain included an annual migration to the then-wild southeastern coast of Florida for the winter months. During these first eight years of my schooling, I knew two places as home and valued the journey between. My college years in the Midwest included summers on the Connecticut shore at the American Dance Festival with the inspiring New York-based “pioneers of modern dance.” Graduate school at the University of Utah and the professional years that followed included performing throughout the western states, punctuated with overseas tours, providing a worldview. My first college teaching brought our young dance company east to Mount Holyoke College, and I’ve remained in New England ever since. I now teach at Middlebury College in Vermont and continue to perform and write. Movement and landscape, body and earth, inform all that I do.

My relationship with the sciences began with anatomy. Seventh grade with Mr. Barlow, then high school zoology with Mr. Green involved looking at the insides of things. This felt essential. When I joined the graduate program in dance at the University of Utah, my professor of anatomy and kinesiology, Dr. John M. Wilson, said, “All lasting dance techniques are based on anatomical truth,” weaving, as he often would, science, history, and philosophy in a single phrase. I have now taught anatomy for twenty-eight years, deepening my knowledge of and fascination for this subject. Teaching anatomy as an artist makes me an amateur, not an expert, in science. It also allows me the role of liaison and translator between the sometimes impenetrable walls that separate disciplines in higher education.

When I leave my writing group, I am often shaking. It takes me hours to settle down. It is not the spontaneous exercises that trigger my response; I feel nothing as I write. It is reading my work aloud. Amid this small group of peers, I never know what to expect. As the words unfold, I might feel energy choke my throat, tears come from nowhere, unaccountable emotion. I have come to enjoy these sensations, even in public readings, allowing the vibratory power of the voice to unleash its response.

One has to know a lot about a subject to speak simply; and often the more we know, the less there is to say. Instead, we embody attitudes and states of attention, communicating through our actions as well as our words. It has taken me eight years to refamiliarize myself with the distinct vocabularies of various sciences. I want, in this text, to retain the struggle of comprehension, something of the process of going from “outsider” to “insider.” Based in specificity, the language of science can bring clarity or can confuse the newly initiated. Yet we each know the earth—the rocks, animals, plants, air, and water where we live. In approaching the sciences we can cultivate curiosity, humor, and awe, as we remember that every field of study begins and ends in mystery; the origins and the advanced edge are often conjecture, and “facts” change as new facts are discovered.

I had been a professional performer and educator for two decades when I moved to a wildlife sanctuary in western Massachusetts. My first book, Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, reflecting my years of work with the interior landscape of the body, had just been completed. At the sanctuary our focus was outside. My naturalist, botanist, and biologist mentors would set off, butterfly nets in hand, identifying dragonflies, searching for the unnoticed rare plant, and debating about invasive species. Just as with the body, there was always something to look at, something to look for, and a new place to explore. As well as preserving habitat for wildlife, the sanctuary’s mission was to assist those of us who wanted to learn to see the world afresh. It was good-spirited fun, a safe environment for exploration.

Meanwhile, I continued teaching one semester each year at Middlebury and became caught up in the enthusiasm of the burgeoning Environmental Studies program. Interdisciplinary in approach, its success required participation by faculty across the curriculum. The students, with typical enthusiasm, drew their own links between disciplines and requested a course exploring the relationship between body and earth. Thus, I offered a January term experiment called “Ecology and the Body,” which two years later became a course called “Body and Earth.”

In this process, I was encouraged by gifted colleagues who spearheaded the Environmental Studies program: John Elder, professor of English, was an eloquent spokesperson for nature writers; Stephen Rockefeller, professor of religion and then dean of the college, illuminated the intrinsic intelligence of body and earth in his courses; and Stephen Trombulak, professor of biology, determinedly kept environmental issues in the eyes and minds of faculty, students, and community.

In many ways, my new course drew on the farm heritage of my childhood. I had been schooled to observe closely. As my father, a painter, focused on his watercolors, seated on a portable campstool in the field, his brush revealed the interconnections of branches and sky, roots and soil, shadows and sun. As my mother, a violinist, helped me pick the endless rows of green beans or arrange zinnias in a vase, I learned how to see both the detail and the rhythm of the land. My parents were educators from a lineage of educators. They helped me to understand the patience of discovering afresh what was right there in front of me all day long.

When selling our family home, my sister cleaned out my father’s desk. Among his drawing pencils and photographs were four neatly folded pages, carefully preserved through the years: a high school essay. Handwritten script, etched neatly between blue lines, detailed how his father had deserted his family when he was twelve, how he vowed never to speak to him again, the fierceness of his feelings. Amid this highly personal writing, red circles surrounded spelling errors, corrected punctuation. On the outside, an F was imprinted in bold red ink. I wonder if my father ever wrote again.

Body and Earth is written from and about the New England landscape. Encouraged by my editors to shape a text that “could be written in no other place,” I was inspired to reduce my travels and stay home. It took concentrated effort, including research, writing, and daily sojourns on the land, to begin to know my New England home the way I know my body. Drawing on what I know best, the rigors and truthfulness of dance, I began writing performance texts about my triangle of homes in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. Speaking as I moved required that I integrate the information embedded in the text into the expressive language of my body, an experience of inhabitation. What wasn’t essential fell away. The stories in this book are perhaps the most personal, poetic aspect of the text, exposing the underlying current that moved me from beginning to end, to beginning once again. Completing each chapter, these short texts are intended to be read aloud, engaging the breath rhythms and emotional investment of the spoken word.

The book spans my seven years as a stepmother. Meeting boys of nine and thirteen and accompanying them through adolescence, with few community rituals supporting the process, is humbling. Parenting journeyed me back through my own development, finding the cracks and places of resistance and exposing them to light. Engaging with teenagers reminded me of the deep vitality, optimism, and potential of adolescence. It also highlighted the ways in which our entire culture is adolescent in its resistance to the process of maturation that could move us toward a new way of living with the land. As the boys ventured off on wilderness trips or their own creative explorations, I was invited to experience beyond what I had known. My view of life had been to survive adventure; now it was to grow a heart large enough to encompass what came.

This writing also spanned the death of my father. His passing changed my relationship to this American soil, linking generation to generation. Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography, says about his childhood on the Nebraska and South Dakota plains: “The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien…. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.” Knowing my father’s ashes were spread in the sea, I began to understand his words. Thus, the cycles moving from life to death, from daughter to mother, from visitor to inhabitant, form a defining arc to the progression of the text.

I have written Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide as an educator who dances, performs, and lives an involved life in New England with a husband, stepsons, and a dog. Each chapter or “day” includes elements I have found vital to my own learning: visual imagery, factual information, movement exercises, anecdotes, and personal stories offering diverse inroads into whole-body learning. The goal is to inspire you, the reader, to your own stories, maps, and ways of knowing. As we open our perceptual resources to the present moment, wherever we are, wherever our roots have been, we inspire care, investing our human resources in the land and communities we call home. Throughout the book, you are encouraged to take your own body seriously, to know it as familiar, as the vessel through which you experience the earth.

We have so carefully learned to disguise what we think and feel. Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes that girls assume a voice at puberty and use it long after it has outgrown its effect—perhaps for a lifetime. Through academic training and the daily lessons of our lives, many of us have been taught to be good and to be quiet or to say what others want to hear. The feeling of risk that accompanies telling the truth is enormous. What is the purpose of writing, after all? To perpetuate what we already know or to open new doors?

Pen, painting by Jim Butler. Oil on canvas, 27.5 in. × 90 in.