Infrequency

What's it like to show up?

Hi. It’s 2:26pm on a bright and sunny Tuesday. It’s been two months since my last post. Since my second post. There might be an equation we can come up with that will tell me how successful I am at posting. At this rate, it would appear I’m fading from view. Maybe that’s why I’m inside today, writing to you.

It’s April 1st too. Poetry Month. Two years ago, I showed up every day, for thirty days, reciting my poetry. You can find it on my YouTube channel . The first one, that April 1st in 2023 was called Earth Motherfesto.

As I weave my way through this day, there is something that is resonant, resonating. The Mother. And it’s there, whispering to me. It’s weird.

I’m writing as a stream of consciousness right now. I usually do. No corrections. Just ‘Flow Shirley’, as my Mother, Heather Topp would say. She’s really something else. If you haven’t met her, well, I hope one day you do. Where was I? Yes in flow. So I don’t know what brought me here, or there, oh wait, yes I sort of do… but I found myself looking at the archives for the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, (was I looking for myself, I wonder, or was my Self, looking for me?), and came across something I had written about the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the play in 2002. The play is called Sahel, and it is about a Mother and her child in the desert, in the void. The playwright, Franco Catanzariti took 10 years to write the play, I remind myself by reading my own account. (Actually another website says that the text took 25 years to ripen). I talk about how crucial and rare it is to have the Mother and Child relationship represented on the stage…

Infrequency.

Invisibility.

A lot happens in the void. A lot is happening in the void. When people are absent. We are present elsewhere. We are here. We are there. We are present everywhere.

What’s it matter? Mootie. Mutter. Mater. Matière. Matrix. Matter. Mother. What’s the matter?

I am looking for myself. I’m looking to give myself permission. To give myself permission to show up somewhere, to show up where I am needed. And I think I need myself, now more than ever. To Mother myself. To matter. To find out what I am made of. I’m trying to articulate myself. And it’s hard. It’s dangerous. We’ve been learning to sit still, be quiet, raise our hand, not speak out of turn, not take up too much space, learn to do it all on our own, not ask for help for so long now… nuclear mother. Nuclear family atomized. How and where do we gather ourselves?

Au secours. Succour.

I mentioned in my first post, oh so long ago, (was it really January 1st?) that I am taking a Death Doula course with Alexandra Derwen. We are in month four of twelve. This month is about Self Care. I was asked to present. I said yes. Next Thursday I will guide the group through a two-hour workshop I am conceiving on Consent. I’m working on it, incubating in my sleep time and configuring on paper during the day, deciding what I want to share, how to engage the group in an active practice of feeling into our needs and voicing them. And feeling our resistance, the place, the threshold between the old and the new. Where the past stories and beliefs we hold meet the moving present. Resistance is an invitation, to ignite a conversation. To confront is to name our experience. We need to slow down, feel in to it, let it be, to perceive that which is changing, that we are becoming. To acknowledge is to appreciate. To appreciate is to grow, to grow is to change. Like the spring, like the weather, like daylight… Like this post I am writing. I don’t know where it’s going, or really where it’s coming from, but through writing, or doing, I am breathing. I am being. I am attentive, I am tending to myself. I am mothering me. I am naming myself. Recalling myself. Reconciling, reclaiming myself. Was it just Mothering Sunday btw? In England? I was there last year at this time, for a workshop in Wales called Bear Awakens, with the extraordinary musician Tuomas Rounakari on the land where we wailed, we found our Cry Song. Each of us, as individuals held in a sacred circle, our bodies cried, our bodies heard the call, the lament of the body, the void, the plenum. All that we have, all that we are and can not (yet) name.

How does one measure what one can not see? How to quantify the ineffable? Can we begin to describe what we feel inside? Hmmm. Hum… Infrequency… What’s it like to show up baby? This one life. Finding the words to be in this body.

Words. Matter.

Thank-you for listening.

It’s 4:11 pm and still sunny outside.

Time to head out.