As we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. In contact with the native forms of the earth, one’s senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in ever-shifting patterns. Like suburbanites after a hurricane, we find ourselves alive in a living field of power far more expressive and diverse than the strictly human sphere to which we are accustomed…..David Abram

maybe that sense of disconnectedness is a much needed view from inside out….a break from ‘reality’ with a new periphery….a pause in the usual storytelling….what if it was all turned upside down and this unending discomfort was actually the mystery we craved?…..awake to this world…..

My gaze pairs off with color, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning. The relations of sentient to sensible are comparable with those of the sleeper to his slumber: sleep suddenly comes when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was waiting. I am breathing deeply and slowly in order to summon sleep, and suddenly it is as if my mouth were connected to some great lung outside myself which alternately calls forth and forces back my breath. A certain rhythm of respiration, which a moment ago I voluntarily maintained, now becomes my very being, and sleep, until now aimed at, suddenly becomes my situation. In the same way I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red…..Merleau-Ponty

sweet dreams lead home

I expand, expand, expand-

how can this be- yet I feel

it, my boundaries giving way

as energy and awareness

refuse to be contained.

Something nudges me to

leave behind my skin, like

a garter snake at molting

time. I expand, expand,

expand again until I am

profoundly disoriented.

What am I without the face

I’ve always worn, without

the skin that holds me in?

I gasp as the broad sky

meets my opened eyes and

then expand, expand, expand

again until the molecules

of me disperse between the

clouds- yet, strangely, also

coalesce where I am sitting.

The thin veil that separates

me from everything parts in

that instant, a pure and

simple gift of the Infinite.

….Danna Faulds