Wisdom of the Body

I believe in listening and trusting in the wisdom of the body.

I believe in the intelligence of cells.

I believe cells always go towards living in balance and ease when given a choice.

This is an allegorical painting of Wisdom -Wisdom as an elderly woman embodied in the form of the oldest tree in North America, a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the Inyo National Forest in California's White Mountains. She contains and supports all the stages of life within and on her ancient tree form. She holds polarites: old and young, night and day, sun and moon, warm and cold, dead and alive and the elements of earth, water, fire, air, and spirit. She is sitting near a marsh and an estuary, transitional spaces between ocean and land.

I practice listening to the wisdom of the body. I practice waiting with patience. I listen with my hands, my underlying knowledge of the body, and my intuition to qualities of tone, to movement and stasis, to rhythms, to images and feelings that arise.

One day I felt my kidneys were like lotus blossoms connected through their waving stems to the bottom of a pond. The bladder as lotus pond, the floating kidneys as blossoms wearing their adrenal party hats, the ureters as stems rising in the internal waters of the body.

Other days I do not feel my kidneys as happily holding the lotus form floating on the water’s surface. Some days my kidneys feel like punk rockers in a mosh pit, like they are lost wandering in a fog, or like tense small rodents backed into corners, or containing the force of the wind behind me.

I trust my body to tell it’s truth. Cells are the first to know what is happening and then they send that information to the brain. The cerebral cortex of the brain is the last to know. Cells communicate with their neighbors and their environment, sending and receiving information. They live in conversation in community. I trust myself to listen without judging too harshly and to receive my truth.

The title of this art quilt is ‘The Heart of Matter.’ I started by playing with texture. I cut up a felted mitten, used upholstery fabrics, old prints of leaves and leaf forms I had made, silk, and lace. I sewed them together in a pleasing (to me) way and then decided to put them in the center of a 4 x 4 piece of green felt. I put the quilt on my design wall and waited for the next step. The trees/lungs emerged first. Then the heart underneath and the horizontal pulmonary vessels/root from heart to lungs/trees. Roots dangled down and underneath a diaphragm, a bridge, a cave and earthen lumps. I sewed some translucent circles onto the limbs of the tree in honor of the alveoli that are the mediators in the conversation between the sun and leaves and our own internal workings. The sun and moon came to play. The clouds became the pink and violet of twilight. I patterned the leaves on top after the locust tree outside my bedroom window. I quilted patterns of capillaries and wind. If you enlarge the image and look closely you can see the machine quilting and the hand stitching.

There are similarities between how I quilted this piece and how I work with the body. Listening for what is arising. Being present to the process. Waiting for the next step to appear. Finding structures and connections. Playing and noticing what happens, where the body wants to go towards ease. Seeing patterns. Allowing for readiness and timing.

I wish that for you.

Trusting in the process. Hearing the whispers of your own internal landscape.

Listening to the wisdom of the body.