For International Dance Day, I participated in a Yoga and Writing workshop, to which I was invited through the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada. Following a Terrill Maguire-led half-hour of yoga-inspired movement to get our creative auras active, we did time-constrained writing exercises led by Carol Anderson. One of the writing activities consisted of 3-minute bursts of writing about parts of our body. Here are my unedited (we weren’t allowed) writings:
My Hips
For years, my hips didn’t know they were lonely.
My hips didn’t know they’d enjoy bearing, didn’t know they’d like having tiny hips, hands, arms, feet, legs, face nestled in them.
My hips experienced this once and are sad – just a little – that they haven’t had a chance to be a nest again.
My Feet
My feet are looking forward to the sunshine, to grass, to sand between their toes.
My feet will be glad to dress in sandals and toe rings and paint.
My feet enjoyed their winter cardigans – reds and blues and cats and bows and hearts and stripes,
but they long to breathe and not be cold, for a change.
My hair
My hair is shy, thinning since it was ten years old.
My hair artificially sought body, and it broke, severed under a perm.
My hair is long and I cut it because what’s the difference.
My hair learns, every night, to be curly the next day.
My hair discovers it is happy even when stifled under wigs;
and as my hair gets wispier and wispier, it knows it has in them a replacement.
My spine
My spine woke up a few years ago, no longer curving at the neck – elongating itself, asserting itself, finding a way to lengthen though it is part of only a five-feet-tall frame.
My spine is short, yet mighty.
My heart
My heart skips beats – literally. (Figuratively, that hasn’t happened in years.)
My heart likes to surprise me and worry me with its literal irregularity.
« Don’t worry, it’s normal, » says the doctor.
So, everyone is walking around with their hearts stopping for milliseconds at a time?
It’s a wonder we keep going and don’t stop, for a moment, to feel until our hearts start again.