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\u00a0creative 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:<\/p>\n
My Hips<\/strong><\/p>\n For years, my hips didn’t know they were lonely.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n My hips experienced this once and are sad – just a little – that they haven’t had a chance to be a nest again.<\/p>\n My Feet<\/strong><\/p>\n My feet are looking forward to the sunshine, to grass, to sand between their toes.<\/p>\n My feet will be glad to dress in sandals and toe rings and paint.<\/p>\n My feet enjoyed their winter cardigans – reds and blues and cats and bows and hearts and stripes,<\/p>\n but they long to breathe and not be cold, for a change.<\/p>\n My hair<\/strong><\/p>\n My hair is shy, thinning since it was ten years old.<\/p>\n My hair artificially sought body, and it broke, severed under a perm.<\/p>\n My hair is long and I cut it because what’s the difference.<\/p>\n My hair learns, every night, to be curly the next day.<\/p>\n My hair discovers it is happy even when stifled under wigs;<\/p>\n and as my hair gets wispier and wispier, it knows it has in them a replacement.<\/p>\n My spine<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n My spine is short, yet mighty.<\/p>\n My heart<\/strong><\/p>\n My heart skips beats – literally. (Figuratively, that hasn’t happened in years.)<\/p>\n My heart likes to surprise me and worry me with its literal irregularity.<\/p>\n \u00ab\u00a0Don’t worry, it’s normal,\u00a0\u00bb says the doctor.<\/p>\n So, everyone is walking around with their hearts stopping for milliseconds at a time?<\/p>\n It’s a wonder we keep going and don’t stop, for a moment, to feel until our hearts start again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u00a0creative auras active, we did time-constrained writing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[607,610,609,613,614,608,612,611,12,615],"language":[7],"class_list":["post-1170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-body","tag-carol-anderson","tag-dancing","tag-guild","tag-international-dance-day","tag-movement","tag-playwrights","tag-terrill-maguire","tag-writing","tag-yoga","language-en_ca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Flanguage&post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}