I feel…

This weekend I attended another session of Write From the Body, an incredible workshop designed by the dancer-runner-writer, Elizabeth Schwyzer.

This is the workshop that inspired me to get back into creative writing seven years ago. It is an amazing combination of movement, sound, visuals, tastes, and touch; basically inspiration for every physical sensation our bodies possess, used to feed the most important non-physical “senses” imagination and creativity.

After a lovely session of moving and vigorously jiggling our bodies, we did a timed continuous writing exercise (don’t let your pen stop…don’t re-read anything). The prompt was “I feel.”

I hope you enjoy my raw and unedited “feels.”

I feel…

I feel
I feel
I feel
I feel emotion despite moving and being embodied.
I feel calm
I feel tired
The muscles are soaked in delay. Delay from jet-lag held over to self-lag…wit-lag, want-lag, will-lag.

Where is my will? How can I make?

I feel myself be aware of gravity. The gravity of mass and the gravity of yo-yo happy and grief. But is the happy just a little too untrue? Was there a slight lag before that smile?

I feel time making me heavier and slower than I want to be.
Sometimes there’s so much time
Between texts
Between glances
Between dog walks
Between sandwiches at lunch and sweet yams for dinner.

I feel time in the air of winter, making me colder than that breeze blowing by.

I feel safe in my hood and pockets and socks because warmth is safety. And safety is everything.

I feel I feel I feel my guts
My guts are complaining about the spotlights.
They like the dark.
My guts are curling in on themselves and wondering how long, how much, how this will all end.
My guts hate the jiggling.
They are tender and that tenderness refuses to callus no matter how often I practice pummelling and emptying and dredging their information.

Callused. Callous.
I feel the writer’s callus over the top of the prickly pear cactus spike scar and my fingers know what to do.
They point it at the guts
and they demand the guts to spill and keep spilling
because nothing is truly hidden where you make a life of sharing.

Sharing. I feel the shared space. Me, You, Us, We, All.

All the fingers, all the guts, and all the time we have together.

Yvette Keller, December 1, 2019