meditations on forests and dance

My muscles have the delicious ache of dance and hiking. Allee, my pup, and I hiked deep into the MacDonald Forest yesterday. I love the silence and the noise of the forest. I listened to the prattle of bird and squirrel and then in the background came the roar of chain saw and the occasional thunder of a tree falling. Small motor sounds sound like death to me. I try to remain open hearted. I try to remember all the good uses of timber. I try to remember that each of us has different ways to enjoy the forest. When I lived in Hungry Horse, Montana, I would often awake to off road vehicles buzzing around my small cottage. It was the same high pitched motor sound. It also sounded like death.

I have a yoga student who rides off road motorcycles and likes to try to engage me into debates about trail usage. Is it unfair to covet silence and desire that the small engines stay far away so I can listen to the sound of the forest? I hike and I try to meditate. I turn my mind again and again to just being in the forest, to listening to its sounds, to seeing the trees, the patches of sunlight, the moss, the ferns, the flow of creek. I stop at the top of my trail, the turning point to heading back down hill and I observe the huge root ball of a toppled fir. Insect, plant, mammal, bird, fungus, all of them are thriving on this bit of slowly decaying root wood. In the midst of observation and silence, my mind wanders back to my life: to my relationships, work, and obligations. I struggle again and again to stay in the forest. I turn my attention over and over to the moment and the place where I am.

I have a favorite trail, one very few people know of. I go to this sacred place on special occasions. A few others must go there as the train remains open, but no one clears the fallen trees and you can see where I and a few other jump over them again and again. The trail is always blocked by an abundance of spider webs. I train myself to look at the air in front of my face. To search for the glistening dew on the small web strands or to notice the body of the spider floating there in mid air. As soon as my attention turns back to the distractions of my life, smack I walk face first into a web. Chills run down my spine as I brush it away, looking for the spider on my shoulders, hoping it is not in my hair. I know they run away if they can. I watch them flee when I break their webs purposefully. They scurry off to the corners and gather in the broken web quickly. They will set themselves on rebuilding the web before I return in a week or a month.

We danced in silence last night. It is easier to remain in the moment during the dance. I danced and fell again and again into my body, touch, and the awareness of another body. I played with balance, with lift, with gravity. I didn’t worry about form. I didn’t worry about being seen. I melted into the dance and remained there, melting again and again and again. For some reason it is easier for me to melt into the dance than it is into the forest. My mind becomes distracted often in the forest. I must learn to take dance mind there. I want to be as aware of the heart beat, the pulse, the sweat of the forest as I am of my partner’s body. I want to be as aware of the world as I am of my dance partner’s body.