It has been 18 months to the day since I landed in Berlin. Today was also my last day of graduate school classes (a couple of small workshops notwithstanding).

I leave this period of my life exhilarated.

Something has been shifting since this program began, and something has now shifted. My classmates have noticed and commented on the difference in the way I move, in my capacity for that thing we’re always questing after—embodiment. I feel it, too. (And they, also, have grown and changed in subtle and substantial ways.) Embodiment has settled into me; or I have opened myself and laid back into it.

I feel it when I move, when I’m telling stories. I feel a gesture emerge from my chest, rather than my wrist. I feel it in our exercises—I drop into my pelvis, center of impulse and expression. My mind is quiet. When it squawks an idea and I move in response to an intellectual notion rather than an embodied impulse, I feel it immediately, and can, usually non-judgmentally, return to listening to my deeper impulses, which come from who knows where?

My relationship with gravity is different, too. The ground is my playmate. When I step, I feel that we are both elastic, dancing with one another. To step these days is often a profound pleasure.

On Wednesday, we engaged in an exercise we do somewhat regularly, and that I find really fruitful: shifting modalities, from movement to free-writing back to movement (sometimes we add drawing, painting, or observation to the cycle), keeping creativity flowing by switching to a different medium when an impulse in one fades. This time the experience was transcendent for me. Ecstatic. There in the studio my body was a prayer.

I wrote,

thirst for what i do act know have not been done seen tasted scented the joy of being lost in the big world the joy of being lost and in wonder at this big world full of small people the ancient roots the rhythms immemorial the trades from earth to earth they stay one stay close to the earth close to you close to one another to you . . . keep me close i don’t know how to pray but i do know how to press my body press you my body back to you my foundation support sustain life keep me close

i want to live a life close to the earth

keep us close to you bring us back to you bring us home bring us home call us home i want to go home to you anywhere in you on you close to you everywhere close to you my face dusty yellow with the dust of you the sky wide spread smooth inviting embracing protecting enticing calling inspiring respiring respiro respiro respiro atmos air breathe breath spirit over the waters waters waters . . .

my love our home our mother and foundation keep me close hold me close let me be held by arms of earth flesh of earth i am dust i will be dust again i am dust i will be dust i am dust even the dust sings praise to dust the glory of dust dust dust the glory of the dust the dust says the dust sings the dust let me be dust let me sing to dust let me

Two days later we did a similar exercise with a different pedagogical goal. I wrote,

I want to do this for the rest of my life. Find the pleasure of my body, of movement in my body. To be entirely subjective. Entirely within myself. I want to do this for the rest of my life.

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A common experience when beginning this work is profound frustration, a need for clarity. A sense of, “just tell me what to do so I can do it!” We all experienced it last year, and as new classmates have come through this year, we see the same struggle in them. But really, this knowledge cannot be taught. It can’t be spoken. It can only be transmitted through embodied experience.

We in the West are used to distrusting statements like that. That probably sounds pretentious to at least a part of your brain. But it’s not. I can talk to you about it all day long, or try, and you won’t understand until you do, until you’ve moved through it, with it, enough that it becomes a native part of your being. I dearly hope it is an unshiftable knowing. I would not give up this understanding for the world, because to give it up would be to give up the world.

Movement is not metaphor, because movement is not symbol. But neither is movement merely technique. It is—let me try to explain—it is through being material beings in the world that we come to understand the world. By exploring the world using our own materiality, we come to understand the world—the materials within it, our fellow living and non-living creatures, and also that which lies beyond the material, but is nonetheless real, real, real, real, real. Realer than mere observation and measurement can discern.

I think that’s all I can say for now.

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Now I will begin work on my thesis. I am so ready to work.

We will have a works-in-progress showing in mid-April. We have taken it upon ourselves, as a cohort, to put on a collective works-completed festival in October. Our theses are due at the end of October. My current visa runs through early December.

I need to find a job. I’m starting to work as an extra on movies and TV shows that film here, which hopefully will be fun. I would also like to continue to help people shape their stories, whether in spoken, written, performative, or digital formats. I’m better at it than I used to be. If you are writing an essay, article, speech, story, poem, manuscript, etc., and you’d like my help, let me know and let’s talk. I’d love to work with you (or anyone you know who might want such help).

I am excited to be going out into Berlin with a better idea of the kind of work I want to do, ready to meet people, communities, artists, new friends, new adventures . . .

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When our instructors have invited us into an exercise, and we do it, and they reflect back to us what they saw, they never say, “not like that.” Thomas is notorious for saying, “There’s no right, there’s no wrong” before launching us into an exercise. Instead, what our instructors say, in various charming accents, is: “You have proposed [X]. Yes, ok, why not?” And then they go on to say something that begins with “or,” or “and,” or “but if . . .”

I love that. The generosity of never discounting our earnest offerings, of always seeking instead to invite us further, deeper, wider, farther out into the transpersonal universal possible. Which is why I’m exhilarated. The doors and windows have been thrown open, and I am standing on the edge of limitless possibility.