To The Marrow: Recognizing our deep knowing
Etched in the bones is our history, ancestry and longing
Registration is open for Root & Unfurl: Syncing to the Rhythms of the Natural World and the Knowing In Our Bones, a 4–day in-person retreat for women of color in Mi’kma’ki near Halifax, Canada exploring practices for deepening self-trust and moving from intuition. June 18-22 : SPACE IS LIMITED. Registration and more info.
Listen to me read this post:
Friends,
It’s something to know a thing in the bones. Bone knowing delivers us from the shallows of intellectualizing to the pulse and breath of a thing. It opens us to its tidal ebbs and flows. In the bones, we come to new understandings of words like friend, partner, death, and surrender. This knowing is not arrived at through the thing as it is named but rather the streams of experience inside these words that etch us with their wisdom.
Partnership becomes the wordless concessions made about the dishes or the laundry or the budget because it’s simpler, because it makes them happy, because today is a day for ease. It’s the kind hands that gently treat your oozing poison oak’d skin – the same hands that sawed and hammered and spray-painted gold the ancestral altar you asked them to make. And when the owner of these hands proudly tells you how he rescued and revived these pine planks, measured, cut, and sanded them for you, you try not to tease his pronunciation of the words sawing and drawing, which sound like saw-wing and draw-wing.
Death is the call you were not expecting as you Uber’d to the airport for some work event. It’s how you fell to the floor when the sliding doors closed behind you, tears and luggage splayed for all to see. Death challenges the mind which insists it cannot be: “We have birthday reservations next week.” In this state of disorienting grief, Friend is who you call from the airport floor. And even though you haven’t spoken in months because of some stupid boy, she answers on the second ring. Friend tells you not to get on the flight. She stays with you on the phone through hours of silence and waves of sorrow. When the sobs come, she says, “Good. Let It out.” And when the call drops and you’re afraid to call back because this is too much to ask, Friend rings you right away.
There is also the bone knowing we’re born with.
These are the memories the minerals of our bones gathered from the minerals of the bones of the wombs that held us. I can’t, for example, explain my trust in the unseen or why my nearest and dearest tend also to be profoundly and beautifully empathic. But there are my mother and my grandmother, both uniquely sensitive and both confident companions of the plant, animal and spirit realms.
Grandma selects the most exotic plants at the nursery for her garden — the ones that look like tropical birds with colors and plumage that can’t possibly make sense in the unrelenting Colorado sun. When you ask her how she does it—how her plants flourish despite their seeming fragility—she tells you matter-of-factly, “I tell them I love them. And I ask them what they want.”
And then there is Mom who, once while walking across a busy San Francisco street, immediately attuned to the sadness of a passerby. “I wonder what is wrong,” she turned to you with watering eyes. For her, this feeling was as evident as the sun. But you had not felt it. You were just trying to cross the street.
Beneath our tissues, muscles and ligaments, we are all shaped with these kinds of bone knowings. They’re beyond the analytical and proven. They’re the whispers. The ancestral songs carried from womb to womb and heartbeat to heartbeat.
It’s remarkable to recognize these genetic glimmers. How, when you nurture your dahlias from tiny seeds to flamboyant blossoms or sense when a being needs a special kind of care, this is an instinct that extends back.
Then there are the things the bones long to know. Or, long to know again.
Pace, Sync, Trust, Surrender, Spirit, Collective, Rhythm.
These are some of the word containers I long to dive into — to feel their rivulets of wisdom racing down my neck, back and shoulders and eventually soaking in deep. Now though, the words splash in the shallower waters of the intellect. This is a good place to begin. It is where we often start, and the books, guides and teachers we meet here hopefully dance our minds with possibility.
If we’re lucky, a time will come when this splashing arrives us to the edge of the shallow. In that moment, we sense that the lifting of our foot could deliver us to strange depths, the familiarity of what we “know” no longer reassuringly below. This is not a time for thrusting and bravado, rather it’s a space of trust. The container of the word has brought you here. Hold its invitation with curiosity and humility. Let the tumble of its vowels and consonants sing to you until the following of their call floats you to the wild unknown.
Splashing with you,
k
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What’s Coming Up
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN: Root & Unfurl: June 18- 22
In Mi’kma’ki/ Near Halifax, Canada
Root & Unfurl is a retreat for women of color to explore personally and collectively how we might move toward a more liberated future. It’s a space to practice being free and feeling whole together. My incredible co-host and I are looking forward to offering heart-centered somatic and creative practices, nourishing food and ample rest in the farm and forest.
Join us as we collectively sync to the rhythms of the natural world and trust the magic that arises.
11th Annual North Puget Sound Conference On Race
April 20th, Everett, WA & Virtual
I’m delighted to be a keynote speaker for this year’s conference on the theme of “I reclaim.” This is a free event. Join us in person or virtually.
Movement Meditation for Women of Color
Thursday, April 11 at 11 a.m. PT: What The Bones Know
Register
This month, we’ll make space to attune to the knowing that lives within. What stories, relationships and places have shaped you? What wisdom has been passed from womb to womb that leaves in your bones? I’ll lead a movement practice and then we’ll have space for reflection, creation and sharing. This is a free somatic and ritual space for women of color offered on the second Thursday of every month. Learn more about it.
I bow to your abundant creative spirit.
This, "Then there are the things the bones long to know. Or, long to know again."
Enjoying the sweetness of a slower way of living or the power of a fearful step forward is one thing. Swimming in those waters daily is another and something I long for.
Beautiful piece Kelsey.