Entrainment

Entrainment, getting in sync with my environment, does take time. I’m being gentle with myself as I find my way back home here. The elements, the topography, the way my body meets it all is a cellular re-education and my body needs time to remember how to fall in rhythm with my habitat. And my post op shoulder rehab is making it more challenging. Very humbling. 

With each step on this less familiar terrain, my body has to re-find its true north as if for the first time. The land, the temperature and the inherent flow of the place I find myself seem to be testing my loyalty. How long are you here for, how much should we invest in you if you’re only visiting, how do we know for sure you want to inhabit this place with your whole being? I seem to have to earn her trust and her inclination to engage with me intimately.

Fair enough. I do come and go each half year and I betray her for a different lover. She has a right to hold back and test my devotion.

Back in the studio, I feel lost. I know it would be inauthentic to try and capture and commune with her essence through my art at this point. It feels disingenuous to try. But perhaps there is an expressive longing that wants to capture that very thing. The longing for connection versus the actual connection.

Years ago while attending a dance instructor training, one of my fellow students was given a piece of music to embody in her authentic way of moving. Frustrated, she said, “ I hate this music, it’s impossible for me to move to it”. But it was precisely those feelings and emotions that the music stirred; discomfort, distaste, anger, frustration, that she was being invited to express through movement, rather than inspite of those reactions. So what would my art of feeling disconnected be?

I really noticed the power of entrainment and its opposite when I lived on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada. A funky back to the land community nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Elphinstone Mountain range extending for miles along a narrow corridor, dotted with several small maritime towns south to north. Only one traffic light along this 50 mile stretch. You could only access this peninsula by air or water.

When I first moved there, partly because Joni Mitchell had a home in Halfmoon Bay, one of the tiny hamlets up the coast, I continued to work 2 days a week in the busy city of Vancouver, BC. Going back into the city each week by 40 minute ferry and 40 minute bus ride, after living in the low key laid back temperate rainforest butted up against the rocky drift wood laden beaches of “the Coast” as we called it, was a serious assault on the senses. More entrained with the slow gentle pace of the coast, I felt separate from the buzz of the city, like oil floating over water. A witness to the buzz but not of or part of it. I was glad for this distinction and enjoyed merging back with my happy place the moment the ferry pulled into the dock on the coast at home after 2 days in the chaos.

Today, like those trips to the city, I'm in a limbo state, not fully entrained with this land and no longer fully entrained with where I came from. This liminal place has its own charm and wisdom I am meant to learn from despite how uncomfortable it is.

And with that, I’m off to my beautiful new studio to do and make whatever is begging to happen through me, connection or disconnection. Vamos a ver! 🙏🏼