The Body In The World

The body is the way we enter into relationship. The body begins our entry into relationship with others and at death ends relationships with others. With our bodies we can come together or walk away. With our bodies we can go or retreat. We can make choices, we can materialize thoughts, we can come to an understanding. To embody an idea is to live it-to research it’s life-to speak volumes with out uttering a word. We come to our senses, we arrive at an answer, we linger over pleasures. Birth is action. It involves being moved involuntarily and becoming a potent rippling force. It is the race to death or life always and forever. It has an end and a beginning—and out of this a self is formed.

The journey creates the self as much as the physiology. It is the dance that makes the dancer be known to others. Without movement the body would not exist. And the body becomes us. It is in fact a movement factory internally and out in the world. We are held and spun by the earth, that in it’s watery roundness, echoes the microcosms of our cells. We are touched by the world and in fact become her after our death.

Our body gives us meaning in the universe as a temple of co-creation. We can’t have a body alone. And in this way, meaning comes from relationship. If I know I’m moving my body, I am having a series of relationships: with my self, with my body, with the forces of gravity and
buoyancy, with environment, and with my movement, itself. My movement becomes an object as I become intimate with myself. For a moment I know myself, and from that place I can speak of my experience with an authority that only I can issue. The I, the sensate embodied self rises up and is met by a world of meaning.