Witness

So I’m sitting down behind my laptop and I’ve decided to make myself write. Sometimes I feel frustrated with my lack of ability to just sit down and write something of substance and value. I got really excited when I read about Rachel Carson, because she is an absolute genius. It’s hard to make myself sit down and focus on a Friday afternoon, when I am in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. Like it’s not just kind’ve challenging to focus, it’s exponentially challenging.

I had made up this wild plan to take an ADO bus to Tulum and spend my Friday in Tulum. I woke up this morning and instead texted my dad about whether or not he was going to come back and visit me in Mexico. “It’s too HOT” in Mexico, dad emphatically told me. Ok, dad, I guess it’s too hot in Mexico. It is hot in Mexico right now, it’s close to 90 degrees, everyday. The thought pops into my head occasionally when I’m dehydrated that everything in the world is a mirage, that my thoughts, my actions, my ideas - they are all a mirage. I feel like this is the appropriate thought to have while someone is in Mexico - to have the thought that our human experience is, something much like a mirage.

The mirage metaphor is really the only way that I can bring myself to cope with the endings and beginnings of things. Why is the time I have with the people I love so short? Why doesn’t spring last all year long? Why can I only remember stuff for a certain amount of time, and then two days later I will forget it? I have all of these questions that drift through my mind on a daily basis. The voices of friends and mentors and dance teachers and yoga teachers drift through my head too. Sometimes it feels like I’m playing spin the wheel on somatic advice. “Travel!” “Travel across the floor!”. I have the tendency to use the somatic cues that I have gotten in dance classes to encourage my movement through the “real world”. I am not sure if this is something that every dancer does, but it is something that I do. When I feel stuck or like I don’t know where to turn next (a combination of stuck and confused) sometimes one of these cues will pop up into my head, as a reminder that the option to move in a different way, is always there for me. “Explore!” a dance teacher might say to me. Actually, someone in a Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles said this to me, before the pandemic began. This guy said “explore!” as I was taking a very very very long time to look at wine selections. I started getting lost in the idea of which wine would be better - a little 22 year old wine connoisseur - completely lost in Los Angeles and in the middle of Trader Joes. Occasionally I feel very very guilty for the amount of time I have spent, just getting lost. I know that there is a JRR Tolkien quote that says “not all who wander are lost”, but the truth is - some of us who wander - are lost.  His suggestion made me feel safe, and less embarrassed about how lost I can feel sometimes, so when I am really feeling lost I reframe the judgement I have about being “lost” and tell myself that I am “exploring”. It actually does make a difference.

Another dance cue that has made me feel less alone has been the dance cue “travel”!. This is a good cue for teachers to use because I feel like dancers are travel oriented by nature. We like shiny things, we like movement, we enjoy being in motion - so traveling makes sense to us. Just, travel! Travel across the floor. As I write this, an image pops up in my mind of a Tuesday night improv class I will take when I am back “home” in Portland. One of the exercises is to improvise for a set amount of time (around 60 minutes) across the floor. During our improvisations, the dance teacher will encourage the movement pattern we are using if it is pleasing, or discourage the movement pattern and redirect the movement pattern if it is displeasing. I have always suspected that there is a correlation between the way that we are dancing and the way our avenues of thought are functioning. The dance teacher acts as as witness - as a guide, as someone who can help us along our journey. By re-directing movement, we are re-directing energy flow and re-directing outcome. The dancer can not do this work on her own. The presence of a witness is not to be underestimated, because sometimes I think that having a witness is one of the things that can keep us off of a rocky path and on a better one. The concept of a “witness” is not really discussed in western culture. 

I think in the west we talk about mentorship a lot, but what we don’t talk about is witness-ship. We forget to talk about the act of witnessing. The idea of a mentor is someone who is there to guide us, or lay out a map for us, a mentor is someone whose footsteps we follow in. Mentors are people who we are supposed to mold ourselves into being “like” - however, witnesses help us unravel into becoming more of ourselves, instead of molding ourselves into another sort of being. I think that there is too much power given to the idea of a mentor - and mentorship also comes with a power dynamic. I think that there has to be a clear line between a mentor, and a witness. People are fallible, we are given power and we misuse it, we do not always have a clear idea of how to react to the power that is given to us. The voice of my mom interrupts over the thought intercom here - her voice is saying to me “Lizzie, power corrupts, power corrupts totally”. Perhaps this is the issue that the public has with institutions - our leaders are power hungry and take power away from the public. This has been a struggle between people and institutions that has made its mark on the human psyche for generations.

Power and/or the lack thereof, has shaped people’s choices and as a result, shaped the world we live in today - as well as shaped people’s lives, romances, and bodies for generations. 

This is a tale as old as time. Perhaps this is also an issue within relationships- as human beings we seek connection and we also seek power, and we also seek balance within power dynamics. 

As far as - people versus the powers that be, go - it has also been a trend that it is often very difficult for “the people” and for “the populous” to gain power back. It is not an easy task to organize a revolution, and institutions have profited off of the public’s need to simply survive.

So having a witness is a lot more empowering than having a mentor, in some ways. A witness can act as an observer, who offers suggestions. A mentor can force you to do things that you might not want to do. A witness is someone you can talk to. I think when it comes to mental health awareness, what a lot of people are seeking on their paths, are other witnesses. As autonomous beings I think that often-times what we are looking for along our journey are witnesses to our experience - not necessarily mentors. However, in an age where everything is commodified - where health and wellness are commodified - it is hard to find something as simple as a witness. In Japan, people are renting their time out by the hour, just to be a “friend”. Our lives have become incredibly fragmented as we live lives without witnesses. If a tree falls in the forest, but there is no one there to hear it - does it really make a sound? As human beings we need witnesses in order to help our experiences be real. Otherwise, and I can say this from personal experience - it is easy to feel like you are walking around as an amnesiac. Someone can have a mentor, and still feel like an amnesiac - like there is a ghost living inside of them instead of feeling safe enough to exist and take up space. Institutions profit off of the physical and somatic sensation that people feel like ghosts - because if we are in a ghost-like state we are not in the real world and need something to breathe us back into reality. However with a witness, we are able to individuate away from institutions and choices that may not fully align with the reality that we are seeking. This is why western people flock to yoga and other spiritual practices - if someone gives you the express permission to “let go” then you have the express permission to make changes in your reality and build a different one. This permission can be beautiful, and to be honest (from personal experience) it can also feel overwhelming. Enough permission to breathe is good - too much permission is like having a parent that lets you eat whatever you want whenever you want - an individual runs the risk of becoming a full on sugar addict, who eats ice cream for three meals a day. There is definitely a thread that connects the role of the witness and the role of a parent.

There are therapists that will claim that all of our actions stem from early childhood but a lot of that has been debunked by neuroscience. A lot of the soothing that adults need has to do with having a witness. Even if you had a shitty childhood - you are not broken. As adults we also need permission to forgive ourselves for making mistakes (like, for example, standing up a date). We have to forgive ourselves for overwhelm we might feel. I can say this from experience. I am pretty much an only child, and had to learn how to hold a lot of my pain on my own, and trip through uncomfortable experiences by myself. Sometimes I just cry realizing how much I have been through by myself - and also at the same time I will feel moments of immense gratitude for the strangers, baristas, and just random people in the world who have helped me stay stable and functional. I experience this gratitude like a tsunami wave, like the famous block print of the Great Wave Off Kanawaga. That’s what the love in the world feels like, so I feel an immense amount of gratitude.

Anyway, it’s 6 pm and I did the thing, dear readers. I wrote my little heart out about power dynamics and the famous Japanese block print of the Great Wave Off Kanawaga. As I wrote about the wave I thought about how it might be cool to add a picture to this blog post, and then I realized that maybe that was just my overachiever brain going into overdrive. It’s 5:58 on a Friday…I should… go out and EXPLORE!! RIGHT? I’m in Mexico..I shouldn’t…stay inside and revel in the sensation of the cool air blasting out of the air conditioning! It’s only….90 degrees outside. I should go and take a walk and watch the sunset though. IF I was in the US I would have probably structured my day around the sunset. I may also have a date… I have to go text back a spontaneous human that seems cool and I might take a walk with. Poor dude, he seems really cool too - has two doggies….I guess the Trader Joe’s employee I met at 22 would encourage me to…explore!!

Until next time, I will leave you with this wonderful music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0VuNt7fWJI

THE WORK CALLS.