Gaia Comes to the City

"To experience what isn't, love what is." ~ Eric Mi'chael Leventhal.  When I recently came across this quote by Leventhal, who is a holistic educator based out of Hawaii, I sat thinking. Seven words that glow with a personal and a collective truth. As is my habit, I soaked in the simple intensity of the quote to see where I stood with it. And so it emerged - the unknown and the unknowable are forever hiding within the known, but the real question is, are we ready to go on a path of self-discovery to find what we've always thought is a direct result of blessing? What has this got to do with body-based writing, you'll ask. I'll say, "Everything." The body is our first organic contact with the manifested world, it is through the body that we know our minds and our creative selves. Imagine if we didn't have a body, what pleasure would there be to touch paper with ink or colours? Imagine how in the absence of the body we would access our prim

"Every collective fire is a personal fire, and every personal fire uncontained can run amok in the collective. The Wing Commander is sent back home without the kind of drama many had anticipated. There is rejoicing, but there is also a lull. An underbelly full of unsettling questions, sitting tightly. I can feel it in my chest, in my gut, around my shoulders. Where do we go from here?" Written a couple of days ago, this piece carries the wind of two things - personal experience of the universal and negotiation with that experience, from a place of processing. You can't undo what stands done and yet, you have the choice to express. Funnelling it through what I often refer to as "personal truth". In a social scape, it might seem minimal, because who doesn't know how large the collective is, but does that mean it needs to be minimised? I think not. And that brings me to write about what body-based writing needs from anyone willing to try it. - SHOWI