Casual Steps, Taken In Earnest

I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

In late March, visiting my friends in Vermont, the Ferguses, and their Icelandic ponies on Butternut Farm, I was "escorted" up the hill - Butternut Hill, I suppose - behind their house.

I had just arrived and Nancy insisted on a cup of tea - but a "walk" up and around the hill first.

Handed a pair of walking poles, adjusted by Nancy to my height, we took off up the hill. Breathing meant drawing slivers of ice down my throat. I felt the thunder of my heart loud in the complete Winter silence of the woods.

But I noticed things - Nancy kept calling them out to me: sugar maples, tapped and ready to flow, the whirring of a grouse, an owl watching us from a pine tree, the peculiar deadfalls of trees needing to be cleared, variations in the soil, the criss-crossing of old logging trails that would soon be used to exercise Birkir and his other Icelandic expatriates, Nancy's delightful figurative and joking stories.

I noticed things. It made an impression. The same way the the first words you share with someone sets a tone for all further conversations and expectations - this made an impression that had so far never gotten past my skin before that moment.

Oddly, while returning I stopped at the Bean's outlet in North Conway, pricing walking sticks. Just pulled off and walked in like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

Add to these amazifying events my involvement in Argentine Tango. I've danced before, nearly married a dancer once upon a time, years ago, a genuine New York ballerina, who choreographed many of the shows I started out in. Finally learned the basics of jazz tap. Basic, basic ballet.

But tango - the physical sharing of the dance, the elegant expression of writing the music - and the almost psychotic sociology of its practitioners - all speak to a need to express what's going on inside me in a global manner, with all the tools I have to hand - my body seems to be catching up.

I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

William James, the 19th Century American psychologist and philosopher, was of the opinion that feeling resided in the body at a deep, atavistic level and that our conscious mind, the ape coming late to the evolutionary party, as it were, recognized emotions by observing them in the body's reactions first, then expressing them.

Brain scans show this to be on the right track. Our bodies react first with lizard-brain speed, apprehending something and reacting - then our ape-brains sort it out, label it and express it.  Many paraplegics admit that they have muted emotional lives, the best explanation being that their brains are cut off from their primary source of emotional stimulus.

So the wisdom of the body is immediate and true - or at least, accurate. The brain can also be immediate and true if not trained to hide or obfuscate, whether out of fear or traumatic experience.

I suppose the brain could draw the opposite, more positive, honest conclusion as well, if the circumstances were right.

So perhaps my body is catching up with itself, that parts of me - parts that are just some of many parts of me - are taking over the microphone - in this case, microphones shaped like two walking sticks I bought some months ago - and insisting that I walk two or three miles a day, blast my way up and down Bradbury Mountain, work on simple core exercises, work on basic technique, over and over around the floor, just as I did when studying fencing as a kid, marching when in drum corps.

Technique that serves you so that you don't even think about it when you're performing. "You practice you scales, your chords", said jazz great Dizzy Gillespie," then you forget all that shit and just blow".

Tonight I set a record - I walked three miles on an in-town course with an average of 15:49 per mile.

I started recording in March - 22:08 per mile.

I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

But I have a feeling that my body knows who I am better than I do - and that means that "who I am" may not be "who I am supposed to be".

I think I'll go for a walk up Bradbury Mountain in the morning and see what comes.

Portland, Maine