20/06/2025
Do you dare to move like a barefoot professor?
[do not answer this question from the confines of your computer chair]
Out in the garden we’re all moving with a ‘yes’, though the sheet drying on the line has caught on a twig, and the tulips are still green pointy-headed potential, instead of flowers. Things you don’t really think of are here too, like delicate rosemary flowers, and the garden fork, very straight and vertical, and deflating footballs on the path.
It’s too cold to be barefoot just now. My wellied feet squish down on the muddy lawn and a rotten apple, take care not to skid. I’m a bit like a barefoot professor, with these stiff shoulders seeking more dimensions of movement, full of noticing, and my back exploring its bend. Today, my audience is this bay tree, growing with great vigour, surrounded by its own browned fallen leaves. In an absence of humans, I link arms with this shirt upside-down on the line, move hand-over-hand along the duvet-cover towards the cavalcade of socks.
It’s daring to be here, and be different, and be yourself. This morning, shiatsu-ing an artist, I thought about how creativity is a movement towards something that is not there yet, that it can only become as it unfolds, through curiosity and practice. We like bringing things together, you and me, how the hedge meets the grass, how the aeroplane sounds through the birdsong, how the cool damp air brings the end of the nose into feeling focus.
Doing it, we are in it, and we are it. Bring in the words too, and it’s reaching towards magnificence, while magpies skitter on the roof and somewhere, a wren sings.
-----------------------
some of my writing bringing together different strands of my Shiatsu and movement practices, and my connections to academia!
ESF - European Shiatsu Federation
Shiatsu Society (UK)
