DISCUSSION

With-ness: Between Sensing and Being Sensed

The sensory and movement-based inquiry of my encounters with trees reveals the possibility of a perceptual shift from a narrow experience of embodiment - focused on the will to move and act upon the world, to the expanded experience of being moved by the world. This shift was manifested in the emergence of a felt sense of reciprocity between the human body and the tree. I began the explorations by focusing on scanning, grounding and shaping and ended up with the perception of being scanned, grounded and shaped by the natural environment. How does this shift happen? How do we become aware that the soil, the tree, the leaves and the air are touching us? In her philosophy of dance, Kimerer LaMothe (2016: 109, original emphasis) argues that: ‘Every movement “we” as individuals make expresses an impulse to connect with whatever other movements have enabled and will enable our ongoing participation in the rhythms of bodily becoming’. In this inquiry I ask and explore somatically how this connection is experienced and expressed as the weaving of threads between the sensing body and the sensible world. There are three key threads emerging from my inquiry: reciprocity unfolds in the spaces between the human body and the tree; it unfolds as the awareness of being witnessed by the tree; language can contribute creatively to this unfolding as a directly felt expression of movement.

How can we engage and become aware of the movement of the tree if, approached with our unaided senses, we perceive it as a static entity? We cannot physically move and be moved by the tree as we can move and be moved by another human being. Our human body can, however, meet the tree because we are both living forms of this same living earth, because we are both earthbound. We can bring attention to the agency of other natural forces moving the tree, like the wind moving its leaves, the sun feeding it with light, the soil providing it with minerals and nutrition and the air exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen with it. These movement processes are much more subtle and harder to perceive within human spatiotemporal patterns. Seeking cues on the tree’s movement leads to shifting the focus of inquiry to the livingness of the in-between spaces: between the tree and the land, between my body and the land, between the tree and my body. These meeting spaces are spaces of contamination: both body and tree, both body and land, both tree and land. It is in the earthiness of these in-betweens that the perception of our human spatiotemporality meets the spatiotemporality of the tree. For example, when I lie under the tree and observe how body and earth are scanning each other, I can meet the movement of the tree in the complex microcosmos unfolding between its fallen leaves, the soil and the vegetal and animal beings participating in the process of decomposition occurring above and around its roots. I can meet the movement of the tree also in the exploration of grounding when pouring weight with my feet into and out of the soil in which the roots of the tree are embedded while leaning with my body on its trunk. In this case, it is possible for me to sense how reciprocity is incarnated in the transmission of movement impulses occurring across the circuit created by the tactile connection between land, body and tree. The investigation of the reciprocity of perception in the spaces between human and natural elements resonates with Tim Ingold’s (2009) anthropological study of perception of the environment as a process occurring in a ‘fluid space’ in which organisms ‘leak’. Drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, Ingold (2009: 153) contends that sense perception is not an interior faculty of the individual, separate body but, rather, ‘one aspect of the unfolding of a total system of relations comprised by the creature’s embodied presence in a specific environment’. This system of relations unfolds in a fluid space in which ‘there are no objects of perception’ and ‘every living thing is itself an entanglement’ (Ingold 2009: 154). In my inquiry the fluidity of the spaces between my body and the tree was perceived and understood as an osmotic experience, that is, as an experience of sensory inter-penetration. The awareness of this carnal exchange was experienced and articulated as a process of witnessing and being witnessed. 

Weaving the threads between the sensing body and the sensible world involves engaging a more subtle and challenging form of bodily attention. By approaching perception as a process distributed throughout the entirety of the body and integrated with the sense of self, it is possible to decentre human agency so that the tree can be met as a demanding and responding being. Andrea Olsen (2002: 4) describes the dialogue between body and earth in terms of ‘the capacity to maintain inner awareness while attending to the outer world’ in a ‘process of inclusive attention’. In this inquiry the fleshy nature of reciprocity emerges particularly in and as the embodied awareness of witnessing the presence of the tree and being witnessed by its presence. How can I become a witness for this tree as I lie under it? How do the leaves fallen from the tree witness my presence as I lie on them? In the active experience of with-ness (witnessing), the tree is encountered as the sensible world and the human body is engaged as a being sensitive to it. In the passive experience of with-ness (being witnessed), the body is encountered as nature and the tree is engaged as a being sensitive to it. In both cases, the human body and the tree are there for each other. The active and passive perspectives exist as imbricated one into the other rather than as exclusive to each other. The tree and the body are witnessing something about each other’s living systems and bodily and affective states which belong to our shared earthly nature. With-ness is a mode of resonating with, of vibrating with the presence of the other through key somatic processes such as breathing and touching. With-ness involves being moved by each other’s presence by making our embodied connection accessible to the senses. If I want to know how the tree feels, I need to feel like the tree. As an osmotic process of becoming, with-ness requires the capacity to wait and to listen without judgment, both to one’s body and to the body of the tree.

To perceive reciprocity in the experience of sensing the tree and to evolve an awareness of this reciprocity through movement, we need to slow down human temporal patterns. We need to embrace a meditative form of stillness which puts us in a condition to intercept intuitively non-human temporal patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. First of all, we need to give ourselves enough time for wandering freely and curiously in nature and the chance to allow natural elements to speak to us through what is happening - rather than through what we make happen. Take the blossoming of a flower. This natural process occurs over a long time, but it becomes perceivable to human consciousness as a single, integrated phenomenon only by watching its time lapse. To sense the agentic forces of nature we need to frame them in human times. Otherwise, what we see is immobility, which is confused with inertness. The much more extended temporal patterns that characterize the experience of being a tree is linked with the fact that the tree is moving in relation with everything else in a web of interdependencies that is extremely hard to notice and understand for us humans. In my inquiry the importance of slowing down time for experiencing with-ness has led to the emergence of a stage-based exploratory framework. With-ness was not sought but met in a gradual process of letting moments and sensations emerge spontaneously. Movement explorations were engaged as an improvisational process of going through stages of spatial and temporal perception of the presence of the tree. These stages emerged through speaking out and articulating the lived experience of noticing perceptual shifts in the experience of movement. My exploration of grounding with the tree, for example, was based on three macro stages: seeing the tree, meeting the tree and touching the tree. These stages work as broad intentions rather than prescriptive categories. The perceptual shift from one state to the other cannot be expected or anticipated.

As a practice of waiting for subtle sensory inputs to reach us and take us into the next movement, the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’ is deeply reliant on the tactile experience of one’s body weight in relation with the natural environment. Both humans and trees are bound to the force of gravity. Touch and the sensation of weight felt in different body parts and in different bodily positions emerge from the inquiry as secret codes of the human companionship with trees. For example, when combined with the fine-tuned sensation of pouring weight into and out of the soil, the trunk or a branch, waiting comes alive as a very fleshy and bony experience of with-ness. Even just by attending to standing we can notice how our perception of weight reveals the sensation of being witnessed by the earth. Weight is also a code through which the tree and the earth witness each other. The tree exists in a constant dynamic of pouring weight and pressure into the earth and of moving away from it. 

The third key thread emerging from the inquiry is the creative and facilitating role of language (written and spoken) in the experience and understanding of the reciprocity between the human body and the tree. As a channel to connect with and bring awareness to sensory experience, language participates in the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’ by enriching the embodied experience of relating with the natural environment. There is a tendency to mistrust words in dance and somatic practices that is often linked with asserting the central role of the senses. Why do we name experiences if they can be sensed somatically without the intervention of words? In her phenomenological analysis of movement Sheets-Johnstone (2011a: 127) argues that ‘it is one thing to attend to movement kinesthetically and to discover experientially the distinctive play of qualities that are there in our movement, and quite another to try to put that kinesthetic experience into words’. According to Sheets-Johnstone (2011a: 127), when we pay bodily attention, our direct, non-verbal experience of movement is ‘kinetically unmistakable’ because the spatiotemporal perception of how we move coincides with the actual manner in which we are moving. In trying to find words, on the other hand, we run the risk of adding ‘unwanted association’ to our descriptions (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a: 127). In this inquiry I have explored how words can be met, rather than found, in the kinaesthetic process of listening to and with the body.

Drawing on David Abram’s (2010, 2017) philosophical anthropology of depth perception, I have approached naming as a practice of attention which helps connect the sensing body with the sensuous world. The type of language that I have engaged during and after movement explorations tries to speak of and to the body and the tree as intelligent beings. This involves naming specific parts of the body (e.g., pelvis, feet, eyes and spine) and of the tree (e.g., trunk, roots, branches and leaves) as agentic forces rather than things controlled by the brain. The working of these bodily agents of consciousness is foregrounded to attention in the process of following the moment as it arrives. Words are engaged in their capacity to reveal and evoke very specific sensations in the unfolding of an integrated sense of perception. Uttering and writing words can also contribute to perceive what is happening at a more subtle level of embeddedness by bringing to life sensory aspects of the encounter with nature that extend beyond the kinaesthetic sense of one’s self-movement (e.g., the light of the sun, the songs of the birds, a leaf falling off the tree). Like the imprint left by the body on a pile of leaves, words are traces of the ephemeral reciprocity felt between the body and the earth. This inquiry shows how, in speaking, naming acts as the echo of bodily becoming by coming into the world when the felt sense of the movement is about to land. In writing, the traces left by movement explorations emerge as the lingering qualities of a mode of embodiment that is re-engaged in the act of moving the fingers on the screen of a digital device or on a piece of paper.