How to Love a Wolf: Christmas Edition, December 24, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: Christmas Edition

It's been a while.

I'm sitting in what should be the dining room of this large white farmhouse. Zemmi has taken the sheepskin-covered loveseat for herself, as she should. I'm in a high backed chair facing her across a round table lit by a single candle. She'll soon move to be closer to me and crouch on the back of this chair.

Until last week, this room has been mostly empty, functioning as part studio, part entryway, part walk-through space between the rest of the house and the kitchen. During Covid I put down a Marley floor and taught dance classes from this room. It became a space in which, each time I walked through, I chastised myself a little for not "dancing more," or using the space more productively.

A few days ago I hired a local high school student to help me move furniture around. I'm resolved to redecorate to make this house work for me for the remaining months of my occupancy. I cleared everything but cushions and a couple lamps from the regal, tall-ceiling'd living room. Since then, I've spent more time attending to my body, outside of teaching or directing rehearsal, than I have in probably three years. Certainly more time than I have in the last year, when I've been on embodied lockdown: a year of my life when I *should* be moving, and simultaneously a time when I least want to move. The first such time in decades, and, sometimes, increasingly, I miss my good friend, movement. The weirdness of this pause has made me a better teacher, though, less drive-y, and in some ways still yet to unfold, it's probably making me a better dancer.

Once, I had a minor catatonic seizure in the studio at Northwestern. I'd been at the hospital the day before getting a couple of pre-travel precautionary injections for an upcoming trip to Bhutan. Catatonic seizures, I later learned, is a rare side effect of one of the injections. I was sitting on the black Marley floor, about to teach the next movement phrase for an advanced class of dancers. I had just told a joke, and was turning my head back around to the front of the room. Suddenly, time seemed to stop. I couldn't move. The feeling was so low key and so strange. It wasn't like my body stiffened or tightened. It was sort of like a daydream state that I couldn't snap myself out of. A case of the "stares," but deeper, closer in to my space of most aloneness. A pause that just kept going. I thought the pause, the strange feeling, would pass, and then it didn't. I could feel the students waiting, and their brows starting to furrow; and, without panic or even worry, I knew that something was wrong. So I said, "something's not right; go get Joseph" (Mills, the chair of the dance program at the time).

He came and we went to the hospital. The seizure passed, probably within moments and long before we got the E.R. Joseph waited with me while the staff ran a bunch of tests, but already I knew I was fine. It happened, and it passed. The feeling has stayed with me, though, and I call it up in moments of pause, reverie, just being; I find myself envisioning that a moment's pause extends past the acceptable limits, and then longer, and longer still. But what I remember most about those moments that day in the studio at Northwestern was the absence of panic. The quiet inside my body and mind, like being tucked away watching a snowfall. I remember the kindly faces of the students, still chuckling from a jovial moment, their bodies expectant for what would come next. I remember feeling that I could have just stayed there for as long as it took, but I worried about their worry, about their clocking of the stretch to the acceptable pause. And I remember the alacrity and calm that took over when the student's realized that something wasn't right, and flew quietly into action.

—

It's a room with seven doors. The one I'm sitting in now in the large farmhouse. Not a large room, this means that it's mostly *door*. The Room of Seven Doors. A container of portals. A space of the liminal, as my sister reminded me yesterday. Like a lot of my life right now, it's not quite what was before, and not quite what will be.

—

I struggled with Christmas for a long, long time. A very good gift-giver, I began to fear gift giving, the hustle-and-bustle, what I perceived as the expectations of extraversion, sociality, abundance that didn't match the kinds of abundance I longed for. In this way, and others, I'm my mother's daughter. She always wanted a "simpler" Christmas and, a single mom, how could she not? I didn't know, meaning I didn't *really* know, what she wanted, but I formed my own longings as if they were her longings. I formed my own version of a simple Christmas that's been floating in that space of most aloneness for decades, waiting for me to thaw it out and take a closer look.

It's taken me until this year, even just these last few days, to realize that my desire for isolation—the parts of me that embody the archetypical hermit—has been with me my whole life, at least for as long as I can remember myself, being. At its core is a recognition of something sacred that takes place in deep solitude, the kind of solitude that settles in after being alone transitions, passes through the liminal, into awakening.

I'm blessed with a family to whom I can say, "I'm going be spend Christmas alone this year." They've grown to understand, accept, and (hopefully) not worry. I love my family: they are a team of deeply kind people, smart, keen thinkers; they have integrity and live from that place. We're lucky. That space of my most-aloneness is hard to describe, and harder still for me as a young person to describe to others about how I might want to spend a time that is so commonly about togetherness. It was hard to say: "Nothing is wrong; I'm just waiting for this strange, special pause to settle in." And, to be sure, the alchemy that has made me accept my needs for solitude depends on the base metal of being accepted by others, by this family, for having a need that doesn't match their own but that they recognize as true and worthy.

I sense the sacred in that, in this, in the space and time of solitude; the liminal; the portal *between* that can arise at any moment, really, but tends to emerge for me right around Christmas, when the light is just starting to return, and to return so slowly it seems like an extended pause.