How to Love a Wolf: Day 37, July 7, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: Day 37

When I saw this picture of me, teaching recently, I thought: "this light is great oh wait is that me oh god that can't be me is that what I look like when did I become this who am I oh no do people know?"

It's hard to write that. It's also funny: the humor that enters now is among the greatest gifts of my life.

Then, after that long run-on thought, I thought something utterly absurd, like: "I can't *share* this picture...because then people will *know* that *that's* what I look like"...

...As if I were invisible.

...As if I operate effectively in the world yet retain a power to disappear at will and re-enter the world, with agency, purpose, and direction, kind of like the voice of Superman's dad in the first movie.

...As if I weren't teaching a dance class that I actually meant to teach, filled with amazing (I mean that) movers listening with intention to my invitations to 'drop the fat' (as in release the holding, not 'lose' it—[hand-up, pause, look away, shake head once, tiny groan, as if to emphasize)].

...As if I were in a dream and suddenly exposed in that dream, naked, revealed for the first time *as I am*...utterly unprepared for the litany of performances, exams, first days of school, operations, marriages, conversations, care of mutant child-cat-paperclip. Life.

Then, as I looked past this one picture and onto the others, the Goddesses of Midlife granted me the perspective to remember every single fucking picture of myself I've looked at since puberty—when I was stunned into recognizing with the biggest exhale of humility my beautifully human body in a constant (duh) state of change, usually growth, expansion, age—and had (just a moment before) had the impulse to be repulsed. I had this memory, and then, like a dull thud of maturity, the corresponding memory: the one where I realize (over and over and over) that *that* picture, actually, is not only not so bad, but kind of great, and definitely a reminder/reflection/representation of the longing, good human that I was when I hated the very image in front of me.

Anyway, with thanks to those Goddesses of Midlife, I chilled the fuck out and looked again at the picture of body/self/Molly/changeling I was so ready to disavow, shudder, hide from. I saw (in my mind, recalling the day) the faces of the people in the room with me. Tears burned in the backs of my eyes, as they do now, remembering again. I saw them, these soft beauties like deer and fox and rock and river, looking at me, not with judgment or fear or disgust, but with interest, the leaning-in of trust and (sometimes) new, aha considerations. I hear (now) the inescapable audacity of my (Goddess of Midlife) voice, a voice that is sometimes waaaaaay ahead of the still-17-year-old me who wears vanity like a coat of arms. [Truth: just two years ago I was mixing tiny vials of homemade skincare from micro-doses of high density cosmetic ingredients ordered in foil refrigerated packets from Amazon. And I do love a good science experiment.]

I chilled the fuck out and remembered the cycle of hate, appreciation, hate, appreciation and wondered if I could possibly by the Graces of this day circumvent the cycle and jump to a new wheel, a new groove, a new spiral.

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I remember now my grandmother Katharine Clifford and great Aunt Mary. I remember as a young child looking forward to the time when my face, hands, neck, and gestures might gain the gravitas and unique Irish-Catholic pained, give-a-fuck ethos bestowed by their en vivo flesh. I thought they—sisters—were regal. No, no, let me correct myself lest I veer into patriarchal registers of power: I thought they were INTERESTING; to be desired as a young girl. I thought their faces with wrinkles, dips, and crevices were fascinating, their hands capable of complex non-narrative depictions while lifting black Maxwell House coffee cup to mouth, their papery necks a novel distraction of elegance from the mundanity of evenness, like slow to change sand distracts from its more glamorous oceanic partner in flow. Simply, I saw their skin, flesh, shape, and embodiments as having a variety that my childlike complexion lacked. This list of their virtues is endless and nearly (could be) forgotten under the Salemesque, Giles Cory weight of tonnes of Glamours, Seventeens, Cosmo magazines. [I am reaching back to pluck that girl, me, as yet less colonized by those 'zines and boys and girls and gazes, and beckoning her to dart across a young adulthood poisoned by ink and trauma to a fire now burning hot from the fuel of those pages.]

I had not yet, then, when my aesthetics were so magical and dare I say ethical, learned to fear age, nor to auto-fetishize (read: objectify and loathe) my own shape, appearance, outline, relative smoothness.

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Something happens to me through the crucible of dancing that takes me to those fires, deer and fox and rock and river, to an oceanic flow. I am not talking about the dance "field" with its marketplace and trends and jockeying and snares. But maybe the dance cosmos. Where disappearance and appearance rule in harmony, with a humor that says, in equal measure: chill the fuck out, trust, consider anew, and, thankfully, 'send the Goddesses of Midlife in for this one.'

Photo by BMBO Creations.