How to Love a Wolf: only spirals, now, June 15, 2025

How to Love a Wolf: only spirals, now.

September, 2017. This video marked the beginning of a long period of my body attempting to metabolize trauma. The beginning of a period of unanticipated and still-surreal re-traumatizations over the next many years. Surreal? UnreaI.

It's June, 2025. Eight years after this video and many like it, and the first time I'm able to look, take in my body, grappling. The surreality has not completely lifted, nor has the trauma. Nor do I expect them to. I live with these tissues now. Yes, changing. Changed. Always changing, I suppose. Aways remembering. And I have a very good memory. What slips through the sleeve of thinking-memory is sucked into the deeper and wiser memory-archive of body. Clock time slows, morphs. Eventually it vanishes.

Many people, I have found, speak in platitudes about dance. "I hope you are dancing." As if dance is a skeleton key to freedom, resilience, and moving through what is hard. I nod. Yes, I know, I say. But my body knows something harder to put into words, that eviscerates platitudes. Dance is not liberation. It is the vehicle and vessel of change. When we resist change, we are not dancing. We are grasping for the constant-upward, the always-forward, the tyranny of the vertical, transcendent, upright. But sometimes we are not upright. Sometimes we are crushed. And, flesh becoming sand, we have to wait, stay down. We have to feel the weight of our collapsed self; remember the sounds and smells of what it is to be crushed, to be harmed, to be down. We have to see the foot of the oppressor—whether it's a memory, a traumatic event that has become rigid, non-negotiable; or a person, or people, or institution.

My body said: wait. Stay down. See the foot, see the boot it wields. Examine its gait, stride, and strategies. Feel the rumble of its weight and supposed might. Watch, from this place of sand and grit, how the others are blind to the lower, the boots, the sand and grit that was once your flesh. Stay down. Not forever, no. No longer that is needed. Learn, again, to listen. Listen, and let the fluid of tears saturate the sand-and-grit-flesh until it begins to reform. Grieve that it will never be the same: there is no going back.

Only spirals, now.