Descent

I have started to work on a new dance piece.  It will be a duet and is intended to be quite intense. It will be called 'Descent'.  
There are so many things we learn through our bodies. In ways we don't often acknowledge.  
The unsaid words, the habits of thought and feeling, all the millions of patterns we build over a lifetime. All these lodge in the body, to become the way we hold ourselves, the way we breathe.  We send messages to each other through this, it becomes the way we hold our children, talk to strangers, treat our lovers. 
Now we no longer live alongside those who are aging, sick or dying. they are sent away to care homes and hospitals. So this source of knowledge, the unspoken body knowledge, is being lost. Old age is an incurable condition, it always worsens and is ultimately 100% fatal, and we all get it. But now- even as our doctors and scientists learn more and more about it, we experience less and less of it through our animal selves, our bodies.
I have decided that this phase of my life, while I live with and care for my mother on this last journey of her life, will be a gift to myself. A time of learning and openness. I know this is romanticisation of a process that is far from beautiful, but that is the choice I have made. 
And that will be the subject of the dance piece.
Starting with the long slow descent of the spine, it will explore, gather and weave this experience into something .... that may, just may ... make sense.  
I found this poem I had scribbled on a piece of a programme coming back from seeing a ballet in Sadlers Wells last year.  It's part of this weave:

The Separation of Difference

We are constantly being born.
That first wrenching parturition
Constantly repeated.

To blend is bliss
But to separate is to become.

This mother’s womb does not devour,
Suffocate,
But still, it clings,
Reaches out to a hand long gone,
Though still-present.

That never knew oneness, sameness,
Only ever the separation of difference. 

And I cannot go with you, 
Small hand in yours,
On this last journey
Alone.
Cath Blackfeather