Sometimes I have wanted to escape the emptiness I feel inside of myself. I believe this emptiness started at the beginning of my life when my twin was lost in the womb. Missing fingers, missing connection, emptiness where once there was fullness, wholeness. I have always wanted to know more and have been drawn towards loss and grief. I have looked in so many places –, for a while unconsciously, to try to understand how to be with it or to somehow make it okay. I am still learning how to accept loss as part of living, how to have a soft, open palm with life. I often want to death grip onto life for fear of loss, which is one reason this project is personally important to me. It’s an exercise in holding loss as a connective experience. It is also why I have come to imagine the soft open palm as a somatic guide for how to let life and death come and go. If we want to control the butterfly, to keep it “forever” in our grips, we grasp and squeeze, we suffocate, and ultimately crush it, missing the very experience itself that we were so afraid to lose. 

I have started to believe that each of us carries a form of the “emptiness” within us, and each experience of loss calls us back to this place within ourselves. I have come to see this “emptiness” as a portal into the spaciousness inside my own body, around my body, and ultimately into space and timelessness itself, into a connection with those that have passed, into a world of non linear time and expansiveness. We may each call this “emptiness” something different, depending on where we are in our lives and how we’re relating to it. We might call it the void, trauma, pain, depression, god, goddess, goddex, spirit, surrender, expansion, connection. Feeling into this spaciousness can be frightening - it’s frightening without boundaries, without the ground, and without remembering that we’re not alone - it can feel dissocassiatingly huge. The project hopes to create containers that illuminate this giant web we are connected by and ground this expanse in community.

Years ago, after a traumatic brain injury, I became fascinated by the negative space between the trees. Having lost my sense of my body in space I was comforted by how absence and emptiness seemed woven into the fullness. I became curious about what that does to my sense of self, when I’m no longer floating alone in space but connected by space. My yoga teachers Jessica Von Schlichten and Mathew Sanford teach people of all abilities and disabilities by utilizing this in between space. Becoming aware of this empty space as supportive and full, we can grow our sense of self into something that does not end at the confines of the skin. I’ve been studying it in my own body and I’ve found that fatigue, pain and loss have been the most direct teachers of how to move into this larger space. Suffering simultaneously pulls you deeper into your own body and through that can expand you further beyond the confines of your “self”. It’s as if loss is the force that pokes holes in our “veils” and reveals something more magical, mysterious, and full. It is the force that illuminates the invisible web in which we are all connected by. I’ve wondered whether the reflexive death grip on life needs to be held in a larger body, the one that meets the edges of my skin and connects to your body, to the land, the sky, the bugs and trees and spider webs. The larger body that enters in through the breath, animating myself and animating you.

I worked a lot on this project over the past summer of 2023. A summer with more record heat days of 100+ temperatures and air quality alerts from wildfire smoke than I can remember. Loss is rampant; our world is shifting. Many are already losing their lives, their homes, and ways of being. It is time to grieve and adapt. It is time to remember that we are not alone in our grief. I’m not sure what the future holds for us, but my body often feels frantic, confused and exhausted. My body knows something, and it is screaming to be connected in the grief. Grieving the climate is so much larger than an individual body, we have to grieve together. One body alone cannot contain the pain, fear, loss, and confusion of climate change. This project is one practice of many, a piece in the larger web of how humans are meeting this moment in time. To lean on each other and remember our webs. 

It is an ongoing response to what it means to be mortal, what it means to live through climate collapse, lost love, the vanished pair of sneakers, missing keys, illness, death, lost dreams for what life would be. For what it means to be human in a world that is increasingly unknown, shifting quicker than we can keep pace - climate, technology, intensifying demands of capitalism. It is both the small things that slip quickly through our fingers and the larger ones that contribute to this sense that everything will in some way die or be lost. 

This project is also a celebration of life, of our stories, of the wonder that shines within us. The luminous flickering of life. It is in honor of all the stories that have needed to be told but haven’t known where to be heard and held. It is also a question: what keeps us singing even after we experience devastating losses? I think the most important holes that loss pokes in our veils is the illusion that we ourselves will not die and also, specifically in western culture, that we are separate from each other and the world. Loss is a force that is beyond our control, and in that way it is also a force that can illuminate the larger world we are intrinsically connected to. It was through the losses of illness that I realized I could let go into the mountains when my individual life felt too filled with pain. That we are in fact not in total control, can be a frightening realization, but also a relieving one. It can help us to live fuller and become more alive and teach us to get messy because it is all going to end. I believe that if we are closer to an understanding of how fleeting and temporary our lives are, then we can actually be more fully alive.

It is a sprawling, messy project. Something as mysterious and limitless as loss doesn’t need perfection- it needs vitality and aliveness, a certain adaptability and warmth. It needs to not feel someone turn away. No perfect scripts, no getting it right, no walking away feeling you said just the right thing. It’s sprawling, spirals, inherently uncatchable and it needs to be met with a vastness of presence, and the okayness of not knowing. 

More than anything, this project is for my twin, a being whom I started this life entwined with and whose formless presence has filled me with questions. It’s for the dance we continue to share of pouring our souls between life and death and the grief that is tended to each season.

“He does not mean that it does not hurt.

He does not mean that we are not frightened.

Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet.

This is what it means to be alive.” - Madeline Miller, Circe

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

-Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods