It starts with a hungry T. rex that I think may be satisfied with a pizza crust. I write these words,

I’ve found a way to perch from the rafters of a high ceiling. T.rex is nosing around me like a dog/bear/wolf might when collecting scents. What can I offer this creature? What could satisfy such a big appetite?

These are some of my first notes from a night’s dreaming. More words follow, and more dreams come up as my haul from the night. I don’t always have ample time, but this morning I do, and as I linger with my dreams, the ones from the night before have something to say too. I can’t help but notice how they speak to one another, with themes rearranged into different scenarios. And as I stay in the dreaming field just a little bit longer, like the alchemist, all of this is boiled down into a drop - an elixir of longing I carry with me into the day.

Movement Score:

Where do you connect with longing? Is there a time of day, a place, a position? a memory? a familiar impulse? a dream image? Do you have a way to experience it moving through you? Around you? Are you the rock that the water flows around? Are you the water? Are you both?

Once you're in a place that feels like it can receive you, activate your imagination, rearrange your limbs as needed, and explore the contours of your longing. Here is a menu of options:

Lay down. Curl and arch, purr too if you like, like a cat half asleep and half awake in a pool of warm sunlight.

Stretch long. Long belly and wide-mouthed yawn.

Nuzzle your face into your inner upper arm. One side and then the other.

Shake

Run. Run in place. Run and actually make tracks.

Pounce, which is to say play with your balance. One foot and then the other. light feet like rock hopping in a creek, active eyes searching for your next perch.

Swat/Bat/Grab finding both calculated speed and conversely being taken for a ride by the swat, which is initiated not just from your paws but from your sternum, your armpit, or your hips.

How is Longing’s gesture gesturing through you today?

Curling up or reaching?

Yawning and stretching? Running? Or both?

Caressing a tree and drinking in the scent of her?

For example, every time I go food shopping, I connect to a sense of tiredness. If I can’t lie down on the grocery store floor and I know not everyone in the store wants to hear how utterly tired I feel I can admit the minor gesture. I can spill over with an exhaustion that is bigger than me and taking my leaking self from the store I can and as you take your leaking self out the door is there a place that you would like to saturate with utter exhaustion? Pour, spill, ooze, melt into?