Dick Anderson is behind the idea to make the A.T. an international trail. The way he sees it, more than 200 million years ago, the mountain ranges were all connected anyway — back when the Earth had only one giant continent called Pangaea. That land mass broke apart, and “when it opened, some of the Appalachians stuck to each big piece,” Anderson says. “The big pieces were Africa, Europe and the United States.”

So Anderson is trying to get all the countries that were once connected by that mountain range to designate certain paths as part of the International Appalachian Trail, or “IAT.”

People are taking the idea of a supersized hiking path seriously. There’s already an 1,800-mile section of the IAT in Canada. It starts at the end of the American leg of the trail in Maine and goes all the way up the coast of Newfoundland. Anderson says a number of people have already hiked the entire path.

My goal in life is to hike the Appalachian trail, and that it would open up across borders in such a way–I find astounding and amazing. I would sooo dream of walking that, although I doubt I ever would or could.

But…at the same time. I do find it interesting? Ironic? Intriguing? Not sure of the word–I find it *something*–that “hiking” is the officially sanctioned way to cross borders. That–the original travelers of the Morocco/Appalachia trail would’ve been traveling for reasons similar to Mexicans coming to the US through the US/Mexico border. But some how *hiking* has become what is deemed a more appropriate form of travel. Of course, hiking entails many purchases (gear heads anyone?) and is respectful of borders and boundaries.

Everything else is criminalized.
The original trail between Appalachia and Morocco would never happen today because governments somewhere would’ve thrown the travelers in detention centers and/or deported them (as happened in Iran and happens on the US/Mexico border).

Which makes me wonder–what is the nostalgia that hikers seem to be reaching for while walking ancient trails like the Appalachia? What is the nostalgia that hikers seem to fill up with when dreaming of an open trail to Morocco?

Is it a longing for a freedom we don’t know anymore? Is it an addicts longing for “adventure” that so many “extreme” sports people seem to be on an eternal hunt for?

Is it a current political desire to eliminate borders?
Or an inner unexplainable human need to just walk? And capitalistic endorsed consumerism seems to be the only way to go about fulfilling that need?

Some things I’ve (re)learned from a year of riding.

The climb is its own reward:

That hubs are spaces of tension. (The graffiti on this one reads “Hike, not bike.” What does that make those of us who do both?)

That property-owning humans may think they’re the most important beings in the trail:

…but they’re wrong:

That there’s no shame in dismounting if you unsure of the terrain:

But sometimes, you just trust that your body knows what to do:

That when the trail keeps getting steeper, it can actually be a good thing:

***

And after a year of thinking about it, I decided that on my bike, I’m a cyborg.

Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labor. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and social bodies, is made possible for us through our labor.

–Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

i wonder if a baby is aware enough to feel her first feelings–apprehension, curiosity, interest, fear. or if she just rests. nature’s hormones helping her to just sit back and relax until it’s all over.

knowing that my son listened to the patter of shower hitting my belly as he was born (that was the only way to calm him down as a sick newborn), i think that babies are more aware than we think.

we come into the world riding a cycle, a part of it, creating it, noticing it.

spring is rebirth. all of us have been born before. and will be born again. spring just reminds us.

before the joy of new life,
there is quiet
contemplation.

… when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore.

That’s fascinating. It tells me a lot about my body, body memory, and the words we use for movement. We understand language, ideas, the world in part through our physical bodies and the movement of our bodies. We yield and open to each other, to concepts, to conversation. It’s not just a question of body language being independent of mind, something that happens when you aren’t looking. It is that movement of the body is an integral part of feeling, speaking and apprehending language and, further, the world itself.

The body’s movement is language. Movement is understanding. Understanding arises in and from movement. The presence and possibility of such bodies is awe-some. Understanding, speaking, being in the world is literally a sustained sequence of movement: a dance. When dancers talk about pedestrian movement, we often mean movement that originates in every day life, that doesn’t necessarily belong to a particulary movement vocabulary. Embodied cognition makes that even more true.

But what about disability? What if your body doesn’t or cannot do what researchers would “expect.” Does that mean that you don’t understand in the same way or cannot process or develop moral cognition? Not being a specialist in the field, I don’t have access to most of the research, but the little available on the web was provocative. Michael Anderson lays out the issues:

… first of all, that no researcher in, or theorist of, embodied cognition has ever suggested that physical handicaps imply cognitive deficits. Nor, if there were differences in the conceptual contents or structures of differently abled individuals, would one expect them to be detectable at the level of the linguistic mastery displayed in conversational interaction (the usual evidence offered by those who object to EC along these lines).** Language and linguistically available concepts are highly abstract phenomena; one would therefore expect the criteria for participation in a linguistic community to be likewise somewhat abstract. Thus, the concept of ‘walking’, in so far as it is logically and semantically related to various concepts of movement, and given that examples of walking exist in, and can be easily seen in the environment, ought to be easily acquirable by an individual who cannot, and who perhaps never could, walk. The concept can be placed in a logical and semantic network which is on the whole grounded, even given that there is no specific experience of walking which directly grounds the concept. Everyone is able to understand things which they have not directly experienced, through imagination, analogy, demonstration, and testimony; the physically disabled are in this regard no different.

** (is to a footnote: “assessments of children with spinal muscular atrophy bear this out”)

I support his conclusion, but not, of course, his language. Walking, it turns out, is less about the planting of one foot in front of the other than the experience and idea of moving through space at a certain time. Granted what you see might be slightly different if you are sitting in a wheelchair from what you would see at, say, a height of 6″ 2′. But then, it would also be different if you were 5″ 4′. And no one would argue that people of “only” average height are unable to develop effective cognitive strategies.

So, yes. It comes down to the act of moving your body. Interesting to find that there is a scientific way of expressing what I thought was only an artist’s take on movement (link here is to an earlier post in bfp’s rethinking walking series). We who move through the world experience the world differently, travel differently, but engage in the same moral and intellectual process of cognition as we go.

I also rather liked the disability rights perspective here as articulated by Jackie Leach Scully (I so liked much of what I could get from the google books clip that I have ordered the book. It seems to put together other thinkers that I am familiar with in oh-so productive ways. hooray!). The excerpts are full of paragraphs like this:

Suppose it really is the case that preflective moral cognition is mediated through sensorimotor pathways mediated by the body interacting with the environment, and that this happens differently when anomalous interactions are involved. It would still be true that adaptions of the environment are a distinctly formative of moral cognition as morphologies, movements or perceptions themselves. It certainly cannot lead to the essentialist conclusion that there is a “disability brain” or “disability mind” that is unlike, or should be treated as unlike, the brains of “normal people.”

I am going to go out on a limb for a second. From studying the history of race and bad evolutionary racial “science” in the early twentieth century, I am wary to make any kind of argument about the connection between brain and disability. Remember the awful stuff about cranium size and race as a justification for why African-Americans could never attain full citizenship. Actually, even now if you do a google search on cranium size and race, you get a series of pretty nasty links, including one to a David Duke site. No link love from me, here.

But I also feel awkward about saying that all brains are the same. These days, we happily accept the idea that all minds don’t work the same way, and we value (except perhaps in grade school) the things different minds do. If we believe that disability is a social construct, made up in part of the negative judgments we impose out of fear and goodness knows what else, what would happen if we admit that brains — like minds and bodies — work differently, that such difference is a social benefit of the highest order, and that we aren’t so filled with fear that we have to denigrate people because their brains are different and work differently? Would difference matter in an objective sense?

What could difference could create? What would we have to set aside in order to see disability brains and minds as powerful creative forces, equal to those of non-disabled people? What if we explicitly worked on movement and cognition, if we could take classes in refining movement with regard to cognition and vice versa? Encouraged people to move and think?  What if dancers were critical to a new society?

Wheelie spins and leaves to go to studio.  I have work to do!

x-posted at my blog here.

I think the short answer is that I am stuck.  That of course is not so much a place as a statement of condition. I hope that the distinction will help me move beyond the sensation.  For stuck, I am.   At West Coast, we often play with stuck or bound movement; that contradiction seems useful, too.  In class and on stage, it always generates interesting movement both to dance and to watch.  How you move when you are stuck is the key question, no?

Mostly, I have appreciated the idea that in my dance life (as opposed to my former life) there is nothing but the present, the next movement, the next project, the next class, the absence of planned career and target lists, the absence of stress, the  ….  And mostly, I have been able to commit to the utter and incredible singularity of each of my daily experiences.  That’s a new for me (I’ve been a follow the rules/worry about the next thing girl all my life). So, let me come clean.  I have no reason to complain about being stuck.  I am where I wanted to be; I worked to be here.  And I will work harder to stay here.  I even kind of feel it is wrong to feel stuck because I am dancing unbelievable work with unbelievable people.  Dancers would kill to be in pieces by choreographers I have had the honor to dance for.  And believe me, honor is an understatement.

And yet, I feel stuck.  (I don’t mean to sound whiny, honestly; I am trying to access a complicated feeling about how to develop as a dancer and person this year.)

While I enjoy the experience of being in the present, I also realize that I have nowhere else to go (that thought that makes me worried.  Will I always be here doing only the daily?  What if?  Worse, what when….?  Am I trapped in the present? Should I be planning/saving for the future?).  My skills are limited: I am not so much a creator of work as I am an interpreter and realizer of other people’s visions.  I am a tool, literally, but probably not in the negative common use of the word.  Understand, please, that I don’t find that a bad thing.  It’s what I am best at in this field; it’s where I find the most pleasure, and my pleasure in my work is what keeps me here.  And yet, this particular skill set is also one of the things that prevents me from doing many other different things.

I want to work at the highest possible level; that’s where I am.  (There aren’t that many places for a disabled dancer to go at a company level and I have been too shy/injured to build networks of other people to move with — should work on changing that).  So, here, I am.  At the very best place to be.  I am not a starter upper — I won’t be starting my own company or even be doing significant amounts of my own choreography.  I am not a fixer-upper, either.  In addition to the work, I have to think of the other side of the coin as my body.  That’s not just my job, it’s also me.  I have to recognize that I have physical limits — and I don’t mean my disability: grin — that’s part of my job.  It’s that I need a body to live with when I am done with my job.  So, I have to remember that I should not be doing certain things (like slamming onto my shoulders or torquing my hip).  I am recognizing that my current approach to dancing — hard on, full out  (or perhaps I have my prepositions mixed) is perhaps more suited to someone in their twenties and less appropriate for a (wannabe grand) old dame.  There’s a reason so many dancers don’t dance at my age; it’s that the body cries in the morning when it gets up and cringes through rehearsals.  Even the adrenaline of performance can seem insufficient.

So, I have to grow as a dancer before I discover that I can’t do it anymore.  I have mapped out for myself a set of things to achieve and accomplish this year.  Some are classes to take; some are new conversations to have; some new experiences to extend my range.  If I can do these things, I will be happy — and I can use the tools that I will have learned to in all walks of whatever life I happen to be in.

In addition to whatever happens next, I also have to plan for disability itself.  If I trash my shoulders dancing, I won’t have them for mobility when I am sixty. It’s all very well to say, but there will be powerchairs …  There may or may not be, depending on how access is granted to this wonderful device.  I can imagine a world where my insurance company says, “You know, you did this to yourself in an unapproved use of your chair.  Don’t expect us and your fellow citizens to pay for it.” “But it was ART,” I will weakly protest.  “Yes,” they will say, “and this is the budget.”

The other thing is pain.  I am so scared of reinjuring myself and of the pain that comes with it.  Accidents happen, but stuff shouldn’t happen because I wasn’t focused or wasn’t taking care or was simply doing stupid stuff.  I am so scared of pain.  Every small twinge has me running to the heating pad, the ice pack, the hot pool, the …  pain has a way of getting inside my head and freezing me.  And at this point, even the things that are disability related pain and not dance-related pain are scary.  I know that they aren’t the same thing.  I know that disability related pain doesn’t mean that I am hurt; it just means that I am hurting.  Different thing.  Different, brain, really.

Taking care of yourself as a dancer is a necessary precursor to the acts of creation that people see on stage.  Non-disabled dancers go through years of training so that they come to know what their limits are, how to take care of themselves, and how to prepare to dance.  Disabled dancers don’t show up with years of training.  We have to figure out our limits (what, I shouldn’t have done that! If I want to do that, I should use these muscles?)  It is also a kind of responsibility we have to each other in the company; we don’t have understudies.  (Runs to ice her shoulders and her hip just in case.

So, this year, I have to grow.  I have to grow for myself as a dancer and thinker.  I have to grow as a writer.  I will take on new projects, ideas, experiments.  I will allow myself to fail, to be told “NO.”  (Well, all right, “no.”)  And maybe, just maybe, at the end of the year, I will have dug deep enough so that I will not only be unstuck, I will be have seen the curtain go up on new vistas.

X-posted at my blog.

If you can’t afford a zine now (and lord knows, I know how that goes!) just know that you will always be able to get the current zine {(re) thinking walking}–I will just have to print off some copies before I send it out!

~en lucha!

I haven’t gotten myself a paper cutter (good holy god those things are *expensive*!!!). But I did get the last batch of zines cut by the official cutter man at my local office supply store. And that made a huuuuuuuuuuuge difference in the overall appearance of the zine. Oh, and I *also* got this zine (stolen sharpie revolution) from C/S distro. Which spends some time talking about/giving advice on “zine layout” (among other things).

I think part of what my zine was struggling with was the layout–I was working with quarter pages (of a standard sheet of paper), and getting all the different quarter pages printed off so that everything went in order etc. was *incredibly* fucking difficult for me. The most time consuming part of creating the zine.

Following the layout advice from s.s.r., I got the zine layout down such that even if I did have to use scissors to cut it, the cut would’ve been a single cut right down the middle, instead of me having to look at every single sheet of paper to make sure I wasn’t cutting into words or pictures. So if you are ADD like me, or have some other sort of issue with being able to organize things spatially and logically–I *highly* recommend getting stolen sharpie revolution!

Anyway–I took my bundle of zines to the Office Supplies store, and the guy working the printing machines sliced the entire bundle in about two seconds all for two dollars. I would prefer to not have to spend that money at all–but for now, while I don’t have my own paper cutter, it’ll have to do. And I must admit, it was highly worth it.

Like I said, the difference in the zine is astounding.

But… I am not sure I like it.

The zines that the last group of people are getting are like a real booklet. The pages all line up together, you can tap the booklet against a table or something and they all line up again, nice and evenly. The folding of the zine was much easier, as all the page sizes matched. I didn’t staple it (an artistic choice that many may not agree with), but now that all the pages are even and clean cut–I don’t know as if it makes much of a difference that it’s not stapled.

I think that there are a lot of benefits to this new clean cut version. And seeing as the critiques that I did get about the zine were mostly about the uneven disheveled appearance–I think it’s good that I figured out this layout/paper cutter style.

But…I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for the uneven unstapled disheveled looking zine. I love texture. That is one of the main reasons I have fought so hard to get this zine done and keep plugging away at it even though it was biting me in the ass so often. I love the texture of zines. One of my favorite zinesters gave me one of her zines out of her purse one time, and it wasn’t stapled, it was sorta crunched up from being in her purse, the pages didn’t fit together cleanly–and to this day, it is one of my all time favorite zines.

I love the feel of the crinkles in my hands. I love needing to rearrange the pages with every page turn so that I can read what she has to say. I love that when I am finished reading, I have to sort of organize the whole booklet again and tap it all together. It’s sorta like a reading ritual. Like, her thoughts can’t be forced into this neat clean package. Like her thoughts are resisting in a *physical* way. Like I am learning a new way to read.

I won’t be arrogant enough to say that my “unclean zine” invokes that sort of feeling in readers. In fact I got a pretty emphatic “I am very frustrated trying to read this thing!” from a dear friend!!! Lol.

But I will say that while I am deeply impressed with the clean cool lines of a good layout and a massive paper cutter–I do enjoy the intimacy of working with my thoughts with my own hands–even if the result is a bit of a mess. (oh, alright, maybe a huge bit of a mess!!! lolololol).

One thing I *do* really like is that I feel like the physicality of my zine actually (re) thought walking as well. I love that it changed and morphed from one set of buyers to another.

Ahhh, impermanence, says the shiny eyed Buddhist bfp.

Oh, and I am working on my next zine! I think it’s only going to be a small run–as I am going to be using a bunch of yellow fabric that I found at a second hand store. So each zine will be hand made by moi! Hooray! But also *booo* because I can tell already, my hands are only going to be able to handle so much of this gluing and sewing and sticking thing.

I’m excited to see how it all goes. How about you? What are you dealing with now in your creative life?

And I am not looking for only positive feedback! If you want to say it sucks, please do so–but please tell me specifically what sucked and why so that I can start working on that particular thing for my next zine!!!

Oh, and if you’re a newbie zinster like I am, or an old timer–PUHLEEZE share some of your own experiences with us!!!!

AND–if you want to order your own zine, click here!

The first zine hand made by brownfemipower, the editorista of the blog, Flip Flopping Joy. Featuring continued commentary in the manner of (re)thinking walking, this zine grapples with brownfemipower’s place as a survivor, Latina, Chicana, immigrant, sexual, organizing, moving mami.

Cost: Baseline=$1.00 plus $1.00 for shipping U.S. 2$ for shipping outside of the U.S.! If you feel it is worth more, please consider paying more! All collected monies will go towards maintaining this website (webhosting services) and the creation of future zines!

Delivery Info: I will be sending out zines every Monday and Thursday. Latest order times for each date will be 8 PM EST the previous day. So, if you order your zine on Sunday at 7:35 PM EST, your zine will go in the mail Monday.

If you order your zine any time on Monday, however, it will be put in the mail on the very next Thursday.

I am doing it this way so that my helper can help me make sure I have all the organizational paper work-y type stuff (for example: correct addresses, etc) taken care of properly.

Once I figured it all out, I will get the information on how to order one out to you!