Big Mama by Arianne MacBean

I used to tell my dance students that the dance floor was like a Big Mama, aways there to catch them, always there to sink into, always there to press back. This was my way of teaching them to trust the floor, that it was not a place where they needed to fear crashing into, but a place that wanted to take them in, hug them, love them. As dancers, we spend much time focused on the floor, how to release into it with control, how to push off it, even how to defy it and manipulate it. It becomes our partner in all dances, this blanket beneath us. But I haven’t been in a dance studio for a few years and so I have found myself looking up, instead of down.

Something happens when you start raising your eyes toward the sky. Your experience of yourself becomes not so much about how you respond to the ground beneath you but rather how the world responds to you being in it. You notice, if you are attuned, that just like you, everything around you has a perspective – everything you look at looks back at you. This is an essential aspect of environmental psychology, which examines the interaction between how the environment affects humans and how humans also affect the environment. When you begin to feel the way the earth, plants, animals, wind interacts with you, a very magical convergence happens. You become aware of the in-outness of being, the small-bigness of existence, the mundane-divinity of life.

There is a Coast Live Oak tree in my backyard, probably over 100 years old. It reaches at least 80 feet high and maybe wider from drip line to drip line. I have the perfect view of it from my studio, where I see clients, exercise, and makes whatever strange guttural sounds and wild stomping movements that need to come up from the root of my being. As I wail, hum, kick, and slide, Big Mama stands stoically arching gracefully over me.

This Big Mama is not here to catch me if I fall or surrender. No. This Big Mama is a monument and rememberer. She is her own icon. She holds her lifetime in circles of sapwood and heartwood, layers of herself that were born then died and were born again. She reminds us that time passes easily, but growth takes effort. This effort is evident in her thick sinewy branches, which look as if she was flexing her muscles as she sprouted and flourished. Her branches twist, lengthen, then wind around again to produce more limbs, then more, then more. Her trunk reaches up from the earth sideways, then three thick offshoots counterbalance in the opposite direction as they extend up and out, eventually tapering off to wispy twigs with flutters of tiny, prickly leaves. In the rain, fog, sun, and wind, she stands and sways, responding to whatever the world sends her by relinquishing and resisting at the same time, relentless in her purpose. She belongs here and she knows it.

Although I cannot see her dynamic movement with my naked eye, I see proof that she has moved in the tendons of her boughs, the tucks and seams are braided into her body. She dances an unseeable dance, but I know it’s happening as I look at her. I seek her knowingness, her brazen stance, and when I take her in, her power fuels me. I cannot know what she knows, but I feel the pulse of our connection in my own trunk and limbs. In Big Mama, I understand that the world has its own perspective of me, just as I have my own perspective of the world. My movement around Big Mama becomes part of one of the grooves in the rings of her life. My presence becomes sewn into her density, as she wraps herself around the furrow of my being with her inching internal halos. When I touch her, when I smell her, when I move to her, she responds in kind, dancing her ancient dance of silent grace. We sway in a duet of souls. She leads, I follow, then I lead, and she follows. This Big Mama is not the floor to dance upon but the dance herself, miraculous in her simple beauty and presence. I feel deep gratitude to partner with her in this mundane-divine dance of life.

BIO: Arianne MacBean is a writer, educator, and Artistic Director of The Big Show Co. – an LA-based dance-theater group. She recently graduated with an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and currently works as a Somatic Psychotherapist as a registered Associate Marriage & Family Therapist (License #139718) in Los Angeles, CA employed by Here Counseling and supervised by Connor McClenahan, PsyD. You can find more of Arianne’s writing at her Blog Write Big.