West of Alice Springs, last October, Bettye and I stopped to look at the ochre-pits where the Arrernte people had gathered ceremonial ochre for generations. We walk in from the road. The experienced world amazes, always... After marvelling awhile at the vertical striations of rich and varied colour in the stream bank, we decided to go on, up the track to the ridge and its eventual juncture with the Larapinta Trail.
Walking along the stony creek bed, Bettye suddenly paused and exclaimed, “This is why I love the wilderness! It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones...”
We walked on in silence, making our way up the ridge. There’s a deep well of attention, which envelops me sometimes when I’m realising something.
Thinking the body-senses...
This is ankle-turning country, this is snake country, and I’m all alert. Sensing... Seeing and hearing, of course, but these are less important at the moment. Rather, I am living especially in the body-senses of touch, life, movement, balance... Underfoot, the stones keep my attention held there — we feel our way along the track — even my eyes are fingering the terrain, while my feet are sensing the securely embedded stone, the stone that slips and slides, the stone that’s wedged amongst the others... Thus we touch our way forward...
Bettye had already mentioned the revelation in her of the sense of life — that sense of well-being that opens awareness to the inner condition of the body. “It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones.” It’s true. A walk along a city street is much more tiring than this. We sense the body’s health in the wilderness — that it is hale and hearty.
Then there is movement and there is also the sense of movement. Without this sense we would be unable to experience and monitor our own body’s movements. Contemporary science refers here to propriocentric awareness. Walking along that creek bed, climbing that track to the ridge, I am more self-aware of being in movement than on a flat path.
And of course there’s the sense of balance. Couldn’t manage without it, clambering along that creek bed. The deep relationship between movement and balance suddenly becomes clear to me. Walking as the balance between impetus and the ability to pause — impelled out of balance, then catching oneself. Freedom is experienced in poise between impulse and constraint...
I stand and sense my feet on the stones, noticing the dynamic relationship between ball and heel, side and arch. Touch, life, movement, balance — and the essential experiences gained through these senses on the trail towards being embodied — yes, to sense the wonder of this particular homecoming. Of entering the home of the body.
As I walk on, I’m now thinking of Ghilgai, the Steiner school where I work. Of the playground, and its uneven slope... Of the steps, varied, unpredictable... It is a happy pedagogical accident that the drought, and then the rains, have eroded the hill, as we call it. The children are truly being educated in their body senses as they run about at playtime. Maybe I can relinquish my vain dream of seeing it levelled off and ‘safe’...
So much of our learning is incidental. It occurs through these incidents and instances of a good experience of being alive, registered through these body-senses in which we are mostly unconscious.
These are the senses that enable us to know our place — in the body, in the world. They are sometimes also called the ‘lower’ or ‘inner’ senses. We could call them the senses of orientation. The task in the early years of childhood is to exercise them, to live into the body through them, to know ourselves at home there. If we reflect for a moment on the lives that are lived by so many children in our society — lives spent indoors, or when outside on smooth lawns and even paths, inside cars, in front of flat screens, touching undifferentiated substances — then we will begin to recognise a childhood at risk.
