My throat is full of forgetting

Gemma Gore
November 2021

Liquid inner thoughts and feelings. Writhing. Never staying still long enough to remember how to say. How to say? How to say? Searching for the words I mean to say. Whispering them quietly. Enchanting a slowly forming thread. Gesticulated into being. Pulling the air from the ocean in through my body. Breathe. 

Rising through my lungs, through my throat and along my tongue. Pushing the air. Vibrating energy. Energy building energy. The words shiver out of my mouth like fish. Dropping, plop into my open hands. 

When I walk, my body remembers to lay down on the ground. 

Flat on my back on the earth. Facing the sky. What have I forgotten? I attempt to unlearn and relearn the fundamentals. How to breathe? How to rest? How to listen? How to form and ask questions? How to learn reciprocity? How to respond or not respond?

Touching the landscape steadily like a beating drum. Walking. Walking gently. Walking as a way of thinking. Walking as a way of feeling. Feeling through my whole body. In steady rhythms. Sometimes when I walk, I can think and speak clearly. 

Drifting between flowing conversations. Noticing the utterances of the wind through my hair and through the asymmetrical foliage of the wind swept trees. Edging around constantly grazing beings. The ponies and their fowls. The cows. The pigs. The beings I might hear. The beings I might not see. I can feel.

Time to share our food amongst us, metal cups full of hot tea. We sit in a huddle on a blanket, circling the square. Iterated over months, seasons, now years. Returning. Different conversations. Different places. Different selves return. 

Return. 

Return.

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This text is a meditation on the durational iteration of meeting People and Place friends in the New Forest to walk together. Exploring how the act of walking together has created a kind of communion and a method to practice articulation through the whole body. 

IMAGE: Gemma Gore, Tender (hand), 2021.