This project is taking shape in an unexpected way. My habit of neutrality and objectivity cannot apply here. Something I have been doing for years, though thinking it was personal because my body was involved. But in those past projects, I was an observer, a visitor, even when I thought at the time that I was a participant. Now, in walking these neighborhood streets, I am finally experiencing what connection feels like. The curbs and sidewalks, trees and bushes, houses and businesses, are not neutral for me. Not blank material for this body to explore and sense. Rather, these entities, components, and beings of place reach out to meet these knots of memories that are stored in my body. Street corners hold meaning for me here. Tied to events and occurrences, encounters and adventures, or rather, misadventures and failures, these seemingly static objects vibrate with the past, processing timelines that were, are, and will be along with those that will not.

Historically it has been a struggle for me to get into this body, stay in it. Presence most often eludes me, evades my grasp. Years of dissociation and denial took me from where I was standing and put me somewhere else; a vague non-presence or void that is always already slipping through my fingers and the cracks of understanding. So now, I ask myself: what does it mean to touch a tree and really feel it? What does it feel like? To walk along the street and sense soles of feet making contact with the thoroughfare, retracing steps that I have tread and those of others that have passed this way before? What is it to walk in my own footsteps not having remembered what it was like to make them in the first place?

So, now I return. To my past. To my memories. To myself. And the land itself supports me. Earth holds me while I cycle back through the recesses of my mind to rendezvous with my former self who is still really me though she feels so different. The goal is to integrate these selves, not leave them as floating fragments in the dark, riding the waves of the churning sea, wandering ceaselessly lost. But how do I do that? How do I approach this homecoming in a place where I find myself living for the first time, but that already holds the weight of my memories and experiences? Systematically? Systems and discipline are comfortable to create, but impossible for me to maintain. Instead, what would it look like to be gentle, work softly? Tenderly even? Hard and jagged edges smoothed out and caressed, allowed to expand and fill their fluid and curved contours as they were meant to. How would that feel? To walk the streets with joy instead of obedient purpose? Connecting the frayed threads without pressure of completion? To live just for today in the beauty of imperfection?

These are the tasks I have set for myself. I invite you to walk in embodied presence and touch the world around you.

~ Meredith Kooi