Last night I was nursing two injuries at gymnastics. Injuries sustained from going to the dentist and sleeping! I was considering skipping the training session because there was a screening of some archived readings I was curious about, but, after the day that was in it, physical action was the more necessary choice.

Not entirely sure how I thought not being able to lift my arm was going to facilitate flinging my body about the place. I snagged something in the shoulder, all the way up the neck to the ear region. It’s a 72-hour type strain acquired from sitting in the dentist’s chair with my head on an angle, in a state of terror, that caused it.

I find working with the body when it’s injured rewarding. I am interested in the seperation of how muscles work and interact and inter relate with each other: Not unlike the ingredients in a sentence. One’s awareness shifts when you’re denied access to a particular muscle group heavily relied on in a particular sport. I had not bargained how much the upper body is engaged previously. The transfer of weight to and from the shoulder region especially. Bit like losing the wheel on your car.

I figured I could easily spend the session on the trampoline or stretching, but it proved overly-painful. I was chatting, between tramp turns, with a contortionist. Her body arrived in the world equipped for the task it appeared. She’d always been very flexible. So I was asking her whether she discovered this from doing tricks at school or with her friends. She didn’t like that kind of attention, she explained. She’s a shy person. Now she’s an apprentice circus performer. Her connection being with her body over the spectacle of it displayed for an audience. Or perhaps she’s concealed by that spectacle and therefore comfortable. There was something of the ornament about this particular physical activity because a contortionist places the body in a manner and to an extremity nearly all of us cannot and leaves it there for a period of time and then moves to place it into another ‘sculpture’ (?).

I was thinking about the way truth is contorted lately and it’s curious that contorting truth is not an arrival point. It merely continues to ping, and ping, often with unsettling results and listening. What are the conditions neuro-scientifically that allow for truth to be contorted? Does the brain mimic the body in this way? Does it allow sculpture (ideas) to form and remain static, rather than be released to the next move, until their outline becomes so clear they take over ?