what do we know about unison?

Every year for the past decade, I’ve hauled myself out to the cold, windy, Sonoma Coast on January 1st, with many friends and strangers, to flock.

Flocking? This is one of those terms that we all know with our bodies, no matter how obscure it may sound to our minds. It’s the score we agree to when we walk down the street together in big cities, and what happens when we applaud a great performance. It’s also protesting, and marching. Flocking is simply moving in unison, but that sounds easier than it is.

When I was 22, I spontaneously went with a dear friend to Ocean Beach (SF) on New Year’s Day to watch the sunset. We walked lazily out on the sand, shoes left in the car, and stood facing the light. As the orange sun began melting into the horizon, I noticed many others had turned to stand and watch. There was complete silence in the human realm as the sun slowly descended, and then, suddenly and all at once, we began to clap. All along the beach, hundreds of people were applauding, laughing, and delighting in our collective response, like an infectious tickle. It sparked the ritual I now refer to as ‘murmurations’, always performed on new year’s day (gregorian calendar).

I engage the Cherokee folk dance known to most as ‘the Tslagi Dance of Life’. I was taught it by Shinichi Iova Koga, who learned it from his Butoh teacher, who learned it from a woman in Golden Gate Park. It’s a simple dance of reverence to locate oneself inside the landscape, with gratitude and awe.

Last year, it was just me and my sweet oldest child, bowing and moving with a mirrored grace in front of the cresting waves. It was solemn, given what was happening last January, but full of reverence, and no less aligning. We both felt the importance of doing something just to be beautiful - not productive or useful - to begin the year. In a sense, it’s quite the opposite of a new year’s resolution - it’s a gift to the waves, the passing birds, the shifting sand.

This year, I find myself far from that deep ocean place. I’ve stretched my roots such a long way from that coast, I can almost touch the other side. In these stark Massachusetts woods, I’ve spent the past several weeks inside this question:

what flocks here?

I’m looking for a bird, a bug, anything, to reflect that calming energy of unison in my new home. The birds have all flown south - except the individualistic jays and cardinals, the trees stand naked, seemingly apart from each other, and the deer have strangely disappeared (it’s hunting season). It’s all felt a little fragmented, not unlike the human realm.

Then recently, standing by the Saw Mill river that bends so sensually through the nearby forest I walk through, I found the unison I’ve been looking for. It’s right here, in the congruent, single-minded flow of water as each particle finds the slightest downhill slope and it braids it’s way to the sea. Water is what the trees of California told me to move toward, what I dreamt about before I knew I was moving, what stands as reflector, teacher, muse…not to mention the element all life hinges on.

There’s something truly profound about mirroring the qualities seen in the landscape with our own limbs and breath, and this year more than ever, it feels so important to do so. I read so many words typed into a screen or printed on paper about belonging, accepting, and reckoning during this time of the Great Turning, but find that the body is often left stagnant and uninhabited in that receiving. Words take up space - in our minds, “the cloud”, our attention, but a dance is simple a form of reciprocity…what’s taken is equally given.

This new year, may we take a deep collective bow of gratitude, all together, and align with what is beautiful in the landscape of our living.