The cat and the roses

Forehead on the wooden floor. Legs limp, arms at my side palms towards the ceiling. Bodies all around me in the same position. By the end of the hour I will be howling in a corner or rolling across that girl's arched back or playing pattycakes with the guy near the window.

I am prone on the floor, still but fully aware. I hear the ticking of the clock and notice the grain of the wood beneath my eyes. I stretch and turn my head when I feel like it is time, my eyeballs rotating in their sockets in the search for images, details. My fingers move through the cool air as I flex and straighten, trace circles on the floor, feel the nubby fabric of my shirt between valleys of fingerprints. The scent of pizza wafts through the windows cracked open to let the radiator heat out, the city sounds smells in.

Slowly I try to feel every joint in my body, every point of contact of skin with the floor, air, other people. I go from prone to squatting, I do some vigorous predetermined movements, I start moving around the room stopping to examine a gray crack in the wall or a piece of hair clinging to a door knob or eventually I make eye contact and react act react to my fellow players.

I am in college and I am a theatre major and I am doing an exercise called the Cat and I am more alive than I have ever felt in a classroom and I am learning to observe and feel.

Sometimes I think of this scenario now and giggle. Yup, a theater school cliche. Yet I am so thankful for my rolling around on the ground hippie touchy feely training. I may not be in plays anymore, but all that quiet observance, that yelling into the corners on such an impulse, that improvisation, that interacting with others by reading body language, by making eye contact and holding it, by exchanging focused energies taught me more about the world and people than my economics course ever did.

Now I am in training again. This time for a rural stage where the main performers are the plants and animals. The farmers tell us to slow down, observe, walk through the fields and stare at the growing vegetables. See the bugs carving a path through the tender leaves. Feel the dirt between calloused fingers and smell the ripeness of the compost. Sit in a field and listen to the wind. Watch a spider wrapping a bee in sticky silky thread. Try that mustard leaf. Smile back at the baby goat with her goofy alfalfa laced grin.

The sunflowers are bowing in the late afternoon light. The air is cool and damp as a marine layer rolls dramatically towards the farm. A donkey brays in the distance and the chickens seem to respond on masse. I pick a leaf of lemon verbena and rub it between thumb and forefinger. I bring it up to my face, close my eyes. I breathe. Yes, I'm inhaling the scent of lemony sweetness, but I also just breathe, really breathe for the first time today. I feel that energy rising from my solar plexis and I can't help but smile and be thankful- for what I've learned, for what I'm learning, and for the simple skill of literally stopping to smell the roses.