Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • Respect the pain

    Pain that hits out of the blue is the damn weirdest thing. I don’t know quite what I did that led to such deep pain in my left glute that I couldn’t bend at all from the waist without triggering it.

    Before that, I had been feeling pretty self-satisfied, what with daily walks and three lively hourlong Nia dance sessions a week. That all changed overnight.

    Perhaps it was the six hours of gardening, up and down and leaning forward, to weed and prune? Maybe.

    The how-did-this-happen to vigorous healthy me isn’t clear. The more important question: What now? I started by trying to figure out what I could do that wasn’t painful. Fortunately, that turned out to be walking (not a steep uphill, but on mostly flat terrain).

    I also tried one Nia class, but it was too much too soon, so I continued walking, consulted a physical therapist, got some stretching exercises and did them, being careful to avoid any moves that hurt.

    After several days of stretching, I turned to Nia’s online catalog of choreographed routines. They include several “moving to heal” dances designed for situations like mine. And I also discovered instructor Nia instructor Fred Bass’s therapeutic movement series.

    I’ve done two of these routines (they’re 10 to 20 minutes) and they’ve reminded me to stay centered on how moving feels in the moment. When I haven’t been in pain, there’s a great joy of community in dancing with others. But this dancing privately, by myself with Fred Bass as guide, has let me go inward for a kind of emotional release that feels healing in another way.

    Dance is a way of loving my today body, of recognizing all the ways I can still move, despite being in recovery mode.

    In the first of this series, Bass describes what brought him to Nia and to create these routines. I appreciated his story.

    I’ll stay with these therapeutic routines (seven in all) until my body says it’s ready to move on.

  • Because she can

    This morning I sought inspiration through an online search on the words “dancer’s wisdom.”

    I found a link to a BBC piece on 77-year-old ballet dancer Suzelle Poole, still dancing, still teaching and looking back on a 70-year career.

    Here’s the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP214lJtKlM

    After watching, I saw that the video was created seven years ago. It made me wonder if Suzelle Poole was still around and still dancing. The answer: yes, of course.

    Here’s another news video produced last year. She’s 84 now and still dancing every day.

  • Poetry, for starters

    It’s pretty easy for me to get ensnared in outrage these days. But pragmatism suggests that it makes more sense to choose appropriate emotional responses, rather than react to every little (or big) thing. I’m returning to my morning ritual: starting the day with poetry rather than news.

    For that, The Poetry Foundation provides an easy option: Their emailed daily newsletter delivers a poem. These poems can be contemporary or classic and they choose from a global list of poets. Today, they offered an emotionally rich poem from British author D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence holds a place in my heart because he wrote about sexual intimacy in a way that doesn’t feel salacious to me. (Lady Chatterly’s Lover).

    I didn’t know that Lawrence had also written poetry, so this piece was a fine surprise, a messy moody evocation of unexpected emotion.