Partner Work

Whether you’re paddling a tandem canoe through whitewater rapids, sparring with your training partner in martial arts, belaying someone on an exposed, difficult climbing route… or navigating the morass of give-and-take in a relationship… the balance of communication lies in a netherworld of the unspoken and, sometimes, unseen.

 

  

Partner work relies on fluency in the nuance of movement and body language.  Speed, tempo, precision, focus and responsiveness are the building blocks – consistency is the mortar, the glue that holds it all together.

Balance and counterbalance, attack and defense, slack and tension – all rely on integration between partners, a fundamental synchronicity and symbiosis. Feedback is essential; your partner can’t read your mind.

Use your words and the language of movement to affirm and acknowledge, establish a connection that will facilitate progress, learning, accomplishment.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Photos:: Titanium Photography



Nenana River, AK

Breathe.

What Whales

            And Infants Know

 

A beluga rising

from the ocean’s muddy depths

reshapes its head to make a sound

or take a breath.

 

I want to come

 

at air and light like this.

To make my heart

a white arc above the muck of certain days,

and from silence and strange air

 

Send a song

 

to breach the surface

where what we most need

lives.

 

-Kim Cornwall

* * *

For Kris. And each one of us who needs to breathe again.

Hope Floats

There were dark years. Difficult, painful, raw and searing days and weeks spent apart.

shafts of sunlight cut through

(hikes in the mountains, bouldering together)

“firsts” of many kinds:

Her first time paddling a kayak, solo, on a river… she was seven and it was magic.

Pure magic.

 

* * *

To this day, when I hear the word “hope” I remember this picture as clearly as the day I held the camera. 

"I hope I can come home and live with you every day, Mom...”

Her eyes squeezed tightly shut with sheer joy of buoyancy. The magic of flotation. Of amazement at her own courage (she really did paddle my kayak all by herself, down the river).

It took two more years, but she did come home for good. Last year, on Mother’s Day, we tested side by side for our red belts in Taekwondo.
 

We’ve come far, together, in the years since this photo.  

Of this I am certain: hope floats.

 

"We still believe in all the things that we stood by before,

and after everything we've seen here maybe even more".

 

-Rise Against, Endgame (Architects)