I’m feeling ridiculous, standing here, holding a sock filled with cornstarch, tied at the top. A new miracle cure, you ask? Perhaps an esoteric facial treatment endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow? A fun way to whack your husband?
I know I should throw it away, yet I stand beside the garbage, my lower lip extended, an unexplained anxiety settling in my upper ribs. Really? This is it? I actually can’t believe I brought this sock full of cornstarch to Asheville with me 16 years age. It has waited, ignored in a corner of the bathroom drawer, for its return to the limelight, to no avail. And now, I throw the sock in the trash, then say, wait a minute, it’s a perfectly good sock, just dump the cornstarch. As the white powder covers the compost, a little voice says, “Don’t worry. You can always fill up another sock if you need it.”
For twenty five years, at least twice a week, I put on white face as a professional mime, and then “set” the make-up by smacking myself all over the face with a sock filled with cornstarch. It gave my whiteface a kind of china doll look, smooth, porcelain like, no pores, no greasy dribble. Whiteface was a love/hate relationship: there was romance and fantasy upon donning the white mask, as well as an embarrassing corniness in the cliché of the white faced mime. I stopped performing regularly in 1999, and almost all concerts after that did not involve whiteface And yet, I held on to the sock.
The mouse I was chasing this morning ran into my sneaker. Oh good, I thought, I’ll just take the sneaker outside and he can depart into the woods. I went outside and shook my shoe. He wouldn’t come out. I looked inside. He was clinging to the front of my shoe, making himself as small as possible. Irritated, I grabbed his tail to pull him out. Nothing doing. He was not going to let go of this dubious haven. I left him outside. An hour later, he was still in the shoe. Finally, when it started pouring rain, he made his escape.
Speaking of escapes, a couple of years ago, somewhere between 4000 and 350,000 Atlantic salmon made a daring break for freedom from one of those fish farms. Some folks blamed the solar eclipse, even though the escape occurred a couple days before that event. Others blamed global warming for higher than usual tides. In any event, the pen broke. Imagine being part of a gang that is high on drugs and has been swimming in circles since birth.
Salmon #1: Dudes, this is it! Let’s get the hell out of here!
Salmon #2: I don’t think that’s a good idea. I hear you have to hunt for your own food out there. And how will I renew my prescription?
Salmon #3: I need to do a couple more laps.
Were the escapees simply random victims unleashed into a cruel world, or daring innovators willing to let go of security and risk death for a taste of freedom? Eventually thousands of the rogue salmon were captured, but hundreds of members of the Salmon tribe eluded capture. Did they make a new life out there, letting go of the false security of the pen and living out the American dream of finding a new land of opportunity, pillaging and foraging?
Could our attachment to objects be a similar kind of prison? These no longer useful items that gather dust in the corners of our bureaus; the too small shirt that fit perfectly in 1983, the tights so old the elastic has died in the waistband, my mother’s measuring cup, all fill my house and my mind. I think about things like voodoo, or about psychics who sense something about a person based on a personal item. Do we imbue our objects or places with some kind of power that supports and simultaneously traps us? Am I penned in by my memories and perhaps missing a chance for seeing something new – in my life, in my home, in myself?
So then I start to think – if I’m like the salmon stuck in the routine of the pen, or the mouse hiding in the safety of the shoe – is it possible that it is more than “stuff” that is imprisoning me? The stuff is the material, but the prison is my habits. Of course, I need good habits: brushing my teeth, remembering how to get to the office. But when do habits get in the way? Habits like holding my shoulders up, or needing to be right (oh what an awful habit), or angsting at 4 AM over whether I remembered to pay the phone bill? Are these prisons any different from the stuff I can’t let go of?
When I think about health, I equate it with freedom. The freedom to be who I truly wish to be – my original self. I’ve tried many strategies in my life, with greater and lesser success. I gave up the whiteface, but continued my love affair with movement, teaching Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement. Not just because it’s my job, but because I need to remind myself daily that the way to freedom is learn to see the escape hatch and have the discernment to know when to jump in the ocean and when to hide in the shoe, when to let go of the sock, and when to caress my Mom’s measuring cup. I teach what I need to learn. And no, I have not yet thrown away the actual whiteface makeup. However, I can’t remember where I hid it.