Last Days in Oakland :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
A Hasty Farewell
Bay Area referrals
Words by René Char
I hope you all are staying cozy and enjoying a bit of this mid-winter sunshine. I have put off writing this update much longer than I wanted to, and I apologize for the lack of communication. Folks who have been in to see me in recent months likely already know that I have been planning to move back to Los Angeles, but this will be news for some of you. The move has been looming for some time, but only recently became real. Now we have a date: next week; and a location: Pasadena. The timing and location feel uncanny. My partner and I signed a lease mere hours before the Eaton Fire sparked a few miles away in Altadena—the Santa Ana winds already whipping up at fearsome speeds I’ve never seen in Los Angeles. Like everyone, I have watched the progression of the recent fires with horror. So many homes lost and lives thrown into uncertainty, the toxic air and ash that have no doubt affected and will continue to affect literally everyone in Los Angeles county, are almost too much to bear. My heart goes out to everyone displaced by these tragedies, and to everyone who couldn't leave and has had to endure.
Meanwhile, the new presidency has brought even more terror and uncertainty, especially for trans, immigrant, and racialized communities. We need each other more than ever. I hope you all are reaching out to your neighbors and loved ones, building relationships of trust and solidarity, and standing up for each other any way you can.
I don't have a location yet for my new practice, but will likely focus on Pasadena & Northeast LA. Any referrals, resources, or words of encouragement are of course more than welcome. If you have friends in the area who might like to know about my practice, please recommend that they subscribe to my newsletter to receive an update once I have landed. I will be accepting in-home bookings immediately, and aim to have an office set up within the month.
I will be putting my Bay Area mailing list to rest. If you would like to continue to receive seasonal updates from me, I will happily add you to my Los Angeles mailing list. Please let me know by replying to this email. Out of town subscribers will be transferred over the the LA list, but it doesn't hurt to remind me. If I have future opportunities to work in the Bay, you may receive a note from me. Otherwise, consider this my last (semi-)regular Bay Area newsletter. If you are already on my LA list, you will receive another, slightly different version of this newsletter shortly. Apologies for the duplicate.
This is my final week in my Oakland practice. I have a few openings available, should you like to schedule before I go. See below for a few other recommended practitioners.
I took this photo a couple months ago outside Groveland, CA, at the western edge of Yosemite National Park. The area is badly scarred by the 2013 Rim Fire, but new life is abundant amid the burnt remains. This photo has me holding a bit of wood char I picked up on one of my walks. Cycles of dormancy and renewal are central to how I think about my practice, and why I named it Winter Garden Healing Arts.
Bay Area referrals
A few Visceral Manipulation practitioners I have met and worked with during my time in the Bay:
Leia Ambra is a physical therapist working out of her home near UC Berkeley.
Dallas Everleth is a massage therapist and pilates instructor in north Berkeley.
Vanessa Escovar is a massage therapist based in Oakland's Dimond District.
For other possible practitioners, there is a searchable database of folks who have studied the VM curriculum. It's not the most user friendly, but it will show you what classes folks have taken and basic contact info. I would recommend looking for people who have taken at least VM1-4, and maybe a few other classes, but 1-4 are the core of the discipline. If you're curious, you can search my name and see what I've taken, for example.
Words by René Char
I return perpetually to the work of René Char, surrealist poet and a guerrilla leader of the French resistance under Nazi occupation. His writing is thorny, oblique, lucid, deceptively concise. It is unlike any other. The selections below are from Hypnos, Char's furtive, fragmented, and at times lightly fictionalized diary of life in the underground. These are from the 2014 Mark Hutchinson translation.
187.
Action, which has meaning for the living, only has value for the dead, is only complete in the minds of those who inherit and question it.
193.
So unreceptive has our sleep become that even the briefest of dreams cannot come galloping through to refresh it. The prospect of dying is submerged beneath an inundation of the absolute so all-engulfing that the mere thought of it is enough to lose any desire for the life we cry out for and implore. Once again, we must love one another well, must breathe more deeply than the executioner's lungs.
218.
In your conscious body, the reality of the imagination is a few minutes fast. This gap, which can never be bridged, forms a gulf that is alien to the acts of this world. It's never a straightforward darkness, however redolent of warm summer nights, the religious afterlife, incorruptible childhood.
219.
All of a sudden, you remember you have a face. The features which shape that face weren't always racked with grief. Drawn to its varied landscape, creatures gifted with kindness would appear. Nor was it only castaways who succumbed, exhausted, to its spell. The loneliness of lovers could breathe freely there. Look. Your mirror has turned into a fire. Little by little, you remember your age (which had been struck from the calendar), that surplus of existence which, by working at it, you will turn into a bridge. Step back inside the mirror. Arid it may be but at least its fruitfulness has not run dry.
35.
You will be part of the fruit's savour.
[I place this one last because I find it to be the most tender and reassuring. I feel more held by this line than by anything else I've read recently. The idea that one might exist in pure relationality, in fleeting experience that is profoundly personal, but inherently exceeds individual subjectivity. The idea that relation and identification transcend not only species but taxonomy itself. It's also a queer, atheist sort of destiny, and it's quite humble. The ambiguity of subject and object is delightfully unresolved: Will I savour the fruit, or the fruit me—or both?
The obvious answer is Yes.]
With care,
Wilson