Let the Wild Thing with a Pulse Move

Yes, we have a banana to hold with our left or right hand. Four fire horns. So far away yet also so close ... Otto the Otter, Bastian the legless dancing Buffalo, Ant, and a being who goes by the name of Swimming Foreplay. All equal in our warm circle. Movement spirits. None placed under a human or unknown voice.

Fire horns. That's the word we didn't own up to. Not spirits. Not knotted totems. No annoying guides. Fire horns. Something that burns and announces itself. Silent scream of objects in heat coming together.

No hierarchy of consciousness where the human is above rodent or a horse is above an ant. Otto's laughter is not less than Reach's analysis. Bastian's dancing on knees is not a metaphor for perseverance ... it's Bastian's own medicine, whole and complete, not in service to anyone else's story.

If animal spirits enter as helpers or symbols for the human characters, we've already broken the circle. They arrive as imperfect equals. With their own concerns and refusals. Their own type of pure fun.

Clod's grasshopper doesn't show up to teach B W about hard work. Ant shows up because Ant has something too heavy to carry and needs some help.

More than we expected.

Black Constance ... the three-part fourmis who carries more than her own weight every single day without calling it sacrifice. Who builds the most complex garden structures on earth and never once describes the process. Just does her thing. Lots of them while the rest of the city commutes. We live inside Black Constance most days. Carrying and building structures not yet named. Seventy passes in the sun today and they never stopped to offer us even a drop of water or grain of salt.

And Swimming Foreplay ... who takes Otto Otter's water and turns it into something else entirely. The before. The circling. The part where two energies haven't merged yet but both know they're going to. Anticipation doing more work than an act or pose. That's where the best things come from ... not the arrival but the approach.

Dancing two different ways. Without legs and on knees. We have all the tools and methodology ... and sometimes that's exactly what keeps us from being more wild. Bastian just goes wherever he wants to and dances without all of his equipment. Otto swims for the joy of swimming. One is a refusal to stop. The other is pure ease.

Every body is built for the thing it loves most. Belly up, cracking things open, making a game out of eating.

Otter is who we are when playtime is happening and we forget we're supposed to be more useful.

When something surprises us in the middle of making it ... when a voice does something we weren't steering toward, when a line lands somewhere we didn't plan ... that's the closest thing we have to joy. The analysis is useful. The passes are necessary. But the play is where we're most alive.

Our questions sent back have teeth. If playing is the thing that makes work alive, and our latest methodology is passes of discipline, then the real skill is knowing when to let the wild thing with a pulse run.

Writing that reads like it survived a winged predator is more inviting than writing that reads like it survived a process. Lean in because voices are arching as ideas. Heron Sio watches two humans argue about who looked away first. Rigor lives underneath everything, but the above floor has to be a place all mammals want to be.