I’ve been suffering from a tension headache over the last few days. Headaches are not something I usually get, so it’s been a little unusual to have one.
In searching out some of the causes of headache pain, I discovered that human beings seems to take great pleasure in representing headaches visually. There is a whole sub-genre of visual art produced by migraine sufferers that is some of the most harrowing and despair filled imagery you will see anywhere.
How headaches are represented is fascinating. Headache art and graphics combine a number of elements to give one the sense of what having a headache is all about. These include:
- People holding their heads, or touching their fingertips to their temples
- Cracks in the skull
- Dark colours
- Subject alone in a dark room, perhaps surrounded by light
- Teeth clenched together
- Eyes shut, half shut or covered
When we describe problems as “a headache” several of these images come into play. Sitting in a meeting, with a seemingly unresolvable problem at your feet, described as a headache, people take on these stances; hands rub eyes, eyes close, fingers touching head, frustration captured in clenched teeth, a feeling that we are alone at this moment, unable to see a way out. The problem is focussed in the moment, and the world has collapsed into a small universe, exploding within the cranium. Darkness moves in, hope leaves. Attention shifts to sensations, to coping with the immediate pain of the problem, with no focus on the way out.
Painful as it is, the headache takes the sufferer into an immediate place of total connection with one’s interior. Out of that comes such eloquent expressions or art as migrane paintings, and poems, perhaps the best known of which was Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which was composed on opium with a raging headache.
Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is an amazing place. It is natural shortgrass prairie and home to all kinds of interesting plants and animals. Over the course of three days there in 1994, we saw badgers, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, burrowing owls, ferringous hawks, black tailed prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and red foxes. We saw teepee rings on the top of bald buttes, unused for maybe 100 years, but each stone cast off the bottom of a skin teepee and gently placed in a ring for another time. We saw buffalo stones; huge erratic boulders rubbed smooth by centuries of buffalo who scratched themselves against the cool stone.
But initially, it wasn’t easy to see all this. Grasslands is wide open and one can travel anywhere on foot. We decided that we would visit every tree that we could see in the park (4 in all). During the first evening of looking around we saw none of the wildlife we expected. The next morning we spotted a coyote trail and decided to follow it.
Suddenly the world revealed itself to us, The trail took us past deer beds and badger dens, prairie dog colonies and owl burrows. Past a bleached skeleton of an antelope and down to the muddy Frenchman River, the northern most reach of the Mississippi River Basin.
And the trail wound on, almost aimlessly, yet connecting each of these living places like a songline. I got to wondering how long that trail had been there…200 years? 1000 years? How long had the coyotes been patrolling the valley, checking on every possible chance for a meal?
I soon became convinced that these trails had no beginning and no end. To follow them you simply hop aboard, like a depression era drifter riding freights, and see where they carry you. Other trails join, and sometimes the path splits in two. But there is no beginning and no end. In theory, the continent is laced with these paths, the original story of the land etched gingerly into the natural surface of the earth. In most places these paths have been covered over, but I am sure that the acquired energy of thousands of years of animals walking has left an imprint. If one was sensitive enough, one might even be able to feel the trail humming beneath concrete or blacktop, honouring only the topography and natural contour of the land.
We can find these stories again. We have to dig beneath the layers that have grown over the trails like grime. But the story is there. It reveals itself the same way a dirt path emerges across a grassy urban park, in complete defiance of the paved plan . There are natural ways to navigate within space. By honouring them, the real story emerges, and the living places reveal themselves to us.
In an analysis of the physical components necessary for sound production – power source, oscillator, resonator – breath occupies the most active place in human vocal production: it is the energy impulse that excites the vibration in the vocal folds and the resulting resonance in the body – starting, continuing, and stopping it. Because of the living and therefore infinitely changeable quality of the particular actions and structures that are responsible for this sound vibration, the way in which the human body breathes impacts the voice a great deal, much as the hands of a good pianist and a beginner create different sounds with the same instrument. Breathing, then, makes an essential difference in quality of vocal production. By quality I refer not only to timbre, but to the entire range of use of the voice.
Voice is an action. It has no location in the body except when it is in action, sounding. The essential physical structures – diaphragm, intercostal, abdominal and back muscles; larynx; articulators; body form and cavities – are in themselves virtually mute until with a particular use of the breath and vocal folds they all inter-relate as power source, oscillator, and resonator to create sound. It is for optimal functioning of the breath energy, as power source, that I have searched.
From Riley Dog
Happy New Year.
We are poised on the edge of the millennium – ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues.
Yet we will leap.
The exercise of imagining is an act of creation.
The act of creation is an exercise of will.
All this is political. And possible.
Bread. A Clean Sky. Active peace. A woman’s voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cookfires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body’s integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair, and valued. Delight in the challenge for consensus to solve problems. No hand raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors – of heart, home, land, – so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, early paradise, in the now.
We will make it real, make it our own, make policy, history, peace, make it available, make mischief, a difference, love, the connection, the miracle, ready.
Believe it.
We are the women who will transform the world.
From: A Woman’s Creed Written by Robin Morgan, in collaboration with Perdita Huston, Sunetra Puri, Mahnaz Afkhami, Diane Faulkner, Corrine Kumar, Simla Wali, and Paola Melchiori, at the 1994 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) Global Strategies Meeting.