Have I Been Hiding? No, Just Writing Elsewhere

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” ― D.W. Winnicott

For readers who receive my blog posts via e-mail or WordPress, perhaps you’ve wondered where I’ve been. Typically I publish weekly, and occasionally less frequently, but it’s been a whopping three weeks since I last wrote something on my home turf. If you thought I’d gone into hiding, your conclusion would not be farfetched. Indeed, as Mr. Winnicott aptly stated, some of us have strong desires to be seen and heard and, simultaneously, to vanish off the radar. Yet, I wasn’t hiding recently but writing elsewhere.

The circumstances around my debut on The Huffington Post spawned not just my last post here but also two articles for different publications, each emphasizing a different aspect of the experience. One thing I’ve taken to heart from my Feldenkrais training is that we can always find at least three ways to do something, including writing about a singular event. There is more than one way to tell a story. It’s like holding a gemstone up to the light; it might not be possible to view its facets simultaneously, yet each is part of the whole and none are in contradiction even if one area gleams while another is obscured.

The first article I wrote explicitly for Feldenkrais practitioners; still, I hope it can shed more light for everyone on how Feldenkrais thinking can be applied in contexts that are not obviously movement related. It’s called “How Feldenkrais Principles Created a Writing Success”. You can read it here. The second one I wrote for The Wisdom Daily, where my articles appear every four weeks. It has a slightly different emphasis, on the seeming dichotomy between slowing down and springing into action while traveling the spiritual path. You can find “What If the ‘Still Small Voice’ is Neither Still Nor a Voice?” here.

Last week amidst “burkini-gate”, when armed police on the French Riviera demanded that a Muslim woman remove her head covering and some clothing, the still small voice within told me via a distinct churning if not rumbling sensation, like that of a large wave approaching shore, that I had something to contribute to the conversation. Did I want to surf this wave or scurry out of its path? I wavered for a bit and chose to ride it. My Feldenkrais training reminded me that I could approach the topic from a somewhat oblique angle rather than headlong. Knowing that time was of the essence given the speed and fickleness of the news cycle, I began composing the article in my head, tossed and turned last Wednesday night as my subconscious generated some snippets, and hunkered down the next day to figure out which pieces to put together. Given the paradox of both wanting to communicate and to hide, I published it on The Huffington Post without including a link at the bottom to my blog or Facebook page, which is where I can be found when I’m not hiding. Then, to clear my head and avoid the possibility of having my eyeballs become glued to the computer to track the article’s performance, I ran some errands and hung out with my brother’s dog who, despite having her own Facebook profile (seriously!), doesn’t own a digital device and always helps me be more present. During my brief digital detox a Huffington Post editor featured my article on Facebook and it began to go viral. Guess what? Suddenly, I went from playing hide and seek to wanting to be found. That evening I updated the article with links to my social media presence. That piece, if statistics are any guide, has made the biggest splash of anything I’ve written to date. It’s called “Why I’d Choose a Burkini Over a Bikini”. You can read it here.

Since the probability of my sporadically disappearing this blog is reasonably high given my penchant for wanderlust, if you’d like to receive my future writings in your inbox, approximately every four weeks (more frequently for time sensitive material), please sign up for my mailing list. The mailing list is not the same as receiving WordPress notifications of my posts. Since I will be transitioning away from WordPress in the future, do sign up now to be sure you won’t miss anything. I will also send reminders before the transition is complete. Questions? Please contact me. Thanks again for your readership and support!