ABSTRACT
It was peony season last year when I committed to write this chapter. It is peony season again, as I struggle to nish. Monday’s tightly compressed buds, the size of pink cotton balls, have become ursday’s 13-inch, eusive, exuberant, multilayered wonders, and they’re still expanding. Last year, I was in a full-bloom self-state while planning this book. As soon as I tried to use words to describe ineable, imagistic experiences in bodywork, I tightened into an apprehensive, deant, compressed-bud state: I was afraid I could not convey what I needed to in narrative form. It seemed like an overwhelming project, and I discovered that I did not want to work so hard. All year, I have felt like one of those oppositional buds that never opens. You know the ones I mean: ey have such potential. You can wait forever but they never open. I felt as if I would never open. But I did. What I wrote during the year was self-conscious and stilted, too studious, dead. What helped me open was taking in the beauty and wonder
of the peonies, staying with the feelings they evoked, and starting to write from that place.
