This is a walking and wandering score.  It will ask you to move about in the world, only in ways in which you feel comfortable.  There is no wrong approach, no incorrect way to interpret these instructions.  Refusal may be a valuable form of accuracy. I invite you to join on your own terms. 

Let’s start together here where you are. We’ve started.

Look down, and find a line on the ground. position yourself behind it.  If you cant see one, scratch one out. Let’s make something together from scratch. “From scratch” comes from scratching a line in the dirt.  A starting line for a race, most likely.  This is not a race. This is a walking and wandering score, you should move at your own pace, and it’s over when you’re finished. Cross the line, and begin to move through space. 

Now look around. Orient yourself.  To orient is to know where East is. East yourself.  East is the rising sun. if you are on the church campus and you face Orange Grove Boulevard, you are facing east.   now turn your body away, walk away.  Keep moving. 

To Orient also makes a verb we all can use, out of a whole place, a whole set of fantasies imagined in our West.  West of East is here, where we are.  East is east of here, and let’s be clear about what is borrowed, and what is taken, what is considered important, and why.

Arrive in some new place, any place, when you’ve decided you’ve arrived, stop. 

Notice where your eyes are drawn. What is the quality of the light? What is nearest to your body? Then begin moving again- going faster, or going slower. Let your attention wander. Arrive and depart on your own.  Drag your feet. Pick your heels up and hurry.  Try going backwards. If you went slow before, go fast, switch.  Try the other way around.

Now take a step towards a tree.  The trees around you have grown slowly. Some thrive, some stunt. A stunted growth. A stunt is a fancy step. A stub is a stump.  To stub your toe is to make a stump of a tree from your foot.  Try not to stub your toe but let your steps grow wild. No longer in a straight line, no longer to get somewhere, but to stay in place.  A foot hovering in the air, then falling hard like a tree in the forest.  

Root yourself in this place.

Trees have been telling stories since we spoke old tongues, when our language was a different language and different people lived here, The Tongva, The San Gabrielenos, or what they called themselves before the Spanish called them that. 

Re-orient yourself in-between something natural and something constructed by humans, on that edge. That in-between line.  One thing on the right, one on the left.  Hold your arms out to your sides, one in the human world, a built thing, and one in the natural world, a grown thing. 

Let the built-thing-arm drop to your side.

With your natural-world-arm, find a tree trunk, or a branch, or a leaf, or a needle.  Trace it with your eyes, with your attention, and with your outstretched hand.  Trace and describe each change, each bump or shift, each knot, vein, thorn.  Trace this contour line with your eyes, with your attention, and with your outstretched hand.  Trace it as it changes from leaf to branch, or bloom, or bark.  Trace the lines of connection.  Let your attention draw you from one thing, to another, connected by the line of your movement.  If your arm gets tired, switch to the other arm.  Your attention is a cord, a tether, between you and the world around you.  

Now Try to do all of this while moving through space, on a contoured path, a line of interest, your attention keeps moving.  Go towards the thing you are noticing, Re-orient yourself.  

Now use your elbow to trace, instead of your hand.  

Your shoulder.  

Your knee.  

Your nose. 

Pick some other part. Pick up the thread of the drawing with different parts of your body, switching at will. 

Try going faster.

Try going faster still.  Faster,  faster,  faster, Keep moving in space. 

Rest, let your attention go slack. Move towards stillness.  Find a tree or a bench or some grass, sit or stand.  Lean yourself away, but orient yourself towards the house with the huge stone chimney. The Cole House.  

Some of these trees are more than 100 years old. They hold 100 years of memory. That means they were planted when this house was built, perhaps to replace all the trees cut down to build this house. This is a house built out of trees.  Probably redwood, probably old growth. 100 years. Many things have changed since then. history has a way of looping, and  loops define experience. Loops like rings, rings of sap, the ringing of bells. 

Living trees tell stories with their bodies - evidence of what has happened to them.  Blight, windstorm, battle. They bend around each other to reach errant rays. The words we use to describe the things that happen to them are telling. They show wounds, they have scars. 

The Cole house, built more than 100 years ago, is made of trees cut into very straight lines, and fastened together so they don’t fall down.  Straight trees are stronger.  Bent trees, queer trees, trees that have had more “bad” things happen to them hold up less well.  Their fibers grow chaotic, scar tissue prone to failure.  Their interest is visual, performative.  A burl, a sweeping knot, the crotch cross-cut to form the centerpiece. A live edge. Living on the edge. A queer tree would not pass muster. 

Designed by Henry and Charles Greene, and built out of the straightest trees, the house embodies the style and techniques the brothers were so taken with in books about Japan, copied once already by the British into something made up called Arts and Crafts. They co-opted and celebrated ideas from the East, where they were HONED for generations. Houses with eaves exposed, and sloping roofs. What Craftsman Magazine called in 1906 “a return to honesty and simplicity in construction, rejection of all false ornamentation, and the meeting of all actual requirements in the simplest and most direct way.”   they might have been describing a dance.  

This house holds memory, is made from memory, is made of trees.  A memory of stumps, a memory stunted. They called it an ideal bungalow.  “bungalow” is a hindi word for a bengali home, a word taken back to Britain from occupied india.  We’re in southern california. Bungalow.  Bungalow.  Bungalow.  Bungalow.

The words i’m reading were scratched on a very thin piece of tree.

After my older brother left for college I started going to origami club meetings at the public library.  Origami, along with ciphers and codes, and games we made up, were things we shared, and it was a way for me to be with him without him being there.  I was 9 or 10.  Origami is a coded, ancient system, honed in Japan, with fixed instructions.  You start not quite from scratch but with a piece of paper which must be square, and you make whatever the instructions tell you to make.  Their patterns, a known way to start simple, and simply grow complex.

i co-opted this ancient paper system to deal with missing my brother, and i placed my relationship inside its folds.  Is my relationship my own?

You are not a piece of paper, exactly, but you could be a kind of house.  Your bones are studs and joists.  Your heart, a furnace, the main electric box.  Miles of Cable, tendons, plumbing, septic, Ligaments, Windows, Lungs, ventilation.  Muscles.  

An efficient structure, with purpose.  An ideal bungalow.

Here are some instructions from Origami, try them on like you were a house made of trees, or a piece of paper.  Try to fold some part of yourself.  UnFold.  Crease. Fold, crease sharply.  Bird base.  Mountain fold, valley fold. Crimp fold, squash fold.  

Try to loop your pattern, Fold, unfold, lift and twist. Keep moving. Keep looping.

Now try and remember what you did, show it to someone else. Like they could keep it, preserve it in amber. A nugget, a seed, a phrase, a koan, an origami jewel box, a choreography. A known thing, a remembered, rememberable thing.  A memory object, a movement object. So we together could KEEP the MOVING.   Keep moving.  Keep moving.  Keep moving.