Lena Tichy

Tag: poetry

  • still dancing

    still dancing

    Last Saturday, just after ten in the morning, seven other people and I stood in a bright room looking out onto the rooftops of Berne’s old town. Most of us were barefoot. We had come to learn something about ‘the essence’ of embodied connection in dancing. The workshop was open to everyone who loved to dance, whatever their preferred style or skill level. As we would soon discover, too much skill was not that helpful, anyway.

    According to our two teachers, Bigi and Anna, the simplest way of accessing embodied connection in dancing with another person is through fully inhabiting our own body and learn to move from the inside out. Most of us, me included, don’t usually feel very free or relaxed inside when we dance. And whatever you feel inside, our teachers said, you bring into a dance with another. Well then, I thought.

    After a long warming up, Anna had us all choose a spot in the large room. She instructed us to stand there by ourselves, arms hanging by our side, shoulders dropped, knees slightly bent.

    ‘We call this still dancing,’ she said. ‘It’s the movement that happens when you seem to not be moving at all. It’s about noticing the myriad things that go on inside you as you supposedly stand still. And then to make space for those things. To notice how alive the stillness is. Imagine the surface of a lake early in the morning. Imagine that stillness.’

    I took a few breaths. I began to sway. The stillness Anna had invited us into was neither punishing nor restrictive, it was spacious.

    After a moment she said: ‘Everything is still moving in this stillness. Feel that. And let a movement rise up in you, as you stand here now.’

    I felt myself become calm, which is not a state I have experienced very often lately. The tiger of anxiety and stress that had been breathing down my neck for weeks ceased her hunt, curled up and closed her eyes for a while.

    I found that, while my conscious mind often didn’t know what to do with a phrase such as ‘there is stillness in movement and movement in stillness’, my body had no trouble entering this paradox. Here I was, in my old running shorts, both still and moving, my chest gently rising with my breath, my heart beating, my diaphragm climbing up and down. My naked toes spreading across the hardwood floor. My muscles and fascia holding my skeleton upright, adjusting themselves continuously; a little bit here, a little bit there. Still dancing, I felt, was an abundance of action.

    As I rode my bike home afterwards through the thick city air, water-starved trees providing shade, I repeated it to myself like a mantra:

    In this fever dream of now, still dancing

    In this heat that we have made, still dancing

    In the waves of things to come, still dancing

    In the great sorrow, still dancing

    In the dark, still dancing

    In everything that dies, still dancing

    In everything that is being nurtured into life, still dancing

    In everything I have to give up, still dancing

    In everything that is, still dancing

    I feel the weight of paradox more so this year than any of the other years before: The more I slow down, the faster everything moves. The more I try to understand what is happening in the world, the more confused I become. I think part of the practice is just being with that. I’m still dancing and, also, I am still dancing.

    Dancing, for me, is also a form of rest. A place where I get to be in the flux of things, unfinished, where I can lose my balance and find it again, laughing most of the time. I’ve written about rest and its powerful political dimensions here in ‘the snail’s deserted house’. In that piece, I quote the inimitable Báyò Akómoláfé quite a bit and sure enough, his words came back to me this week: ‘The time is very urgent – we must slow down.’

    Maybe you want to try your own version of still dancing? It can be done sitting, lying down or standing up; it does not matter what kind of body you have. And there is no wrong way to do, either. 

    From Monday, June 29, to Friday, July 24, Mercury will be retrograde in Cancer. This transit will probably send us on one or two nostalgia trips while also upping everyone’s tendency to assume ‘it was understood’. Remember: it’s not understood. You will have to spell things out, even if you don’t feel like spelling them out. From now until the end of July, just try communicating what you know to be true for right now. No need to give anyone the ‘full picture’ if you don’t have it yet yourself.

    One day after Mercury goes retrograde, we have a Full Moon in Capricorn. That’s a pretty rough setup on its own but warrior-planet Mars, newly in Gemini, is fast approaching revolutionary-planet Uranus with a proverbial gasoline can. The two planets meet for their first conjunction towards the end of the week on July 4. Their next conjunction will happen two years from now. Though the meeting between Mars and Uranus will be mathematically exact on July 4, I imagine we’ll see Gemini-related things (technology, communications and travel, that is) become magnified and possibly unstable as soon as Mars moves into the sign two days from now, on June 28.

    And so, these final days of June and the first days of July are confronting, both on a collective and on a personal level. An exclamation mark in a year full of exclamation marks. It’s a moment where patience and caution are advised. The paradox is that a Mars-Uranus conjunction can make us feel rather impatient, and we might want to throw caution to the wind.

    I hope that, however this coming week and July as a whole unfolds for you personally, you can enter stillness, even if only for a moment at a time. I think when Báyò Akómoláfé says ‘we must slow down’ he does not mean ‘you will be punished if you don’t’. It’s not that simple. But I think he’s gesturing at the haunted, wild places inside ourselves we can enter if only we try. Our conditioning may tell us to keep going while our bodies, weary and wise, want to offer us a path into the paradox: It’s good to be alive. It hurts to be alive. It’s good to be alive.

    For the curious

    If you’re in the Berne area and want to deepen your movement practice, Bigi Wälchli’s and Anna Blöchlinger’s ‘Embodied Connection’ courses are a great starting point. Their most recent course cycle just ended but you can find the dates for the Fall cycle on this page (in German)

    If you’d like to know more about Still Dancing as a methodology, I like this introduction by researcher Tania González.

    The essay by Báyò Akómoláfé I quote from in this newsletter can be found on Báyò’s beautiful website

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in June 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • all apologies

    all apologies

    What does it mean to be embodied? I’ve thought about this for years now, maybe ever since I was seventeen and decided, while looking at myself in the mirror, that I was not going to spend this life hating what I saw. I made a promise to treat my body kindly, even when other people didn’t, or couldn’t. Wild, I know. Though in many ways, the promise has been an easy one to honor: My body has been mostly healthy and dependable. Why wouldn’t I be kind to it?

    But the older I get, the more I realize I have not even scratched the surface of inhabiting myself, of being present with what my body is telling me. And, of course, I also realized that some of what I thought was me loving myself was just me piggybacking on my many physical privileges: Fair-skinned, young, medium-sized, with no visible disabilities. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve missed something. Which is maybe another way of saying: I am aging.

    I’ve been stuck on the phrase ‘The Body is Not An Apology’. This is the title of both a deeply influential poem, a book and a movement by writer and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, who is one of my favorite teachers. Her poem, and everything that grew out of it, is a call to bring light to all the places in our bodies where we feel shame and to celebrate these places instead. Here is a part of her poem:

    The body is not a wrong answer.
    The body is not a failed class. 
    You are not failing.
    The body is not a cavity, is not hole to be filled, to be yanked out.
    It is not a broken thing to be mended, be tossed.
    The body is not prison, is not sentence to be served.
    It is not pavement, is not prayer.
    The body is not an apology.
    Do not give the body as gift. Only receive it as such.

    These are not easy instructions. Receiving our body as a gift, however we define this, can confront us with so much pain and grief. Sonya, who has a big, brown, queer body, understands better than most people how difficult and yet necessary that is. And she is very clear on how body-shame is used as a political weapon to silence and disempower ‘the other’.

    Her poem reminds us that there is freedom in no longer apologizing for our being here. Freedom in no longer feeling as though we have failed just because we have a body. Her poetry and her writing allow me to grasp that freedom when I lose it (and I lose it often these days).

    I have read ‘The Body is Not an Apology’ many times, and watched the clip where Sonya performs the poem live. I suggest you go see it too, because Sonya is a priestess of the spoken word and it will give you goosebumps of the good kind.

    You would think I understand by now what the title means, since I have read the poem. But the more I thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed: How is my body an apology?

    Yesterday, while doing the dishes, it came to me. I thought of all the ways in which I – secretly – have made my body into a kind of strange friend that I drag around going ‘here she is, I’m sorry, she’s a lot’. And of course I have done it secretly. Shame does not like to be seen. Instead, I do my best to come across as confident, and sometimes it works. Still, I can’t get rid of my strange friend. So, as an experiment, I decided to write out some of those secret thoughts and see what happens. I call this my ‘all apologies’- poem. These are the things I don’t want to know.

    please forgive my big soft belly

    please forgive my aching arms

    I am sorry for growing older and closer

    to death; forgive the grey hairs, the lines on my skin

    can I offer you my undivided attention and uncritical adoration as proof

    of how sorry I am?

    I can make amends

    and I know I should, because one day soon

    I’ll be sick and need you even more

    it seems no matter what I do

    my body changes and is never less

    than tired, hungry

    and tender.

    I have not yet decided whether this poem is serious or ridiculous. Perhaps it’s both. A bit of a trickster, like my body. I wonder what we’ll get up to in the decades to come. I think Sonya’s work continues to teach me that radical self-love is not a switch I can flick, it’s a process, a practice. A walking companion toward the final edge we all eventually reach.

    Perhaps it was the New Moon in Taurus last night which made me want to write about embodiment. Taurus, more than any other sign, is associated with the body and its most fundamental needs: food, sleep, touch. People with strong Taurean placements often don’t think they ‘have’ a body. They believe they ‘are’ their body, which is a beautiful and very different way of being in the world.

    Taurus, as a fixed Earth sign, teaches us the beauty of slowness and the power of staying with the process. All good things to bring into the new week, when Mercury moves into Gemini and immediately makes its first conjunction with Uranus (on May 18). A few days later, on May 22, the Sun does the same. Both these conjunctions up the ante with regards to technological advancements, communication and learning. But since Gemini is also famous for its witty jokes and hot gossip, I think we may see some of that, too. Either way, expect to be a little distracted, a little disoriented by all the influx of info over the next seven days. And when in doubt, go slow.

    Resources

    You can read the entire story of Sonya’s poem and movement here, and you can find the whole poem on this page if you scroll down a little.

    ‘The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love’ by Sonya Renee Taylor was published by Berrett-Koehler in 2021 (2nd Edition).

    If you are interested in learning more about shame and its gendered nature, I think there’s no better teacher than researcher Brené Brown (apart from Sonya, of course!). My favourite book by Brené is one of her earliest: The Gifts of Imperfection, published by Hazelden in 2010, though you can really start anywhere.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in May 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • our ruins, their songs

    our ruins, their songs

    There is a poem written by the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail that has been following me around. I first read it in a workshop with the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama last year and it traveled all the way home with me, not leaving my head. It’s title, stark and descriptive, is: ‘This Poem Will Not Save You’. Mikhail lists, with empathy and clarity, all the ways in which her poem will fail to prevent tragedy, death and heartbreak. The phrase ‘I’m sorry’ is repeated three times in the poem’s fifty-three lines. The poem ends like this:

    I don’t know why the birds
    sing
    during their crossings
    over our ruins.
    Their songs will not save us,
    although, in the chilliest times,
    they keep us warm,
    and when we need to touch the soul
    to know it’s not dead
    their songs
    give us that touch.

    Take a moment. Read those lines out loud. Notice how the line breaks and commas urge you on at ‘us’, ‘times’ and ‘warm’ and how, in the lines that follow, you are made to pause at the words ‘soul’, ‘dead’, ‘songs’ and ‘touch’. I say all this to remind you that your own body is also part of the poem; that you have song in you, too. For the longest time in human history, poetry was only spoken, passed on through music and speech. Birds, signing for their own pleasure, gave us rhymes, gave us poems. To write a poem is to express gratitude for that ancient gift.

    Whereas Mikhail addresses an unspecified ‘you’ for most of the poem, she switches to an ‘us’ and a ‘we’ in the final lines. Because I am in some ways quite a self-centered person, it took me a long time to see that Mikhail’s ‘we’ is not necessarily about me, at all. The language here takes you right into a war zone (‘their crossings over our ruins. / Their songs will not save us’) and I have never lived in one. I have never known that kind of despair, or known ruins like that.

    Still, I do know loss and sorrow, on another scale, in other contexts. And I believe Mikhail is being generous by writing a poem for her people (or so I guess) and yet also offering it to a larger ‘we’, knowing that despair can take many forms, that all our lives are eventually touched by loss.

    The genocide carried out against the Palestinian people in Gaza is in its third year. Although much has been written about the horrendous 7 October attacks by Hamas there is, still, next to no political support for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people being starved and killed at the hands of the State of Israel. And while the recent decision of the Israeli government to introduce a death penalty for Palestinians was widely condemned, it also, crucially, did not seem to have any consequences for Israeli leadership.

    What is unfolding in Gaza is untouchable for me, in that I cannot imagine it. But I believe the people living through those horrors. I believe their voices must be heard, I believe their truth must be written and sung and shouted from the rooftops.

    Coastal Lines Press is a publishing collective founded by people who are living and surviving in Gaza. The project was initiated last year by Palestinian writer, poet and translator Shahd Alnaami. Shahd hadn’t been writing before the genocide, but when she lost her closest friend Eman in Israel’s war on Gaza in December 2023, she began to express herself on the page. And soon, others joined her. You can buy Shahd’s writing, and that of many other Palestinians, in the form of digital zines (which you can then print yourself). Each zine you buy directly supports the artist who created it.

    ‘Hope, however fragile, is an act of resistance,’ Shahd writes. I believe reading and sharing her words is part of that resistance too.

    There is a Full Moon in Libra on April 2. In that relationship-minded sign, Full Moons can sometimes be quite lovely, though I’m not expecting this one to be so smooth. The Sun and Moon are both in a square to Jupiter, loud, and demanding to be seen. Small adjustments will not do. But if it’s a shake-up you’re after, this Full Moon may just have it and put you back in touch with desires you have long neglected. Incidentally, this week is a great moment for reading poetry, too. It’s a moment to read a poem out loud and see how it lands in your body as well as your heart.

    Sources and further reading:

    ‘My Poem Will Not Save You’ by Dunya Mikhail is part of the collection In Her Feminine Sign, 2019, New Directions Publishing Corp.

    A portrait of Coastal Lines Press in The New Arab

    Shahd Alnaami’s personal website

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in April 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.