The Silly Octopus
A sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes
I would like to begin this time together with an embodied meditation. I invite you back to your breath and the feeling of your body. The breath inside you. The air around you. The bones and muscles holding you up. The force of gravity hugging you into the earth and the structures upon it, the floor and the chair. Your own beautiful consciousness playing in this moment.
The year I lived in DC, I took a bunch of theatre classes. I worked at the theatre, so I could take classes in their conservatory for half price. I signed up for Principles of Realism and braced myself for doing scene work in the 20th century two-people-having-a-lifechanging-conversation style—not my favorite. I had my prejudices and did not connect with what I assumed I would be learning.
You see, I was all about the work of poetic theater playwrights like Mac Wellman and setting free the imagination to ask big questions on a tiny budget rather than trying to breathe life into a photograph. Or so I pre-judged.
The funny thing about this Realism and its Principles we were supposed to learn was that we had to set free our imaginations to get there, with no budget at all. One of the first assignments for that class was to do an animal improvisation. We had to observe an animal until we could portray it in the conservatory classroom. For some reason I decided I was going to be an octopus. I had only ever seen an octopus once, but it seemed like a thing I needed to do.
Luckily for me, there was an octopus in the national zoo. So that weekend I went to the zoo and stood in front of that big tank in the invertebrate house, stood there and watched the octopus all noodled up into the upper corner of the tank. It wasn’t doing much, so other people did not stop for long. They mostly paused for a moment before heading on to the crabs or other residents on exhibit.
It felt like being in a train station and not taking a train, just standing and watching as everyone moves around you. I laid my bag and coat on the floor and decided that I could try to copy the octopus not moving, if it wasn’t going to move while I was there. It swayed a little bit as it took in water through its gills and propelled it out through its funnel, so I started to play with the idea of being not so much air and bones but muscle and water, that the water I was in and the water that was in me were the same, that my body was sensing the water all over me and through me.
There I was, oh so subtly rocking in place trying to feel instead of my internal breeze of breath an internal tide, constantly waving in and out. The octopus began moving its tentacles in tiny subtle movements, tip over tip like shoelaces trying to untie themselves, so I copied that motion in my hands and my wrists, delicately spiraling, until the octopus’s motion became larger, moving the whole arm. I moved my whole arm, trying to embody that fluidity of motion.
I don’t know when the octopus saw me mirroring its motion—probably pretty early on, because they have excellent eyesight, you know—but it started copying me back. I had done mirroring exercises many times in theatre classes, where two people face each other and make the same movement at the same time, but this was the first time I had done such a thing with a non-human partner. The octopus made its movements larger and larger, until we were dancing back and forth across the front of its tank. I don’t know how long we kept this up, whether it was five minutes or thirty, long enough for me to get the feeling of the octopus in my body. My focus had narrowed to the tank in front of me. I could not tell you whether the invertebrate house was empty behind me or full of spectators.
It was a silly moment.
Silly, not meant disparagingly but way down in its root as being in the same word family as soul, which is a thing I learned from my poetic playwright Mac Wellman. Silly as opposed to proper or moralistic or respecting of an external order. Silly as coming from its own impulse. Silly in the way that this play meant everything and absorbed my whole being. My soul was invested in dancing with this octopus, and I think that it is because the octopus was teaching me how to move from my center out. You see, an octopus when it reaches does not reach with the ends of its arms. The movement spirals from its center until the whole arm—or sometimes the whole octopus—gets where it needs to go. The tips don’t operate separately from further up the arm. Everything comes from the center.
And we forget that, don’t we, while we’re so busy moving through the air with our skeletons inside us. We’ve even created a myth that the octopus can do eight different things at once since it has eight dexterous arms, rather than the unified grace I saw at the zoo. It’s almost as though the eight arms keep us from noticing the center. Everything has a center. Even the octopus. Even us.
How do we connect to the center? How do we connect to the soul?
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Divinity School Address called for, “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul” to fix what has become stale and rigid in our life together. I don’t know for sure that he would endorse pretending to be an octopus in public, but I do know that he was an advocate for the embodied and whole-hearted embrace of life. And the only way to come back to soul over and over again is to come back over and over again to risk appearing foolish for the demands of heart and soul.
It’s time to get silly, full of soul. The word has meant childish, pious, and foolish at various points in its history. The best translation I can find for the word silly as I mean it, as I feel it, is whole-hearted. It’s time to be whole-hearted. It’s time to love something so much we let ourselves be beginners.
This formula has become my personal theory of everything. When in doubt, how do we lean deeper into the relationship? When called to something bigger, scale up from the center. When something goes wrong, where have we lost connection to the center? What’s the whole-hearted way to stay engaged?
It’s time to love people so much we screw up on Tuesday and keep trying on Wednesday, not for the sake of optics but for the sake of relationship. Daring to get it wrong in learning to get it right, learning in public, and for the love of God loving joy more than wit. It’s why we have covenants and not just rules. We make explicit how to create relationships not just how to break them.
It’s time to get silly, to love connection more than perception, to be fools together rather than cool to each other. It’s time to be all in. It’s time to ask the awkward question and listen to the answer. It’s time to love one another instead of loving things about one another. It’s time to be whole-hearted, to jump in rather than hang back.
What would happen if we tried to be whole-hearted instead of being right or good or smart? Who would we be to one another if we dared to be all the way there, without preconception? How could we be transformed by our own center? I think of how our life together might change, how we might reimagine our justice work, our idea of congregational right relations, if we dare to work from relationship rather than an imposed agenda.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we can’t have agendas and procedures, but I am asking you to do something bigger. Agendas, procedures, bylaws, and institutions if they are to exist must serve our relationships rather than the other way around. How do they move from the center out, from that impulse to connect and be in a relationship that acknowledges that you are a whole and beautiful happening in the world just like I am, not simply my fellow committee member or my companion or my social hour friend? How do we create the pathways to relationships that acknowledge the heart in each other?
To be fair, we’re going to screw up. Eventually we will treat one another as objects instead of the wonders of the universe that we all are. It happens. It happens every time there’s a relationship worth having. The way back in is to come back in, to lean into the relationship, the covenant, and say, “I didn’t take your perspective into account, and I am sorry.”
If any of you are taking notes, here’s the formula: “This is how I didn’t honor you. I am sorry.” Not “I’m sorry if you felt that way” or “I’m sorry if I offended you.” Nothing in the air, no if, just be sorry. And then do nothing. Honoring the relationship means not demanding a particular response, not imposing your project of how you will make amends. Return to treating them like a wonder of the universe who gets to make their own decisions and gets to decide how they show up to the relationship. You don’t protect your image. You open up. And learn how to not make the same mistake again.
And while you’re at it scale down and be this generous with yourself. Scale up and live boldly into the communities that are part of your life. Scale all the way up and get into beautiful relationship with earth and sky and ocean.
It’s time to look like fools, to try something new, to invite the new kid to play, to be the new kid, to forget everyone is or is not watching. It’s time to reach out in curiosity, because sometimes that which is curious reaches back. And the movement spirals from the center so beautifully, moving past what is probable and predictable to what is real beyond our imaginations. We are called to witness, and the only way to witness is from within, to get real in ourselves and our relationships, to get silly. It’s where the joy is, where the heart is, where the soul is, and that is how we come back to center ever more.
Please join me in a moment of prayer.
Breath of life, beat of our whole hearts,
We are called to this moment now.
Help us to be whole-hearted within it.
May our heartbeats remind us to live expansively in ourselves and with each other.
In the many names and many silences where we find our deepest connections.
Amen. Blessed be.
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Photo by Alessandro Canepa on Unsplash
