When I teach writing classes for adopted people, I now start out with my theory of the tornado and the still point. I know the energy of tornado. Even though my bodymind literally ache for me to find and stay in the still point, I feed tornado to keep it and me in deep spin. Caffeine, sugar, over-spending, under-sleeping, and ruminating are all great ways to be in tornado. Tornado is stress, the sympathetic nervous system, living in Camp Do, while the still point is rest and digest, the parasympathetic nervous system, living in Camp Be. The tornado is you do not belong. Tornado is you hurt people just by existing. Tornado is it will be better if you don’t feel.

My theory is that my brain believes it has to stay in tornado because that’s where it thinks my mother’s body is. Part of my mind thinks I’m still back in my infant body, living in the anguish of where is she?, which is the same as where am I?

If my body was created in a body that did not want me, is that not also tornado? Is not my developing body learning that stress is home, stress is safety? If the baby does not have the still point of true safety and belonging, the baby learns that felt-chaos is the world. That it is therefore how things and its body are meant to be. In the brain, the tornado becomes the right way to be because it is how the baby experiences the world.

Nineteen years later, the baby-teenager may choose to drop out of college suddenly when things seem to be going well because the sense of well-ness, okay-ness, and safety can be felt as dangerous and wrong to the nervous system which desperately wants the body and mind to get back to the tornado so it can rest and feel safe in the chaos and danger it knows as home.

I thought writing You Don’t Look Adopted would get me peace, but because I was reporting from the tornado, that’s what I got: more tornado.

When you are born into the tornado of mother loss it becomes the home you want to return to over and over even though the very marrow of your being is exhausted and cries out for you through various physical maladies to find a way to be still. 

The irony is that when you are in stillness you can feel sick, in trouble, or like death is about to come get you. So much for stillness! Stillness can feel like tornado! But let me ask you something, if you were in a tornado, or if you were in a spot of stillness, would you know the difference?

Of course you would.

Health resides in stillness. Deep, sustainable creativity resides in stillness. Churches are built as shrines to stillness. Have you been to Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia? It was like a giant needle came out of the sky and pinned me in place when my body stood inside that structure and tried to understand what was happening to it. I think Guadi took tornado and made it still. I don’t know. I still don’t know what happened to me there. I want to go back and have that feeling again.

Stillness is our breath, our heart, our body, where we reside. Tornado is the mind, a place of stories and of others.

It’s incredible to me how frightening we can be to ourselves. How terrifying space can be, stillness, quiet.

And how amazing.