summary

First completed carry on Wednesday, November 28th 2007

completed carries: 13

remaining volunteers needed: 87

heaviest person carried: 185 pounds

No deadline or time limit

The Route: The project originated in Portland, Maine. Since I am traveling around now, the route is different every time. I still try to keep it true to 2 miles though.


This project is about reaching out towards community. There is a gesture in the offering to carry someone that is about coming together. It's also an homage to the body and the mind. The body is capable of much more than we think, and the mind can help the body work through those barriers. It turns out this process is also about two people helping each other, and through combined dedication, accomplishing a difficult task. Over the course of the carry, fatigue erodes the mental barriers that keep both people from functioning as one entity. Judgement disappears, and what's left is two people accepting and supporting each other in an intimate setting. This, to me, is an embodiment of community. To read about people's experiences scroll down.

13

well, what to write about that? i got really wet. it took a lot more energy than i realized to be carried.... lots of holding on, repositioning, trying to figure out where to put my head, trying not to slip down too much. not like being carried as a small child, all no-thought and effortlessness. the positioning was tricky... hard to find a way to keep my arms from getting all tingly and numb. my right leg got really painful toward the end.

i've been thinking a lot lately about carrying/being carried... i'm at this point in my life where i realize i am carrying a completely unsustainable amount of stuff, both physically (things i own) and in an energetic sense. so it was interesting to have a reflection on that while being carried by another person.... hearing armen's breathing as he exerted himself carrying me around town. it made me think about how much energy i expend carrying my stuff through life and that it is a choice to carry every single thing, whether it's an object or an energetic pattern.

i spent a lot of time looking down with my head tucked next to armen's neck... noticed some things i may not have otherwise: wiggly paint lines on the road, undulating bricks in the sidewalk, lots and lots of cigarette butts. i closed my eyes at times & tried to navigate by smell/sound: that's a bike passing by whooshing through a puddle, people talking quietly & smoking on the stoop. it was an interesting sensation... moving about but through someone else's locomotion & not my own. there was quite a bit of trust involved in that for me... i intentionally kept my eyes closed when we passed through larger intersections where my instinct was to look and check that there were no cars coming, trusting armen to move us through safely.

because of the rain, i was quite soaked & at one point i noticed that my wet ear was making a suction-y sort of noise against armen's neck, which really bothered me. it was too intimate, and i kept turning my head away so it wouldn't happen. i thought it was interesting that that popped up as a boundary for me.

pretty much as soon as we turned around from monument square, i had this feeling of oh shit, i am going to have to write about this when we get back! i purposely didn't read anything armen or anyone else has posted about their experience with this project because i didn't want to color my experience... and i had this fear that i would not write about the right things, or that my post would be too long, or what if everyone else was way more insightful than me? and i really had to work on letting that go & accepting that as part of the process and just being okay with Letting It Happen. now i need to post this before i start editing myself. oh, and it seems relevant to mention that my thirtieth birthday is in two days. that definitely has a lot to do with my mindframe during this experience.

peace and love.

lauren markert
woolwich, maine