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

12

Let's start with the numbers. Armen's five years younger than me (which is maybe five years crazier) and a good 40 pounds lighter than me. Look, I'm just 185, but it's really something to think about a guy smaller than me schlepping me around like that.

Other things: When I'm done with exercise or a bike ride or mowing the lawn or something, I'm usually bathed in sweat, which I am now, too. It's not all mine, though, and there's something about that - not anything gross, because we came by it honestly - but in terms of comingling of selves.

I had thought, when I first heard of this project, that being carried might be a sort of passive thing - that I might be as a sack of rice or a barrel of flour or an animal carcass being carried home from a market somewhere. But it's not - which I cottoned on to after reading a few of the earlier posts here. So I knew it would be an active endeavor, but even so I didn't know how active it would be for me.

I'm pretty exhausted, and still breathing hard now 30 minutes after the carry ended. The discomfort and exertion never really went away in the 80 or so minutes I clung to Armen as we labored up the hill, down the hill, through the flat, back up the hill, and back down it.

Then there were the other options, always just beside us.

As the carry started, a bus pulled up to a bus stop as we were walking by. Even then my body was tempted - my mind said I should give this effort a real try, though, so I did. Next we passed a U-Haul van being loaded up, and I realized there was space in there for us, too. I think another bus went by before we got to city hall, and then when we were in Monument Square there were two huge stretch limos in the middle of the square. One drove out past us as we began the return leg. Coming back past city hall again, a bus stopped to let some people off, and the driver waited for us to walk up even with the entrance door - maybe she thought we'd climb aboard. She called out to us something about getting a back injury, but we kept going.

By then - actually rather well before then - the world had shrunk down to my body, Armen's body, and the 10 or so feet immediately in front of us.

My job was really just to hang on as tightly as I could - basically keeping the connection between us, so Armen could put his energy into moving us forward.

A few people commented as we went past, looking upon our effort as amusement or fun or exercise - and yet we were struggling, working, in pain. I'm mostly still not sure how Armen did it - I am not sure I could carry him that distance. On the other hand, that's some of what this project is about - to suggest to me that indeed I could, if I put my mind to it, even though good sense, logic, even sanity might suggest otherwise.

One thing that helped me - and Armen said it helped him too - was that early on in the carry, I'm not really sure where exactly, I remembered a strategy I had used to keep myself moving on a high-altitude trek in Nepal several years back. With every step, no matter how small a step nor how long after the next, I would recite another syllable of the Buddhist chant carved into rocks all along the trail: Om Mani Padme Hum. I told Armen about it, and when things got really rough on the way back, I chanted aloud to him - and with him, sometimes, when he wasn't needing every ounce of oxygen for his back and legs - and that did help us keep moving, and it helped me find a rhythm to hanging onto him.

We were able to do it - we set out to do it, and we did it. Now we will see what we learned. I wonder, you 11 others who have been carried before, what do you think about the carry now - days, weeks, maybe months from when it happened? I guess I'll see in a while. For now, I'm tired, sore, and curious.

11

Can we do that again? Right now I feel like a little kid who just screwed up my courage and did something I wasn't sure I could, and now that I have, I want more. What a great experience being carried was for me...

I confess I had had so many ideas about what I would think or feel as I anticipated the carry during this past week. What I found was that I just had a really great time. I felt immediately comfortable in our amble, like we'd done it yesterday and the day before and the day before that.

The thought of one person carrying another touched the same place in me that finds me getting teary whenever I'm in a group of people that is clapping for someone -- a performer, a speaker, the like. People appreciating one another, recognizing in each other something that is good, is valuable, and people tending to one another is just so pure, so sweet and so rare. In the actual experience of being carried, however, with my arms crossed over Armen's chest in a strong embrace, and my arms, neck and head rising above his, I felt that I was the one who was doing the tending, that I was the caregiver, the angel and protector. Even as he toiled under my weight, I felt that I was comforting him, loving him, supporting him. Realizing that this idea seemed a little backward did not make me feel any differently, but as the carry went on I almost forgot that he was carrying me at all. I got used to our position and our conversation, and I was more focused on learning about the person whose body was pressed to my chest than I was in tracking the nuances of my own feelings or ideas.

The position I was in, with my arms crossed around Armen's chest and my legs sticking out rather straight was strikingly similar to a cradling sculptural figure I just completed this week, and I found myself enjoying embodying the cradle's intent.

As we neared the Eastern Promenade at the end of the carry, I felt rather let down that it was over. I had become surprisingly settled into my drape over Armen's shoulders and quite engrossed in our conversation. The journey felt like such a quick one, and such a natural activity, and that little surprise is something I'll be thinking about for a while.

Thank you, Armen, for bringing me into this experience.

Catherine Fisher
Falmouth, Maine

10

We started at the ocean, breathing in the fresh air, air after a rain, and the birds were chorusing.

I leapt onto his back, and we set off.

I instantly felt a memory attached to this physical feeling, a memory of being carried as a child by my father, and how safe and secure and comfortable i was, feeling tall and laughing.

I am light weight, and it was easy to fit immediately into a position on Armens back that felt good.

I could feel every breath that Armen took, in my chest, and in my legs which were wrapped around his middle, the steady in and out, the swelling of his lungs. I became very aware of his body, his steps, his breaths, and wondered how I was affecting him, if it was painful, heavy, or easy to have my body on his back.

The more we walked the more I became aware of the three points of weight, where I felt my weight the most. In my armpits, where my arms touched his shoulders, on my inner knee where my leg touched his arms, and on my chest where I lay against his back. These were the three points of the most contact, and I became very aware of them.
Riding on his back, i could rest my head against his head easily, and it felt good, if my neck became soar from holding my self up, I could lay it there and even the tiniest bit of contact changed the stress on my body.
He carried me on a route that I walk everyday, and I noticed that from this new position, raised up on Armens back, I was seeing things I had not noticed before, things that were obscured from view at my normal height, or things that I hadn't looked up at because of my concentration on the uneven cobblestones.
When I closed my eyes, I felt that I was riding on the back of some kind of a creature, horse like in rhythm, bird like in structure.

We went faster than I expected.

When we saw people on the street I noticed them watching, and most of them smiled, like seeing this kind of contact between two people made them happy, seeing someone carry another gave them a feeling of happiness.
When we walked (and I say we because we became like one, I wasn't walking, but Armen was) up the hill back towards the water, i could feel his body temperature rise, as he worked harder to carry me, he sweated more, and where we contacted on his back and my front, it became very warm. This was an intense feeling, being so close to someone as they worked on this physical challenge.

We reached the water, and it was exhilarating.

From monument to monument.

I detached myself from his back, and stood again on the ground,. My entire body felt so different, so loose, yet tense, so warm in a few places, and cool in others.

We breathed.

Maisie Broome
Portland, Maine

9

I really just volunteered to participate in the carry to help Armen. I had read a bit about his project on the website and was intrigued. I wasn't sure what I would learn from it, but I didn't participate for that. I do know that in my life right now I am usually in charge and in control. Even in my family life I take charge and solve problems. So I became curious to see if I might learn something about letting go and being dependent on someone else.

Mostly, I was struck by how much the carry reminded me of being a child again. I guess my parents carried me like that a lot when I was small. I really enjoyed feeling like a kid. It was quite relaxing. I almost could have fallen asleep. We could have gone anywhere and I'd have ridden along.

I was also thinking about the physical closeness. I had a few friends react with surprise that I was going to ride on the back of some man I'd never met. I was never uncomfortable with that. Yet, I can be quite shy and was surprised how easily I was able to hold on tight to this fellow. There was an easy feeling of trust.

Finally, I walk that route every day to and from work. I always walk that way alone. Today I enjoyed more than simple companionship, but very close companionship. I also enjoyed seeing the sights I know so well from a taller perspective--things truly did look different. As I walk that way over the coming weeks I'm sure I'll be thinking more about this.

Nan Cumming
Munjoy Hill
Portland, Maine

8

I'm aware of my pulse, the vitality coursing through my body. I feel surprisingly light and alive after the carry. There was never a moment of doubt that I couldn't make it, but there was discomfort. And since there was no retreating from the discomfort, the solution was to transfer it, from one part of my body to the next and between Armen and me.

All the while the image of a horse came to mind. Armen was the horse, I was the rider. His gait, breath and shifting weight brought to mind this image over and over. I thought of the labor endured by animals, the physical labor we undertook at one time to provide food and transportation for ourselves. The everyday labor of survival, now practically unknown to us. Yet we still seek it out. Our bodies crave it, though we rarely recognize it. It must be part of what inspires some of us to lift weights at a gym, to pursue sports in a complusive manner. We seek out our limitations as if in defiance of the value put on comfort and ease. Or we succumb to gavity, to convenience, and in turn we loose vitality. We become physically and spiritually disembodied.

I was being carried but I was not a passive participant in this experiment. I wasn't dependent on Armen to carry me; we were dependent on each other to complete the trip, despite the inclimate weather. On a wet, sloppy Saturday the warmth and comfort of home tempted me to stay indoors. But by sacrificing the comfort, by laboring with Armen, I am rewarded with a body made more alive.

Janie Newkirk
Portland, Maine

7

So we made it. So cool, huh? Now I am sitting in Armen's house writing and he is making tea. I feel the need to describe what is going on right now instead of on the carry, maybe I should have taken notes as we walked. We are amazing. We started at the Monument on the Eastern Prom, the pointy and plain piece of granite pointing to the sky. We bowed in a way to the Ocean but we didn't really bow, we just acknowledged and breathed. Then a look to Congress Street and we were ready. I jumped on Armen's back and felt really determined and we started walking and we moved uphill a little ways. Before we had left I told Armen to take his time and not feel rushed please. When we started to go he told me it would all fall into place and we would find the way. It was great. I told Armen he was amazing and tried to sing to him a little but the movement on my diaphragm made it a little hard to be soothing. I remember saying it felt like cuddling while walking. Armen was concentrated and moving pretty swiftly. One man said why don't you start running and we laughed. Before that we saw a man who said wow, let's see how far you make it and Armen said we were going to Monument Square and he laughed. We took our first break at the Church of Immaculate Conception on Congress street. Armen just bent over with his hands on his knees and I hung over him like a rag doll. It felt cool just hanging there over someone's back on the sidewalk, pretty oblivious to cars and people around me. We started again and I closed my eyes. That felt really nice. It was like I was floating on a cloud for a moment I envisioned myself being as light as a cloud and felt very comfortable. A woman behind us laughed and said it should have been the other way around, I should have been carrying him. I thought of all the strange ratios Arnmen would experience over the 100 carries, how there would be big people on his back and little people and different gender and color people and how strange it must seem to some people just to see that anyway. Armen said it was interesting to see different people's personalities come out on the carries. He seemed very focused but maintained conversation readily and in an interested way. We took another couple breaks I think but I don't remember where. I saw a friend as we walked and stopped to tell her about the project as Armen paused. I felt like a advertisement billboard and felt embarrassment for a second, but realized I am just wanting to support the project in that way I guess. We made it to Monument Square. A dog looked at us funny it was funny. Spirits are still high and we're still moving on. Armen says he wants to do this for a living and talks about possibilities to do that and his want to keep carrying after the 100 carries as long as his body allows. We are now half way through. Armen's hands have been hurting from clutching my legs and carrying my weight. We stop again and the openness and looseness in his back is amazing. I feel like I am resting in the hammock of his frame. Up the hill is easier he says and we make our way up. I am focusing on keeping my head out of the way. My arm's strong, my stomach clenched and my legs light. I alternate from wanting to relax fully and clench fully, release or help, I go back and forth. Armen says it is a game of readjustment. I say I am challenged to find ease in hardship knowing readjustment is there as a choice. We make it to Saint Laurence Church and take another break. Armen walks slowly over the ice in his crocs and makes it back to the monument. He feels for the railing as he walks around the monument and struggles a little in the snow. It has been fun to be so close with him. He puts me down and we both feel our bodies. Mine feels light but begins to settle with heaviness. Armen is very warm and sweaty with a smile on his face and we walk back to my car and his apartment. I feel such admiration for his devotion, courage, perseverance, and will. I ask to carry him as we get closer to his house and he lets me even though I almost dropped him completely the first time we try. He is light and it feels really good to hold him and carry his weight for a second. We talk about the realization physical weight can bring to acknowledging how people deal in their relationships to others and ourselves. Then we make our way upstairs and I write. Peace and Love. -

kATE
Portland, Maine

6

The ocean, a plethora of directions, routes, destinations. The runway, linear, chosen.

The beginning is rough and uncomfortable. I try to find a mutually comfortable place to rest, but everything I try doesn't feel right. I notice my wet feet scrapping against his legs. I push my feet away to try and keep him from getting wet.

Slowly things begin to feel more natural. His body heats up and his breath quickens. His steps are short and careful when we step over ice.

No connection can be made without sharing a strong feeling. My legs and arms ache as they become fused to his. Our eyes become as one, scanning the sidewalk for the best route to take. My own feelings and worries are replaced by those of our new entity. This new being doesn't care about school or friends or family - it cares about it's own goals and accomplishments.

Soon a routine is established. We walk until I slide too far down his body, he scoots me up, and we start walking again. With something to focus on, time goes by quicker. Moments pass. As it becomes harder and harder to hold on, I feel myself gripping tighter and tighter. Afraid that I'm making this harder, I loosen my grip and put more weight forward.

My legs are numb once we reach the last stretch. Our connection hurts more than ever as it is finalized in the last few yards of our journey. He scoots me up one last time and takes me around the monument at the end of congress street. We rest for a moment, then I slide off his back and my feet touch the ground for the first time in an hour. We look at the ocean, then at what we have just done. Though the pain has stopped, the connection is still there. The experience is sealed forever in our histories.


Elliot McInnis
Munjoy Hill
Portland, Maine