About Porter Witsell - Somatic Therapist
Porter Witsell OIC, EOLD
Welcome to my practice, Fieldwork Somatics. I am a certified Organic Intelligence Coach and End-of-Life Doula on Tohono O’odham land, Arivaca and Tucson, Arizona offering in-person and online sessions for adults, adolescents, and couples. I am a white, queer, mama and plant nerd, a lover of magical realism, and I can flip a record without getting any fingerprints on it.
I come from movement practices, critical and performance theory, art, humanitarian aid, and deep play, all in service of understanding the conditions and containers of being. I believe so much in the space between, in relationality, and in the resilience and depth of a human spirit.
I hold that the best self care is also community care, that community care is the stage for prefigurative politics, and that healing and tending to self is brave, worth it and also our responsibility to each other.
I am a part of the Sonoran Desert Somatic Collective, offering a Politicized Somatics Course this fall. See website for more information https://www.sonorandesertsomaticcollective.org/
In the words of the masterful Alua Arthur, “How can we live presently and die gracefully?”
And to echo in the fields with Mary Oliver, I’ll leave you this one to read again.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
+ Mary Oliver