Monthly Archives: November 2013

Nov28

Thanksgiving

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abundance

Grace

Thanks & blessings be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessings to them
who share it
(& also the absent & the dead).
Thanks & Blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
(may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
& blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want – for their hunger
sours the wine & robs
the taste from the salt.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & work of justice, of peace.

~ Rafael Jesus Gonzalez ~

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Nov25

performance: mark the date!

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DSC00272Photo:  Pam White

On January 10, I will be performing part of a new solo, The Traveler (moth to the flame) at the Booking Dance Festival NYC.  Once again, we will be at the beautiful Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Time TBA, but probably around 8 pm.

Broadway  at  60th  Street,  New  York,  NY

www.bookingdance.com

I hope to see you there!

Nov24

thank you

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DSC09410

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
“Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
Meister Eckhart

 

This morning’s Deepak Chopra meditation was about gratitude.  About the prayer that is simply, “thank you.”  As I sat with that feeling, I was overwhelmed.  There is too much, I thought, too much to appreciate, to be grateful for.  Where do I begin?  With just the touch or air on my skin?  With the raving wind outside?  With the field of possibility this day holds?

For the past seven months, since my daughter ran away, I have not felt the gratitude, but the curse of loss and sorrow.  In the midst of that, I have felt moments of appreciation glimmering through a penetrating darkness, but my heart was dark, wounded.  My attention felt magnetized not to what was present, but to the absence.

Today though, I felt flooded with light.  I am not a religious person, but the experience was ecstatic, like Paul on the road to Damascus.  What I mean is that I felt an inner conversion to lightness, to gratitude, to appreciation.  As if all of the work I have been doing to make my way through my grief and rage had suddenly taken hold.  As if “thank you” had illuminated my personal yellow brick road.

Looking up from my meditation i saw the branches of the birch trees outside tickling the waning moon.  The light on the white trunks was like a call to action.  So for me, today, thank you.  Thank you.  thank  you.

 

 

Nov23

I am free #2

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rylance-630Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night.

“Where most of us succumb to the limiting power of self-preservation, Shakespeare rushed toward the enormous freedom that can come with “why”—the spirit of inquiry that jump-starts the imagination.”

Hilton Als, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The New Yorker

I was struck by this quotation in The New Yorker from a review of the current production of Twelfth Night at the Belasco. I got to thinking about the “limiting power of self-preservation.”  What does that mean?  To me, it brings to mind living safe, trying to protect against disaster, loss, injury or heartbreak.  Right away, I can see that I have failed that litmus test.  My particular road is littered with all of the above.  I don’t see them as battle scars, so much as evidence of either rank stupidity (14 years of out-of-control drinking, for example) or the wisdom of putting my heart on the line.  Doing that was when I came out 27 years ago and fell in love with my beautiful wife, Pam.  It was also when I crashed through my fears to adopt our two daughters.  More than “the enormous freedom that can come with why” those were about the  freedom that came with “why not?”  or “yes.”

Saturday I went into my studio with dancer and long time friend Pamela Newell to do some Authentic Movement.  At the end of one time of moving, I found myself lying on the floor, holding my heart.  To me, it felt as if my heart, bruised and  cupped, had migrated to the outside of my chest, and that my hands were needed to keep it from falling away from me.  I knew that movement and the image were connected to my absent, estranged daughter.  Embodying that allowed me both to feel it that hurt and to release it.

Have I felt like giving up?  Of course.  Does that feel like the “limiting power of self-preservation?”  It does.  My broken heart requires me to keep opening, loving, praying.  Not asking “why” – which in this situation creates more suffering – but rather what am I being asked to do, and how shall I do it.  And in those questions I find the freedom to imagine, to dream, to hope.