Yaakov Asher Sinclair

 Now that my hut has burned down,

I have a better view of the moon.

                  Mizuta Masahide

I spent yesterday in Boston working with Ingrid Schatz and DeAnna Pellecchia, the co-directors of Kairos Dance, and their lovely dancers.  They had invited me to come in to coach and critique some new choreography that they are doing during a residency at the Boston Center of the Arts.  They gave me carte blanche.  I had a blast.  The dancers are wonderful, young students at Boston University – vibrant, receptive, eager, hard-working. I got to play in the garden of the angels.  Movement, image, music – my favorite foods.

At the same time that was happening, I was dealing with some very difficult news at home.  Not exactly life or death, but close.  This morning as I sat outside Ingrid’s Cambridge apartment on her bright orange Adirondack chair talking to Pam, I looked up and saw this Masahide poem taped to her window, facing out to the street.  Perfect, I thought.  I am looking at the ashes, when I should be seeking a view of the moon beyond.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For the time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”