Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Apr3

guinevere

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This is Guinevere.  Guinnie is an off-the-track greyhound that we adopted from Greyhound Friends in Hopkinton, MA. She is bringing me back her favorite toy for another toss.  Look at those eyes.

Most greyhounds do not fetch.  They often do not sit because of their big haunch muscles, and many of them have no idea how to climb stairs when they first come into a home.  They will either not try at all, or try to do the whole flight at once.

Every May and October Greyhound Friends has a big greyhound reunion.  Doting owners arrive with their dogs – often multiples since it is hard to have just one greyhound.  It is an amazing sight – a huge field with hundreds of beautiful dogs.  To me, it looks like a gathering of gorgeous fairy dogs and their human attendants.

Sometime in the afternoon there is a competition.  Longest tail.  Softest coat.  Baldest butt.  Oldest.  Youngest.  Best look alikes.  And the grand finale:  best trick.  The running joke is, “And it isn’t much.”  Greyhounds do not do tricks  – or at least none that I have met.  The best trick that I have seen in twenty years of greyhounds is a prolonged sit, followed by a high five, first with the right paw and then the left.  That got a lot of applause.

We took home a lot of ribbons last fall:  Guinnie won baldest butt.  Cho won oldest.  And Guinnie came in second for best look alike.  I thought Cho should have won it with his twin – a winsome Saluki mix, but the judges gave it Guinnie and her twin.  But anyone who has a greyhound will tell you that they feel like a winner. No ribbons needed.

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Apr2

the deep end

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Dominique and Malou in Cafe Muller by Pina Bausch

On Sunday when I was teaching in Boston, I challenged the dancers in the workshop to open the doors to their movement obsessions.  It is an idea that the great Bessie Schonberg opened to me.  I was already doing it, but she identified and crystallized it for me.

It takes a certain amount of courage to go there.  Many dancers would rather play in the safer end of the pool and not get emotionally overheated.

Obsession is what I especially love about the work of Pina Bausch, and more recently, Crystal Pite.  I admire the ferocity of their dancers, the sense that everyone is all in, all of the time, even in moments of exquisite stillness.

To my deep pleasure, the dancers in my workshop took up my challenge and dove deep.

Beyond the dance studio, I think opening to one’s obsessions – listening to them and allowing them to take form  – is what is required to live a full life.  Not following, not embodying those passions is like a series of little deaths, one moment, one dream, one day at a time.

One of my obsessions is the writing that I do weekly in Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs.  This is writing that dives deeper than I do in the blog.  It is a subscription, which is one of the ways I support myself.  The current offering is a surreal story in four parts.  The next is going to become a part of my new dance solo.  If you subscribe mid-story, you will receive the story from  its start.  I hope you will join me!

Mar31

the wild and the tame

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My friend Michele sent me this picture of the Mustang Nelson lounging in his hay.  Happy horse.

At the end of our time together this week I stood facing him, my hands softly stroking both sides of his shoulders.  Minutes passed, and I could feel his head coming to rest on my shoulder, his breathing relaxation.  Those moments felt holy, like a healing.  I am so blessed.

Most people that I speak to are unaware of the ongoing brutal culling of the fragile herds of wild Mustangs that still run free in Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado and other parts of the West.  The ongoing program of planned extermination of wild horses is well under way in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management in service of the cattle industry.  The helicopter drivers are paid per horse trapped, so there is no particular intelligence guiding the way in which the horses are chosen.  Many of the horses end up being shipped to Mexico for slaughter for the European meat market.  Slaughter is NEVER humane, and horse slaughter in Mexico is an unregulated, unimaginable horror.

As a ten-year old stallion, Nelson would have met that fate were it not for the generosity of Equine Advocates, a sanctuary in upstate New York.

If you have not signed the petition that I have up to the right of this post, please take the time to do so.  The plight of the few remaining wild Mustangs in depends upon our voices.  Not the voices of hysteria, but the steady voice of right action, of compassion and respect for all beings.  As Klaus Hempfing says, the horses are always innocent.  We must speak for them.

I am incredibly blessed to work with Nelson.  He is the anchor for many of my posts and has taught me many lessons about connecting being with horses to the rest of my life.  I do not believe that sanctuary or ownership by a human is a solution for all the wild horses, just as zoos are not solutions for all the endangered elephants.  We need the wild.  We need to feel ourselves in relationship not just to what is tame, but to the wildness within and around us.  The horses do just that.  As poet James Wright says,

Yet the earth contains

The horse as a remembrancer of wild

Arenas we avoid.