You are invited to a free dance performance, open to the public. I am performing SPEAK on a shared program with some other wonderful choreographers. Here are the details:
Once you come onto the campus, follow signs for the dance center. I hope that you can come!
from The Traveler by Paula Josa-Jones Photo: Pam White
I am not sure that this photo will enter the dance, but I could not resist this graffiti in Venice.
“As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.” Jane Hirshfield― Come, Thief: Poems
This is a picture of Chandra Kala. She is a blood sister of my daughter Chandrika – one of five. I met them both fifteen years ago at an orphanage in Kathmandu. This girl has more courage and resiliance than anyone I know. Tomorrow she will be married to Ivan, a wonderful young man from the Bolzano region of Italy where Chandra lives with her adoptive family. They are also the most courageous, loving and resiliant people I know.
Chandra has overcome some extraordinarily difficult life events and challenges. I do not want to list them. They are more than most of us encounter or even can imagine.
Pam and I are in Italy to celebrate her wedding. Her mother has asked us to say some words at her wedding. I share them here.
Dear Chandra Kala,
I have loved you from the first moment that I met you at Bal Mandir. It was fifteen years ago and I was in the midst of adopting your sister Chandrika. I met you and you touched my heart. These things cannot be explained. I love you the way a plant reaches for the sun. It is my nature.
From that first meeting, I could not dream the story that would follow. That these two great-hearted people, Yosy and Werner, would become your parents and that you would join their family with your sister Gita. That all of you would become our Italian Nepali family. That we would become your American Nepali family.
Now here we are to celebrate you and Ivan on the day of your wedding. Ivan, it is easy to see why Chandra loves you. You are all heart and spirit (and humor!). I am bursting with happiness for both of you, and am full of hope and faith for your future together.
The poet Mary Oliver tells us that love is not just loving each other. That love is rooted in the world, in finding joy in each moment, in discovering and relishing the simplest details of the world around you.
I wish for you the greatest blessings and joy as you move into this beautiful marriage.
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for–
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world.
Pam and I are in Venice. We are here for our daughter’s sister’s wedding next week. Except for India, Nepal and probably the Galapagos, I don’t think I have been anywhere so jaw-dropping. There is the mystery and movement of the water, and the buildings that rise out of it, the absence of earth traffic, the presence of every kind of water and human traffic. The sounds of Venice include the rolling of suitcases (our Airbnb is near a vaporetto stop on the Grand Canal), the click and clatter of footsteps, the church bells, the boats passing beneath our living room, the continual thrum of voices – soft, loud, children, dogs – and of language, accent, expression. It feels as if everything is in motion all of the time. This evening we rode in a gondola down some of the narrow, quiet canals, and when we got off, our walking rhythm had shifted into that of the gondola – so slow and soft that we were barely moving, as if our cells were still on the water. At night there is a darkening, more muted tumult of human sounds and the high streaming cries of swallows.
This morning I became a street performer when Pam and I went out to shoot some film and stills for a new dance I am making.
