Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Oct11

into the fray

Posted on by

In 2008 I went to New Hampshire for a month to work on the Obama campaign.  I made friends, I learned a lot.  I am going back.  This falls into the category of “ride” in the title of my blog.  I am saddling up, picking up the reins.

It is important to me to show up and stand up for something that I feel to be this important.  It is important to me to walk the walk.  I have two daughters.  I am doing it for them.  I am doing it for myself as a gay woman.  I cannot bear the idea of scaling back any kind of human rights, of “othering” anyone.  I find it heinous to think of reversing the social justice gains of the past four years.  It is unimaginable to think of reversing ourselves , as women, to once again being regarded by insurance companies as being a “pre-existing condition” on the basis of having a uterus.  No thank you.

So in ten days, I will hit the road.  I will be posting from the road.  I will have stories.  Stay tuned.

SHARE & EMAIL
Oct11

sky and water are the same state of being

Posted on by

Monet Refuses the Operation

By Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.  Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Source: Second Language (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

Oct8

after the dance

Posted on by

photo:  Pam White

I spent Sunday, the day after our performance feeling a sense of relief.  Right next to that was a lovely blank slate feeling – as if there was infinite creative possibility.  Monday however, when I awoke, I felt list mania sneaking in from the edges, and that feeling of available creative space shrinking.

I want to hang out in the open field and just gaze and breathe for a bit.  I am also reviewing the “management” part of my life – the house, the gardens, the kids, the animals, the career, the relationship, the body, etc.  My wish going forward is to manage less and appreciate more.

All day Saturday before, during and after the performance, I had a huge sense of appreciation.  For the dancers, the farm, the riders, the horses, the people who came, for myself.  It came in lovely big swells, like the waves on the south shore of Barbados.  Lifting and carrying.  More of that please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the Pretty Horses Facebook album