On Sunday, January 8, C. Ryder Cooley is bringing her show, Xmalia, to the Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan, CT.
I first met Ryder when I interviewed her for my book. A friendship bloomed, and I have since been helping her with direction and choreography for her lovely show.
Ryder is a serious artist who creates and inhabits worlds that are both whimsical and deadly. Xmalia explores themes of extinction in film, song, movement and trapeze. Among her subjects are deer gigantus, tiger, butterflies and the tragic dodo. Joining her onstage are her band of musicians and the exquisite Lady Moon.
Ryder calls her work “tragedy cabaret,” a description I find apt and provocative. Showtime is Sunday at 5:00. You will not be disappointed.
postscript: Breaking into Blossom begins January 23. It is an online, five-week meditation on moving into an improvisational life. There will be assignments, conversations and surprises. Join us!
“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”
Patti Smith
My friend Suzanne sent me this quotation. I love this because it feels like a koan to me. A puzzle box that time and curiosity will keep opening. A series of nested matrushkas. I am especially interested in the ways that abandon, balance and stealth intersect and overlay; in how I am dancing the dance of those three.
This photograph that I took yesterday morning feels a bit like how I am stepping into the new year. Spacious possibility and all that is unknown. A blank tablet that carries the cuneiform of the previous year(s).
My charge to myself is to move from feeling, intuition and trust. To find something new every day. More than once a day.
Bimala with a pack from the past: Luna, Tashi, Liam (under and still here), Esme, Dae
I don’t usually write about the dogs. I am not sure why. They feel more intimate somehow than the horses, even though they are not.
For the past twenty years, we have adopted “retired” racing greyhounds. Retired is a euphemism for “done.” Some are injured, like Tashi, who broke his leg, and was never treated. Some never made it as racers, like our bright Esme, who just wouldn’t race, despite a brilliant lineage. It was not her thing, though you wouldn’t know it to see her on the beach. Others, like Luna, Dae, Jules and Guinnie, have long careers and do actually retire. The retirement is a tricky thing. It is about the luck of the draw. Some dogs get on the rescue vans, and find their way to shelters or greyhound halfway homes where they await adoption. Others are not so lucky. Our particular rescuing angel is Louise Coleman, the founder of Greyhound Friends in Hopkinton, MA.
Our greyhound saga began like this. We were on a cross-country ski weekend in New Hampshire at an inn owned by a British couple. At tea time on the first day, the guests watched in fascination as the owners’ very tall and very elegant greyhound, Finbar, walked into the room. He proceeded over to the table where the cookies and crackers were arranged, and reached his long thin nose forward to select a single cracker, not touching anything else, and carried it back out of the room where he presumably enjoyed it.
Pam and I were done. We found out where Finbar had come from and made a call the next week. Two weeks later, we brought home our first greys, Misha and Zoe. That was twenty years ago, and in that time we have had ten greys, including Gordita and Cho, two Galgos Espanols from Andalucia, where they are used as hunting dogs by the gypsies and cruelly discarded or killed after they have lost their edge.
I love greyhounds in part because they are athletes – racers, like horses. To see a greyhound run at full tilt is a miracle of nature. I have never been to a racetrack. But I have seen them open up on Lucy Vincent Beach on Martha’s Vineyard, or in our back meadow. Racing greyhounds run in powerful muscular surges. Galgos are more like watching skimming, airborne water – they are fence climbers, shape shifters. Greys are beautiful, even formidable. They are often shy and delicate, with an almost feline quality about them, and, I like to think, a bit of unicorn mixed in. Mostly I love them because of their sweetness, and because they seem to understand and appreciate the gift of home and family that they have been given after a far less auspicious start in the kennels of the racetrack.
Capturing video of a dog that goes from 0 to 40 can be tricky. Have a look.
