Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Jan23

where I’ll be

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veduta Bogliasco

The Bogliasco Foundation in Italy has generously offered me a one month fellowship during time which I will be making new dance work.  Pam will join me for the last two weeks.  We are collaborating on still and moving images that will become part of the film that opens my new dance The Traveler.  I will also be diving into Beast, gorgeously costumed by my long time collaborator, Christine Joly de Lotbinnere.

Preparations are daunting.  How many books, how much stuff?  Send ahead, carry with me?  How warm?  How cool?  Actually, I know that it is mostly in the 50’s there now which seems balmy by comparison.  No swimming, but definitely some beach walking.

I am excited and honored.  I will be sharing and posting from Bogliasco and surrounds both about the place and my process and what it feels like to dive into new work in this sheltered, supported way.

I will miss my ponies, dogs and cats, and they will miss me, especially Mamacita, the feral mommy of Precious and Obadiah, who we feed and house outside, and who, after four skittish years, has decided that being petted is the bomb!  If my experience of travels all over the world from Nepal to Barbados is any indication, the kitties will find me. . .

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Jan22

lighten up

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“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

       “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

You cannot really disconnect yourself from the passionate, desirous being that you are. It was with enormous clarity that you came forth into this body, and that’s why when you try to hold your desire down, it keeps coming up…Your cork will always float unless you are holding it down. — Abraham

 I have been holding down the cork of my love for my daughter.  That cork  gets heavy and shitty with my disgust and anger at her choices.  But my cork needs to float.  Because that cork is attached to all the other corks – my love for myself, my wife, my work and on and on like a big net of floats, and the more I push that one cork down, the more it drags on the others.

So I am going to let the light enter, which can feel like hard work when all you see and feel is the wound.  This morning Pam and I shared some laughter around breakfast and realized that we had not done that for a long time, that we have grown somber and heavy with hurt.  Time to shine, time to brighten, time to love. That is my prayer for this day, this life.

Here is some serious light, a gift sent to me by one of my gorgeous goddesses, Suzanne.

Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.

Jan20

bear

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imagesDriving Through the Wind River Reservation: A Poem of Black Bear by Mary Oliver.

from Dream Work

In the time of snow, in the time of sleep.
The rivers themselves changed into links
of white iron, holding everything. Once
she woke deep in the leaves under
the fallen tree and peered
through the loose bark and saw him:
a tall white bone
with thick shoulders, like a wrestler,
roaring the saw-toothed music
of wind and sleet, legs pumping
up and down the hills.
Well, she thought, he’ll wear himself out
running around like that.
She slept again
while he drove on through the trees,
snapping off the cold pines, grasping,
rearranging over and over
the enormous drifts. Finally one morning
the sun rose up like a pot of blood
and his knees buckled.
Well, she whispered from the leaves,
that’s that. In the distance
the ice began to boom and wrinkle
and a dampness
that could not be defeated began
to come from her, her breathing
enlarged, oh, tender mountain, she rearranged
herself so that the cubs
could slide from her body, so that the rivers
would flow.

Jan19

the dance, again

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8b7dc933ef10c640900367f0b3485a87Umut Kebabci

Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?

by Mary Oliver

Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it.
It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn’t the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven’t the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?

Don’t call this world an explanation, or even an education.

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking

to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,

as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?

Copyright ©:  Mary Oliver