Category Archives: improvisation life

Apr30

can you help? thank you!

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I don’t usually do an outright ask on the blog.  And I will not do it often.  This is an ask for help with our new horse dancing project, All the Pretty Horses.

Since I started working with rescued horses, it has been my dream to create a performance with these “throw away” horses and local dancers.  We have now found the perfect partnering organization, Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham, New York.

Little Brook has been saving horses for many, many years.  The unique part of their program is that these horses then become active, participating partners in a range of activities:  riding, performing, vaulting, jumping and teaching generations of children and adults about horses and all of the ways that we can connect with them.

A visit there is moving.  It is a humble place, staffed by passionate and dedicated volunteers.  The effort goes into the programs, into the care of the horses, and into sharing the joy of horses with humans from age three to the sky is the limit.

In order to bring the project to fruition, we need to raise $3500 to offset fees and travel for the professional dancers from my company who travel from Boston.  Those funds are also for publicity, costumes and modest administrative costs to assure that the event is a rousing success.

The performance will take place October 6 at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham, NY.  Mark your calendars!!!

Please help us to whatever extent you can.   Dancemakers Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Donations are fully tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. To contribute, click on the link below or make your check payable to Dancemakers Inc. and send to the address below.

Dancemakers, Inc.

P.O. Box 773
Sharon, CT 06069
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Apr29

dancing in the flames

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Photo:  Pam White  Anima Motrix by Paula Josa-Jones

My friend Nicole Rushin recently posted a link to a film about the brilliant Jungian writer, scholar and dreamer, Marion Woodman called Dancing in the Flames.

Many years ago, I attended a conference headlined by Marion Woodman.  I was reading Jung day and night, in the midst of a Jungian analysis, and steeped in Joseph Campbell.  It was a heady time. Mystical, sublime.

In the intervening years, I feel that I have lost some of that connection to mysticism.  I am dancing in the flames, but it can often feel like the flames of hell, with me doing a scorched tango.

Last night, we had dinner with our friend Brett, a lawyer who is also studying to become ordained as an Episcopal priest.  I have not had lovely experiences with religion.  But Brett is drawn to something deep and lovely and mystical in his relationship to God.  It is not my experience, but as we talked, I could remember some ecstatic, embodied moments in the music – the divine in the unspoken.

Brett said that he recently gave a sermonette titled “Wounded Corporeality.”  It was about coming together to share our wounds.  That surprised me.  When I heard the title, I immediately thought he meant something else:  how corporeality itself is wounded in the church.  That the disembodied, dogmatic nature of religion is the real wound, and that until we can discover a sensuous, embodied mysticism, that wound will persist.

Something in me is wanting to re-awaken to the mystical and this lovely film about a living goddess is shining a light.

 

Apr26

home, re-home

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Yesterday my sister and I transplanted a Rosa Rugosa from a rose bed to the end of a grape arbor.  She says that it is a traditional, auspicious place for a rose.  Plus, she wanted it out of her rose bed.  It was big and hardy, sending runners everywhere.  It had to go.

We dug a deep hole in the new location in the rich Wisconsin earth and then labored over an hour to unseat the rose.  It was a taproot problem,  We couldn’t find it, and when we did it was as thick as my wrist.  We sawed and clipped.

By now, I was talking to the rose.  “Rosa,” I said.  “You are going to love your new home.  You’ll have more space.  You will have an important job protecting the grapes.”  My sister, sweating, cursed the rose.  “No, no,” I said. “You have to be kind.  Persuade her. Gentle her.”

Finally, she came free and we planted her deep with cow manure and more rich dirt.  We watered her.  The next day she looked good, leaves still firm and green, despite her amputated taproot.

That, I think, is the problem with planting oneself deep.  You send down a taproot to the waters below and runners to connect out into your community.  There is belief there:  “I am here, I will be here.”  Moving, transplanting means disruption, severing.

So now, I must find a way to speak to the rose that is me.  To persuade, to comfort, to reassure myself that I will find a new place to root, to grow, to flower.  A place that will hold me, hold us. And that in the coming cut is also the opportunity for new growth, new vistas, beauty and happiness.

 

Apr24

river sculpture

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Nineteen years ago we put my father’s ashes into his beloved Mississippi River.  Yesterday my sister and I walked along the river, and came across these cottonwood trees, their roots revealed and honed by the river.

Can you allow the river of your life

to shape and polish you?

Will you stand in the slipstream,

the eddy, the boil and wash of your life

and reach for the sun?

The tree is not afraid

nor should you be

even when the current

is carrying you,

faster than imagination,

to another shore.