Category Archives: improvisation life

my heart, our hearts

Painting by Pam White                                     This painting is FOR SALE (Contact the artist for details).

Today like every other day
We wake up empty and scared.
Don’t open the door of your study
And begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of way to kneel
And kiss the earth.

                                                     Rumi

I have been reading Jon Katz about Valentine’s Week.  This post touched me deeply, because I too live with an artist, and when I see the light shining from her studio windows, my heart leaps.

Lately she has been painting hearts.  They are ecstatic, wildly beautiful.  I have already picked out mine.  “That one,” I said,  “That one is mine.”

2012 marks 26 years together.  That seems an impossible number, and yet there it is.  The years, the days, the minutes are a complicated dance, a beautiful improvisation, a meditation on listening, on moving, on being moved.  Being a love warrior, which mostly means learning to love oneself deeply enough to love another.

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bodyscape

(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

 

the plan

Whatever you’re thinking about is literally like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you are planning. When you’re appreciating you are planning…What are you planning?

Abraham

I have found myself worry planning some big trouble lately.  It is so easy.  Just think the scary thoughts and follow the scary mind movie to its scary conclusion.

I think this is in the category of not doing my best, one of the four agreements from  The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)by Don Miguel Ruiz.  “Always do your best,” he says.

When I do am doing this kind of worry planning, here’s what I do.  I tell myself that I want to feel good.  I pet a cat a dog a horse.  I take a walk.  I watch something like Bridesmaids again or listen to Annie Lamott reading Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. I get as general as I can, which means not drilling down into the situation or even a good feeling solution for that situation.  I leave it alone.  As best I can.