As the book-in-hand date for Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body nears, I am delighted to be able to share the ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT . It contains links for some beautiful dances with horses, an interview, and more information about the book.  Please share this with friends and on social media.  Thank you!

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As my book Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body comes closer to its actual premiere/opening/you-can-actually-hold-it-in-your-hand day, I am filled with so much appreciation for all the beauty, wisdom and effort by my collaborators of the last thirty-ish years.  The list is VERY long, and appears in the “Special Thanks” section of the book.  It begins and ends, of course, with Pam White, my love, inspiration and best friend of the last thirty-one years. It also includes all the horses, dancers, mentors, friends, collaborators, and those whose  stories and perspectives are woven into the book.  It does indeed, take a village!

You can pre-order the book here.

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The publication date for my book, Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body, is approaching (mid-September).  The final scramble of editing is finished, and within a few weeks, it will be in the hands of the printer.

This project has been an amazing, daunting, joyful, frustrating journey of over 10 years.  Actually though, this book pulls from the last forty years of living in a moving human body,  and the past twenty years of dropping deep, then deeper still into the world of horses. The horses hold the two ends of my life – the raw childhood horse love and the ripened adult passion.

Are you emptied out when you finish a book like this?  Not really.  Like making dances, there is always that thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night – a movement that must be danced or another way of saying something about touching horses, learning to be a mindful being in the blessing of their presence.

This next stage -getting the word out, scheduling of readings, workshops – feels overwhelming.  I have done this as the artistic director of a dance company for many, many years.  For whatever reason, I do not feel that  has prepared me.  Maybe it has to do with the ephemeral nature of dance and dancing.  A book is something that can be held, it is an object.  Scary, that, and exciting too.

You can (please) order my book HERE.

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While the notion that I am separate from my experience remains, there is confusion and turmoil.  Because of this, there is nether awareness not understanding of experience, and thus no real possibility of assimilating it.  To understand this moment I must not try to be divided from it; I must be aware of it with my whole being.

To understand music, you must listen to it.  But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.  to understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it.   So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it.  This surely is the meaning of that strange saying, “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

by Alan Watts from The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (Vintage)

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one looking forward

the other looking at

the one

who is leaning a little

in as if the wind had

caught her sails

gently, for a moment

bending her toward.

the one looking in.

she is steadfast, seeing

 the one and beyond,

holding both the moment

and what is coming.

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Driving Through the Wind River Reservation

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.

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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?

From:  Why I Wake Early: New Poems

Copyright ©:  Mary Oliver

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“You’ve got to give before you get. You cannot expect to receive generous rewards and then decide what to give in return. You must give freely and have faith that the rewards will eventually come.”  Napoleon Hill

I spent the weekend in Boston rehearsing a new dance work with Ingrid Schatz and DeAnna Pellecchia.  Two full days in the studio, diving into movement, trying things out, looking for the light, for heat, for brilliance.  I was reminded of what Alex Webb says about taking photographs:  that you may take hundreds and only one will be wonderful.  I have more patience and faith in that process now than five, ten or twenty years ago.  What has to be there, every time, is willingness and teachability. My own and my collaborators.  If that is missing, then we are caught in the sands of resistance, and I am pretty clear that I do not have the time or energy for that.

Directing and parenting and partnering are interestingly related for me.  In all of them, there is listening, opening, guiding, loving.  With directing and dancemaking, it is loving the process, loving the work and the workers, even when it is awkward and raw, unformed and murky.  I am old enough to have a lot of staying power, and a pretty handy toolkit.  I am also more attentive to the guidance of my heart.  That is really important when starting a new project.  The heart has to be there to keep things pulsing, to support the whole system of the making.  And the heart has to guide toward truth, toward a kind of inevitability in the outcome.  Meaning that when we see the final work, it feels as if nothing else could have happened.

Back to giving.  With directing and parenting and partnering that means that I hold nothing back.  And that reminds me of this from Annie Dillard in The Writing Life:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this:  spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book:  give it, give it all, give it now.  the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.”

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Today I mailed my manuscript to a publisher that I believe to be the perfect fit for my book.  I toiled over the cover letter, and then wrapped it – swaddled it really – in its packaging.  I want it to be safe. Sending it is both a dive and a flight.  Preparing it took months.  It felt important to say exactly what I want to say; to read it and revise it until the simplicity and fullness of that shone through. I stopped writing anything that felt like selling and wrote only what felt authentic and embodied.  Like these blog posts, where I write and then shake it out and see what remains, what is essential, necessary.

So it’s off, flying to California, diving into the river of manuscripts, all leaving hopeful hands, sailing onto anonymous desks.  Actually, I think that it is important to dive and fly in some way everyday.  Today’s other dive is about love.  Love of that work that I have been nurturing.  Love of myself – or finding a way to feel that better and more reliably.  Because I think that loving will open me to the places where love is harder, where betrayal and abandonment have dried me like a husk, where hopeful rains no longer fall.  Am I being to abstruse?  That’s ok.  In Authentic Movement, the mover moves, and the witness, watching, takes their own journey of feeling and imagination.  Their experiences may be utterly different – connected by the mover’s moving, but perhaps journeying to opposite poles.

So I wonder, when I speak of hard love, or harder loving, what comes to mind?

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O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions’ beautiful laughter
And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

                                                                        Hafiz

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