The Joy of Movement

I recently completed a White Belt Intensive, the first stage of training in the dance/movement technique called Nia. This seven-day experience was astonishing and continues to unfold learning that is really quite profound and made me want to dedicate myself to reflecting deeply, so I will be sharing what comes up both to chronicle it for myself and to deepen my learning as a potential teacher. Go on the Nia website to learn more about the technique, classes in your area and trainings.
So far I have been concentrating on free dance, giving myself permission to move my body and experiment with intensity, ease and most of all, the #1 Nia principle: Joy of Movement. Every time I’ve put on a CD and danced to the music I get a great workout and end up feeling balanced, relaxed and centered. Yesterday, I planned to step it up a bit, and dance along with the instructional DVD where Debbie Rosas, Nia co-founder, leads a class in the routine she choreographed to the CD Sanjana. I have danced to this routine in classes and in the training but this was my first major effort to actually learn the choreographed moves. I knew I would be sacrificing the ease and pleasure of moving freely however I wanted for the challenge of learning a routine. I stumbled through trying to watch Debbie on the screen, stay in touch with my own body and remember to breathe. As usual, the actual steps, though simple, proved daunting. When taking movement direction I can usually either move my upper body with ease with a stationery base or do a step awkwardly and flail around with my arms. During the training I found that by imprinting on the instructors (the fabulous Winalee Zeeb and Caroline Kohles) and shutting off my thinking mind I did a little better. The support of the movement of my fellow students also allowed me to take a ride on that energy which enhanced my performance a bit. I should mention that the atmosphere of love and non-judgment prevails in Nia and that is crucial to the work.
I was doing poorly with the steps but able to stay in a no-judging state, after all, this was the first time I concentrated on dancing using the DVD. Following the class on the DVD, Debbie teaches a break down of all the moves for each song in the routine, giving the reason for each move while demonstrating. I did okay following the first few songs, even getting some insight into why I trip myself on the jazz square arggh! Then she says: “The next song deals with rhythm,” and before I knew what hit me, I was in tears. I was back in Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar School in West Orange, N.J. in a gym class in maybe the 4th or 5th grade. By that time I had become adept at leaving my body for long forays into my imagination. School was pretty boring but more than that, my mom was sick with cancer and I had lost faith not only in God; but in the corporeal world as well. That left the imagination as my daily destination of choice.
While I was great at leaving the body, I wasn’t always great at returning to it, especially in situations that aroused anxiety. Gym class was never a favorite of mine but by this time, terror about sweating, becoming smelly, wearing a bra, and being looked at by others, was magnified by the gym teacher, a towering ex-marine. Now, why the hell is an ex-marine teaching phys ed in a Catholic Grammar school, you might ask? I can only guess things hadn’t worked out too well for him in his life and that, plus basic training in the post WWII era Marines didn’t exactly teach him love, tolerance, non-judgment or insight into the emotions of a girl on the verge of puberty. He bellowed and yelled, sarcastically accused me of not competing and finally made me run alone in a relay race so as not to penalize my team for such an out of it runner. My memory is that I was awkward and slow and probably seemed to be willfully so since I was tall and thin and had no visible defects to give me an excuse. I hated this guy with a passion but using my trusty imagination, I could exit the premises leaving behind my body to fend for itself, pretty much bereft of mind and spirit. I know from other experiences with more compassionate teachers that my behavior mystified them; I seemed to be physically present and seemed calm as could be but the essential part of my being, that part with feelings, the part that could be hurt, was literally in another dimension.
So yesterday, forty-six years later, I stumbled on the emotions and the tears that were never felt or shed. In the safety of my living room, with only the video witness of Debbie Rosas, I am reminded that the body holds all and for as long as necessary. In college when I began therapy for the first time I brought a drawing to my therapist that expressed my felt reality: I roughly outlined a figure and inside it were a number of corked glass bottles that held feelings like the ones from gym class. By that time, there were hundreds of bottles, carefully corked and sorted by my soul, or my guardian angel or whatever higher part of self is charged with such duties. As therapy progressed, I drew those bottles breaking and the figure unable to walk or move for fear of being cut up alive from the inside by the shards of broken glass, IF I MOVED. I spent countless therapy sessions simply sitting and crying, never able to utter a word as the waves of the past simply washed over me on their way out of body to join, finally, the ocean of all human grief. Later, as the sharp edges wore away, the fragments became like sand in an oyster and gave birth to paintings, poems and books and afforded me the dignity of transformation through art and expression.
Why was this memory triggered by hearing the words: “this next song deals with rhythm?” More on that in the next post.

A Day at the Farm

Johanna and I were at the end of the field as Steve started the tractor and made a second pass down the row to turn up any last potatoes. He was pleased with the size and quantity of the spuds and we had all congratulated him on the good yield, due, he said, to the cover crop of peas that had been plowed under to fertilize the soil. John, Jeff and Francisco followed close behind the green tractor intent on the task at hand with white plastic buckets to hold the harvest. As the blade bit into the soil and cleaved a furrow something shot up into the air, thrown by the force of the metal pushing through the clods of earth. The men kept on moving forward. Johanna and I, our mouths agape, watched as a squealing grey field mouse catapulted through the air. But what the hell was that? A slender pink form was trailing the back of the mouse; at first I thought it was the guts, ripped out by the tractor blade. I blinked and stared and then realized the pink mass was a live creature. The mouse was giving birth at the very moment she’d been ripped from her nest. She landed on the ground and ran off with the half-born baby hanging out of her body. At our feet another new- born mouse, pink and mewing lay near the remnants of the nest. Johanna picked it up and it rooted about in the palm of her hand seeking a teat. Perfect, hairless, pink and doomed. We yelled to the guys but they were engrossed in their work and couldn’t hear us over the tractor noise. We both realized they probably weren’t going to be so…so… what were we feeling?
I’m not sure about Johanna but in a few seconds I cycled through feeling stunned, freaked out, helpless and awed. Then words and thoughts cascaded through my mind: ‘don’t be so sentimental,’ ‘that’s nature,’ ‘it’s the way of the world’, ‘that’s how it goes,’ but there was more that I couldn’t access in the moment. An incongruous word, “Darfur” floated up and I said it out loud and then immediately apologized. But Johanna said: “Yeah, somehow to these creatures we’re like that. Who knows how much else we kill with digging, but that’s agriculture…” I felt her mirroring the multiple voices in my own head. We did that thing that women friends do, we affirmed some common emotional experience in a shorthand of words that might seem excessive to someone overhearing. Johanna is no airy-fairy California “Dharma-squito” intent on saving the life of every ant that crosses the kitchen counter and neither am I. We both felt we had witnessed something profound and complicated, something that would require more attention. As I write this I am aware of a peculiar yet familiar sensation, a heaviness and itchiness in my breasts. It’s the way I felt twenty-six years ago when I was a nursing mother and stepped out for a break from child care to do a few errands. I was in a store and heard someone else’s baby cry. My milk let down and soaked through the front of my shirt even though my own baby was safe at home with her dad.
I admit, I wept for that mouse, stunned that the common thread of motherhood stitched me to her so intensely that my body cried out against her loss. The mind can run the gamut from a Cassandra-like drama equating an unfortunate mouse with a child bayoneted by janjaweed warriors in a far off place to a stern and philosophical farmer’s voice that says creatures die every day, hour and minute by the hand of man or a thousand other ways. Just a fact, Mam deal with it, no one and nothing gets out alive. Yet I am grateful to be reminded that the body flows toward feeling, toward caring, toward empathy. We shut these capacities off at our collective peril. The body suffers and by suffering deepens our connection to life. I am deeply grateful to the mouse.

Changing the World: The Suburban

Recently I visited The Suburban:
“…an independently run artist exhibition space” located at 125 N. Harvey in Oak Park, IL. run by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killan. On their website they say: “We give complete control to the artists in regards to what they choose to produce and exhibit. Thus it's a pro artist and anti curator site. The Suburban is not driven by commercial interests. It is funded within the economy of our household. Its success is not grounded in sales, press or the conventional measures set forth by the international art apparatus, but by the individual criteria set forth by the artists and their exhibitions. In this, The Suburban is more closely aligned with the idea of studio practice than that of the site of distribution.”
The Suburban has existed in Oak Park, where I live, for ten years. I have driven, walked and biked past the modest and anonymous building that houses this endeavor countless times. There is no signage indicating an art venue. I have vaguely known that ‘some artists run a gallery in their garage’ and for years had it on my mental list to find out exactly what this meant.
Ironically, in the last two days I have also witnessed the new objects announcing the “Arts District” in Oak Park, four large metal objects that look like ice scrapers that have been erected at the Harrison Ave. and Austin Blvd. and at Harrison St. and Ridgeland. I owned and operated Studio Pardes at the corner of Harrison and Ridgeland for five years in the euphemistic arts district. One of the factors that drove me from this enterprise was the weight of expectation of being in a public space in what was essentially a retail district masquerading as something to do with art. (Disclaimer: There are some actual artists surviving on Harrison, visit Sally Wolf’s Calypso Moon for example). There was a sense of obligation to be “open” and available to a public and offering a product that was counter to the necessary solitude and self-regulation of art practice. Maybe I’m just too sensitive or easily pressured.
Both Michelle and Brad of the Suburban are art professors, Michelle at the School of the Art Institute and Brad at College of Dupage. They have consciously and deliberately created The Suburban as a site of resistance to the commercial art world while also participating in that world as gallery artists and art critics on their own terms. Milwaukee Museum of Art and the Chicago MCA have collected Michelle’s work and she is a contributing editor to X-TRA, a contemporary art journal published in Los Angeles. She is also currently completing a book about The Suburban. This is no outsider endeavor but instead a living counterpoint to global commercial art locating meaning in the site and the economy of everyday life. (See their website for an engaging reflection by the couple’s son on what it means to have an art gallery as part of the family’s economy of everyday life.)
Michelle Grabner and her husband Brad Killam have solved the dilemma that I was defeated by: they have created a commerce-free zone for art. This is an essentially political and revolutionary or maybe evolutionary act in that the Suburban also influences the other institutions of the globalized art world since artists who participate in the Suburban also participate in the world of museums, galleries and international art fairs. Work sometimes travels from the Suburban to the MCA for example or from the Suburban to the major art fairs. Art journals recognize the space and the artists who show there. By stepping outside of the circle drawn by others: art as commodity, art as investment, art as another manifestation of celebrity culture, they reduce the crushing sense of monoculture that pervades our globalized world.
I realize how powerful self-definition is. Where will the next free public art making space arise for creating culture and consciousness in community? I learned that the implicit expectation of a “storefront” had weightier implications than I realized when I signed my lease at Harrison and Ridgeland. I’ll be on the lookout for where the next opening presents itself for a meeting and mixing space where a little mess can be made and we can experiment together in making art and making life.

The Nuanced Language of Image

This time last year I was engaged in a project I called the Pomegranate Exercise. I had begun finding hollowed out pomegranates on my walks in Ojai and the image of the empty fruit spoke to my imagination. I was (and am) working on a novel about an underground group of older women. The pomegranate, its lush innards gone, skin dried dark and leathery put me in mind of the Crone. After meditating on the fruits and on all the friends who were in various sorts of life transitions, I invited women I know to engage in a meditation on the topic of age, creativity, the pomegranate itself, whatever came up. I mailed the pomegranate shells to about twenty women friends and friends of friends who responded and asked them to create art about or with fruit. The resulting art and witness writing can be viewed on my website (click on collaborative projects).
Last year the pomegranate shells were few and far between, the scarcity contributed to my sense of their preciousness. My own intention was to feel less isolated as I engaged in my fiction writing as my primary form of expression during the winter months. I also sought to experiment with collaboration, a skill I would like to learn more about. Sallie Wolf, one of the artists, agreed to host a show of the actual objects in her studio and I committed to create an exhibit on my website. All of this transpired and was very fulfilling.

This season, the pomegranates appear very differently, many remain on the trees, eaten, but not as thoroughly eviscerated as last year. I suspect weather conditions made the fruit more abundant so the birds and animals didn’t have to do such a thorough job of cleaning them out. My association this year is that the fruits look like exploded grenades. (In Hebrew, the word ‘rimon’ is both pomegranate and grenade). I am offered an opportunity to consider that destruction is aspect of creation. Death, endings, finishing something -- all these are necessary for anything new to manifest. I have some resistance to this. There is some grief scratching at my door, just outside of my consciousness and I have been staying a little too busy to answer the door. Until I greet that guest I know that something else that is waiting cannot arrive. What’s keeping me? Do I need a suicide bomber to enter my space? What would such a being look like? The storms of the winter attempt to instruct me, tear off the roof, flood the living room, burn down the storage shed. But do I?
It is something to do with just being, not doing, withstanding the winds of chaos, the explosions of things breaking down, with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open and my feet planted firmly on the earth. And this, strangely, feels like death.

All the Rules are Changing

Last year I discovered this wounded soldier in myself. I was surprised to meet him because I was writing about how the term ‘spiritual warrior’ was incorrect. I never expected to see a soldier of any kind show up in my own work. Yet there he was. My intention was to understand what is happening in the world and what is the right response, the right attitude, the right action? Are we on a sinking ship? Is it hopeless? I had just returned from a leadership training with the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I created this piece in the class I teach on the Creative Process at the School of the Art Institute.
I wrote in my witness: “The lone individual defending himself yet scarily, tentatively extending his heart out into the world? The black sequined and netted material felt to me like the Shadow, dark, mysterious with beauty encoded in the sequins but it also needed red because pain and passion are so tangled up in the Shadow and our Shadow flows out into the world and affects how we are in the world. But the beautiful dark rose also flows from the Shadow stream within us.

I revisited the image this week, a year later. Everything calls me to pay attention to light yet these dark images come up. I try a method that Galit, one of my students is using. She is taking words and giving them definitions based on her felt sense, her intuition. I write, “discover”- reaching into the dark with faith. Then “teaching”- collapsing my telescope and seeing what others have in their hands. I feel like an anthropologist of wound technology. I can tell with my eyes closed how the wound occurred and if I can conjure light I can heal it. Are we supposed to be wandering like this? Is this the work?

I added the mask and ‘red badge of courage’ to the soldier piece. All of it feels old and incorrect, not what’s called for. I wrote in my witness: “My shadow is the heroic guy against the world, even as I have taught others to follow their pleasure through the creative process and trust where they are led…why is this wounded place of red and black asserting itself so strongly? I’ve done the dark; I’m done with the dark. I know it’s time for light, to follow bliss. The piece answers me: “Don’t pretend you are ready.” But I am, I protest. “No, you still prize your dark credentials, you all do who earned them. It’s hard to give them up. The world no longer needs your dark roses, it needs light and you resist that and it is mostly unconscious be cause you say YES, but your body knows you lie.” So I say, “I make a new intention: I see the light, I be the light, I am the light, I love the light.” The piece says: “Let those who have genuine darkness that hasn’t reached its expiration date come to you and give them light. Your darkness is over; funny thing to mourn, but its so.” What does it mean to mourn the dark? I don’t exactly know yet but it has something to do with giving up all the well-earned credentials and meeting the world with an empty bowl. More on that later.

Happy Birthday to the Fool

So today is my birthday, number 55. Of all the experiences I've had this year, I am most pleased with having made the film The Fool.
Completing The Fool is an accomplishment for a number of reasons which I will now list as a birthday gift to myself to offset the weird sort of shaky feeling I've had since I woke up this morning.
1. The film represents a successful collaboration of a very close kind, working with another person to create and express my own vision without knowing exactly how it would turn out.
2. I collaborated with my husband, John. We have very different styles and even though we screamed at each other from time to time, I am completely sure the film would not have been finished without him and is better for his involvement. He is a "Point A to Point B" kind of guy and I am a "I need a shot of those white birds even though I don't know how it fits in the film yet"kind of gal.


3. Technology was involved. Although even a slightly dyslexic chimp could probably successfully make a film using a Mac with IMovie, the fact that we both(John and me, not the chimp) feel competent and comfortable using the editing program is an achievement.
4. I feel like this isn't a one-time thing, I think I could be endlessly fascinated making films with John about all sorts of things indefinitely and that sort of takes my breath away. Talk about a birthday gift!
Last but not least, the film has enabled me embrace being The Fool, which if you aren't familiar with the Fool's symbolic meaning: "The Fool represents the essence of what we are: whole, healthy and without fear...that spirit so often expressed and experienced in those states of wonder, awe, curiosity and anticipation." (from The Tarot handbook, by Angeles Arriens)
Now to push my personal envelope with technology, I am going to add a clip from the film, which premiered September 22, 2007 at the Third Annual Oak Park International Film Festival.
ENJOY!

I See Dick Cheney

I keep seeing Dick Cheney. Well, not exactly. I keep seeing balding white men with glasses, a curled lip and an expression of smoldering dissatisfaction. I saw the first one in a restaurant called Suzanne’s in Ojai, California. He was ignoring a woman I took to be his wife in the outdoor patio facing a lush garden replete with pale pink roses and a stone fountain. It was a beautiful mid-August night. Many couples seemed to be celebrating some occasion, as we were, chatting and smiling, sharing bites of their meals with one another. Dick Cheney’s wife seemed to tolerate his gradual retreat into glacial remoteness with calm resignation. Maybe he had a legitimate beef. Maybe the service was slow or the food not up to his expectations.
Why did I even notice him? We were having a lively discussion, enjoying the ambience, the unusual appetizers, the celebration of our 28th wedding anniversary. I noticed because one of the elements that make a restaurants a fun place to celebrate is the energy of others, the general good will and happiness, the sense of sharing at a little distance with others through a smile, an acknowledgement. Seeing and being with others who are in a state of pleasure and enjoyment amplifies my own. The warmth that emanates from other people in such a public setting is something we take for granted but it is important. It is a way we each can contribute to the common good in a simple and modest way. Sometimes we take it further, when eyes meet or by an appreciate glance. Sometimes a compliment or comment of recognition: “Oh, that entrée looks great, which one is it?”
So I noticed Dick Cheney because his light was out. I felt a chill. Not the feeling of annoyance that follows the ring of a cell phone and subsequent conversation. This was more a perception of absence. The look on his face convinced me that this man was in angry retreat from the human condition. His wife, abandoned, stared off into the distance.
Since that night I’ve seen Dick Cheney in a car stopped at a red light, hands clenching the wheel, eyes as flat as coins, mouth in a thin tight line. I saw him on Michigan Ave. in downtown Chicago striding along aggressively, crossing against the light as if daring someone to hit him.
I believe life is about call and response. The spark in each of us calls out to that in others to reassure us we are not alone, we are all together in the complicated mystery of life. I worry that if Dick Cheney multiplies, the world will grow too cold to sustain life. Each time I feel that chill, a sense of cold anger, I wonder if this is a trend, like the opposite of global warming, human tundra syndrome. I fear the simple glance or smile is not enough to bring Dick Cheney back. More desperate measures may be in order. Is this like the die off of the honeybees? I want to study this problem. Why is Dick Cheney multiplying? And, can anything be done?