Category Archives: improvisation life

Jan13

think on these things

Posted on by

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 10.10.50 AM  Last night I watched our president delivering his last state of the union address.  I thought about campaigning for him for a month in New Hampshire in 2008 and again in 2012.  The excitement of that work and the devotion to this brilliant man of impeccable character and positive vision.

I subscribe to the daily thoughts from the Napoleon Hill Foundation. This one arrived this morning and just took my breath away. 

Every thought you release becomes a permanent part of your character.

Thoughts are things. Every thought you release — good or bad — is a form of energy that can affect those who receive it, for better or worse. More important, your thoughts affect you. You become what you think about most. If you think about success, you condition your mind to seek success, and you attract large portions of it. Conversely, if you think about failure and despair, you will become miserable and desperate. To keep your mind on a positive track, the moment you begin to experience creeping negativism, make a conscious decision to eliminate negative thoughts and replace them with their positive counterparts.

The creeping climate of fear, rage and racism that has arisen in the past eight years confuses and frightens me.  So many people, it seems, willing to be miserable and desperate.  And then I remember:  rage is easier than love.  It requires nothing of us.  It is mindless, reactive and addictive. 

Lovingkindness is hard work.  Not because it is difficult in itself, but because it means that we have to become vulnerable, willing to listen, open to feeling what is actually happening in our bodies and minds.  It means letting go of being right or wrong and opening to just being. 

In this picture I took during the 2012 campaign on a cold early November morning in Concord, NH, I love the skyward look of the young boy echoing the skyward look of our president asking us to move forward with courage and compassion.  I pray that we will do that now, again, each day, each one of us, together.

SHARE & EMAIL
Dec9

solar system

Posted on by

Solar-system-orbits-ESO1

I am again on Martha’s Vineyard with Jacob, my autistic godson and his family.  The story of this family is a series of miracles unfolding over the past fourteen years.  Besides Jacob and his parents Jo-Ann and Derrill, the house now holds Charlie, Jo-Ann’s 92 year-old father, and Mary Helen, her sister.

The sun around which we all orbit is Jo-Ann.  She is the lodestar, the gravitational force, the heat and the center of this system. The choreography of this complicated and extraordinary family is a little like what Twyla Tharp said about Bach: “”Everyone understands that there’s Bach, and then there’s most everybody else,”  citing the composer’s “architecture, righteousness, justice, control, possibilities — the richness and variety of his imagination. He encompasses all. I call his work ecumenical. No one has more range.”‘ Bach and Jo-Ann. Music and mothering.

What I would add to this list is devotion.  To an unendingly curious, determined, loving search for anything that will make Jacob’s life and his connection to his world as rich, varied and beautiful as it can possibly be.

Seeing this requires being with Jo-Ann, Jacob and Derrill long enough to move past the sheer overwhelming enormity of what she and they are doing daily, hourly. It is too much. We don’t want to let in how big the task is, how the entirety of a life can be taken up by this rigorous caring care. To witness this without looking away requires its own kind of bravery.

I don’t look away. I want to see and feel it all.  Maybe that is the best thing I can offer here.  A steady loving witness.  A willingness to keep looking and to be curious and soft. To see things anew each day, each moment.

Nov30

mammal (save the date)

Posted on by

Screen Shot 2015-08-12 at 6.23.58 PM - Version 2

Costume for Mammal by Christine Joly de Lotbinniere

Last year I wrote this about the new dance I am building, called The Traveler (terra incognita), part of my new solo work, Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, which will premiere in Cambridge at the Dance Complex in June 2016.

“It is a dance that is chewing me up.  It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it.  Tom Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark. Working on this dance, I enter through a door that I hope won’t explode and find myself sometimes in a mine field, other times in a field of flowers.  It is the music, but mostly what comes slithering and snapping out of my body.”

This year I have been opening another door to a new work called Mammal.  Initially called it Beast, but felt that Mammal was a roomier title, one that had space for the ferocious and the tender.  The dance is still downloading, but the essence is there.

I will be performing an excerpt of Mammal January 17 at the Booking Dance Festival in New York City.  Here are the details.  I will post times and ticket information shortly.  Please save the date.  Please come!

January 17
5:30-11:30 pm

The Allen Room
Frederick P. Rose Hall
Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center

Located in the Time Warner Building at Central Park’s Columbus Circle
Broadway & West 60th St.
New York City

 

 

Nov21

to gladden the heart

Posted on by
DSC02526 

What Actions are most excellent?

To gladden the heart of a human being.
To feed the hungry.
To help the afflicted.
To lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful.
To remove the wrongs of the injured.
That person is the most beloved of God
who does the most good to God’s creatures.

~  Muhammad ~

For the past three years I have been studying Somatic Experiencing, the trauma healing work developed by Dr. Peter Levine.  We are currently in the final Advanced module of that training, focusing on touch.  After all of the lectures, the practice sessions, the questions, the confusion, the flashes of insight, this poem is what the training cooks down to.  Helping others feel better.  Simple as that.  We have a lot of tools and perhaps the most important of those is our focused intention, our desire to create a space where balance and coherence can emerge.

I will be working with clients using Somatic Experiencing in combination with the other tools of Somatic Movement Therapy, including the possibility of working with horses in a therapeutic context.

Contact me for more information or to make an appointment.