Category Archives: the body

Jun19

blessed to be obsessed

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I had a lovely conversation the other day with my friend Adrianne Ryan, a horsewoman and photographer who lives on Martha’s Vineyard.  We were talking about work and she said, “Well, I am blessed to be obsessed.”

Me too.  Movement – finding it, growing it, blowing it open, turning it into something ineffable, inevitable and fierce is my obsession (one of them.)

It is work and it isn’t work.  The movement claims, re-shapes and hones me.  And then I want to share it – speak through it, connect with it.

Last year, during a creative residency, I became obsessed with editing and layering these photographs taken by Pam White (above) that have become a part of The Traveler, one of the dances in the LFRM trilogy. I wanted to evoke something about layering, overlay, what is there and not quite there in all of us.

Yesterday I listened to a wonderful Diane Rehm podcast with Buddhist priest, philosopher and writer Mathieu Ricard.  He was talking about his new book Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World.

Listening to him, I realized that my wanting to share and connect with the world through movement is a form of altruism.  Maybe earlier in my career it was about something else, something less generous.  But now it is about making a connection, about sharing the best of myself and reaching out to the best in you.  I felt that so clearly when I watched Kyle Abraham’s solos filmed by Carrie Schneider, that his vulnerability was a deep gift to us.  I was/am so deeply moved by that.

As artists, I think we have to aim higher than personal ambition, beyond what we know to reach that skyward, earthly part of ourselves that connects to the skyward, earthly place in each other.

Please help me share my work with you.

You can do that by making a donation to my

Indiegogo campaign.

 

Thank you!!

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Jun10

keep calm and carry on

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Yesterday I had a panic attack.  Things were moving so slowly with our Indiegogo campaign.  My web guru friend said so.  Do another mailing.  Send out the press release.  Blog.  Facebook.  Twitter.  I couldn’t breathe.

Then about six people said, “Hey Paula,  breathe!  Take it easy.”  I went and hung out with some horses.  They were breathing.

Today, I am going to try doing what I am always telling other people to do.  Take a focused breath.  Feel your body.  Take a walk.  Look around.  Ask for help.  OK.

Abraham says that, “It is as easy to create a castle as a button. It’s just a matter of whether you’re focused on a castle or a button.”

I am focused on a castle.  With your kind help.

Please make a donation to my campaign.  Help support this work that I believe in so passionately and that I want to share with you.

Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

p.s.  Tomorrow I am going to share some cool video.  Stay tuned, please.

May20

Jules

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Last night we lost our beautiful Jules.  He was diagnosed one week ago with an osteosarcoma in his front left wrist.  We thought we had more time.  But last night the leg shattered and the screams echoed through the whole valley.

We were blessed that he could die at home, surrounded by his family and even his other mother, Bimala  was there via Facetime from Korea.  The love of his life, Guinnie, was by his side the whole time.

Jules had a sweetness and innocence that you would not guess from his 90 pound body, his fierce racing tears around the pen and his big, deep bark.  He was a major racer, retiring at 41/2, which is a long career in the greyhound world.  But he was a tender boy, a honey boy, and my most favorite thing was to lie with his back pressed into my front. That was my way of earthing.  I was not the only one.

Last night, his death brought in a roiling, muscling storm – wild slicing lightening, blasting thunder and winds that tore the rest of the lilacs from their stems.  This morning, the wind is there and so is a deep burgundy iris, the first of the season.  Jules.

This morning, before I was awake, a hummingbird fluttered outside Pam’s study window, darting here and there and then staring at her intently through the glass.  Jules.

Jules – always beloved, always present, always in our hearts.  Thank you beautiful boy.

May7

other

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I heard a group of speakers discussing the racial, socio-economic situation in Baltimore and across the country on the Diane Rehm show.  One speaker spoke of “othering”  in reference to how we treat people who live in the ghetto.

Stephen Jay Gould coined that term to describe how we separate ourselves from others – making them less than, alien, disgusting.  We do it with animals.  We do it with women.  We do it with blacks, Muslims, and anyone that makes us uncomfortable because they do not fit into our particular, narrow, socio-political compartment.  Because they are NOT US.  Because they have a vagina or a tail.

What I wanted the speaker to do was connect the dots.  Women have been othered for millenia. Slavery was abolished in this country before laws of coverture that subsume women’s rights and regard her as property.  Why is no one remembering that?  Why is no one seeing that as part of the whole cloth of oppression, othering and fear of what is different (has a vagina, is black, is Jewish, loves someone of the same sex).

I watched Amy Schumer’s brilliant sketch 12 Angry Men sketch on Inside Amy Schumer.  In it, she walks a very delicate line between an ugly, acidic portrayal of sexism, and the excruciating othering of one’s own body and gender.  Heteronormativity, the heart of the case currently before the supreme court, is another, sickeningly pervasive way of othering.

The fissure created by events in Ferguson, North Carolina and Baltimore is an opportunity to look at things from a bigger perspective.  A chance to fly very high so that we can see the landscape of oppression in the broadest way possible.  Will we do that?  Will there be a conversation?  Only if WE talk, and keep talking and start feeling.