Category Archives: the body

May21

sanne, the lily of holland

Posted on by

This is Sanne, the beautiful Friesian belonging to Pam.   He was imported from Holland when he was three.  His name, Sanne, means Lily in Dutch.  When Pam saw him, she fell face first in love.  That was twelve years ago.

In this picture, he is performing in Scarlet and is ridden by Brandi Rivera.  Sanne is the great-hearted performer in all of my dances with horses.  He is the center, the soul, the horse that can handle it all  Dancers doing handstands on his side, yard of swirling fabric, crowds, choreography, changes in choreography, travel, loud music – he takes it ALL in stride.  Sanne is always in a good mood.  He is always happy to see whoever comes into his world.  He is a lover, a snuggle, a honey.

So when he suddenly started to drop muscle and weight and seem cranky, we all worried.  His back became stiff and sore, and he could not find it in himself to work.  As it turns out, he has Lyme.  He has been on Doxy for about ten days and already his back feels better, and he is back to being his sweet, affectionate self.

It was a scare.  I realized that I am completely vulnerable here.  Without him, my dancers and I cannot perform most of our dances.  More than that, HIS vulnerability came sharply into focus.  The vets get very nervous about muscle wasting.  It is often a symptom of catastrophic illness.  I got a lot of information about encysted parasites, muscle enzymes and equine polysaccharide storage myopathy.  I did not want to think about any of it.

Two days ago I heard from my former trainer.  She has been diagnosed with cancer.  She is facing six months of surgeries and treatment.  I do not want to think about that either.  What I want is for her to be fine, for Sanne to be fine, for my children to be safe forever and for all suffering to be at an end.

The temptation is to focus on suffering, on the lack of wellness.  I don’t think that helps my friend or my horse.  I know that it does not help me.  What does help me is this, from Abraham:  “Many around you want to point out “reality” to you. They say, “Face the facts. Look at what-is.” And we say to you, if you are able to see only what-is—then, by Law of Attraction, you will create only more of what-is… You must be able to put your thoughts beyond what-is in order to attract something different or something more.”

The way that I do that is this:  I keep looking for something to appreciate.  For something that makes me happy.  Lucky for me, I have seven cats, four dogs, three horses, two children, a beautiful wife and a wild and wonderful collection of friends.  And if all of that fails, today the peonies are blooming outside my window.

SHARE & EMAIL
May14

naked

Posted on by

I was doing some research for my book, Horse Dancing, and came across the Jacques Derrida book, The Animal That I Therefore Am.  The book was sparked by Derrida’s experience when his cat followed him into the bathroom in the morning.  He asks what this animal sees when it sees this naked man.

Derrida aside, I wonder about our emotional nakedness before our animal companions.  I know that I feel more exposed and more uncovered with my horses than anywhere else.  I have to be more self-aware, more vulnerable with them than I do at any other time.  It doesn’t happen all the time, because I am not always that conscious, but if I let myself be seen, if I am listening, there it is.

I wonder if we mostly can’t get quiet or humble enough to really feel that sense of nakedness, if we are just too busy being the apex species to let that in.  Or it is too much trouble to take off all the armor, all the habitual responses to our animal companions.  What is it like to allow ourselves to be seen, to be observed?

I read in one of Klaus Hempfling’s books that humans get triggered into violence with horses because the horses uncover their vulnerability, their lack of skill, their awkwardness, their ineffectiveness.  I have experienced that many times.  You can’t ride for very long without stumbling into that tarpit.

So here is a question to which I would love some responses:  how do you experience your nakedness with animals?  How much do you let yourself be seen?

May11

reverberations

Posted on by

Last night’s Oliveros at 80 concert at the EMPAC performing arts center, part of Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York, was simply the most astonishing music performance I have ever experienced. Pauline and her collaborators – Stuart Dempster, Brian Perti, and a host of guest artists, created a transcendent sonic experience.

The concert hall had been altered to sound like  a two-million gallon, WWII-era water cistern with a 45-second reverb.  Oliveros used a 32-channel loudspeaker system to capture and process the sounds of each of the instruments (electronically enabled accordion, trombone, digeridu, conch, voice and Dungchen, the long Tibetan horn that sounds like singing elephants.)

The result was a sound that was completely immersive, a sound that resonated the bodies of the audience as well as the instruments themselves.  In the last piece, drummers from the school’s percussion ensemble were positioned around the balcony that surrounds the audience below.  The result was a wild hive of sound that rose and fell in waves and felt, to this listener, like a “soundbodygasm.”

This performance had an almost liturgical quality, a feeling of deep, embodied ritual that took us within ourselves and at the same time connected us to each other through reverberation, heart and an experience of sound as bliss.

Today I am noticing how much more deeply I am listening and I have the feeling that I have been physically re-calibrated by the sounds from last night.  As I was listening in the concert hall, I felt like my molecules were being directed to vibrate around my spine, as if I was being collected and spun.

If you have not experienced Pauline’s music live, you can find out more about upcoming events here.