Category Archives: the body

May10

happy birthday pauline!

Posted on by

This is an appreciation for Pauline Oliveros, an artist who has inspired me for nearly three decades.  In 1985, I discovered Pauline’s music in a vinyl album called The Wanderer (Lovely Music).

Five years later, I found a way to collaborate with her.  Pauline is the author of Deep Listening, which is based on her life practice:  “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”

I watched this video yesterday.  It moved me to tears.  Here is what I love:  the seamless connection between the musician and the music.  It is in her movement – watch closely – the way that she sometimes precedes the notes with the movement impulse. Other times, the music and the movement erupt simultaneously.  It is like a current moving though her.  I teach a practice called Authentic Movement – the mover, eyes closed, waits to be moved.  That is  what I see here.  She is being moved by the music – as if she is being played.  I love the quickness and the whimsy, the volatility and spaciousness.  The color and contrast.  But mostly I love seeing her dance with the music, be danced by the music.

My own practice has a performance artist, a dancer, has cooked down to this:

Listen.  Move. Stillness.  Breathe.  Wait. Stillness.  Feel.  Let yourself be moved.  Listen.  Move. Wait.  Feel.  Wait to be moved. Move.  Stillness.  Breathe.

Thank you Pauline.

 

SHARE & EMAIL
Apr29

dancing in the flames

Posted on by

Photo:  Pam White  Anima Motrix by Paula Josa-Jones

My friend Nicole Rushin recently posted a link to a film about the brilliant Jungian writer, scholar and dreamer, Marion Woodman called Dancing in the Flames.

Many years ago, I attended a conference headlined by Marion Woodman.  I was reading Jung day and night, in the midst of a Jungian analysis, and steeped in Joseph Campbell.  It was a heady time. Mystical, sublime.

In the intervening years, I feel that I have lost some of that connection to mysticism.  I am dancing in the flames, but it can often feel like the flames of hell, with me doing a scorched tango.

Last night, we had dinner with our friend Brett, a lawyer who is also studying to become ordained as an Episcopal priest.  I have not had lovely experiences with religion.  But Brett is drawn to something deep and lovely and mystical in his relationship to God.  It is not my experience, but as we talked, I could remember some ecstatic, embodied moments in the music – the divine in the unspoken.

Brett said that he recently gave a sermonette titled “Wounded Corporeality.”  It was about coming together to share our wounds.  That surprised me.  When I heard the title, I immediately thought he meant something else:  how corporeality itself is wounded in the church.  That the disembodied, dogmatic nature of religion is the real wound, and that until we can discover a sensuous, embodied mysticism, that wound will persist.

Something in me is wanting to re-awaken to the mystical and this lovely film about a living goddess is shining a light.

 

Apr16

horse medicine

Posted on by

After lunch yesterday with Jon and Maria, Jon told me that he still didn’t know what I do every day, reading my blog.  He also said that he didn’t feel like he knew much about me. He likes the blogs, likes the writing, but wants to feel more of me there.  “Caught,” I thought.

The conversation came around to hiding, to fear.  I talked about not wanting people to know too much of my life.  “Why?’ he said.  I thought that I might burst into tears. The feeling was like the moment before an avalanche.  A huge cliff of hanging snow about to plunge down the mountain, obliterating everything before it.  “I am afraid,” I answered.

“Why?” he asked again.  I talked about the kind of fear and vigilance that I carry.  Twenty-six years married to the same woman.  The love of my life.  And in the world, I walk around with this mantle of fear and caution.  Not all the time, but often.  It seeps into my writing.  It colors how much I will say, how much of myself I will show.

I didn’t talk about age, or even about how I hide my age. I will talk about it later.  I am not sure how much of the fear and hiding I can unravel in one post.

I think that is why I loved being with Rocky. Why I love my horses, Capprichio, Amadeo and Sanne, and why I spend time every week with Nelson.  They do not care about any of that.  They care that I am there, that I am present with them.  And when I am with them, I don’t care about any of those things either.  It all falls away.  Dissolved in love and in the moment.