Cocoon

Oh my dear and lovely friends,
This morning I practiced the cocoon, and I want to share it with you. To experience the cocoon lay down on your back with pillows to comfortably support your head and a blanket to keep warm. Cross your ankles and make sure your knees are supported with pillows so that there is no strain on the joints. Place your right hand on your pubic bone and your left hand on the divet where the collar bones meet.. Close your eyes and let your weight fall into the sofa or bed, feel the warmth accumulating underneath your blanket, and allow the magic of connecting the poles of your body to take place. It feels like a cocoon to me, so nice as the energy wraps around and around and around, and ties a nice little bow at the top of my head. It is very safe and protected, and still and quiet.
Much Love,

Como se llama?

Okay. My zen detachment has to take notice of the goings on in the world around me from time to time. With the elections coming up, the capitalist crisis unfolding, and the brooding developments of global terrorism it is often easier to escape. The thing is, life is still beautiful.
Human evolution depends on phases and cycles of unrest. Many many bodies loose the essence of their lives, either within these phases or within smaller holographic phases surrounding more personal issues. The key is to keep our lives inside our bodies by keeping our hearts strong. To sing songs. To celebrate whatever small gift we have towards creating happiness on the planet.
In this vein of thought I choose to think positively about the financial bailout, to acknowledge that greed is in the limelight, to put my faith in soil and in human hands for my nourishment. In this vein of thought, I choose to vote for tolerance, and reasonable efforts at dialogue/cooperation/communication. I remember that the human heart desires change.
Some changes I hope for include the recognition of intolerance, shame, self-righteousness, and greed. I ask for open dialogue about these qualities and how they have shaped our greed/fear based economic systems, human rights policies, and political structures. I ask for wide ranging seeking for new thought forms that will allow the races, nations, animals, and individuals to live cooperatively. As a reflexive and conscientious human being I cast my vote for Barack Obama.
I cast my vote for me. I cast my vote for all of us who dare to celebrate the human tides upon the earth.
Peace,

A Rose

Hello and Hiya,

This week we went to the London Zoo, my kids first time to London and also their first time to the zoo. I have a problem with zoos, because of the cages which confine the will of wild animals contrasted with the freedom of all the gaping people. This zoo is really cool though, and I cried when visiting the gorillas...because the gorillas were saved as infants when their mothers were bushwhacked for meat or trade in the Congo. The gorilla faces are highly individual and their presence is astounding, personal, intelligent. In fact, something is being done right in this zoo, whose main focus is to be a research center, because so many of the animals had an intelligent eye. I watched a mama colobus monkey nurse her baby while men in the family took turns protecting her from us, and penguins dove, leaped, hopped, and frolicked like crazy.

On a more personal note, Mathias has renamed himself Pitter Patter Tadpole Hungry Snake Boy Chalut. Manifest changes? I appear to have an amphibian for a son. And even so, to me he is a sweetie....

Many Blessings All Around,

Streaming

This week in my readings I found shaman, prana, subtle movement, recognition of movement resonance, and necessity of following movement resonance to closure all in my texts. In a practical class, where we move instead of reading and discussing, a classmate said to me, "I can see the energy moving through your body so that it has its' own flow outside of music or steps. When you move faster it is because the energy is moving faster through you." The next day I read at length on the reconstruction of dance from Indian temple sculptures by method of following the flow of prana stimulated by the pose. If I had any doubts as to the actual possibility of combining my experiences in polarity and dance, the last weeks efforts have really encouraged me. And to top it off, an article I read by my professor Andre Grau this morning states "to realize an adequate and truthful ethnographic account, the admittance of the truth of 'unreality' is essential". Is it possible to say that I am finding, and creating, something of a home here? Or maybe a launching pad, or maybe a nice fertile soil. Such a relief, such a big emotional thought. For I have never been able to stop dancing, and I have never been able to stop working with energy and with healing. Sending breath and wealth....

My Son

While it was the best thing in the world, and of necessity, that my teenager Kaiah went to live with his dad this year, it is so hard on a mama! The youth leagues are all out under the lights at night now, practising football and netball (soccer and basketball), and I wish I were there cheering him on at his games. He has a girlfriend. She is of the land he now lives in, and I have no experience of it. They shoot skeet discs together and go to Cardinals games. The complexity of raising a child as a young mother is now wholly apparent to me, as it was not at the time of his birth. So soon, so young, when I have now to let go of him and become the friend. At Christmas when he visits we will go to London and play board games and cook good meals, and I hope desperately that we will actually have opportunities to connect. We will. Just as he is doing the connecting with his father that he needs to do now. They go fishing, play World of Warcraft on the computer, and bond in ways that are unique to their father son connection. Life is still good. It is just changing for me and my oldest son.

First Tooth

Aurora has lost her first tooth today! It is in an envelop waiting for the tooth faery, who will magically appear in the middle of the night. She says, "I am really excited!"

Cosmic Libido

In dance anthropology one of our main concerns is the formation of identity via dance. Group identity, individual identity, national identity, it is always shifting, and dance is a pattern of interacting that not only mirrors this but also actively changes it. In my summer reading I read background literature connecting dance to ethnicity, race, gender, class, politics, proprioception, memory, and kinetic energy. All of it insightful, working deep within me to create changes, some is also deeply inspirational. The early feminists, for example, are amazing.

"Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing (and dancing) can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours...She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language." "In woman there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes and who stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes...Personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. She is an integral part of all liberations." "Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed...and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love." Helen Cioux in The Laugh of the Medusa.