dance

Two quotes from the book 'Dance', copyright 1998, by Dr. Andrée Grau:


- Dance is a series of movements performed in patterns and set to an accompaniment. Every human society practices dance, which may be performed solo, in couples, or in groups. People around the world use dance to express themselves, pass on their histories, and exercise their bodies. In this way, dance can be a celebration of the emotional, mental, and physical human self. It can also be a preparation for battle or an unspoken protest. Dance is often used to mark major life changes or to commemorate an important event in a nation's history. In the earliest societies, dance helped humans survive - it was a way for communities to learn cooperation in working and hunting together - and, like today, dance was probably used to communicate and express feelings that are difficult to convey in any other way.


- For Martha Graham (1894-1991), there was nothing more wonderful than the human body. She saw dance as a celebration of the miracle of the body's beauty, and she called dancers 'athletes of God.' Like athletes, her dancers were expected to move in a disciplined way and to carry out a daily regime of exercises based on her principles of contraction, release, and spiral. Graham's dances were designed to reveal a person's inner landscape - what she called the 'cave of the heart.'

humans & chickens

Two families in Louisiana in the 1960s had chickens. One family had half a dozen colorful hens and a rooster or two.  Though the yard was not fenced, the chickens stayed in the yard during the day, pecking among the grasses with their beaks for food - I assumed bugs and seeds and sometimes little snakes. Their droppings went straight to the ground (as with most animals living on land). The grasses were thick and healthy; the droppings were spread out enough they were not noticed. There was a coop where the chickens stayed at night. The other family 
had a clever cage of chicken wire in a barn with a compartment for each hen and access to chicken feed and a common water trough. The chicken wire floors sloped a bit, and when the hen laid an egg, it rolled out of the compartment to a rim out side the compartments where they could be easily gathered by a family member. The droppings fell through the wire onto a wood surface with a drain; the surface was regularly hosed clean. There were only hens, about a dozen domestic, solid whites, no roosters. The chickens remained in the compartments in the barn at all times.

These contrasts in how humans and other life species relate to each other come to mind often - and I go back to my childhood for insight about how we coexist. Nature and science go hand in hand sometimes; sometimes nature and science are at odds with one another.

the snakes and irises ...

Still not a great artist, but I am prolific. Art is a part of every day for me. Sometimes, I get attached to a particular subject, and it will crop up again and again, like an archetypal experience. The raven (and other corvids), dandelions, ball moss, banana tree blooms, prayer flags, jellyfish, clams, and whales are among those who have surfaced with great insistence. These are not necessarily subjects that hold any specific memories for me - but there they are. When they do surface - the snakes and irises - they bring me a most profound sense of trust and wonder.

 


seventy miles an hour -
the interstate highway and the afternoon
stretch long -
caught up in a steady current
of cars and trucks
(no camels nor burros)-
tires braid invisible trails
vehicles passing this guy
or sailing in the tail wind
of an 18-wheeler
weaving
left lane middle lane right lane
where are we going
caravan of strangers
on the road?

As a kid, I never saw an owl in the wild - not knowing what to look or listen for. My encounters with owls since (Great Horned Owls, Eastern Screech Owls, and one Pygmy Owl) however, have been so intriguing that I remember nearly every one. With only a couple of exceptions, it's as though the owl found the human rather than the other way around. Perhaps there is some reason the owl seeks us out.

People in the United States now have more yard maintenance equipment than ever before, and thus we are more likely to prune our trees and other vegetation. This produces a more tidy look (sometimes a scalped look). The owls are grateful though to find the older, unmanicured, mellowed trees that have branches or tree trunks weathered over the years by insects and lichens and squirrels and such. I was happy to find a pine tree in Lousiana tucked in a corner of a neighborhood - a snag with few limbs still bearing cones and needles. There was much evidence that this aged tree supported a little community of wildlife, including the several young owls peering from a hole high up in the broken trunk.

Jonah and the whale

from the belly of the whale
Jonah thought of wide open spaces
with distant skies running rivers
to ease his claustrophobia.
the whale herself
shared a steady calm
that helped keep Jonah whole

wasp nest

The design and functional expertise of the paper wasp's nest is so beautiful and so geometrically perfect, that perhaps the wasp is my favorite architect. Durable, lightweight, non-toxic in any way, and constructed of sustainable materials - the wasp's work reflects a kind of genius. Last year, I found an abandoned nest perched on a limb. I would not disturb a nest that is in use - this was the first time I was able to look at one up close. Each compartment was so perfectly replicated, perfectly part of the whole. The pale nest was both naturally camouflaged and visually fascinating, a natural wonder. This type of work makes me curious about the nature of intelligence in a paper wasp.

(After writing the above, I did a brief youtube search for videos of wasps building a nest - using 'wasp nest' as the search words. In the first thirty or forty finds, only one video was about the construction. The rest were videos of people destroying nests and the occupants. The subjects in the videos were referred to as wasps, but included hornets and other insects.)