Clare Byrne's Weekly Rites

vespers dance

2012-01-27T13:14:00.000-08:00

St. Rose is the patron saint of florists and gardeners. St. Vitus is the patron saint of dancers. St. Clare is the patron saint of television. Hank Williams is the patron saint of song writing and hard living.

This week I gravitate back to all of them, and Saint Emily Dickinson, patron saint of unto-selfness with unexpected triumphs, right in the midst of my gluttonous Feast of Saint Bob Dylan, patron saint of authentic mask-wearers.

This, today, sent from Emily:

I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes-
Each - with a Robin's expectation
I - with my Redbreast -
And my Rhymes -

Late - when I take my place in summer -
But - I shall bring a fuller tune -
Vespers - are sweeter than Matins - Signor -
Morning - only the seed of Noon -

Transparency

2012-01-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

This week I visited my friend and dancemate Sharon Estacio in her adopted home of Florence, Italy, and felt magically suspended in time. We biked around the city each day. I drank red wine at lunch. I saw Jesus nearly naked hanging over and over again in the museums and churches. It led me to wonder if the revelation of a naked Jesus is as fundamental an event in Christianity as his cross and resurrection.

Maybe Jesus, the animals and the saints toss their garment, their time up, constantly - they spend time by tossing it in the air in an act of constant prayer. So that time does not weigh anything, does not cloak, stick, hold them down - so they are left nude, revealed, floating.

Sharon and I danced in this week's rite, becoming transparent in Tuscany's late afternoon light.

Full Circle

2012-01-08T09:03:00.001-08:00

A time of softening, dissolution of borders, unification of opposites, and the suggestion to let go - to let be - even more. Here is my second love letter from New York, to bring those I love near and far full circle.

2012-01-06T16:52:00.001-08:00

Last week I took a walk, a late-afternoon break from the house, just up the back path. Vertical walls of hill were highlighted, sparkling from sun on snow, silver-gold, and the stream thrust and carved deeply between the slopes, water murmuring and tinkling through ice and stone. I went down into the dell and listened for a while. You can hear sounds back into the past, sounds from maybe one hundred, two hundred years ago, by listening to the rush of the stream. The water not only taught everything how to make sounds and what is beautiful, but also recorded soundtracks of events through time. You have to listen closely, your ear intently on the body of the sound of the stream. A bit ghostly, chilling.

"Traditions are borne by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries." - Chaim Potok

"Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat" - John Donne, from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

"The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." - Bob Dylan

This week I was in New York City, another place of vertical hills, wild metallic sounds, and spooky action connecting planes and angles.

2011-12-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

I love these folk-rock hero guys, with their scruffy looks, unkempt attitude - put on whatever is on the floor - their wild hair and bad skin and bad teeth and scarves and thrift chique. I'll put myself in their snakeskin boots, in their dirty fingernails. I already have dirty fingernails. I guess my lag time is about forty years, enough for someone to become a historical artifact, something I seem to really respond to.

What's harder is the brazen boy confidence, the young ignorance, willful file-cabineting of so much of what they see and feel. They see and feel it all, notice every detail, but they file it and write a song later. Not afraid to lie, cheat, steal, misrepresent, overstate themselves. They have nothing, so they have nothing to lose. They are willing to put it all on the line. They can call up the goods in the moment. They can be real when they need to be. They can be fake when they need to be. Makes me quake in my nascent snakeskin boots, but I want me some of that. Something so free and single-minded about the arrow pointing exactly which way. Doesn't happen often.

Allen Ginsberg says that Dylan onstage in the mid-60's had found a way to be "all breath - a column of air" - whirling in and up and out into the audience, a complete eye-of-the-nervous-system-tornado, a communion in wind.

That Dylan was a performing genius has finally dawned on me, don't know why I missed it before. I've been feeling the evidence of it for years, but got it in my mind that he was songwriting genius but a performing hack - totally wrong. He was interested in precisely everything about performance - hyper-aware of the moment - really singing the s-o-n-g - annunciating - over-annunciating, the words, teasing out every vowel, consonant, syllable, pushing his interpretation and investigation to the maximum, to the point of caricature.

He was known for going into the studio and recording single-take final takes, one after another, all in the same night, for his records. Admits he never really got into the whole recording side of recording.

2011-12-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Been thinking about hobo-ing. I've defined myself as an artist. I've considered being a monk. Put hobo and artist together and you have a troubadour, a traveling player, a minstrel. Can't romanticize the life, though some hoboes do prefer their wandering lifestyle and consider it a vocation. The monk, St. Francis of Assisi, was a troubadour in service of his main love, Christ. Christ was a rabbi, a teaching troubadour in service of his main love, Abba.

Bob Dylan sang a song in his "religious period" called "Gotta Serve Somebody." There's resistance to this idea in the archetype of the hobo. He's someone who refuses to work for the man, on the clock, dinner at 5:00 with the wife and two kids, inside the picket fence. America despises the hobo for all this but on some deep level admires him, because America despises the idea of having to serve anybody.

But to me there's something beautiful about the paradox of someone who refuses to live normally - who lives independently, dangerously, crazily, on the margins of society, dirty and tattered and torn and despised - but who also surrenders to something or someone, at least for some time if not for all of the time. There's also something beautiful about living normally and surrendering to no one, nothing.

Today I practiced decking a passenger train - riding on top in the open-air - with sleet and snow pelting like ice bullets, with smoke and cinders from the engine, watching out for the railroad bulls who might smash my head in with the back end of a pick axe, toss me off to get rolled under the train, or shoot me. Keeping low to the car, hugging my body to it like a lover.

Back to my least favorite definition right now: artist. The train I caught twenty years ago - my beloved world of freaky contemporary intellectual interdisciplinary dancers - is weirdly snagged on an elitist but destitute track. It's holding on for dear life. It's trying to jump tracks, to varying degrees of of sincerity and success. To really succeed it might have to surrender more than it wants to. Or try harder than it wants to.

My attitude these days, from Keith Richards: "As far as I'm concerned, art's just short for Arthur."

This song, which I loved when I was young, is a hobo ballad:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks
The boxcars are all empty
And the railroad bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew and whiskey too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

2011-12-16T17:36:00.000-08:00

Realize I have to have a two-way relationship with the guitar, not try to lord over it, master it. Add to that a relationship with my nerves at the same time, a tricky three-way - how to keep a three-pointed boat even-keel as it rocks and rolls in cascading waves.

Curious about all the dull details I'll never know about all the people I'll never had relationships with, people I'll never live fifteen, twenty years with. Something to know and to love, the minutia of affect and annoyance. How someone might take out the trash every once in a while to con me into thinking he's contributing - trashy sweetness.

Grand sweeps of experience, huge fishing nets cast with hundreds of thousands of fishy moments, nothing left but net. I put on a big sweatshirt lying around as I do my day of work at home. Good to wear my lover's things; this is something like filling in the fishing net. You wear a piece of his experience. It's informing you, you are possessing it, those chemical creases and folds.

2011-12-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

Rumblings underfoot this week: I blew off all my work. I wrote a song rhyming gin with sin. I practiced the guitar a hundred times and then flubbed onstage so bad the audience cringed. I forgot to do my Weekly Rite until thirty-six hours late.

Make a shrine of it - four walls, a roof and a floor. Write the name on the door. Then take a big step back, make a Cu Chulainn grin, swing your big sword, and smash it down to the floor. Pieces fly everywhere and soften into the ground.

2011-12-02T09:57:00.000-08:00

Weekly Rites 12-2-2011 from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

I've been reading Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles I.

Dylan describes himself landing from the Midwest in New York City in the early 1960's, barely twenty years old, with "a mind as sharp as a trap." He tore, spliced and diced melody and image. He was emotionally fluent, the mouth of a shark, dangerously articulate. My response is - my mind spills out foggy as the sound, my body is a boat knocking against the dock, and my heart is gushing as an ocean.

2011-11-25T13:09:00.000-08:00

There is a moment with eyes closed of finding a hand with my hand. The hand is slowly recedes from my hold - all I can think is, of course this is what happens. It's a well-grooved narrative, like a record playing. I stay, wait. Then the hand surprises me, pauses. Maybe doesn't want go on record as the one to slip away, or maybe curious to feel what happens. But I got nothing but stillness. My very best innermost nothingness.

2011-11-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

It's November, mid-November, and as I noted at this same time last year, the chard and mustard and arugula and kale are all a big go. We'll see how far I get with these greenhouse greens this winter, though. I suspect the plants need to be in the ground - some kind of ground, to really do it right. Things like to be in the soil.

I'm waiting - laying in a bed of fertile soil - for a god to believe in. I'm sure whoever my savior is, he's involved in the playing of flutes. A Rahsaan or a Jethro. Perhaps Krishna himself, out in the cow pasture or grove. Blue jays are the entertainment out the window these days, and all else is brown and the green grass is slowly muting. Some herbs - sage, parsley, sorrell - still going. Otherwise the hillside has that empty clear bare November look.

A lot of it comes down to town or country. I don't believe in town and all the sophistication and ineffectiveness it produces. People who live in town want to report to other people, want a lot of mirror reflection. I don't want it, or want to not want it. When I'm all done with town I'll be done with fame - wonder when that will be. I hope this music thing isn't another way into town but it probably is. I want trees to listen. Even if it isn't time to rest completely in a god now, at least I know I want to get there. Maybe my understanding of rest isn't accurate about how to be a contemplative in the world:

"As you work, as you come and go, and you pass among the crowds, to be a contemplative will simply mean that you try to turn to the Jesus within you and enter into conversation with him, as with the one you love most in the world."
- Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus

I might be wrong about the whole town thing.

I realized a few weeks ago that it's only a bad attitude I've had that there is no original fresh dancing possible. If I think there's no original dancing possible, then there isn't. But if I think there is always original fresh dancing possible, then there is. It's all potentially original fresh dancing, perfectly appropriate and necessary for that moment, or even earth-shattering. It has nothing to do with a linear sense of time, or what's been done before, or the history of contemporary or experimental dance. That's always been just a big mud pile in any given moment.

This rite includes appearances by Carlyn Levy, Paul Besaw, and Chelsea Rhyll, and was filmed during a workshop at UVM led by Jennifer Monsoon and Robin Vachal on dance and camera, performing and perception.

2011-11-11T20:51:00.001-08:00

2011-11-04T18:06:00.001-07:00

I'm spending days in a hospital where my father is recovering from surgery, and am struck by the intensity of the place. A kinetic, bustling high-stakes hive where people are being kind to each other because they are on emotional edges. I don't think hospitals always feel like this, or even this hospital always feels like this - but right now I'm seeing soft, tender threads connecting everyone.

Spent a day in the surgery waiting room watching movies on silent - Clash of the Titans, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Harry Potter - feeling grateful for the visuals, the running jumping dancing fighting dying bodies flashing on and offscreen - distracting attention from one beloved body behind closed doors going through a gauntlet. The waiting room was filled with people distracting themselves from anxiousness. But the empathy filling the room, I could have cut it with a knife. Some people praying, some reading, some sleeping, some having gruff or joking conversations. Most, at some moment, smiling across the room at a stranger, or talking on a cell phone, voice quavering.

The web of concern spread beyond the room, out in the world - so much attention coming in, from far away, whirling and twining into thick strands and converging in glittering arrays over, under, and upon the operating rooms.

The high-and-low live-or-die of it made me understand why surgeons and doctors and nurses want to work there, drink up this intensity, live off of it. I was drinking too - this moment with humanity tasted like being ecstatically alone, like being at a really good party, like being in a really good church, like saying hello to God.

My sister Monica was my backstage curtain wrangler in this week's rite.

2011-10-28T16:11:00.000-07:00

Seems Emily Dickinson experienced some kind of enlightenment at a young age, and then lived for another thirty-five years, speaking of herself as being already finished, dead. This week I read about Irish-American Christian Buddhist monk Maura O'Halloran, who wrote:

"I'm twenty-six and I feel as if I've lived my life. Strange sensation, almost as if I'm close to death. Any desires, ambitions, hopes I may have had either been fulfilled or spontaneously dissipated. I'm totally content...So in a sense I feel I've died...At twenty-six, a living corpse and such a life!"

O'Halloran died the next year, traveling home to Ireland from Japan.

Something about this "living dead" to think about at this time, the Feast of All Saints. Not a common experience, but not so uncommon as one might think. I don't there's anything wrong or unusual about thinking about death, a lot, even if one is not living dead. It brings more attention to each moment of life.

Between seasons right now. So that when I walk to the Music Building from the car, I could mistake it for early spring. The air, feel, touch, taste, shares characteristics with its opposite season. I like this, not knowing when I am.

2011-10-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

I just can't seem to figure out all the stuff in my hands - I can't believe all the stuff, constantly going through my hands. I don't understand where it all comes from, how my life seems to generate so much of it. How long, how long?

Trying not to let sensations/emotions cluster into already named status that then gets leaned on, stamped, pressed into permanency or at least undue longevity. Trying to be with emotional states as physical sensation, keep experiencing them - riding them out with observation but not definition - they pass by like clouds overhead.

Some of us are spending time in one place, mostly still. Some of us are leaping great distances in a flashing second, the miles speeding by beneath us. Lord bless us all this week.

2011-10-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

Whatever it is I'm doing in this time, this preparation, this is the place to be doing it. Inexplicably. "All holy desires grow by delays; and if they fade because of those delays then they were never holy desires." - St. Gregory

2011-10-07T18:39:00.000-07:00

Every time my class comes back to the subject of Indian classical dance Bharata Natyam and the devadaisi, the devotees of the temple who danced it in antiquity, I am attracted. I want the fulltime job of custodian of the temple, of dancing ritual oblations in costumes that take four people to put and paint on, of rigorous physical training, of alternate spaces, of staying in one place, of being outside class and caste, of being a different kind of woman, of always being the other woman, of getting to disappear behind makeup and mask and jewel and inner temple sanctums, of being at the same time exposed for all to see, a public spectacle, of living for my body, of giving my body to the gods, of marrying the gods, of complete devotion to the god, of the discreet unions with human and god that could slip through the cracks.

2011-09-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

Sea of white pine backing our lawn has yellow needles interspersed - pretty highlighting - but I hear it's acid rain doing in the tree.

Extravagant fall day - flocks of mixed birds led by indomitable chickadees busying through; leaves drifting down, casting and strewing in every gentle breeze; air so fragrant, so lovely; colors in pastels and sherbets - pinks, oranges, crimsons and yellows. Everything dropping, drooping, complicated and revealing. Butterflies, dragonflies; bees buzzing slower, and even pausing. I come upon one or two fat bumblebees motionless, chomped into a face of flower, shocked still, by what I don't know - a channel of crisp fall air, a whole whole summer of buzzing suddenly piled up and done, suddenly to the end of the story.

Micheal Wall's "beginning" found its way into this week's rite, surprising me!

2011-09-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

"[Clare] referred to herself as the 'plantuncula' of Saint Francis, or the 'little plant' of his movement, a reference no doubt intentional in similarity to the Portiuncula, or 'little portion,' the beloved place where Francis often resided, and where he chose to die."

- annotation by Jon M. Sweeney, to The Road to Assisi by Paul Sabatier

2011-09-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

Raspberries are coming in strong but not sure how many more we'll get, the frost is creeping quickly closer. It's fuschia-time: red wine and from Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking: Indian beet and carrot fermented pickles - the juice of which has singlehandedly kept me healthy, I firmly believe, in this dementedly busy time. Grapes, deeper than fuschia, almost ready too.

The timing of the academic year intends interruption. I'm resenting the intrusion of the school year and my own self-inflicted performance caprices on this solemn and joyous time of harvest. In this particular, strange year when gardens I pass are only now muckily surfacing from the flood-waters. It seems maliciously intentional, how the academic year cuts a slice right into the heart of harvest and demands a new start, a new initiative, a self-important new energy, when all in the field is ripening, slowing, becoming full and golden, and when so much is daily shifting, in the air, in the trees, in the light. I yearn to give it full attention, full energy and languor in turns. I want to have harvest celebrations and invite all my friends and family over, make huge trembling salads and slaughter the extra rooster and slather him in fresh pesto. I want to stomp on the grapes. I want to spend all day at the stove, sweating over canned tomatoes. I want to try rose hip jelly. I want to try mint jelly. I want to try applesauce. I want to use everything, even the wild things!

2011-09-05T11:17:00.001-07:00

Weekly Rites 9-9-11 from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

2011-09-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

Tropical Storm Irene came through Vermont this past week. We were lucky, on high enough ground -midway up - so that the swelling waters pouring down from the peaks to the valleys rushed by us, onto lower levels, during the day-long storm. At the height of the storm the brook was unrecognizable, a foreign entity - surreally high, capuccino-colored and froth-peaked.

2011-08-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

Weekly Rites CCXX from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

Rainy breezy day, not cold. Blackberries behind garage are ripe and tumbling off vines, mountain raspberries too. So much coming to fruition, so much movement and activity above and below, so much shifting - a very exciting time for everyone - birds and trees and bushes and vines and wind and rain, and cats who are having field days with mice and birds.

We just went to let the chickens out and one cat climbed a wooden post into the yard, then up onto the roof to look down on the chickens as they zoomed out one by one. The other cat took at diving leap into the hill of goldenrod behind the chicken yard to go after a bird and we watched his movement zigzag along the goldenrod tips. The bird gave chase and escaped. I walked into two massive muscular sticky spiderwebs behind the garage and got bit on a fingerpoint by a mosquito. All that spooked and shivered me and I came inside after feeding most of the blackberries to the chickens; they took them for shiny black ant clusters.

2011-08-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

Weekly Rites CCXIX from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

I'm re-reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves. As part of his overall argument he quotes an ancient Irish bardic divinatory rite called Dichetal do Chennaib, or "recital from the finger ends:"

"...it is by the ends of his finger bones that the poet accomplishes the rite in this manner: when he sees the person or thing before him he makes a verse at once with his finger ends, or in his mind without studying, and composes and repeats at the same time."

2011-08-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

Weekly Rites CCXVIII from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

Imitation is sympathetic magic. Hunt by doing the same thing as your intended. Become her or him as much as possible, drawing unto yourself. A simple tendency - everything is attracted to more of itself, even if it recognizes it as a polar opposite - tangles, turkeys, money, sex.

2011-08-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

A letter is a good medium for a piece of art. Maybe it's always the vehicle, admitted or not. But when explicitly stated - to whom, for whom, from whom - particular power infuses it. Hello, here I am, this is for you. And then with that all clear, it's for everyone else too.

2011-07-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

The other surprising admonition from "The Cloud of Unknowing":

"...I tell you to cloak and hide from God, like a child playing a game, the urgency of your longing. At the same time, however, I tell you not to hide it completely. That would be the advice of a fool to tell you to do what in any case cannot be done! Yet I still tell you to do what you can to hide it! Why do I say this?"

I don't like the reasons the author gives - some silliness about needing to trample the physical in order to become more purely spiritual. There is no separation and moreover this hiding and teasing technique is shot through the physical/spiritual world, with examples of it to be seen in all desires, in all relationships and attractions. Flowers do it, birds do it, deer do it, and one of my cats does it. She shows affection for me by strutting away, tail arched high, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly - and only gradually - if ever - slowing down enough so that I can catch her.

And about this hide-and-seek with God, about the pursuit of the contemplative life, the author says:

"If you are to ask me what discretion you should exercise in this work, my answer is 'None whatever!'"

When someone speaks in contradictions and paradoxes I smell truth.

2011-07-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

I just finished reading "The Cloud of Unknowing" by an anonymous author - they think an English country parson from the 14th century. It is an engaging read. At certain points the emphasis sounds odd to my ears. Or not. As with many self-help-for- contemplatives manuals, the author is very concerned that you understand the difference between God-given graces and sometimes similarly-clothed temptations that come from the Devil. Of course along with that the author is preoccupied with the dichotomy between good and evil. Seems to me this distinction is odd and unworkable in practice but beautiful in theory, in image. It is beautiful and emotional; I can understand relishing it. This whole obsession with distinguishing good from evil, on an objective level, must happen for aesthetic reasons. People think the image is ravishing. The two sides, the gaping chasm between them - the borderline drawn sharply, or hazily, the inherent dangers of misconstruing. It is so pleasing to spend time on either side, or contemplating both.

What I come out of the book most astonished by is the emphasis that everything - everything in the contemplative life - is based on holy longing. The author insists that all you need to do is desire.

2011-07-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

Untitled from Clare Byrne on Vimeo.

I want to get good at the guitar. Keith Richards says just keep plucking. That's all I need to know. In a 1965 interview somewhere in Europe, at the precipice of Rolling Stones uberfame, he said he had started playing three or four years before and he was "almost caught up." I want to be as good as he was in four years. When I'm forty-four I need to be as good as Keith was when he was twenty-two. Double or nothing.

Keith says, the spaces in between are the key. Stark and stripped down. There's no right way to play the blues. You are always shifting between chords. The masters often found the easiest - or sloppiest - way to get the sound they wanted. Figure out the sound, not just how to play guitar.

Leaves sail the sun, and a plant is a boat going nowhere through space, but everywhere through time. Mysticism is the art of becoming plant-like. Performance is exploding one moment of time, supernova-ing it to its fullest capacity.

"Why, when you are 'nowhere' physically, you are 'everywhere' spiritually!"
- 14th-century anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing

Mick Jagger, asked what he thinks about just before going onstage said, "I think about slaying the audience. I think about going out and destroying them."

Looks like rain or looks like sun, can't tell - cool, almost brisk today, businesslike. All my loved ones whom I'm so far away from - I love you and think about you, all the time. I just need to be away. I'm not away, I'm right here, where I want to be. The sea is a far off prospect - it is way, way down the line.

Beautiful sunny. It's Sunday but I have no sense of time, day of week, it could be Wednesday or Thursday.

The total-blood transfusion myth about Keith Richards - that he went to some clinic in Switzerland and had his blood completely swapped out to rid himself of drugs - is not true literally, but it's persistent and appealing because it is true metaphorically. He really changed, as if at some hard-to-pin-point, he became a different man. There are endless montages of photos on Youtube of Keith that are trying to figure it all out. Everyone changes as they get older, but for Keith it's really hard to put together the old photos with the new ones. The sequence doesn't add up. It's mysterious. And the personality that emerged from the haze - well, deep karmic work was done, some hard-core purifying. And he was very, very up for it, done through and through by all those drugs. Chemicals scoured his soul, insides laid open to the heavens.

"But now you will ask me 'How am I to think of God himself and what is he?' and I cannot answer you except to say 'I do not know!' For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be! For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about them - yes, even the very works of God himself - yet of God himself can no man think. Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because he may be well loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never."
- Anonymous Author of The Cloud of Unknowing

We know too much about the Rolling Stones - Mick says that "fame doesn't sit particularly well with anyone" and I shudder just thinking how it would feel to have all this private, intimate information out there about me. I mean, not only penis sizes and pet names for vaginas but everyone's opinion, true or mistaken, on penis sizes and pet names for vaginas. Well, I'd like you to know, Keith and Mick - and Anita and Marianne - all figures worthy of Biblical attention, our modern-day Jesuses and Marys and Magdalenes and Marthas and daughters and fathers and prodigal sons and whores and stone-throwers - that I am creatively and spiritually feeding on you but I will do something with it. If your lives are offered up at the altar, private and public at once, if it is a huge sacrifice, a huge feast, if I will eat you until I can hold no more, then I must end up at the altar myself.

I think Mick has given everything of himself to his stage presence. There is nothing left offstage but attempts to succor the pain of total giving. Yes, he is the "active" one in the Mary and Martha story. He is Martha, busy, trying to hold up her end, all her duties and responsibilities. Mick's activity is nothing less than high holy priesthood of rock and roll, channeling of immense physical energies - not always perfectly - perhaps increasingly imperfectly - but still expertly. It's what he knows how to do. But I wish he'd have a big turnaround, a big spiritual moment, and choose the "best part" - the Mary role, the contemplative side. I wish the Stones would put out a quiet blues album and see how it cooks up, of its own accord, in concert.

That's my prayer for Mick. Because it's tremendous what he's done - he's fed a lot of people, and now he needs to feed, himself. What's the food? Something simple, radical, basic.

2011-07-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

The marrow of the bone: love, religion and art are things to do - some of the best things to do, maybe the only. They are not moral pursuits, in any generalized sense. Some kind of narrowing, channelling of their activity, is necessary. I guess to each her own morality of love, religion and art.

There is so much humdrum - and a few peaks, here and there.

A huge hawk flew low out of a tree in front of the house as I walked out this morning, and exited down the green lane toward the road. More hawks high in sky, wheeling, today; it's teach-baby-hawks-to-fly-time. Milkweed all aburst, plus cow vetch and clover and tiger and day lilies and morning glory and daisies and common mullein and buttercups and yellow avens and black-eyed Susans and St. John's wort and Queen Anne's lace and chicory.

Very quiet here, today. The day seems to be starting in slow motion, sun hesitating, delayed in casting over garden. No trucks on road. No planes. A beautiful still sunny day.

2011-07-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

A graceful snake is keeping an eye on the garden for me when I'm not there. Eye on the grasshoppers and cabbage worms - mouth on them too. Meanwhile in casual conversation she says to me:

celebrate for any reason wait a while sing the refrain over and over spend profligately embrace difficult communions porn is normal for guys fire in all its names is significant write down the lines right away or you lose them

I intend to follow her council as best I can.

2011-06-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

Once-full moon is hanging in the blue sky this morning, a new day, sunlight brand new. All is part of all. Who knows what they are seeing the sun rise over? I see it rise over forest trees this morning, like trees I walked through to get here, so distinct and green and hushed inside, so sacrosanct. This whole land is a cathedral, vaulted and dedicated, this whole land is holy. I walk off the road and feel blessing.

Annie Dillard says our job is to witness, to be audience for the show - everything - which would otherwise be unwitnessed. I agree we witness in our particular way - but everything witnesses in its particular way - and we are also here to be performers. We are here to sing and dance, just another way of being audience; performing is watching and responding.

2011-06-17T14:40:00.001-07:00

It really is like Emily Dickinson says: the pleasure of the interaction with someone, with ones you love, or want to love, is to be savored even more after. There is a way that you can indulge in what it was, somehow more intimately, privately, indulgently. So that is where I am now - thinking back on a week that was a great output of energy and enjoying it without having to put out any more energy. A delicious hinge in time.

2011-06-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

The order, the Poor Sister Clares, is gathered in Vermont, doing a series of showings this week at various locations, trying out the idea of making dance liturgy.

The goal: to bring God into our midst, to seek the event, to make something happen, for which this liturgy is a vehicle. This is all the same thing. Sarah Carlson, Sharon Estacio, and Jeffrey Peterson join me here on the lawn for some green moving.

2011-06-02T16:17:00.001-07:00

Ritual, sequence, order - the train tracks. You need to get on the train and ride down those rails - to get you out, beyond the city, into the wilderness. But then the thing you have come for - and you may just realize you came for it when you see it - may involve getting off the train, getting off the tracks, jumping down and venturing into unknown territory - weeds and high grass, tiger territory - to retrieve the wild flower, or to witness the dying deer more closely - or to kill the deer or to leave the flower. Or to have an encounter with the tiger.

2011-05-27T13:59:00.001-07:00

My favorite verse from "Girl From the North Country, " a Bob Dylan song that Keith Richards selects as his favorite in the Dylan 70th Birthday Tribute in Rolling Stone Magazine (a song he says is Dylan being innocent, true - not jaded and ironic):

"I'm a-wonderin' if she remembers me at all
Many times I've often prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day."

I like how, many times he's often prayed. I also like that Dylan first sings the deeply-grooved metaphor about yearning for something in darkness, "the dark night of the soul" - from another mystic, John of the Cross, whose book I'm languishing to read - but then explodes and expands it with the opposite on the next line. So simple, obvious. And true - even in the day he is struck with longing for her! I believe him.

It's tucked into this weekly rite.

2011-05-20T12:50:00.001-07:00

A seed in the ground, stimulated, bursts its hard skin from within. More comes out than was inside. The form is complicit in its own demise. The thing coming out is already more than the seed - growing up and growing down, rooting and ascending. Down goes an angelic white mist, a feathering of capillaries, greeting the earth below, spirit-like, deferentially parting particles. Contrarily the stem and leaves pushing up are brusque, determined, thrusting, solid, countering air with mass. The stem unbows, unfolds two catholic leaves, pressed together like hands. In a slow burst they spread into risk, uncertainty, the opportunity of aloneness. They get busy side by side, bordering, collected sunrays to feed the next, particular, "true" leaves.

Each leaf gives way to the next - unfurling, unwhorling - always more coming from the inside out. Each leaf does its time and then falls aside, peripheral. The length of each leaf's time varies - depending on circumstances to which it can only respond: temperature, light, wind, moisture, sun, rain, obstruction: falling trees, falling planes - predators: bird, insect, slug, grub. The overall constellation - the plant - polite networking below and formal shoving above - is many, many parts, and trading roles. Politics give way to brute manipulation and thrust ends delicately, ornately. It is many whole worlds.

It is many hole whorleds. Plants give a part of themselves to making something - or hundreds of a something - that rotates many parts in a circle as it wheels and explodes - a supernova, a flower, a rose. Out of this explosion comes beauty: a process developed over eons to attract birds and insects and mammals and bees. Out of the taking of beauty, a fruit comes, gravity-hung, pendulously done desire. Bearing, borne, heavy, hanging, nodding towards the ancestors below in a loop. In the center of the fruit the seed develops. It develops out of the experience of the bursting, the experience of the upward thrust toward light and the downward dig to root, the lifetime of roots making connections, transactions with dirt, mineral, rock, earthworm, grub, bacteria - where boundaries mean nothing, where mineral is rock is soil is root. The seed develops out of the experience of the opening of the leaves, the risk of the unfurling and multiplying of leaves, the dying, discarding of leaves. The formation of the bud and the explosion into beauty and the enjoying of that beauty and the taking and the resulting hang. The seed is the crystallization of all that experience, the memory of it, the instructions for the doing of it again, the brain of the plant.

The fruit swells and the seed develops in the heart of it, high above or rambling horizontally. The fruit must be heavy, powerful, heaving, packed with things to form the seed and be good to eat. The purpose of the fruit is to create, protect, continue, and hold the seed - to encase it, like a violin in velvet. An indestructible edible case, a hard candy King Tut in five layers of coffin, like our own brains, which end planted too.

The plant knows we will eat it when its interior seed casing is well formed, is ready, has all the protection, all the memory, all the information, when the fruit's work is done. That is ripenesss: exhuming vapors, sugars fermenting, decomposing. We love that moment in taste. We think rotting is delicious!

We eat the seed, it falls through us, gravity eats it. It bites the dust. It dies. It becomes cold. It waits. It waits through periods of time and cold. It is nothing. It doesn't think. Then it feels the moment: temperature, moisture, darkness or light, and explodes, begins its performance, its whirling dervish act, round and round, more and more. Is it heads up and bottoms down, or the reverse?

When I eat beans, peas, corn, grains, and nuts I am eating seeds, complete experience-holding things. A piece of meat, a leg of a calf, a wing of a chicken can't compare. Eat seeds mindfully. One walnut, as my friend Meredith Mandel sagely observed, may be enough for a whole day. I bet our hunting-gathering ancestors grasped the scope of it. Today I ate a bowl of granola finally appreciating that I was eating a spinning bowl of brains.

2011-05-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

I'm doing Rolling Stones time. A bit obsessed. Trying to figure out whose smile 20-year-old Mick Jagger reminds me of. Trying to place 66-year-old Keith Richards' eyes. Imagining all the animals they have inhabited over their performance lifetimes - panthers, wild horses, eagles, foxes, parrots, peacocks, turtles, lizards. So many colors.

They are a pair, the two of them, a fascinating conundrum, real karmic love-mates working out some soul connections. Keith sold his soul to the devil, to god, a long ago. He's pure, whole, a master sound-seeker, has no cares in the world. He makes music and knows he is lucky. He smiles looking up as he plays, in ecstasy. Even offstage, he's a holy fool, a clown of god. Mick seems strained and tied to many cares, but onstage he can release all that fussing and flutterbudgetting - it turns into pure performance. A mess of a thousand thoughts, gestures, concerns, cares, weaving into one architecture.

But I get it: Mick had to hold it all together while Keith continually fell apart, over and over.

How our eyes deceive us - just spend some time upside down looking at your ceiling. It does not take long to convince yourself, from what you see, that you could easily exist with that as your floor, that you could just get up and start walking on it. I don't mean that our eyes are deceiving you in imagining this! They are deceiving you the rest of the time, thinking you can't.

2011-05-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky to have dance as an ally. Can't think of a more useful (because it's useless) talent. I can't think of a more general, catholic activity that I can make specific and still be universal.

But all I want to do is play guitar, that other utterly generic activity made earthshatteringly specific by common blokes. I'm reading Keith Richard's autobiography. About the early days, listening to blues records and imitating:

"Our job at that time was idealistic. We were unpaid promoters for Chicago blues. It was terribly shining shields and everything like that. And monastic, intense study, for me at least. Everything from when you woke up to when you went to sleep was dedicated to learning, listening, and trying to find some money - a division of labor...Benedictines had nothing on us."

He was looking for the sounds he wanted to play. I've been thinking more about imitation as a way to learn. It seems to be a more accepted model in music-learning than in all this contemporary dance-learning. I envy it. I want it. I'm exhausted of being myself. Please let me be like someone else.

When really, you can't not lay down your own tracks, eventually, if you continue to move through a craft. So you might as well start riding the rails of what you love, what attracts you. You've got to be made to do something to train. I'll start with my devotions. I think I'll disappear into Bob Dylan for awhile, then maybe Keith. Their canonizations are well under way.

2011-04-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

Turn-on is about getting to certain geometries - marks - positions - of the body. Orgasm is hitting a mark and is a message hurled, like a drumbeat. Percussion: skin on skin, skin on wood, skin on metal, wood on wood, metal on metal. Anything on anything. These particulars might be called tuning, or might be called narration, or genders or figures or personalities or levels.

The extent to which we make the anything, other, the rub, real or present is individual, part of all the pleasure and the pain - but in the end, like the weather - shifting within its constancy. It is and is always changing: one wind, gusting in and out of sync, in and out of contradiction, to the other. So things happen. Sometimes it's hard to leave town because I'm turning my back on my nearest ocean. But I also want to fly home and disappear into the mountains.

Like yesterday: outrageous towers of clouds lording over the east, communing with the mountains, sending down Apollonian messengers in raggedy cotton trails - a multitude of textures, densities, humidities, colors, and levels. While in the west at my back, the setting sun was pouring god-talk all over the lake, sparkling clear and brilliant, and a cool front moving in to temper eighty degree weather, thick air. It was so much action I didn't know which way to turn, on each hip a pleasing problem.

Of the decision, if it can be called one: there is no need to explain why. In fact it's all about getting to the point where I can't. But really getting to that point takes nothing less than absolute rigor. And it seems clear that the act of balancing involves some kind of a fall.

2011-04-22T08:53:00.001-07:00

It is finally a sunny day in this late-early, or early-late, spring in Vermont. Stefan sets up the camera on a bank of the garden. Three minutes in, realize I have not one camera pointed at me, but two-score! All those flower bulbs point at me, paparazzi of daffodils, poised to pop open. I am world-famous! I roll to my right and the rose bushes entice me with thorns; I roll left and really smell grass, for the first time this year. Everything is shooting up, or out, or open.

The world is laden with words and actions, ready to chime in or chime out on whatever it is you are already doing or thinking.

2011-04-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

I'm performing a show of my work at Christ Church, Presbyterian in Burlington, so have been rehearsing in the sanctuary all week. It is a space to release into, beautiful and open, full of art and light. It opens me up, invites liberty.

"The answer is in the Church considered less as an organization than as a living body of interrelated freedoms. Fidelity belongs not so much to the realm of Law as to the realm of Love."

- Thomas Merton

2011-04-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

Nothing is more silly than having to decide whether a god is descending from light and the heavens or ascending from darkness and the earth, except to decide which is happening at that particular moment, from our particular perspective. Even an idiot knows that were the center of the earth cracked open, light from within - molten rock - would pour forth. We are a spinning egg with a fiery yolk. And that beyond the atmosphere is darkness and matter with some light and darkness and matter with some light, and nothing. It is all everywhere.

"Trees!
Were you once arrows
fallen from blue?
What terrible warriors
cast you down? The stars?"

Frederico Garcia Lorca, 1919

I think art could be described as container-creation (temporary or lasting) to house our deep-seated, deep-seeded and darkest desires, and that artists find this a necessary act, and a normal, wholesome one. This being said, I do not think art is a necessarily moral pursuit.

I'm here, I've arrived. All the work to do now, is here - to build a place for love and spirit, for the important things to have a place. What are we here for, but to love each other, to be with or without each other, to consider this, to pray over this, to act on this.

Today it's snowing! So snow on beds that I measured before - won't decrease today. But birds - robins, mourning doves, chickadees, cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, juncas, and just today, sparrows, all harbinging. Want to have windows open to hear them but still too cold. Still fire going in stove below. We are hauling wood down from the reserve pile at the land - our stash here ran out amonth ago! But we did have more - we wouldn't have frozen.

I planted my seed trays on Sunday, a infinitely hopeful sunny day - nine trays in all - seven in the greenhouse, and two in the house: tomatoes, peppers, celery, basil - which are just, at this very moment, popping up.

In this week's rite Sharon Mansur, a long-time friend, dancer, improviser is up from Washington, D.C., and we are getting back into each other's bodies for the first time in ten years.

2011-04-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I read the entry for March 25 in "All Saints" by Robert Ellsberg, on St. Margaret Clitherow: a Catholic Englishwoman martyred in 1586 under the penal laws of Queen Elizabeth, a death by pressing: "The sentence required that she be stripped naked for execution...she was placed on a sharp stone with a board laid over her on which steadily increasing weights were applied. She endured this punishment for only fifteen minutes before her ribs were shattered."

A late spring. I read in my records that at this time last year it was sixty-five degrees and snowless and I was digging garden beds. This year there is still a foot and a half of snow on my beds and we are heading into new storm, though seems like a bust so far - the earth has begun warming, irretractably.

Sitting on a stone in this week's rites, I was held at bud-point by a long arm of beech tree, and saw below me daggers of daffodil blades piercing and erupting through the dry carpet of last year's leaves. I pulled the mat open to reveal more hidden sproutings and the rich soil, composed completely of earthworm casings - precious nuggets-jewels of soil. This undergirding, slithering, supports us, saints below - the worms, the worms, the worms! pressing their way with soft tenacious tips in a vast substrate.

2011-03-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

"There are only certain very limited and special avenues of freedom open to me now, and it is useless to fight my way along where no issue is possible. This is true not only exteriorly but even interiorly and spiritually." - Thomas Merton from "The Intimate Merton"

Merton's voice, his support, intimate and overwhelming. Speaking directly to heart, calming ego - like a grandmother calming a hysterical child - bring it back around to the essentials: to love, to love, to love, to solitude, to presence, to body, to stillness, to obedience, to usefulness, to necessity, to interior study, to recognition of duty, to feeding oneself, to imperturbability, to accepting suffering gracefully, to negotiating complexity spaciously, to trust, to trust, to trust.

Sometimes being exhausted is good - you trust because you have no energy left to not trust. Wet Blue showed up for this week's rite, which was suggested, framed and lit by Stefan.

2011-03-18T11:13:00.000-07:00

From Thomas Merton's The Intimate Merton, selected journal writings:

"One of the results of all this could well be a complete and holy transparency: living, praying, and writing in the light of the Holy Spirit, losing myself entirely by becoming public property just as Jesus is public property in the Mass...my living of my Mass: to be come as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody."

"Now my whole life is this - to keep unencumbered. The wind owns the field where I walk, and I own nothing and am owned by nothing, and I shall never be forgotten because no one will every discover me."

"...we are all members one of another. It remains for us to recognize the mystery that your heart is my hermitage and that the only way I can enter into the desert is by bearing your burden and leaving you my own."

Merton's daily writing - all true, all contradictory. Seems clear that Merton had no more real opportunity for solitude and hermitage as a monk than I do as an artist and fulltime teacher. The world finds you wherever you are and you must deal with it. As he's saying, it IS being of the world, being in the world, being to the world, that is being a hermit - and our deserts keep reformulating themselves to fit the growth of our hearts, our souls.

"It is another spring. Although I am ruined, I am far better off than I have ever been in my life. My ruin is my fortune."

This week's rite was filmed by a student in my Video Improvisation Class at the American College Dance Festival at Keene College in New Hampshire. She told me this was the most interesting moment for her.

2011-03-11T05:03:00.001-08:00

At The Dragon's Egg in Ledyard, Connecticut:

Got ready a lunch of that European raw dense moist all-grain bread, Swiss cheese sliced very thin, and expensive smoked salmon from McQuade's supermarket, so good it makes me want to lick the ass of the fish it came off of and the man who smoked it. Butternut squash puree also from McQuade's, a beautiful deep orange glow in bowl in sunlight. Set all down on mat in front of glass sliding door in just-before-noon-sunshine to eat like the Carthusians, looking out at the world - at the field with its sculpture and the farmhouse and the barn and the row of bare-limbed trees, the stone wall and the road beyond. I sat down thinking a grace would be appropriate if I could ever have the patience, and glanced up to see shape of a huge turkey just emerging from the big pine tree to the side of the barn - a lone male turkey, enormous, prehistoric, black. It hesitated, looked all ways, walked out. I immobilized in hunt-mode - turkeys can see movement very well, even through glass doors. It nibbled dead winter grass exposed by receding snow and moved down the driveway toward the road. I would witness it cross the road safely or see it hit by car careening around the corner. Thought through my options - should I slide open the door to scare it faster across road? No, always a bad idea to intervene. Also Crazy Jane in me: don't trust relationship with time.

Then looked over: while I was watching and hunting, I was being watched and hunted. The white cat from the farmhouse had zeroed in on me. She saw me through the glass door. She was crouched and poised, hid from the turkey by the sculpture in the field. She watched me - I watched her and the turkey - the turkey watched everything - except me and the cat. I opened the door, reached out to entice the cat closer with a morsel of smoked salmon, but she skulked away behind the sculpture toward the house. I looked to the road, turkey hid behind the stone fence, saw a car careening around the corner. It slowed down by the grace of what - of everything. The next car, coming from the other way, found no obstruction. I ate my lunch.

For Patrick

2011-03-04T14:06:00.001-08:00

Things which comfort me in a moment of duress - things I don't have, lost to me. Is this a cover for something else? Here, though, wonderfully weighted drama being under veil, under wraps.

2011-02-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

We seek comforts in the places we occupy - some dark, small - some open, airy - some tactile, pressable - some imaginative, virtual.

I've spent large vats of time in intentions, not places. It occurs to me a city is not real. Like a heaven. An act of pure imagination in the collective mind of the people, all in the perception.

The space for this week's rite is cozy and see-through, a nook and a pass-through, private and a fishtank. All combined, comfortable. Erica Tucker, a student in Paul Besaw and Selene Colburn's UVM class Site Dance, filmed me in this rite and chose this thirty-second section. The audio is from J. Border, another student in the class, about being on the camera end of the exchange.

2011-02-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

In my dreamworld this week:
Through time and experience I'm wrought, honed, eroded into a fine strong column. In effect, like Emily Dickinson's -

"On a Columnar Self
How Ample to Rely"

(Poem #740)

But in image, in mind's eye, calling up J.R.R. Tolkien's North Pole - like a candy cane after you've bit off the hook and sucked the red stripe until it's honed to a dagger point. This is my column, the tip truly dangerous.

Also the human spine - multicurved, sprung, precise, delicate, potent, suggestive.

2011-02-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

Dance Teacher Mantra:
Dance has meaning.
Give your students things to do - doesn't matter what - and make them really do those things. Make them squeeze meaning through the form of it.

Less helpful if any particular meaning or movement locks them in, preventing transition to another thing -

The "born again" experience is not problematic - one should be born again and born again and born again and born again and born again and born again and born again and born again.

Soaking up many meanings, many movements, many structures, many games, many birthings makes you facile and useful. Bendy- stretchy. Shape-shiftable. A good witness, a good listener. Makes you be in relationship.

Heidi Henderson - extraordinary dance teacher, choreographer, mover - visited me this week and supplied some of these thoughts; she also selected my rite for the week, called this one a "visceral dance."

2011-02-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Between two -
the greater the distance,
more momentous the work.

2011-01-28T12:08:00.000-08:00

Image of Despair as terrible white angels -
and also mundanely, daily bread -
nourishment in place of -

Dry lips this cold winter. Cold dry winter I love, weighted. Deep winter, settled in.

White Sustenance, Emily Dickinson calls Despair - Winter too. Such sweetness of air, delicious on my throat. Refresh, reset, else all would get stale.

Quiet, waiting, nothing doing - cold gets down into the marrow of things and makes a mark.

repetitions - apprehensions

2011-01-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

Begin teaching with my regular cerebral contortions about how and why; am eased and buoyed by words from Ruth Zaporah. She's speaking about "Action Theater: Improvisation of Presence," the technique and book she's developed, but she really speaks about everything:

"I watch the students and observe details. They teach me what to teach. Since every exercise has within it many teachings, what comes up each day and why it comes up, is dependent on what was occurring at that time. Every class is ideal, whether it's progressively arranged or scattered. Understanding the work comes with doing the exercises, regardless of what order they're done in. I purposefully say the same things over and over...We learn through repetition. No matter how different the exercises look from each other, they're all about the same thing: presence."

Emily Dickinson - continually astonishing cheerleader - chimes in right on time:

"Apprehensions - are God's introductions -
To be hallowed - accordingly -"

For my upcoming rites, I'd like to work on assignment. If you feel like it, send me ingredients - places, objects, accompaniments, ideas, words, phrases, poems, songs.

angel creed

2011-01-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

I believe connection
I believe movement in spirit, body, and mind makes results
I believe the realm where it happens is physical
I believe there are many ways to perceive the physical
I believe chain reactions stretch far from their points of origin
I believe two things can act, sometimes, as one
I believe everything has intention
I believe words are best in poetry
I believe poetry's purpose is praise or lament
I believe all oppositional dualities are false
I believe multiplicity
I believe vibration is music and dance
I believe morality is not the deepest truth
I believe time is deep and wide, not long
I believe we are more capable than we know
I believe shame blinds capacity
I believe capacity creates connection

like this

2011-01-07T09:08:00.000-08:00

Love is boundless.

And the Church is like this:
A bunch of boys in town gets together and says, hey, let's throw this baseball through Mrs. Rose's window, okay? They pool their pluck and heft the ball as far as they can. It not only doesn't go through her window, it doesn't even get into her yard. It rolls into Mr. Kreider's driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Rose is downtown having tea and crumpets with Jesus at Nellie's Coffee Shop. And Jesus is looking at her thinking she is something else - in fact, he's kind of love at first sight - but right now he has no clue who she is.

And Jesus is like this:
He's hot, a perfect storm, a poster-boy pin-up. He's the kid with a lot of tease and a lot of sense, the one with the subversive grin, every boy and girl's secret wish. He ends up elected Escort at the prom. A word to be said. A key and a chord to be played in millions of people's hearts. He's a lover. He gives it up. He's ardently confusing. But since the prom - his song, his whole opera - has been sung the boys with the baseball.

The goddess of this week's rite was brilliantly imaged by Dan Potter; the rite was selected by Stefan Jacobs.

For my upcoming rites, I'd like to work on assignment. If you feel like it, send me ingredients - places, objects, accompaniments, ideas, words, phrases, poems, songs.

contemplating jesus

2010-12-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

Horror of horrors. Why stick with Christianity? No good reason. Okay, because it's sticky. Because it's what I've got to dig with. It's home. It's unfeasible to do the work I have to do primarily from a tradition outside the one I was cultivated in - though, secondarily - thirdly - yes - I pray all the traditions, Kali and Buddha and Rumi and a host of others are doing work on me.

Church space - and I do mean the spaces in churches - seems to be where there is "ground to be broken" as Yvonne Rainier says, in this - my - exact moment." It's where my cross (or "my challenge" as Thomas Merton says it) is. This is the subversive strange practical and back-assed reason I'm doing Jesus-searching - so I can have reason to step back into the forum, the container, the venue that has harrowing narrow walls but undug depth - where dirt can fly up - where shit can happen - where interesting controversy can bloom. Secular art world: dull spent ground. Of course, I'm all for erasing these sacred/secular distinctions.

"Salt is good (and salty) - if salt becomes bland, with what will you renew it? Maintain salt among yourselves..." Mark 9:47-50

solstice south

2010-12-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

On the winter solstice:
I learned wind is caused by heating and cooling of the Earth.

It's clear, I caught the ruby grapefruit pink sunrise this last morning. Also got up to see lunar eclipse - around two o'clock a.m. - saw the Earth's shadow half covering the moon, then stayed to see it lock over her fully - made her look like a remarkably three-dimensional tiny buttercream ball.

The sea makes a penitent out of me -
I gladly bear salt crystals in my hair all the way home.

2010-12-15T18:39:00.001-08:00

Accomplishment is arid. Failure - humility - produces all kinds of riches, the good stuff. Humus: the moist worm-cased place to be.

incarnations

2010-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

My Movement and Improvisation class danced at the Fleming Museum in Burlington for their last class, in scores they created for the gallery artwork and spaces. Big light spaces offer release, diffusion, whirling circularity, "spreadingness;" small dark spaces compress, lend intensity, mystery, "gatheringness."

"When a soul sets all at nothing for love, to have him who is everything that is good, then it is able to receive spiritual rest."

- Medieval Anchoress Julian of Norwich, in her visionary testimony "Showings"

baby steps

2010-12-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

Just got a guitar and am learning to play from scratch. Seems like it could be a way to journey while staying in the same spot. Seems like a vehicle - or a train track - or map upon which your fingers move. Feel like I could graph my life, my present moment, my current heart-state on the guitar if I only had the chops. But I'm just a beginner, picking up the guitar and plucking out a few sounds. It is relieving to take baby steps.

for the record

2010-11-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

Thinking of "identity" - a hot word these days - as a rite of passage, a gate. You arrive at it - suddenly, or over a long, hard-won period of time. You may spend some time there - years, decades. But if you don't ever move through, if you don't ever move on, or if you don't ever transform the gate, that identity ends up a blockade.

This is Thomas Merton writing advice to Jim Forest, a friend, writer and fellow worker in the peace movement in the 60's. It's advice for artists too, seems to me, and artists who are re-evaluating identity:

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

Thank god: I can be - not for myself, not for an idea, not for a set of possessions, not for a body of work - but for the strings by which I'm tuned; in the end I'm working on those chords.

bon secour

2010-11-19T05:24:00.000-08:00

I'm outside the Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours Chapel, "Our Lady of Good Help" in Montreal at 7:00am on Sunday morning. The church expresses Mary in her manifestation as Star of the Sea, a boon for sailors coming in and out of the port. I'm walking a gravel plank flanking her one stone side, while on the other side people gather for a soup kitchen. Still shy of dancing on that side.

But - have to walk a plank. Narrow, hemmed in - training, technique, discipline necessary to ultimately dive deep and die deep. Jennifer Monson - choreographer, dancer and enviromental activator extraordinaire - was here in Vermont this week leading workshops at UVM. I was grateful to be led, taught, trained - grateful for her clear available path of improvisational and energy exploration. I was reminded to be thankful for dance and movement improvisation, for body studies in general - a pretty plank I've found myself on for the last twenty years.

Church bells in a city are beautiful, a good reason to have a city at all. Feel the clanging in my lungs; they are the city's lungs. Hypnotic rhythmic improvisation on two or three notes, so plainly heaved for everyone. Depending on your mode, the bells stir up, calm down, celebrate, mourn.

a high

2010-11-11T09:52:00.001-08:00

This week's rite I set up in front of the Fleming Museum in a grove of three pine trees. A private needle-carpeted room, a discrete place where I would've pretended as a child. Ended up above in one of the pines, the best climbing tree imaginable - boughs radiating out at regular intervals, easy to hoist up its axel, enter into a tree's bloodstream, shoot up into its heart. Came out at eye level with our Daylight Savings setting sun and sat comfortably suspended, severely quieted by the blinding head-on light as it bathed a sea trough of waving pine needles turned silver-gold. Religiously calmed, a whole part of my mind blasted clean out of my brain. Dumbstruck, drowsy, I could have fallen asleep, I could have stayed forever.

This week's rite we killed nine of our nineteen chickens. We slit their throats as they were held upside-down in the snug-fitting "cone" and bled them into a bucket until their necks hung limp and long. We dipped them in boiling water for thirty seconds, plucked their feathers, beheaded and gutted them, and cut their legs off. We put their organs back their cavities wrapped in cellophane and put them in a zip lock bag. Now they are in our freezer, radically transformed in this new state, a transformation we enacted. I think that the ten remaining chickens feel some kind of absence. I replay over and over - I hope - that the bleeding chickens felt just dumbstruck, drowsy - but I may be pretending.

waiting

2010-11-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

My eternity is slipping away, slipping out my body with blood flow - slipping away with the angle of my breasts and the crease of my skin. Slipping away in the gathers of my pores, I'm departing my time of endlessly renewable body. Body embracing its middle passage, a middle body - a neat and efficient one, a body of knowledge. This body is tempered: more desirous, less desirous, cognisant inside, cognisant out. Unashamed and more embarrassed, by everything - more public and more private. Functional, useful - mostly - blips of disfunction, signs of deeper bewilderment, signs of breaking down. Pain-seasoned, sensation-drenched, appreciating everything and nothingness, purpose and purposelessness. Less emotional. Tired of same movements. Wanting to learn something new. Waiting.

Waiting: for winter, for surprise, for revelation, for new discipline, for a guitar, for a good voice, for a new lover, for an old lover, for a current lover, for inspiration, for dinner, for intoxication, for death, for sun to depart frosted peaks stained red.

reverence

2010-10-29T14:47:00.001-07:00

A novel, a poem, a dance - huge fissure-leaps, bounding into, binding, the past, future, together - they are metaphor. The fissure is mystery, complexity, foldedness, crackedness, eternity, fall, risk, darkness. I approach these leaps with reverence.

the show

2010-10-22T03:38:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when the obfuscations fall away. The dazzling show, the mirage of leaf upon leaf upon leaf upon leaf, multiplications pointing towards infinity-eternity-roundness and three-dimensionality - undresses - and what is left, revealed of branch, trunk, and especially roll of ground, seems plainly two-D: impoverished, disorienting and surprising. That's all that was there?

Time to undress, take off that brilliant show, get basic. Prepare for the next role.

vessel

2010-10-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

Not supposed to figure out a thing to do, or the thing to do, but my thing to do. It's all I can work on - my vessel's location and vocation for cosmic orbits, fly-bys, head-on collisions.

jerked clean

2010-10-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

Thomas Merton - mid-20th-century Catholic convert, Trappist-leaning-toward-Buddhist monk, autobiographer, poet and essayist - such a friend to read, feels familiar. Devout, irreverent, obedient, rebellious. Reclusion in Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky wasn't enough solitude, so he built his own hermitage on the grounds. He found intermittent peace but compulsively tossed out scores of essays to the world speaking on politics, spirituality, liturgy, the monastic life. He kept a journal. He had an affair with a young woman in his fifties. He welcomed visitors sitting on his porch in secular dress drinking Kentucky bourbon. He wrestled desires for communion with people and complete attention an earthy imminent immanent Vatican II God. I can really relate with this persistent tangle, this tension. He's so nicely flawed.

I read this week about his death in a hotel in Bangkok in 1968: he slipped getting out of the shower, grabbed an electric fan, was electrocuted. Vaguely knew he had died young and strangely, but this picture makes me sad. He seemed to be beginning a new phase of his life, a new rite of passage, a new religious identification - I mourn not being able to read his thoughts on all that, continue to follow his testimony. But maybe he had arrived where he needed to go, had said just enough.

This is Thomas Merton spending the last weeks of his life not in reclusion but on a long tour of Asia:

"He was left on his own to wander among the statuary and the fallen stones...the ruins of Polonnaruwa were giant and magnificent renderings of the human person.. [Merton:] 'the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing...Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly jerked clean of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious...the thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no 'mystery.' All is clear. The rock, all matter, all life is charged with dharmakaya - everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.'"

from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Paul Elie

It may be that being a monk - or any identity or attachment - is in the end better understood as a rite of passage than a promise. When is it time to be jerked clean?

slipped through

2010-10-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

Most automatic, urgent thank you's are for things taken away - thank you's for being emptied, being allowed to relinquish unneeded unfittingness - or used-upness - things already gone, over, done.

Annie Dilliard supposed in 1974 that people dropping from planes say thank you, not please. Death: a welcome door opening to nothing.

Emily Dickinson wrote "Called back." Slipped through. Made it to the other side. How I got over. Emily indicated that she visited - was once led to see - who and where she was going. That she was biding her time living dead until she could rejoin that host - a cool place, undoingness, at one with estranged lovers alive or long gone ahead.

This week's rite was chosen by friend and fellow choreographer Paul Besaw.

raphael

2010-09-21T16:56:00.000-07:00

Discovered this prayer through Paul Elie's book, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" - where Elie noted that Flannery O'Connor received it on a Catholic Worker postcard. I particularly hear the lines about movement, joy, and crushing separation.

"O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us! Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand towards those we are looking for! May all our movements, all their movements, be guided by your Light and transfigured by your Joy...Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy."

Now looking it up online, I see it is one of the Angel Prayers - the lines appear over and over again on many websites. I wonder who wrote it.

sit with it

2010-09-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

"In his view the real religious person lives in uncertainty, thrives on it, as the handmaid of mystery."
- Paul Elie on Czeslaw Milosz in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

I'm reading Paul Elie's book "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," about four mid-20th century writers - Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy - who each wrote from their life journey as Catholics and drew artistic and spiritual sustenance from a shared correspondence. It isn't that a writer makes any specific effort to create a Catholic art, Elie asserts - the art is Catholic because the artist is.

It's making me think - again - about saying I'm a Catholic artist, something I might like to do - unless that identification has anything to do with the structure of priestly hierarchy in the Church and its bulldozing values and beliefs. That circumstance is making it harder and harder to sit within, to even approach the pew of the Church in this era of Catholicism.

As Flannery O'Connor said over a half-century ago: "Usually I think the Church's motto is 'The Wrong Man for the Job...'"

But I'm coming to feel Catholicism - perhaps better catholicism - has nothing to do with the infrastructure of the Roman Catholic Church. I make catholic dance because I say I'm catholic. While I feel the Church has completely failed me it does occur to me that it needs Saving. I might be the Right Woman for the Job.

"We should all feel near to despair in some sense because this semi-despair is the normal form taken by hope in a time like ours." - Thomas Merton

slightly uphill

2010-09-10T13:41:00.001-07:00

I've got nothing, just these sneakers.

descent

2010-09-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

The painkeeper smiles toothfully behind the counter, his shelves brimful with glistening glass jars. "What's your pleasure?" he says. I descend into a hell of, if not my own making, my own request.

As much as we'd like to believe otherwise, all he (or we) can do is help people toward where they're already going.

a grace

2010-08-27T06:08:00.001-07:00

Sometimes a deed starts out as something you have to do -
but in the end is something done to you.

resurrection/unto dust

2010-08-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Noticed when I dug these garden beds in the spring how much I felt like an undertaker. Here I am in August with the fruits of that labor, cucumber leaves translucent to the sun sheltering cheery yellow blossoms and fat fruits, "Poona Kheera" a variety from India that starts lime green, turns sunny yellow, then rich mocha brown.

Nine years ago this week my mother passed away, and this August time is always auspicious, one of beginnings and endings, rich heavy-bearing thoughts, vine tangles and somewhere within that my own version of revelation, my humble pie.

Dirt undoubtedly outdoes even us in its variations on color: I remember the rose, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple of the Chama Canyon in New Mexico. But I was struck in today's rite by my own flesh color and the soil, the dry dusty soil I lay on. We were so akin, the dirt and I, against the cucumber greens and yellows.

Middle Bin

2010-08-13T12:05:00.001-07:00

Signs from nature - bird in the sky, moonrise, leaf on sidewalk - used to be what created benchmarks to know where to turn on the path. Now I'm in midst of so much green and bird and dirt I don't know which way to turn; completely a-drift, a-sign.

So far worms, dragonflies, dandelions, and blackberries, and hawks are the noticeable nobility of the forest; I greet them with great deference.

Headcount: nineteen chickens. One got eaten a couple weeks ago by a red-tailed hawk; a chicken hawk, we've learned. It wind-hovers high above in the sky kee-kee-ing. It ate our chicken right in the yard.

We've put a scare-hawk up, with blue hat, pink mittens, jeans, tan army shirt - shiny CD's for eyes, CD's dangling from its wrists that revolve in the wind and throw sunlight around in such weird ways I'm startled digging in the garden. The chickens don't mind. The dragonflies, worms, dandelions, and blackberries don't mind. But maybe - we hope - up there the hawk is unsure why piercing fractals of celestial bodies are down here in the chicken yard dancing off the trees.

My chickens have wised up. I turned the other day from my digging to see them filing silently and orderly, like a well-executed fire drill, back into the coop. I looked up in the sky and saw a kite of a hawk, red wings blazing in the sunlight, unbelievably high up, suspended over us in the center of the circle of the trees like a batman sign, fully admirable in its menace. Chickens and hawks have impeccable eye for detail.

Today the hawk was out with two youngsters, showing them the winds and how to wheel. The baby hawks cutely wobbly circled and kee-keed, practicing high and low altitudes. I hung another raincoat and hat up on a post. Also reminded myself not to stir up the compost bin in which I had dumped a year of un-aerated, anaerobic bacteria-infested kitchen scraps smelling like the worst shit imaginable, like I've hung up my own glaring sign to the whole forest; now I'm embarrassed in front of everything.

The hawk gives the chickens something to do, something to congregate about, something to make them forget for the moment their pecking, bickering, in-fighting. Some great imperative to gather around. They are calm, look out for each other, signal the alarm. The hawk gives the chickens collective purpose, a rhythm to their day (in the coop, out of the coop, in the coop, out of the coop), the excitement and thrill of living a real life or a real death, daily.

skirt

2010-08-06T10:56:00.001-07:00

I'm still on this song this song two years later. I've been thinking about this line from it for the last week:

"Hike up your skirt a little more and show the world to me."

and have decided it pretty much says it all. It's all the mysticism I need. It's all the poetry I need. It's all the religion I need. It's all the philosophy I need. Skirts say so much. Skirts are great for so much: to be able to squat and piss easily even in public, good for circulation and ventilation, for elimination of underwear, for quick flashes or fucks.

The line says that what's underneath a skirt is the world. I agree. It's the whole point - it's what we've all come out of and what we all want to get back into, in one mystical or metaphorical or practical way. It's the constant peer, the thrill of a peak, the best stage in town. It's the big reveal, the wild space, the jungle, the Bermuda Triangle, the horror show, the house of mirrors, what's known and what's mystery. It's what to run away from. It's awful, in the Biblical sense.

This is the key that Dave Matthews hits upon: to be a devotee, a lover, a desirer of what is underneath the hemline, the folds, the drapes, the veil, the big V is to understand God, life, art, religion, love, life, death, dogs and cats, like boys sniffing out their first pussy.

all aflutter

2010-07-30T10:51:00.001-07:00

God is a convenience of thought, but so are you and I. Personification is one of the things we humans specialize in, along with tool use, sexualized boundary creating, and imitative playfulness in music making.

In a way to not see a god is a denial of what we've been building toward for so long here - words crystallized into covenanted meanings - but I understand the desire to break down that altar.

It's not the fact of god that is contentious at heart but how, in what color and shape, that person has been crystallized.

Here I am with Amy Larimer at the Dragon's Egg, playing with personification, tool use, boundary-setting and music-making.

crow dance

2010-07-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

We just brought our twenty chickens up to the land to be on the other side of the garden, for which we are hoping them as fertilization over the next couple years. Fertilizer is something you can generate pretty easily, given the desire - even out of your own ass.

It is possible to live a rich, rich life. But it must be particular: "I'm doing this now" - do it fully. Don't try or wish for doing other things outside of the richness of this particular life. Occasionally glance over the universe to those parallel lives, those other roadways, but just glance.

It is enough to note the progression of wildflowers and plants growing along this road, this particular road, as they appear throughout the seasons. It is enough.

definition of improvisation

2010-07-16T13:45:00.001-07:00

Beliefs and definitions are fundamentally things to be used, implemented, or discarded - tools, playthings - for art, living, lovemaking, homemaking, faithmaking.

crown view

2010-07-09T14:09:00.001-07:00

Please, please just let me be of some use. Let the path I am on be useful, to someone, to something. All I have to do is smell out, smell out the way. If it coordinates with what I want, fine. If it doesn't, just give me a whiff that it's right - true - fit - and I'll keep on it.

gravity

2010-07-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

Dancing with abandon is easier the closer you are to the ground, the closer you are to the womb, the softer the landing, and the further you are out of your mind. Here I am with my nieces Lily and Emma in a carpeted location. Our focus word in this dance was "sleepwalk."

honeycombs

2010-06-25T06:25:00.001-07:00

In the sacred honeycombs of New York contemporary dance this week, the worker bees are busy buzzing in and out of the cells at all hours intent on their task. Even in the passageway outside, I feed off of the elixir dripping from the rehearsal going on, just on the other side. It is a delicious excruciating position - is their honey sweeter? thicker? more golden? flowing prettier? I wait my turn to prove my cache.

robin's egg

2010-06-17T15:23:00.001-07:00

I'm realizing that all the stuff I thought was important to consider about making art, particularly in New York City - that I thought was real stuff - stuff that people outside of that realm didn't know or consider - I'm realizing that that stuff is imaginary, isn't real, is made-up, jaded bored wrongly emphasized overly narrow stuff. It's a problem of the density of people in the place, like most things. Hard to get a whiff of fresh air there.

Sleep is very creative, just in another whole classification of doing.

deep breath

2010-06-11T14:07:00.001-07:00

in 1577 Saint Teresa of Avila wrote "The Interior Castle" about her ongoing vision of the seven-layered, seven-skinned, seven-walled abode of the soul whose interior everyone must traverse. The difficult journey is the inward one, to reach oneself.

Two other castles I glimpsed this week, exhibiting unmistakable architectures:

This past Saturday, a poppy - an accomplished, professional flower. Means business. Sets up shop sturdily. Evidences its intention of burst in penile flower bulb - then eruption of petals so resolute they read plastic - temporarily wrinkled from deep compression. A world zeroing in on the black black center, startling and ornate, so much dark ring on ring, the center of an infinitely florid shameless pink.

Then this morning, a blues song on the radio. The singers starts with the talking blues, telling a story about the song as the chords progress, wind around, begin their loop again, as he finishes the story, the chords deliver me, descend me precisely, drop me on twanging wings right to the foot of, to the doorstep of, over the mote to the drawbridge of the castle wrought of nothing, of everything, a castle of rhythm and tone: to the inner courtyard, the meadow, infinitely large, infinitely inside the song. The first chorus begins - I am in.

reset

2010-06-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

Remember words are pictures too.
Their information is rhythm or rhyme - the woven word achieves maximum power.

The Sun - opon a Morning meets them -

2010-05-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

This week I am visiting the family farm in Bear Creek, North Carolina. The hay was just mowed - leaving the ground looking too bare - like a severe haircut, or a newly-shaved face! to the folks here, but over in the sheep meadow the grass is still tall, rendering the sheep but subtle grass partings as they make their way through, munching.

I'm on the border of the property - in the field over is a stand of trees that draws me, that reminds me of this Emily Dickinson poem:

Four Trees - opon a solitary Acre -
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action -
Maintain -

The Sun - opon a Morning meets them -
The Wind -
No nearer Neighbor - have they -
But God -

The Acre gives them - Place -
They - Him - Attention of Passer by -
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply -
Or Boy -

What Deed is Their's unto the General Nature -
What Plan
They severally - retard - or further -
Unknown -

I send this week's rite to Julie, my spring flower child sister, in the state of her birth, on her birthday, with all my love.

stretch

2010-05-21T14:18:00.003-07:00

We do want to make performances!

We don't need to worry about what dance is - uninteresting effort of classification - more important greens to fry. Let's concern ourselves with what performance is. No, let's not worry about that - it's anything.

But it is, usually, most interesting for performer and witness when the performance is framed - or is an intensification - of any activity or non-doing. The former usually involves an outside influence working on it and the latter involves an inner influence on the thing being done.

Intensification - framing: a hyper-realness. It's not unreal, it's not disconnected from ordinary activity, but it is an intensification of it. We usually find this interesting, cathartic, illuminating. It's Japanese rock gardens, it's opera, it's a good poem - it's a distillation, it's making essence of, it's making a beautiful point of something - we find this penetrating, helpful, healing - like a good medicine, like a good meal, like a thanksgiving, like a "look at that bird!" - and we look up and see one bird, wheeling, framing in the sky. Our look, our point, intensified it.

Dandelion greens - a revelation in garlic, lemon, and olive oil. I'm in love and astounded that we don't eschew difficult broccoli and brussel sprouts for going out on the lawn every night. I recommend this over rice with a martini, which accounts for this rant. Also I stretched. Lightly - doesn't always need to be so intense, I told myself - it can be easy and light, partial - or, it can be just what it is, more spirit than matter, if we must make the distinction. Doesn't need to be all matter, all the time - this is a modern dancer's - a sensate pagan modern dancer's insistence - a sensate pagan Catholic modern dancer's insistence. Who generally wants intense experience, intense performance, all the time.

sprouts

2010-05-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

The rake would be happy to swing up and hit me in the forehead. Nature is outrageously laden with potential like this, but has no investment in it.

Thankful to be in this green a place. To see seeds sprout. To witness unwrinkling leaves. To catch twin leaves carpeting forth over the brown soil. And to try, in my bumbling lopsided do-over way, to nudge along an overall agenda - a garden - in which the things sprouting have an all-for-broke investment.

it's nice to meet you as well

2010-05-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

This week's rite is the last day of my Improvisation class at UVM - the students created a structure for riding the campus bus:
sit,
stand,
hold onto the straps,
say "I" statements,
tap your feet
move at least twice.

The bus driver told us at the end that we'd made his day.

Still uneasy about curation - creating significance by framing. I do it in choosing what I post for these rites. I'm uneasy about anyone's acts of curation, and downright judgemental of the profession of curation. It is too powerful an act.

Robert Frost said that he just wanted to lodge a few poems where they'd be hard to get rid of. I like this better - that the stuff itself is stuck, is sticky, in our consciousness.

It's time for the curatorio of the RC Church to go down, down, down. Their time of choosing - badly - is long, long overdone. It's time for the consecrated women (calling all nuns - I love you - rise up!) to begin the process that should have begun long, long ago - leading Body of the Church. What kind of a body would it be?

It's May!

2010-04-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the gloriousness, the lustiness, the upthrust and outburst, here is my statement negativa of the month:

There's no deterioration or acceleration in the children these days - it is only all the same, as when I was young, as when my parents were young - it is all the same process, like how the seedlings come up, every year.

There's no progress. There is no mega-narrative, there is no histrionic sweep to be a part of. There's only meta-drama, of how one leaf unfurls this time, this year, how it unpacks itself from the seed.

This isn't to say the style and emphasis of the seedling, generation to generation, doesn't slowly (or in one fell swoop) change - but the path and goal are remarkably consistent. There are only a few goals.

And it's action that needs doing - and needs our interest - how that leaf unfurls! - in fact, it is all our immediate curiosity. But this guilt - regret - about missing out, or not being in the right place for the right action - it's just a sham, a false industrialist capitalist notion of progress.

Just do what you are doing! Fully be where you are being!

And, speaking of the children, I'd like to dedicate this weekly rite, this may-song, to the graduating seniors at UVM - and in particular, Daniel Weinberg - who said he wanted to see more of me in the kitchen. What an inspiration you all are. I wish you "blissfully astray" life-living and art-making.

ecstatic dance with scarf

2010-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

It felt so good to surge around on the deck! I'm dancing to Alice Coltrane, and realize now I must be channelling some of Alvin Ailey's Cry. I really wasn't thinking about it at the time, but amazing how these references are planted on your body, or in your mind's imagery, and sneak in or out the back deck door.

and then it went up

2010-04-16T12:14:00.001-07:00

and then it went up
and then it came down
and then it rolled over
and went into the thing, and then it came out
and then it sat down and stood up, sat down and stood up, sat down and stood up
and then it dug down deep into the thing and then it went #!!$#&%#$!!
[sigh]

no hope of recall

2010-04-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

Nothing better to talk about than the weather, ever:

Heaven of a spring is upon us; don't feel like we've earned it here in Vermont, with the winter so mild, mud season early and easy. Ah but hold my tongue: still time for a blizzard, of course, to mind me and all the buds.

Spring greening of the land but also reddening, oranging, yellowing, purpling, pinking, browning - those first colors out, those first shoots, leaves, flowers are as apt to look like wizened wrinkled pressed skins, like an old man, like a baby right out of the womb. How, how, how is so much contained in so little - so much sprout in a seed? So much unfurl in a bud? The answer is, it is and it isn't - the seed has intent and some of the material to get where it's going, but only enough to just start. The rest it trusts will be found, will be, out there, beyond all safety, once it has stuck itself out with no hope of recall.

all green, breathing

2010-04-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

Appreciating more and more - fabric and its capacity to fold, to create luxurious rippling creases, happenstance artworks of accumulation. Also its function of containing: that it is used to hold us in, and hide us from each other, which only makes us more interested in what breathes underneath. This is not a curiosity of homo sapiens alone - hunting animals have a reflex, a training practice, to be curious about what is hidden, breathing, in all kinds of folds.

gifted

2010-03-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you are gifted with a movement - it sees you, strikes you, and stays with you, for no apparent effort on your part. This week in my improvisation class wonderful Polly Motley who lives in nearby Stowe came to teach. She gave the class a contemplative exercise, in which one person at a time saw or imagined themselves in a gesture or a shape on the stage, which they got up and embodied. Juliana Dye, one of our students, created a long diagonal line with her long arms to the floor - a movement she makes in Paul Besaw's very moving new work "To the Earth" in our student concert this week - and I was struck by that diagonal line, embodied by her - how simple, levered low to the ground, regal and humble and clear. I tried it on in this rite.

tone

2010-03-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Artists: the good news is that any note you pluck, move you make, rock-face you sketch, is changing the world definitively and irrevocably. So you don't need to worry about that.

There is a vibrational tone that each thing occupies in any particular place and time - it is the "doing" that poets talk about in terms of bells, often - the note each thing is called to clang and cannot but. A frequency, a channel, a path to go down - but I think the closest descriptor is "tone" - it is about music; sound; vibration. Sound and light are those physical but immaterial things - they straddle solid and ether, are both and neither, it's why light and sound are said to be the most god-like.

black-capped chickadee

2010-03-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend with Marya Ursin, Dan Potter and all the folks from the Mystic, CT area and beyond who gather at the Dragon's Egg. There the snow is gone, the ground is all shades of brown and the birds are out singing in abundance. I got a long-sidetracked episode of the White Witch up and running for the Egg's yearly late-winter/early-spring extravaganza "What Tweaks Your Dreams" at the Hygienic Gallery in New London. All the performers took over different gallery spaces, and the audience was led through by a bunny with an egg-alarm: Alice in Wonderland-style. It was a great show, on a beautiful Sunday in spring, sunlight pouring through the gallery windows. I was amazed to find Bank Street, New London, always right there down the hill from where I went to college, to be a very hip and happening spot - most likely in large part because of the activity of the Hygienic, originally a group of New London artists who commandeered an abandoned building for yearly art exhibits. Art is like nitrogen in the soil: feeds and promotes growth. Here a bramble vine and I catch first morning sunlight pouring over the horizon.

sunrise

2010-03-04T05:42:00.000-08:00

It is beginning: sunrise, all of a sudden, much earlier as I leave for school - deep yolk stain on grave mounds of snow, crumbled into coffee-cake sugar boulders by the side of the road, ice dripped into fantastic frosting formations off roofs. Heard mourning dove for the first time, today. Air is softer - cold is giving way.