Balance

Balance is not a static state, it is a state of continual adjustment.  When maintaining physical balance all the tiny muscles of the foot synergistically shift from one stress point to another, spreading and pulling weight across arches into toes down to the earth up the calves and along the femur into wide hips in constant transfer.  Attention to this level of balance is prophetic for minute transformation, as physical transfer down to the cellular level is tracked.  It is one of my favorite ways to move, with slow steady awareness and outrageous timeless risk.  However, there are many ways to be in the world and the works I shared last week stretched my sense of balance to maturity in new ways.  

A Heart in Flames made me move fast, huge, tracing the borders of containment, barely held together by flesh, bursting out of pattern.  Alot of anger came out!  Alot of joy!  I kicked my own ass and it too was prophetic, exhausting stubborn attachments and tilling the blueprint of Hannah into fresh crumbly soil.

Grief was *lovely*, so so lovely.  Not a sound was heard, suspended in gorgeous imagery and gentle pulsing of energies universal into the fabric of our bodies, props, and individual stories, we succeeded in balancing depths with concrete moments of stillness.

Tenderness was off balance.  As a professional art maker I really struggle when this happens, when perfection is too elusive, nowhere close enough to catch a wisp of her as she slides in and out of sight, when she refuses to reveal herself.  As the leader of my troupe it's up to me, to grounding my state of inner balance for the energies at hand, and when I take risks that are real risks, beyond the physical, I have to get ok when sometimes I flutter, when sometimes I harvest weeds. 

This three days after performance week mania love I rest, reflect, and remember that many Japanese flower arrangements have an ugly gorgeous out of place weed placed in the bunch.  Notice this lovely example by Junko, a flower artist working and living in London, the dead yellow leaf providing exquisite symmetry to the other obvious beauties.  I should like to have my falls be so poetic.

And really, if I have 60+ years of making work ahead of me, it really is nice to fall sometimes, to find new ground and experience surprises.  

I am open to surprise and delight in its many varied manifestations, yoked within my cellular being, that all comes not just to the good, but to the joy.

In closing, a poem by Jay Ramsay, local transcendentalist: 

I saw a great light come down over London,
And buildings and cars and people were still
They were held wherever they were under the sky’s
Clear humming radiance as it descended –
Everywhere, in shops, behind desks and on trains
Everything stopped as the stillness came down
And touched the crown of our heads
As our eyes closed, and the sky filled us
And our minds became the sky –
And everyone, regardless of crime class or creed
Was touched; as slowly we began to stir
Out of this penetrated light-filled sleep
Dizzily as the hand completed its dialing,
And the train lurched forward
And I saw faces looking at one another questioning,
I saw people meeting eye to eye and standing
Half amazed by each other’s presence
I saw their mouths silently shaping the word why
Why didn’t we know this? and yet knowing
They already knew, and without words
We all stood searching for the gesture
That would say it –

Ohm into~

(photos and video clips on the way..)