sea, sea puede

Yesterday was madness. Ciara had two ballet performances, then crossed to another building to sing Une Cantate de Noel. She was in better shape than I was - at 8 pm, I was ready to fall asleep before the symphony band began to play! But now, for a month, there is catching up on life to be done. It will go much faster than I like, I know, and there is so much I need to accomplish! But at least I don’t have to go anywhere most days…

I do passionately want to get some writing done… in amidst unburying our home from chaos, decorating, readying for the winter rains (which have finally arrived; it has already rained, snowed, slushed and hailed today), mailing holiday packages, preparing insurance forms, working on must-do contracts, and traveling to Seattle in ten days.

Then again, perhaps I am as mad as that schedule yesterday!

Ballet. It can be the height of gender-ification, and it can bend gender. It can be rigid, coiffed, and aloof; it can be sensual, exploratory, evocative. It can break the feet and it can tone the body. It can steal shape or give it. It can be a nightmare of cliques and cattiness; it can be an exercise in shared girl power.

It is beauty and flow, it is starvation and fear, it is desire and release. It is too precious to simply throw away, and too dangerous to dance unwary. Trying every day to find a ballet that is full and hale and powerful and kind, to ease out every killing notion, leaving only the joy and the leap and the spin and the skin and the warmth, at the end.

A full bodied, full spirited, full-footed dance. It may well mean abandoning toe shoes, dressing boys in tutus, and changing our concept of line. I do think there is enough in ballet that it can evolve. That we can weed out the pain, and the prejudice — and ballet will not be lessened, but reborn.

My aunt Sue’s winter fairy, artisan unknown

The winter holidays can be a beautiful time, full of mirth and coziness, cooking and being together. They can also be tense-making and grief-awakening.

Especially in a time of recession, the holidays raise questions of how we will make it through winter and into the new year. For some in our community, winter is a long thought — they aren’t sure where or what their next meal will be. For many of us, there are questions of how to juggle bills, and whether our jobs are secure.

It can be very hard to be playful when you’re not sure how those presents will get under a tree. It can be hard to be mirthful when you are alone, and there isn’t any together to be.

Solstice (which comes a few days before the Christian holiday) is the darkest, longest night of the year. And Solstice is simultaneously the promise that earth will keep spinning, that the bounty and beauty of spring will return, nourished by winter rain and snow. It’s both a recognition of needed dark, and of relief in the light.

I hope that we all find enough mirth and joy and hope and faith and delight and strength to make it through our darkness, into the returning day. That in the unlit periods, we do not forget to dream.

‘Isn’t the forest beautiful?” said Stella. “Look at these big old trees.”
“Are they older than Grandma?” asked Sam.
“Almost,” said Stella. “They must be a hundred years old.”
“Is that why their skin is so wrinkled?” asked Sam.
“That’s not skin,” said Stella. “That’s bark.”
“Grandma’s bark is much softer,” said Sam. “Especially on her cheeks.”
- from Stella - Fairy of the Forest by Marie-Louise Gay

My Grandma’s bark is much softer too. I’ve never touched anything quite like it before. It’s not simply that I adore my grandmother; this summer, neither of my children could resist petting her hands, as if she were a kitty or a horse.

At the age of eighty-eight, Grandma’s skin seems to have reached a similar luminous quality to that of a baby’s. Her mind has lost none of its agility (it’s still faster than mine), but her skin seems to have lost all stress, and become something slightly magical.

It seems to be a very happy zen-like skin. I hope that anything in my body has learned to be that happy and zen by eighty-eight!