Dying/broken/forgiven.... now I begin

Born: 17-06-56....gemini.... monkey
re-born: 3-09-80
born again\found: 14-04-08
other notable dates: 10-03-68; 03-09-87; 23-03-96;
1-05-98; 31-01-02; 5-04-04

Interests: movement, stressed/transgressive embodiment, lived experience (body\space\time\relation)
expression ( word, dance, text, image, story, music, poetics)
learning, yielding......

Hopes for the blog:
offer up the wild intersectedness of lived experience and engage others in creative, expressive, perhaps irreverant, hopefully playful, and respectful encounters....
enact kindness
create moments of pause for disclosure, discovery, stillness

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

words that need to be said

During these past months and weeks leading up to my father's death, my mom and my brother and my brother -in -law have been doing the bulk of the at home care-giving.  The rest of us siblings and other family members have been doing what we can given the contingencies of  distance and job contexts. It was loving and intense work and it  took  its toll, both physical and emotional. I said in an earlier post that I expected to learn, and that there was much to learn when a family goes through the catastrophic health decline and death of a loved one.
What is most present for me now, as  insight, these days immediately following the funeral and the ongoing and amazingly tender interactions  with my mom, and my sister and my son, and also with my brothers and my brother in law ( who is a brother in every sense of the word!) is the need to say the words that often get forgotten or dismissed as unimportant in the larger swirl of more intensely felt emotions, like love and fear and confusion and despair, and the more intensely felt physical states, like exhaustion and pain... the words that those giving and receiving care need to say and hear, the words that enact love with humility and grace.
Here they are: I'm sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don't know.
I had expected to learn. I am learning. There is much to learn.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

... I knew I could trust you


you cast your words 
out into the deep
crafted to touch that space
under my heart 
where your first poem 
was
rhythm 
motion & stillness
moon dance
swimming
sleeping
bobbing
gently 
whispering into my breath
bone
and 
gesture
memory
you would call forth
three years ago
today
when I turned and reached for your hands
I knew I could trust you to reach for mine



Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Old Skipper: October 2, 1930-- April 10, 2011



Life is the childhood of  our immortality
                                         Goethe