Remembrance Day.
The Serenity Prayer
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can and
The wisdom to know the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr
How do I write, today?
A dullness, a paralysis of body and spirit has settled in like a heavy fog.
How do we dance tonight?
Where is the solid ground on which to spin and pivot when seemingly, the foundation has been removed from under us?
Where do we find hope and joy in this time of shadows?
God grant me the serenity…
Give up or Double Down.
The big question: Do we give up or double down?
Remembrance Day: a time to consider the trauma and tragedy of others who did not give up but pushed through the chaos and tumult and survived – or not.
My daughter is one to carry issues of injustice close to her heart. For the past year, it has been the war in the Middle East. She phoned me one day with incriminating self-doubt:
“Dad, am I wasting my life? I am just a singer/ actor. It seems so inconsequential, irrelevant. Shouldn’t I be overseas handing out emergency aid kits or something?”
What to do in response to this rising tide of madness?
Dancing through the Shadows
How do we dance through the shadows?
Leonard Bernstein, America’s beloved conductor and composer, was asked how he would respond if Nazism rose to power in Europe. He stated, “I would invest myself in my music with even more fervour and passion. Life without music is unthinkable, unsustainable.”
There is no time when investing ourselves in the arts, whether music or drama or dancing or sculpting, is more important. Such creative pursuits sustain what is most integral to the human spirit. They nurture the love of beauty and camaraderie in this fragile time so that when barbarism and deceit and corruption and violence and hatred has passed, we can find our way back home to the heartland.
If Hitler had taught his soldiers dance steps rather than the goose step, there never would have been WW II.
The Line of Dance
Of course! The path to heaven
doesn’t lie down
in flat miles. It’s in the imagination
with which
you perceive this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it. Mary Oliver, The Swan
Our path is in the line of dance—a path of expressiveness, creativity, sensuality, touch, movement, connection, and intimacy—life-sustaining energies that bind us to each other.
When one learns to listen to the inner self, befriends the body’s wisdom and becomes attuned to and supportive of another’s movements and creative expression, one loses the desire to dominate. Weoffer up our personal power to generate life and love in community.
The Birth of Tango
One of the most inspirational stories for me is the origins of tango. Tango was birthed out of the squalor and decadence of late 19th and early 20th century Buenos Aires. It was the creative response of immigrants and sex slaves to satisfy the basic human needs for connection, beauty and spirit.
The Sacred Headwaters
In the book, Magdelena, Wade Davis describes the beauty and power of the Rio Magdalena which flows over 1500 kilometres from the headwaters in the Andes through the heart of Columbia into the Pacific Ocean. For several decades it flowed red with the blood from the victims of the drug wars.
Then one day the bloodshed stopped the pristine beauty of the river returned. The soul of the land was restored and the memories of the people washed clean from the horror.
We are custodians of the sacred headwaters of the human spirit, in company with artists and lovers of all ilk. We must practice our craft with all the conviction and beauty we can muster until the human spirit is washed clear of all that wants to hate and destroy. This is our hope.
A Prayer
There will always be shadows. There are always choices. God grant me the courage …
(Photo: A red dress exhibit, Edmonton, in commemoration of the murdered and missing Indigenous Women.)