bee people

This is from my friend and colleague, Karen Stocker:

Dear Human Cousins,

You worry we may be disappearing.

You wonder if we've died, become lost or run away.

We give thanks you wonder! We like it when you Human People wonder.

Please wonder!...about our lives, our days, our ways of flying out and all the way home on any available breeze; our yellow pollen fuzz leggings and blur of glascene wings; our ancient intimacy with blossoms; the precise hexagonal wax of our edible hives; the amazing, thick, sweet medicinal translucence of honey; our dance vibrations languages and questioning antennas, our irresistably magnetizing queen, and faithful tender attentions to each of our precious jewel-like sleeping unborn; our reason for being bees.

Please wonder!...what is flight like in a tangle of satellite signals, cell phone fequencies, exhaust and high voltage wires? What does Life feel like without Her, without Them? What meaning can be made from the taste of sugar water and 'pollen substitute'? Can we be shipped by the thousands, thousands of miles in the chaos and din of metal eighteen wheelers? How many times can we land on the open petals of ancestrally welcoming flowers to find the heart we enter sprayed or engineered hostile?

Wonder Human Cousins, could you live like this? Released, would you come back?

with Respect and Love to our Human Cousins,

Bee People

Bumblebee on bramble, originally uploaded by SouthbankSteve.

more luminous edge: "everyone was like, whoa!"

These spot-on reviews, from today's Seattle Times:

"When an internationally acclaimed performance-art festival is in Seattle, it only makes sense to ask Seattle-area children what they think of it.

"We sent out a troop of youngsters to catch some of the acts on stage during the first two days:

Emma Baron, 9, on "Luminous Edge," with juggler Thomas Arthur:

The most incredible thing I saw: The juggler. He was three characters and he was amazing. He made it look like the balls were coming out of nowhere. He made it look like he was twirling a piece of string. He was juggling and rolling balls through a tube and catching them while juggling. It was really amazing and it was really cool.

They asked us to be quiet but ... The one time it was really loud was when he was juggling glowing red balls. It was dark and the balls were glowing and showing in the dark. Everyone was like, "Whoa!"

Marni Lehman, 9, on "Luminous Edge," with juggler Thomas Arthur.

Where did all those balls come from? At the Children's Festival we saw Thomas the Juggler, and he was amazing! He made juggling look like the balls were coming out of nowhere. Thomas can juggle from under his legs to the top of his head. He can juggle very fast and makes it seem as if you see one ball but it is actually three.

Sound and visual effects: He tells a story as he goes on with the juggling. He makes a lot of noises that I can't make at all. He is three different people, characters such as a wizard. He has a screen that goes with what he is showing. The screen comes on right after or before a character. Thomas makes things on the screen look real. He will make his shadow go in the middle of the screen like walking through it. He makes special noises while he is juggling the balls. He also has a squiggly piece of metal that he moves hand-over-hand to make it look like it is coming up from the ground and never ends. He has a piece of wood that he can make look like a snake. He has rocks that he can make look like a snowman and has lots of stuff that he can make look real.

The show stopper: He can juggle in the dark with three glow-in-the-dark balls that are red. Thomas puts a ball in one way, and it comes out another. He makes one ball go all the way around in a circle. He makes three balls go around at the same time. He was juggling things behind his back and rolling them on his arm, and it was amazing!

photo of Saturn back lit by the sun, from the Cassini probe
photos above, Thomas and Ashley

luminous edge, inside out, upside down, and backwards

Chris sat still for a while, as everyone moseyed out to chat in the lobby following Thomas' performance of Luminous Edge last night at Seattle Center. When he could speak again, he said with sparks of wonder lighting up each word, "Have you ever seen someone make art of what you do?" I thought (out loud), "it's like seeing yourself inside - out up there."

Chris writes more here about the intimate patterned dance of chaos and order, and the "process artist" practices of uncovering and understanding and supporting the natural patterns of human conversation and relationship and organization, and the way that Thomas (and Ashley, who was a matrix-deep collaborator in the creation of the show) illuminated it all in a deep and beautiful weave of sound and story and movement and image.

Two nights ago, I got to sit next to Ashley and her dad, Paul, and my friends Chris and Rick, for a talk by Paul Hawken who is on the lecture circuit with his latest book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, which I wrote a little about last month. You can read the beginning of the book in issue 43 of Ode magazine.

Paul Hawken speaks with warmth and a sweet sense of humor, and deep appreciation for all of the many ordinary (and the few celebrated and extraordinary) people who have been growing the roots and branches of this movement.

Since first hearing him speak at the bioneers conference in October, I have been thinking a lot about his conviction that

The environmental movement seems to have the upper leg because the house is burning down. Literally. So it is very easy for the environmental movement to turn to the social justice movement and say, yes I know how important your issues are, but the house is burning down. You should come and join us on the environmental bus. I think that it is upside down and backwards. Global warming is injustice. It is a type of colonialism. If we are going to be effective over the short time we have, we have to slow down, stop, and change the bus. I think the environmental movement has to get on the social justice bus.

Whatever we call that bus, I think the process artists have an important and useful role to play, perceiving and nourishing and connecting and integrating the deep patterns that are most restorative and regenerative and healthy for the human and more-than-human lifeworld.

Photos by Ashley and Thomas

the full of life is infinite

(For Thomas, whose seat I sat in when his travel plans conflicted with his tickets to see the Butoh troupe Sankai Juku on Tuesday, and thank you dear Ashley for the invitation to sit there!)

Lotus Leaves

"Inspired by the meeting with Mr. Riho Senba, the headmaster of the "koryushooukai" school of Ikebana (the art of Japanese flower arrangement)"

~from the program notes of Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors

The Kage of Kagemi is shadow
The light of contrast, the image in the mirror of water's surface
The mi is seeing and being seen
Some say Kagemi is the ancient origin of "mirror" (kagemi)
In light, the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back
Surface beginning in the horizontal water plane and transforming to the perpendicular face
From an ambiguous and transient state to one clearly outlined
The right hand asks, the left hand answers
Once an imaginary sur-face is defined
~Amagatsu Ushio, Sankai Juku founder, Director, Choreographer and Designer.

The day after the performance, a friend who had also been there said that a difference between modern dance and butoh is that in modern dance the choreographer and dancer will observe a tree or water, and create movement that evokes tree or water; in butoh the dancer becomes tree, or water.

The act of watching becomes a visceral act. Being lulled by the endlessly slow drift of an arm or a leg. In trance and then restless as bodies shift in complex patterns, none of it comprehensible to the mind. So much happens in the lift of the eyelids, in the shapes of the fingers carried like upturned claws or tipped in blood-red paint, in the expressionless mask broken suddenly open in hilarity or howl (which? or both?). Even the faint white clouds arising as the powdered bodies of the dancers quickly cross the stage contribute to the stunning scene. The final image felt too like waves falling, rising: the luminous leaves lowered down to the stage again (where they were at the beginning hovering just above the floor), the dancers reclining on the floor between the descended stems, then lying down as the lights dim. The tiny spotlights on hands rising above the surface of the leaves, fingers alive like birds or blossoms breaking bud.

I Wind in the Water Depths
II MANEBI -- two mirrors
III Echoing of gaze and return gaze
IV In the light by the waterside
V Infinite dialogue
VI Empty / Full
VII CHIRAL / ACHIRAL, Agitation and Sedimentation





Then, on Sunday my 16 year old son and I went to see BODIES: The Exhibition (choosing to go at probably the most crowded time possible), which he has wanted to see since it opened.

Like the intensely expressive. perfectly formed, dancers' bodies, these bodies were amazing, too -- impeccably, exquisitely dissected human cadavers (not without controversy, see here), preserved with a kind of silicone polymer that arrests decay and hardens the tissues. A number of the bodies are posed in athletic gestures, diving to dig a volleyball or poised to shoot a basketball or arm stretched overhead to serve a tennis ball. Others are simply seated or standing to display something particular such as the layers of the spinal cord, or muscle and joint layers. The most mind-boggling to me (having spent many hours during the first year of medical school in dissection lab and knowing how easy it is to do an awful job of it) were the entirely dissected-out, lifted from the rest of the body, nervous system and circulatory systems (arteries and veins). There are also displays of organs both healthy and diseased (no matter how many times I see it, it is always shocking to see lungs that are black from years of smoking, compared with normal lungs that are greyish pink with spots of black from pollution -- spots we've all got, so that "normal" and "healthy" might not be exactly the same thing...)

The choices of what to remove and what to leave were a little curious, I thought -- faces were dissected to remove most of the skin and connective tissue, but eyelids and lips and ears were left, and sometimes fingertips and genitalia, so that you did have a sense of the someone who wore this body at one time. By leaving those features, the bodies definitely looked like people, not just like generalized human specimens.

It is interesting to me that these actual viscera didn't have a visceral effect on me, fathoms away from the internal movement stirred by the living, moving butoh dancers' bodies.

Also interesting to me is that all of these bodies are Asian bodies like mine (except that all of the dancers and most of the cadaver specimens are male), so that the surface of what I was seeing was maybe a little bit more mirror-like for me than it might have been. At one point I heard a woman in the Bodies exhibition say something like, "well, he still looks like the chinaman that he was" and I turned around to stare, surprised to hear a term I haven't heard for decades, but I couldn't tell who had said it (it really was crowded there!). The warmth of the crowd and the buzz of conversation and exclamations, as we milled around the exhibits in our own self-organized choreography, generated a current of liveliness that both encompassed and contrasted with the formerly-alive. My son and I noticed and sometimes shared people's reactions of fascination, wonder, revulsion, wistfulness, reverence, and even a resistance to being amazed ("they're just dead bodies, what's the big deal?" ~overheard while standing in the line to get in)

Sankai Juku's Amagatsu-san points to: the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back

"Kagemi" explores what happens behind mirrors, said founder and artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, speaking in Japanese through an interpreter by phone from Tokyo. The performance begins by using the surface of water as a mirror, he said. "It's real, but not real."

Seven scenes contrast life and death, ash and blood, sand and water. Knowing about death allows you to realize what kind of life you can live, Amagatsu said. "If you think about yourself, there's a beginning and an end, but the full of life is infinite." In other words, individual lives emerge and disappear, but human life is continuous.
~The Seattle Times

Not only human life, but just life, the one life, pouring through the exquisiteness of all of these individual forms; the more forms we see, the more we may see our self, looking back at us.

little mirrors

My dear colleague Karen, who is the psychotherapist and resident artist in our practice, gave me this question yesterday evening, like one of the gifts--long strings of little mirrors, colored glass beads, a piece of an exotic pastry a client baked for her, pretty finds from the thrift store--that she leaves on my desk sometimes:

If someone could see into your heart, the deepest part of you, and really see what it is that you've been trying to do all this time, what is it that they would thank you for?

I am thanked for for that, I think. For being willing to look in the heart-part of people, and to appreciate and bless their particularness (which is their own genius) and for being a warm and kind and not-sticky place where people can glide and blow through and sidle up as themselves without any guilt or shame. I don't manage to do it all the time, but I am practicing.

Because of this practice, and by being both lucky and picky, I have surrounded myself with friends and relations who are good heart-seers too (which brings to mind jack/zen's Ecology of Friends post), and I do get to have reflected back to me in a way that feels just right, what it is that I think I'm doing. How healing, and therefore how on-goingly necessary, it is to be perceived as true by other people. And how hard it is sometimes to acknowledge that the loving reflection is true.

What would you be thanked for? Who is already thanking you, and are you able to breathe it all the way in? recent

lifetime

The Opposite of Life is Not Death; The Opposite of Life is Time was the philosophically thought-provoking title of a show (website no longer live) featuring the work of Morris Graves, one of the four critically acclaimed mystic modernist artists whose work is known as the Northwest School of modern art.

(...and a glimpse of continuing)

The painting at top is “Spirit Bird” and is at a museum in Arkansas