Erica Ross is composing an 'About Us' page at her website: Dance Our Way Home. She asked me to contribute. I share only to encourage you to go, browse and pour over her site, its beauty.

“I've known Erica for many years and witnessed her blossoming into the teacher she is today. Her dance sessions incorporate the power of mythology to give us direction in our transformations through the mystery and magic of our own rhythms, the creativity we call on in our lives. Erica's DOWH sessions are always well researched, and carefully planned with open dance, partner exercises, a flow between movement and resting while Erica guides our visions towards integrating a greater whole within ourselves, in the relationships in our lives, our harmony with the forces of the universe. It is her loving care for the gentle and deep nurturing of women, our often fraught and splintered self-images and connections in an ever-changing world, in a safe and welcoming space that drew me to her Dance Our Way Home practice. In this practice I have found compassion and a celebration of us, as we are, as well as support for who we would like to become, the realization of our dreams.”

Brenda Clews, Writer, Artist

Brenda Clews is a poet and painter living in Toronto, Canada. Born in Zimbabwe, and having spent a childhood in the jungles of Zambia, she embraces the dance of shamanic healing that DOWH offers. She is a developmental editor, a tutor, a certified Kundalini yoga instructor. Published in literary journals, her work shown in art shows, she is developing an aesthetic of multiplicities, of our beings as prisms, in which dance is a central metaphor for living and understanding our lives. Read Brenda's poem "Bramble Rose" and writing "Erica's Dance Our Way Home". A small videopoem she created after the Solstice Ecstatic Dance in June 2009 may be seen on her Celestial Dancers page of her website, Art & Writings.

The 140 character Twitter tweet, and now the 4 second Robo.to video calling card. Or the madness of repetitive movement. It's all fun!

A Globe & Mail series, forthcoming through the next week. I found the first two disturbing, painful. Life is not just worse than ever for women in Kandahar, but life-threateningly dangerous. How, after the short period of optimism and hope, some shedding of the burka for the veil, bravely venturing out to schools, to work, did things turn back into a life that the women say is worse than that under the Taliban? Then there was 'a reason' for the attacks & torture, now there isn't - just a whole city become psychopath. Scary. Sad. Tragic.

Direct link to Grünemusik's 'Nyx' on Jamendo - 6 tracks, about 30 minutes.

You can download this album for free if you wish. It carries a Creative Commons License.


Profound experimental music for inner journeys...

A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading the notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.

And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.

There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.

As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.

The woman singing is ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, she is both, and a vocaloid who is aesthetically crafted.

We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.

The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.

Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese music which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.


Photo of cave from David Darling.
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From Nyx's album notes:

Album description

The primordial goddess of the night. Dark ambient atmosphere with Miku-dub.

Notes on tracks:

1) Melisma singing of the vocaloid Miku in the eastern Asia flavor.
2) Electric ambient dub in three parts with vocaloid's chant.
3) A dub version segued from the previous track.
4) Aether is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." Minimal sequence of electric piano diverges.
5) Nyx, the goddess of the night, appears from the bottom of dark ancient Chaos. Based on a session with Fukataku, the drummer.
6) A short sketch in five. The vocaloid Miku sings the last one verse to fade out.
___

Grünemusik is the name of a unit owned by hikaru (nankado). He's been publishing experimental-pop tunes since 2000 in Japan.

Original CD-Rs internationally available on-line at his official website.

I didn't like what I wrote, so didn't post daily as I thought I'd do, and didn't write more... But that's how it is. Writing emerges in the way it emerges. While we can shape it a bit, mostly we have to accept what is manifesting. Trust it. The artist stands aside to let the work emerge in its fullness. Are we guardians of the creative impulse? Gatekeepers. Filters. Beacons. That which flows through us, from our fingers, in our words, or the strings of our instruments, or the brushes we hold full with paint, through our heartminds. We struggle to give form to our visions, yes. It's work, yes. But we still have to stand aside to allow the shining.

What I wrote, which didn't please me:



Less is more. I forget this on the short ride in the elevator.

The self is contained in its demeanor.

The demeanor in the business suit in the high security corporate world in the role. It is professional, underplayed. Wealth glitters everywhere in diamond rings, Rolex watches, talk of trips, events. Hinted. Happily. Less is more; more is more; a code for what is secure, safe.


A way of sitting, like a bird on a branch, sleeping. Upright. Aware, awake, lucid dreaming.

Allowing strange logic. Deep inner mind unfolding dream image sequences.

Rushing past the moment catching up with us.

Faint etchings of the body on the back of the eyelids, like bird scratchings. Strange, thin stick things in suits.


In the park at lunch, a man shouting, furious anger. People placidly watching. His emotion rises like a maniacal tide in him and unfurls spitting salt on the other man, who stands before him.

And again, he is asked to re-do the scene.

The park, lunchtime strollers, people sitting, birds pecking crumbs from the ground, fountain spraying into the air, sun, the film crew at a distance, the camera like a voyeur, the actors alone on the path, a light held by someone, a reflector by another.

That emotion found in his depths, brought curling in fury to the surface and spitting out his mouth.

I don't know how he does it.

Willing it, summoning inner dreampower, the believing heartmind, imagination.

When we watch the movie, we will be suspended in the reality of the dangerous narrative filmed in the sunny gentle park.

Even if I am working full-time, have kids, a dog, a cat, too busy, too tired, etc etc, I'm considering beginning a "found poem" of my days. Crazy, packed writing. Allowing impressions to form words that form thoughts and images. Keeping a tiny notebook, smacking keys at lunch on my netbook, buying a new Nano iPod with a voice recorder to record impressions; however I can do it, doing it. Letting it grow in its own unpruned ways. Snippets. Definitely snippets. Trusting the heartmind. Trusting the instinct to poetry. Snippets of what the intellect is grappling with. What the senses are detecting. The poetries of living. Awkward sometimes. Knowing other times. Ambiguities. Allowing the heartmind its impressions, the way we feelthink. Not superseding the raw data of living with a determination to present a nice face with nice smiling theories (though some days are like that), and certainly with no "lesson" to teach (never, it's make your own), no agenda. Not trying to show it's a good world, or a bad one. Or that there is an answer at all. And then again, some days there is, and it seems to click and work. Allowing.

Perhaps this is the first paragraph.

Perhaps I've already begun.

Letting it stream.

I want to save how we have developed while I revert back, delete the versions, the revisions, to the origins. To come to first appearance, where the hesitant beginnings are, to re-discover the faint sketch of what is to come. To undo backward to the untouched data as it would display itself now to my worldly eye. To find the first uncut, un-enhanced, unedited draft. Where it is unfocussed and unformulated. Before the narratives tidy it up. Where we dangle freely, a cluster of possibilities.

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, sculptor and engineer designed Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto. There are resemblances to the Eaton Centre, and I discover in an Internet search that a Canadian architectural firm, Bregman & Haman, constructed both.

Two Chinese women, one eating French fries and the other a spinach omelette. One with a white hairband holding straight black hair back, navy blue trousers, a white top, 'business casual'; the other, older, in a flat-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon coloured in blacks and whites, large white pearl earings, a white cotton blouse edged with fine lace, soft black slacks. They are eating inside a café where the ceiling-mounted speakers play romantic French songs. I imagine they are mother and daughter. The younger woman perhaps working in the downtown corporate complex has been taken out to lunch by her older widowed mother. The older woman is dressed for the occasion; it is clear this is an outing. She sips white wine. Her daughter drinks water. The older woman eats slowly with an elegance that recalls times past; the younger appears stressed and looks at her watch from time to time. Simple complaints about living are aired, the cost of rice, or hydro, or plane fare to China, worries about relatives are discussed, lightly gossiped about, who's out of work, who's drinking too much, who works too hard. The missing man, the husband, the father, who perhaps died of a heart attack, or cancer, is ever-present as a shadow. The weight of the loss of him lies between them. Though it is carried lightly today, it never goes away. As they finish their meals, they sit back, one on either side of the marble café table, similar looks of contentment on their faces. It’s been pleasant. A lovely late lunch. Nothing too awkward arose in the conversation. Plans are made for family outings and dinners, perhaps taking the children to the zoo one Sunday, dinner at the daughter's afterward. The mother voices a distant wish that the children's grandfather could be with them. They recognize their mourning. There is a moment of the silence of remembering. It is a full silence that includes gratitude for the blessings of their lives, the children, the houses, the steady financial flow on which their lives rest. And then they rise and the older woman pays not the waiter but at checkout, for this is the way it is done to facilitate the diners who are largely business clientelle. Do they hug and kiss each other's cheek? I do not see before they wander off to their respective worlds.