Row for Your Life
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My Head and My Heart are Here
I've been in motion for several months and now I am finally settling back into routine (and new teaching schedule!) here in beloved Brooklyn /NYC. This past Spring, the lovely and amazing Christina Hatgis and I led a retreat in spectacular Brittany (really missing the butter — and the moss). In Tuscany, I taught at the Academia Dell Arte with my clown husband Chris Bayes — shaking open our hearts together in a gorgeous gaggle of student clowns. After all that, friends and family… swims in the Catskills and meditation with the trees in cool, clear, blue/green Northern Michigan.
So the dance of Summer and heart’s opening ends and on we go into the Fall — the season of grief and letting go — but we’re gonna have to keep opening even in the midst of all of it. I think this Mary Oliver poem (below) resonates because I am an older voice to younger ears: my kids, and so many of my students. I want them (you) to feel things and to struggle towards the difficult and the scary. I want those things for myself too. And of course, the world needs us to show up for each other. There is unfathomable suffering and we must show up somehow every day to ease some of that pain. Every day. And we must love and love and love. And if there are folks out there who prize money and power over love and kindness (and God knows there are) well then…. that simply isn’t us.
___
WEST WIND 2
You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and your heart's little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks --- when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming---then row, row for your life
toward it.
— Mary Oliver
Bless you Mary Oliver. Bless you Gloria and Dolly and Tim Curry. May your souls’ rest easy. May our courage and passion make you proud.
Love on. People.