Cure-ations from the Dancing Center
Beauty and medicine flowing from body and soul
Hello friends- While painful complexities around the world are hard to bear, the dancing center still holds. Nothing is stuck.
Below is this month’s cure-ation of poetry, readings, podcasts, and music that reassure and inspire me to move with love. I feel these offerings in my body and soul and hope you will too.
My very favorite find was Praire Wolf’s poem, read by Janice Ng on Facebook this month.
Your One True Home,
You started off
As a burst of passion
Pure feeling
and that became your centerAround that gathered
substanceAnd then you were born.
From then on you grew
from the outside.
But like a tree
every year records itself
In a ring around the center
And the center is always your beginning.Passion, Feeling. Connection.
No matter what you do in life,
or how long you live
the being that took form around
that explosion
is always at the center,
always at the heart of things.Your soul
does not know words,
cannot be taught
or be reasoned with
or intimidated
or coerced
or corrupted
or bribed
Can’t get sick,
can’t even die.When you need to, dear heart,
Close your eyes, take a deep breath
Go deep inside
and find that center
and come to rest in your
one true home.
Wonder-full readings
If you have an advent practice find Coke Tani in the Movement Abolition Advent calendar, a progressive Daily Advent devotional on, "Freedom for All Bodies:"
I love the title, Dance is in the DNA of the Universe, and appreciate Oscar Peñaranda’s writing as a Filipino Bay Area educator and artist.
Reading Hagitude, as shared in my last post, inspired me to open a Facebook group called Kissing the Hag. Let’s help each other reimagine the power of getting old as our destiny and path.
You don’t have to be a young adult to find inspiration in The Bee Priestess by Anita Amstutz, pseudonym A. Fisher. The first in a forthcoming trilogy, this book centers on the young Althaia in first-century Greece. Abandoned by family, Althaia is given to a sisterhood of priestesses where she develops gifts as a healer, beekeeper, and doctor of herbal medicines. Anita’s research is illuminating and vivid. I’m looking forward to reading the second book.
Succinct, potent ensouled wisdom from activist and teacher bell hooks! “If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path… a path about love.[…] If love is really the active practice — Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic mysticism — it requires the notion of being a lover, of being in love with the universe… To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.
Are you sorting out when to meet in person, on Zoom, or both? Check out the short piece I wrote on The Hybrid Challenge to share with my cohousing community. It covers what I’ve learned about ways to care for an audience’s attention in the performing arts. (Note: I’m not big on Hybrid Rooms, though they have their moments.)
Songs and podcasts
Kaira Jewel’s interview on navigating the News Tune in at
11 minutes on shifting to mindful consumption of news
15 minutes self-care for healing
32 minutes on bringing our beauty into the futureDee Austin’s new power song Stay Dancin’ on Apple Music- an indigenous voice you definitely want to hear!
I got Raye Zaragoza’s 2023 Hold That Spirit album, especially for the song Joy Revolution!
Lior Tsarfsky brings Rumi’s great poem into a singable version. One listener said, “This song has been helping me navigate this last tragic month.”
Geek Outon “Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart and Flying Away” from The Emerald, challenging some common narratives of embodiment discourse in order to help return embodiment discourse to its living, breathing, paradoxical body. Listen on Apple Podcasts:
Filled with the spirit of healing and positive energy flowing.