On retiring from teaching

dancing still

I turn 70 in May. I’ve gathered and led groups since I was 20. That’s 50 years as an entrepreneur, dancer, and artist interested in personal and social well-being, most of it without much institutional support. Not that I wanted it that way.

This winter, the messages came suddenly, and they were loud and clear. STOP!

Burn-out and stamina limits hit me. I wept. I let go. I slept. I knew it was time to retire from teaching,

When my back went out, my gutsy hold on practice, will, and striving also let go. Or was it that it was it that my country just inaugurated a government whose approach to freedom and HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS is the polar opposite of mine?

Letting go is part of 12-step wisdom. When you hit bottom or get stuck in a detrimental pattern- the wisdom is to let go and let god.

While laying flat, I sought to clarify, “Stop what?”

Stop organizing and leading groups! Stop recruiting, enticing, and administrating. More than fifty percent of my lifework has gone to administrating and communicating. And yet, my work evolved out of who I am, an artist and communicator. I can’t retire from art or communication.

Painting I did on the night of the inauguration and Martin Luther King Day...

I asked Phil, my InterPlay partner who is two years older than me, what he was doing. He said, “I plan to make art, hang out in beloved community, and show up.” I know the profound communities he inhabits and the glory of his art. He is intentional and chooses wisely.

He and I both worked hard and long but are also fortunate to be able to be artists.

It grieves me to no end at how difficult it is to be loving even in beloved communities when violence, financial clear-cutting of programs that support us all, and feral masculinity suck up so much air, heart, and brain space.

At the same time, the moment is clarifying. Why am I here?

Artists make art. We experiment, make beauty out of chaos, tend the dancing ground, love, and show up as best we can. This takes a lot of time, especially if our actual body and soul are the art we are making.

As I retire from being a gig hustling, business owning service sector entrepreneur. (See my Facebook Post for the overwhelming reaction to this news) who knows? I may disappear for a while. I get to. AND! I am still filled to the brim with a visual art practice, memoir writing around white settler ancestry, a beautifully illustrated chore-poem called The Great Dance, dancing my prayers each week in the Hidden Monastery, supporting long-time companions, and listening to how best to show up for this exact wonder filled horrifying life day by day.

You can find me here on Substack. These days, I can hardly hold myself back from writing to you. For me, writing, is a sense-making practice.

Spiritual Instructions I am paying attention to

1. Sheila Collins New Substack on The Art of Grieving. If you aren’t making your grief artful, the grief of these times may be too difficult to metabolize. Don’t let grief run you. Make something of it!

2. “Dare to observe the darkness of spirit, to see it just for what it is, and to steadfastly find the love in ourselves, in our lives. Feel our connections to each other. Preserve and guard sensitivity, our continued ability to feel and intuit the world around us, moment to moment.” Stephan David Hewitt, astrologer

3. Award-winning 56-minute film by Lorís Simón: Ensoulment: A Diverse Analysis of the Feminine in Western Culture. Woven into it are themes I try to address in my offerings. I am so excited to learn about it! Do watch!

4. A 17 minute impromptu Awakin Call with James O’Dea, former president of Noetic Sciences who, dancing with Parkinson’s, recently confronted a total collapse. His wisdom of collapse is profound.

5. Pat Plude’s book The Art of Radical Listening: Revealing Collective Wisdom for Change. Radical Listening is embodied, and goes underneath agendas to hear the deeper wisdom and needs of the body as inspired by Dr. Kinari Webb,

6. Eleanor Brown’s song Medicine on her new album Dig Where You Stand

7. Alison Luterman’s poem “Praise the Broken Promise of America.”

8. The Materialism of Angels “Who would say that pleasure is not useful?”—Charles Eames Of course the angels dance. If not on the head of a pin, then maybe on the boardwalk along the ocean of stars. And they eat hot and spicy: salsa, tabasco, red peppers. They love mangoes. They can munch for hours on cashews. Olives sit in bronze bowls on the cherry tables next to their canopy beds where the solace of pillows swallows their sweet heads and the quiet of silk lies across their happy backs. They know the altruism of material things. They want to say to us, “We’ll sleep next to you. Feel our soft and unimposing flutter across your shoulders, on your heartbroken feet.” They want us to take, eat, to smell the wood, run our tired fingers over the rim of every glass, give our eyes the chance to see the way the metal bends and curves its way into the black oval of the chair. They want us to feel the holiness of scratching where it itches, rubbing where it hurts. They want us to take long, steamy showers and a nap. They know how easily we follow directions: hook the red wire to the front of the furnace, fill in only the top half of the life insurance form. They have no manuals for joy. They can’t fix anything we break. They wonder why we never laugh enough, why we don’t know God is crazy for deep massage, and loves to wail on His alto sax whenever they dance. –Jack Ridl from Broken Symmetry (Wayne State University Press)

Bows to all! The Way Knows the Way!