Stephen Hatfield
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Some Favourite Websites and Blogs
Stephen Hatfield
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Honouring Erica Ross Honouring Us
“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.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Erica's 'Dance Our Way Home'
Our sun-wings spread like sun beams caressing the air and we flew as angels of light, I am sure of it.
Everyone's skin was fragile, luminous. Didn't matter what age we were, or size, or what life has carved on us.
Did our eyes shine delicately lit radiating out to illumine the world?
I saw the women's eyes shining; I saw them enlightening the world with their woman-wisdom, their wily smiles, their open-flowered red hearts. I saw their curvaceous dances, their plunging depths, the way they flung themselves into ecstatic states from which they would never emerge, never, if life was composed of the harmonious flowing energies of the dancefloor.
The unwinding from the tight to the relaxed was like approaching an apex and once you reach it you fly. With your feet, your hands, your twirling torso, your wildly swinging hips.
We flaunt it. Our tulle and taffeta and silk and microfibre; pinks and greens and purples and blacks; yogic symbols and alpine wild flowers. Hot breath; luminous, damp and streaming.
In the dance we are embedded in the broad sweeping swaths of sun as she revolves around the planet illumining the world as she goes, spreading rays of wisdom like falling petals of light from the crown of the thousand-petaled lotus that she wears.
We are. In our quiet ways. Or exhibitionist. Or wildly celebrating. Deep. Rich in our sorrow. Visions. Glimmering. Sparkling. Bedazzled. Radiant. Luscious.
Dancing at Erica's Dance Our Way Home (DOWH) is very sweet.
Many thanks...
Beautiful Erica Ross leading a prayer for peace at a DOWH session.
A video created during a short post-DOWH dance at Summer Solstice where my voiceover was this poem:
Woman with Flowers 7.1
(7th sketch in series, first iteration of this one) Woman with Flowers Flowers, props upholding the woman. The flowers, fragrant, imaginar...
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The Buddha says: “ You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself .” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding for...
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What if relationships are the primary ordering principle? What if the way relationships are ordered clarify, explain, and instruct us on th...
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"I hope you are all creating every day according to the inner map you were born with. I know it sometimes seems that map is written in ...