Honouring Erica Ross Honouring Us

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.

Dancing on Poetry - a video calling card

brendaclews

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!

'Behind the Veil: An intimate journey into the lives of Kandahar's women.'

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.

Grünemusik's 'Nyx' - experimental music for inner journeys...

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.
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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.

The self is contained in its demeanor

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.

The poetries of living...

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.

First Draft

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.