Another Weekend Edition: There is No Standing Still

When I began this series of messages back in mid-March, I gave myself a break from the work of creating new content each day by using others' material on the weekends. I called these e-mails (later, posts), "Weekend Editions." I haven't done one since I shifted from a daily blog to an occasional one, but I am delighted to be sharing this gift again.

 Alonzo King LINES Ballet is a San Francisco company that, although it is in its 35th year, is new to me. I read that King has spent his career exploring the connections between dance and nature. In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic and our (I hope, transformative) reckoning with systemic and structural racism, his work and his words are both a balm and a challenge. 

 Here are two videos from his distanced series, "There Is No Standing Still." [Note: These are best viewed on a tablet or laptop, rather than the small screen on a phone.] Before you watch them, I encourage you to take a deep, cleansing breath, and open yourself fully. Then focus your heart on beauty, and on our connection with every living thing. What do you experience when you see these dancers? Are you transported by the movement, the music, and the sense that we are truly a part of the Earth? 

Watch again. If you live in a White body, what is your visceral reaction to the Black bodies you see? What sensations roll through you, what emotions well up inside you, and what thoughts come to your mind as you see Black bodies in this way?

 It's enough, in my book, that King has given us these glorious experiences. But there's more. He says of himself, "I need to look and see if there's any trace of the harm that I see in this world inside of me? Is there a thread, because I have to remove it. Before I point the finger at anyone else, I have to look at myself." 

 Amen. As we all try to protect our Mother Earth, and we who are White do our best to fight back against racism, let's remember to look at ourselves, and to ask what role we have played in the harm to the world that we see. Perhaps these works by Alonzo King LINES Ballet can not only lift our hearts, but remind us to see the sacred in everything and in everyone. And perhaps Alonzo King's words can inspire us to do more to remove the traces and threads of harm that live within each of us.

 May it be so.

 Love,
Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Nancie


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