after the fall, unearthing digging, rooting, re-seeding

“no one I ever met wanted an abortion”

said a friend who has lived many years in the world, who was a nurse and counselor at a women’s health center in the 1970s.

At this center, she said, “we counseled women on birth control and making decisions about pregnancy four days a week and performed abortions one day a week. In the sixties, in many states, birth control was illegal. In the seventies, this was still changing.”

She had known women from the time before, damaged by dark stairways going down or going up

She had also seen women through the difficult choice, before and after.

Choice, she said, in that matter of fact way of hers.

There is another woman I know who has also lived many years in the world.

She has a keen sense of insight about personhood, the difficult journey towards what calls and I have felt connected and seen in conversations with her.

She lived many years outside the place she was born. “The place I was born is a loud country,” she says, too much sun, strong views and she has always felt unseen there for her sense of nuance. This woman says she has spent nine and ten hours a day reading about what is in the vaccines and the damage it can do to the body. Unless I have spent that much time reading about vaccines, she says, we really have nothing to discuss.

But what we do talk about is dance and the body and there is a generosity in her spirit.

She said - when the court documents were leaked, and the fall seemed imminent, she said, well. I have a different view on this subject as well.

She said, it seems to me that what women are losing is a right they never had.

I’d like to leave it at that, she said.

It was difficult to listen to her. I did because it seemed to matter to just have the capacity to listen without reacting. Just for that moment.

So I listened and I cannot say that we - she and I - continue to be friends. Nor can I say that we are not.

But what I felt in that moment was that - we are all in this life together and it matters - for me, for that moment - to have listened without reacting.

even though everything in my body spirit was contracting and galvanizing for a fierce defense, it mattered to have listened.

it matters to have listened because we are all in this together and if we are to find a way through, a way to agree and disagree, I felt - in that moment - it mattered to listen.

I do not not know the way through

So I am going down into the dark.

I am unearthing a new creed.

I like the word creed even though it has a connotation with the Apostle’s Creed and religion.

I want to take the word back.

I want to take creed back into my body, my story, our stories.

Many years ago, I drove with a friend half away across the US and one of the places we happened on, just by a chance, was a town in the mountains of Colorado called Creede.

with an e

above the small town were remnants ruins of ghost towns, mostly settled by men seeking gold.

one place was even called Bachelor.

I remember a sign with that name and beyond a vast field of flowers where houses used to be. And by houses I mean slats of wood nailed together in the shape of a dwelling, a log cabin.

That is another story we are living now - the dreams of men seeking gold.

the last gasp of who have been in power.

Let what is falling break into dust so it can dissolve into the old earth so new trees can grow, a new everything with roots that are nourished in earth that is nourished by truth.

Nourish the earth with your truth.

I say that to myself and I want to share this with others.

Now is the time to excavate the body story, face the difficult dark and step forward into what is true for you. Grow your own song and sing it with others. Rise into your own tree of stories, let the leaves - have you seen new leaves? tightly furled into themselves, a fetal leaf curled so tight around and how it slowly opens in the sun.

That.

Yesterday in the Plaza de Mina, I stopped in front of a tree that had such a wide trunk, grey ripples of bark, sinuous skin, that seemed to ripple across the square. Strands of brown hanging roots, cut short, just above my reach.

An old tree that had been there a while. towering over the museo in front of it. or behind it. depending on where you are standing.

I wanted to know the name of it so I went into the museo and the older gentleman there - brown, white haired, said: “este arbol es Laurel de la India”

Laurel de Las Indias. I said. really?

yes, he said,

By las Indias he meant the route that the Spanish and the Portuguese sought for years before the Portuguese found it and then everyone followed…

cadiz, colonization, roots, india. excavating earth.

laurel de las indias

plaza de mina, cádiz

I came to Spain for flamenco and how curios to have met - within four months of arriving - an opportunity to perform The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects here

India in Iberia, the cuna of colonization, where in the Treaty of Tordesillas, two countries in love with the church and vice versa, divided the world into two and decided who got what.

This line:

The treaty worked out well for the Spanish and Portuguese empires but less so for the 50 million people already living in established communities in the Americas.

Then

After decades of sailors trying to reach the Indies, with thousands of lives and dozens of vessels lost in shipwrecks and attacks, da Gama landed in Calicut on 20 May 1498.

Unexpected opportunities bring unexpected expenses.

Suddenly, once again, the dance of fundraising.

the unending dance of unending art.

and yet

to do it brings beliefs to the surface.,

to ask someone to donate you have to believe enough that it matters that this new version of the play is created, shared, seen.

This first performance of The Good Manners… in Spain at a conference about India in Iberia, a place that funded the whole enterprise of colonization, in Cádiz which was the embarkation point for Columbus second voyage - the happenstance of it all is beyond words! A preview of a new incarnations with live musicians, part one of an audacious dream to re-version the play in English & next year in Spanish, to tour it to other English departments of universities in Spain and cultural spaces in Andalusia…(read more)

unearthing - after the fall

Yes, I believe.

unearthing - after the fall

Yes, I believe.

mountains and trees

after the fall