Tag Archives: Mary Cutrera

For Cara, Vanessa, and Jeanie

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GooselandingA Celebration of Life
If I Die–Pablo Neruda
IfI die, survive me with such sheer force
that you awaken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth,
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want y heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call upmy person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through it’s walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love,I will die again.

Obama Yes, Gay Marriage Yes

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…”the answer to every question was ultimately the same answer. It is the answer that each of us has to come to for ourselves, the answer that each one of us needs to discover through our own process of self-inquiry. That answer is simply, “I am.” What is surrender? “I am surrender.” Surrender isn’t something I do, surrender isn’t an act that I perform. Surrender is an expression of my own truest being. No matter what question, I found that by the very end of it, I got to the same place- not to answer in the mind, but to a living sense that it all ended in “I am.” Adyashanti

Fringing soon

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Thorsen’s“Higher Ground” takes a penetrating look at mental illness in contemporary society. This work is a butoh performance for 5 dancers. the dance explores the struggle to maintain control in the face of madness, and the humanness and vulnerability of a soul coming to grips with their own unraveling. The inspiration for the work comes from the documentary “The Library of Dust” based on photographer David Masiel’s photos of the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Masiel’s photos document the decay of the hospital and the 3500 copper canisters which hold the remains of residents of the mental hospital who were unwanted in life and in death. The dance honors the journey for wholeness, and explores the interior life of our most vulnerable, the people on our streets, the resilience of our human spirit, and the courage to go on in the face of adversity.

 

Fringe Me Sept 20th – 23rd West Hall

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“Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,
nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.
They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.
And in my streets—the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map—
they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,
and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,
in hours uncounted by the self-clock,
they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.
There too have been the hard extinctions,
missing birds once feasted on and feasting.
There too must be machines
like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.
A few escape. A mercy.
They leave behind
small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.” jane Hirshfield

30/30 tonight New Dances at Velocity Dance Center 1621 12th Ave 8pm

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“In the process of creating an indigenous form of modern dance, Japanese butoh founders discovered a universal poetry of the body. Rather than transcending the human condition, butoh asks us to descend into it- down into the turbulence, awkwardness and uncertainty of life- and from there, deep in the thick of things, we discover our own healing and capacity to love unconditionally.” Lani Weissbach

Training Notes

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Higher Ground

Whenever we begin to evaluate, deciding that we should or should not do this or that, then we have already associated our practice or our knowledge with categories, one pitted against the other, and that is spiritual materialism, the false spirituality of our spiritual advisor. Whenever we have a dualistic notion such as, “I am doing this because I want to achieve a particular state of consciousness, a particular state of being,” then automatically we separate ourselves from the reality of what we are. …when we formulate a second judgement, “I should be doing this and should avoid doing that” then we have achieved a level of complication which takes us a long way from the basic simplicity of what we are. The simplicity of meditation means just experiencing the ape instinct of ego. If anything more than this is laid onto our psychology, then it becomes a very heavy, thick mask, a suit of armor.
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgement, comfort or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking.
Chogyam Trungpa