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From an email reminder sent to campers 5/7/05 Dear Campers A reminder for any who feel called to joining together in live circle dance, music and song at Living Circles Camp. 12-19th August. If... we run we will be a one circle camp. An easy and spacious intimacy where as well as sharing the ways of camping together, we would grow our music making and come to a deeper relationship in the dances. The experience of Mayflower Camp holds above all else for me the freedom to be. I could also put it this way: The freedom to be love. Yet such experience comes from yielding rather than control, from receiving rather than getting and is utterly unlike the experience of being a private and separate self getting fed. (Though the latter is likely to reassert itself later and absorb the form of the experience into its own thought system). Words may attract the mind to 'understand' but this can never initiate much beyond map making unless it also gives the courage to risk experientially - to live the life that is in us to live. Music is a language of life, the movement of life energy in the whole body-mind. With a more conscious presence we become attuned or sensitized by music to the qualities it carries. Such music also tends to touch on so much of what it is to be human. Across times and cultures these songs are our songs. In making music we can grow beyond the forms and methods to open to the Muse. we do not have to be a musical expert to experience transcendence as an ordinary occasion in music or song but one does have to bring attention fully present. In this way music holds an innate sacrament or free participation rather than a product, performance or entertainment, regardless of its form or genre. Any moment of such a freedom holds a glimpse of the whole - it takes practice to let go old patterns. No pressure. One step at a time. Dancing gives embodiment and expression to that which moves us. I can think of no better metaphor for what life is really about. Opening to that which moves us - and moving with it and as it. In the west we have a cult of the individual such that joining as a community in any intimacy is now rare. Dancing circular or repeating pattern together in the feel of the music is like a body chant where we grow present - drawn out of our minds chatter and into a depth where our hearts may be smitten by beauty of the ordinary. Nothing that we might use to stimulate a sense of life or fun comes close. And at this point I draw the likeness between the camp and circle dance with shared music and song. Prior to camps I had taught circle dance for many years and on coming to camps I found them to hold a similar process - freely drawn to a depth and flow of our own being. Together. In the early days of Camps - perhaps before history was reinvented, there were often conversations as to whether 'camp was real' and a desire to 'live like this all the time', or to 'bring this out into the world' - and so on. Of all the tools or channels I know of I cant think of anything more fitting than to meet communally in a music and dance that also holds for just being. The forms evolve and change as well as stay the same. There is nothing fixed about what new dances or music may be or become and can integrate with free dancing. Western culture and education tend to teach the dominance of the intellect as the controller. This would be laughable if it weren't also tragic. Thus music is often reduced to reproducing something from 'out there' and dancing becomes a challenge or a chore of 'getting the steps'. This need not be. To demonstrate or model the dance in a living sense allows the dance to be picked up almost immediately - along with group permission to focus on the spirit and let the nuances of the dance come in later. A lot of my approach is to bypass that which triggers the classroom. The classroom was often where we were trained to lose our self. Maybe some of that is necessary to enter our world but we can also go native anytime we take the opportunity and in my sense of life, our innate nature is not sinful or fallen. I also hold for the conditions that encourage an organic experience and like nothing better than the utter freedom of being out of (any need of) control ;-) Grass roots. If there is to any kind of real change for good in our world it has to come up from the ground up through individuals who join and it has to hold a sense of a life worth living - and giving. Anyone who has camp experience knows that we can live a greater life than what we often end up accepting as 'making the best of a bad job'. In the act of joining we touch on something in life that is the source of joy and we thus don't wait on the world or our lives to sort themselves out before finding a renewed sense of peace and wholeness. Without some practice that frequently renews us we easily are dragged down into well worn strategies of survival that don't - in my opinion - work. When in the mindset of surviving we are locked in a self fulfilling circle that feeds the very thing we believe we are fighting, escaping from or managing. Until we are ripe for change we only try the harder on the same basis but at some point we start to say 'there must be a better way" and we open again to be curious as to what is really going on beyond our maps and definitions and judgements as to what anything is. That is essentially the key. An opening, an invitation and a willingness to trust into that which moves us and discover that we share the fruits. Because there are such problems and suffering in the world - and sometimes our selves too, there is great need of Joy that brings peace and allows the vision to respond rather than react from the same framework of belief that the problem tends to present. I yet hope that some of you reading this will be prompted to be part of a small circle in the Summer Field, dancing, singing, the stars wheeling. This great mystery. The turning of days. Pages of light. Silence that speaks all things new. Oh maybe we'll feel whatever at times and respond to that as we meet it. Whether this camp runs or not - (the lateness of bookings catalyzed these writings) - this is a living path that has found me (I tried to hide but failed) and which I will take the dance to wherever I find a welcome and hands to join and feet to dance. If you wish to be kept informed or indeed invite an event where you live be in touch with me: brian@clearlight.uk.net I currently dance (mostly with live music) on the second Friday in each Month at Inner Space in Norwich. 8-10 (Excepting August when we meet on the first Friday the 5th to fit around Living Circles camp 12-19th August).
in Love's blessing Brian
Tuesday, July 5, 2005 |
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