G Is For… Graceful!

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Contributed by Adele Fasick.

G Martha Graham

G is for graceful, the beauty of movement that balances motion and stillness in a pattern pleasing to the human eye. Dancing is one of the most ancient arts. Images of people dancing have been found in India in pictures made more than 6000 years ago. Over the centuries, dancing developed in every known culture.

Throughout Europe and America ballet gradually became honored as the highest form of the art of dancing. When I was growing up in New York, high school students could be excused from classes on Wednesday afternoons to attend ballet performances at the New York City Ballet. For sixty cents we would watch performances of traditional classical ballet and dream of becoming dancers. But even as we watched, the dance world was changing.

Martha. Graham was the one of the people who revolutionized dance during the twentieth century. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1894, but moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California when she was 14 years old. It was in California that she first saw professional dance performances and decided to study dance. She soon became a star. During the 1920s she moved to New York where she started her own studio and school in 1926. The school that she started has been an important part of the modern dance world ever since its founding and it is now the oldest active dance school in America.

Most dance performances staged in America before the twentieth century had been based on the European tradition of ballet dancing. Dancers wore gauzy tutus and ballet shoes that allowed them to dance “en pointe” and move about the stage as if they were floating.  Graham’s approach was very different. She developed the concept of “contraction and release” as the major style of movement. Some fans of the more familiar European style of dance considered Graham’s work a betrayal of the traditional culture of ballet. Graham herself felt that she was expressing the spirit of her time. She wrote: “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that the others are behind the times.”

Graham believed that dancing was an important expression of the nation’s culture. She declared that “The body says what words cannot.” Many videos of the dances she created are now preserved in the Library of Congress. You can discover them through their website. Her works continue to inspire dancers and audiences throughout the world. If you want to read more about Martha Graham and the art she inspired, take a look at my blog, Teacups and Tyrants. (teacupsandtyrants.com)

F Is For… Fresh Starts!

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Contributed by Laura Rios.

As I sit to write this, I’m looking out through the patio door at the neighborhood treetops showing all kinds of colors: white and pink blossoms, the reddish color of new buds on the maple trees, and the bright new green best called “spring green”. The varied colors bring a welcome change of scenery after the starkness of winter. Nature is making its fresh start, as it does just about this time every year without fail.

Some fresh starts, like springtime, are connected in some way to the calendar. We’re all familiar with the first of January. Many of us establish New Year’s resolutions, determined to make positive changes in our lives as we set off on a new journey around the sun. Perhaps our birthdays spark a similar motivation in some of us.

Late summer or early fall brings the start of a new school year for most young people. If it means attending a completely different school, it’s truly a fresh start. These new beginnings can be both exciting and stressful; either way, they rarely come as a surprise, and we generally take them in stride.

Other new beginnings have nothing to do with dates or moon phases. These fresh starts can be brought about by the ends of something, often due to circumstances beyond our control, and they can cause major upheavals: perhaps the loss of a job, learning that we suddenly need to move, or finding ourselves newly single. It’s natural to feel adrift in such times and face these enforced fresh starts with some trepidation. Maybe we nurse some self-pity. Where to start? Might we glimpse some positivity in these situations so that we can find a little excitement and less dread in such cases? After all, when one door opens, there is usually another one that opens somewhere else. It may be up to us to figure out where that is.

Or maybe we simply feel compelled to make some changes. Possibly we’ve decided we don’t like what we’re doing, what we’re eating, how we look or how we feel. Luckily, we are largely in charge here, and all we need to do to begin anew is to put one foot in front of the other and set out on a new path.

As we search for the next open door, or to pursue a road untraveled, it can be helpful to view new beginnings in a positive light. Fortunately, we don’t have to do this alone. Many wise people have pondered this very subject, and maybe you’ll find some pearls of wisdom in their words. Here then, in no particular order, are quotes intended to lend support if you’re facing a fresh start, large or small.

So, set all that old baggage down and let the past serve only as a memory from which you’ve learned. Take a deep breath. Ready… set … go!

“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” – L. M. Montgomery

“The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.” – Arnold Bennett

“Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future.” – Daphne Rose Kingma

“No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter… this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun!” – C. Joybell

“Stay away from what might have been and look at what can be.” – Marsha Petrie Sue

“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” – Mary Pickford

“Although now one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” – Carl Bard

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” – Plato

And finally:

“The beginning is always today.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

E Is For… Exercise!

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Exercise! Love it or hate it, we all need more of it – especially if you, like me, are a person in love with words, reading, writing, and all the other things we do while SITTING.

Sitting is the new smoking.

You’ve probably heard the new buzz phrase: “sitting is the new smoking.” According to the Heart Foundation, they decided to do some research and find out if that’s true. You can see the article from 2019, here.

Turns out, it is.

I’m also sure, though, that you’ve probably heard ad nauseam all the exhortations for how to move more: stand up during phone calls, get up once an hour, don’t sit so much, bla bla bla.

It’s not that those ideas are bad, it’s just that they aren’t addressing the root problem. We aren’t being honest enough with ourselves. We sit because of stress, or because we just can’t take it anymore. Modern life is STRESSFUL. Even if you don’t work a stressful job like a firefighter, we all are feeling it – the pandemic, growing social unrest and polarization, fears about the economy, the climate, our own safety in our communities from epidemic gun violence, spiders…

No really. Spiders are on my list, dude.

Point is, we sit because we crave relaxation, ease from all the noise and fuss and bother.

What if I told you, a simple walk will help with that relaxation?

What worked for me are a couple things:

Gratitude walk

Try going out for a 20 minute gratitude walk. Each step you take, say in your mind, thank you. And get specific and granular. That silly little thing you’re grateful for? Walk it out!

  • Sunrise
  • I woke up this morning
  • I have enough to eat
  • My bills are current
  • There aren’t any spiders on me right now

 

Yes, silly does work. Here’s the magic of it: the silly lets our brain start doing its brain thing and free associating. You may find, as I did, that once I start allowing myself to get silly (I’m grateful for the dark chocolate Dove bites that my family member got for me), then my brain starts coming up with even more things to be grateful about (I have a job, I have a car and enough gas to get around, I love my cats). Also, walking for gratitude doesn’t hit our radar as “Exercise” with a capital E. So it can help us to get around the “doan wannas.”

Be inefficient

Say huh?

No, really!

Take the stuff from the living room to the kitchen in three trips instead of one. Walk the long way around the house. Leave your purse in the car and then go back for it. Take a deep breath and let go the obsession with having to getitalldonerightthissecond. Be willing to move. Oh, crap; my water is in the kitchen. Guess I’d better get up and go get it.

Be willing to befriend others in your journey

Smartphones allow us to do a lot of amazing things, like play solitaire in the bathroom. But they can also be boon friends to us. Why not schedule a video call with a friend and go for a walk together? I’ve done this with friends in other states even. You start up the video call and share the walk. It’s a fun way to get out of the house, off that damned chair, and moving. And when you’re talking with someone, the time passes in a different way than if we’re there, just us an our thoughts, exercising.

Change your language

Don’t let exercise be a bad word. I’ve been up close and personal with someone who wasn’t able to make this shift, and she died a long, awful, and painful death from complications of obesity and immobility. NONE of us want that. We don’t want to fall at the table during a holiday meal and have to call the fire department to come help us back up again. That doesn’t take us down a journey we want to go. But the thing is, we all have to take a journey. It’s up to us whether we want to do it on our terms, or in pain and unable to use our bodies.

We ARE our bodies. It’s high time we acted like it.

Now get out there, and MOVE.

D Is For… Delight!

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D… delight. An old fashioned word meaning “great pleasure.”
 As a child I frequently would squeal with delight at being pushed on an old tree swing, wooshing back and forth, ever higher, hair wafting in the breeze stirred by my comings and goings in the air. Dancing with my shadow in the late-autumn sun feeling such unrestrained delight. Smelling new mown hay sent me into delightful olfactory joy.
I remember teen years growing up in a sophisticated community with high-faluting ideas about keeping up appearances. Showing delight at a splendid sunset or a sailboat skimming across Lake Michigan, in that atmosphere, was anathema to being cool. Same when in my 30s; I was steeped in the world of professional gallery and museum art. A chilly stance was appropriate behavior then, even when standing in a room full of paintings by Renoir, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or the Renaissance masters. My soul burned with a passionate delight and I always felt compelled to stifle my giggles of pure innocent delight. Dare I again mention I felt a childish delight in the face of such awesome (in the true sense of the word) beauty?
Now that I have reached that age where, upon being tickled with delight at the slightest provocation, ( gleeful self-expression is still often sniffed at with disdain by “mature” people), I guffaw, snort, dance a jig, twirl around and wear my heart on my sleeve not caring a fig about who is looking down their reserved nose at me.
Is there a point to this story? Yes. When we Move Forward through life, we can be mindful of our genuine authentic self.  Whatever your age, your stage of development, your culture, your circumstances, when your delight button is pressed, let go of that reserved cool and snort-giggle your feelings of delight. Let it out.
You’ll feel so good.
by
JaeSage
Iowa Druid and Compassionate giggler.

C Is For… Create

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Contributed by Tina Holland.

Create – It always brings the image of something new and fresh.  That image holds for the story as well.  I have always found the early stages of writing the most exciting.  Spending time with my characters, learning where they live, and what they do, generating back stories for them, and so forth.

The early days and sometimes weeks are the easiest.  What is not easy is when I hit that first wall.  What do I do then?  I create something different, I play with crayons, I try and figure out a new dance, I garden, or plan a space in my home.  Sometimes I even create another story.

It may seem counterproductive to create another world with new characters, new rules, and new everything, but I would argue why not.  If the goal is to be on the page and in my case published page, why not get as much of that early story out before I run out of creative energy?  I find shiny object syndrome much preferable to writer’s block.  I guess technically I am blocked on one story so why not create something else?

Eventually, I find my way back and finish, until I reach The End, I embrace my process.

 

B Is For… Beginner’s Mind!

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Welcome back to Day 2 of the A to Z Challenge, Dear Reader, and the letter B!

B Is For… Beginner’s Mind!

What does that even mean?

A beginner’s mind is a curious one. They know they don’t know, and so they stay open to new information, ideas, things, people, places… I could go on. Point is, a beginner is someone who is new, and who knows they are new; because of that knowledge, they become teachable.

When we allow ourselves to be beginners in this way, we give up the need to control the situation. After all, we are beginners, and we aren’t IN control, and so we relax and allow things to happen and unfold naturally. In turn, this allows our stress response to calm down and gives us a chance to experience something without all our preconceived ideas getting in the way.

Sometimes we can sneak into a state of Beginner’s Mind when we move very fast into something. For example, “I think I’ll do the A to Z Challenge.” Rather than stopping and examining the idea, we allow it to take us, and we think, what shall we post for A? and for B? and so on until Z and the challenge is done. By allowing ourselves to be beginners (after all, we’ve never experienced April of 2023 before), we allow ourselves to BE. This “in-the-momentness” allows us to be completely present in the moment, which is where, they say, enlightenment lives.

What about you, Dear Reader? In what would you like to be a beginner?

A Is For… Again!

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Contributed by Laura F.

When I was in school (long ago now), a classmate claimed that anyone who went a full year without having sex automatically became a born-again virgin.  I won’t comment on the validity (or invalidity) of this claim, but I want to connect it to something I heard from another classmate in another context.  She remarked that one of her professors had told her that he envied students who still had the experience of reading Anna Karenina for the first time ahead of them.  Of course, it would be possible to substitute any book for Anna Karenina.  There are videos on Youtube by booktubers who lament that they have forever lost the ability to read – oh, the Harry Potter series, to give one example – for the first time.  How did they lose this ability?  By reading the series, of course.  The first time, it appears, is always the best time.

But is it true that we each get only one first time?  Recently I’ve re-read a few books and I was astounded by what a “first time” experience each of these re-readings was.  No, I don’t mean that my increased maturity, greater experience, and expanded consciousness :>) led me to new and brilliant insights into what I was reading.  I wish!

I understand that there are people who proclaim that enduring a painful breakup/becoming a parent/undergoing a serious illness/[insert important life experience of your choice here] has given them an entirely new perspective on their favorite books.  That is NOT what I am describing.

What I mean, somewhat embarrassingly, is that the books I was re-reading seemed entirely new to me because I didn’t remember a dang thing about them.  Oh, PRIOR to picking them up again, I would have said that I remembered them.  I could have named the major characters and identified significant aspects of their personalities. I had a pretty solid grasp of the plot, or at least I thought I did.  I had vivid recollections of one or two particular incidents.  I wasn’t expecting any surprises.

But it turned out that on a sentence-by-sentence, page-by-page, scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter basis, I had one surprise after another.   Eventually, the surprises ceased to surprise me because I no longer had any expectation of recognizing anything I read.

Now, admittedly, these were all books I had read years ago.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected them to seem familiar upon re-reading.  Nonetheless, despite being in what a lot of people apparently consider the fortunate position of being able to read the same book “for the first time” twice, I’m not sure that I consider it quite so fortunate.  After all, what does it mean to tell people I’ve read a certain book if I have so little memory of it?  What does it mean to tell MYSELF that I’ve read that book?

I wonder now whether I should turn to another “A” word”: annotation.  I’ve never been one of those people who mark up their books with all kinds of underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes.  I’m used to reading books that I’ve taken out of the library and libraries prefer that patrons return books in the same condition they found them.  But I do own some books, including quite a few that I’ve never read.  If I annotated those books as I read them, would I have only one “first time” experience with them?  Would I retain more memory of the books once those books have returned to the shelf?

Despite what booktubers might wish for, despite what that professor envied his students for, I think I’d rather be an experienced reader instead of a perpetually first-time reader.  Maybe it’s time to make highlighters and other annotation tools my new best friends.

 

The A to Z Blog Challenge – New Beginnings!

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So, you know how that whole “time” thing works? Where it’s January 1, 2, 25, 527, then all of a sudden it’s April 1st?

Which is the first day of the A to Z Blog Challenge?

Which you’re planning to do on your group blog with friends?

And then your partner’s power goes out and your work blows up?

And…

And. We’re HERE.

Happy April everyone! Welcome to the A to Z Blog Challenge, an annual challenge to post everyday in the month of April except for Sundays. Each day corresponds to a letter in the English alphabet. You can pick any theme that you want.

Theme: Moving Forward

Our theme for this year is “Moving Forward.” We all agreed that 2022 was a rough year for many of us, and 2023 has been intense as well. We are feeling a collective sense of wanting to move forward, build momentum, and bring new life to our writing and craft.

Other words that we came up with:

  • Spring
  • nature
  • balance
  • inspiration
  • muses
  • new beginnings
  • rebirth
  • momentum
  • actual movement

Our first post will be by our member, Laura Fasick, and will be up shortly. Enjoy!

Z Is For… Zombies!

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Contributed by Evilynne.

In the horror genre, zombies are used as a metaphor for ‘xenophobia’, that is fear of ‘the other’.  This is a logical fear as the unknown is always just that, unknown.    Writers and directors work to create art that resounds with others.  “Let’s make a movie, write a story, paint a picture about it.  Everyone responds to fear.”  Zombies have become a useful, and evolving, creature in this art form.

In the black and white horror movies of the 1950’s zombies were depicted as black slaves, usually from Haiti, most of them entranced by a witch doctor.  They were forced to obey their master; they moved slowly and had no thoughts of their own.  Their circle of influence was very small, within a few miles of their creator and they died when their master did.

Looking at those first movies we can see ‘the other’ was usually a black man, and we don’t need to make a reach to see the Civil Rights Movement of the time feeding these fears — especially considering the witch doctors often used their zombies, dirty from working the fields and dressed in rags, to kidnap blond, white women, dressed in flowing white gowns.  What a terrifying image: the vulnerable, unconscious landowner’s wife thrown over the shoulder of a black man and carried away into the night.  Not only did it look great on the black and white film of the time but tapped into the upheaval that movie goers lived with in their daily lives.

Now let’s fast forward to the modern zombie movies. In their newest incarnations zombies are the reanimated dead; horrible and unnatural as that thought is in and of itself.  Most are brought back by a disease, a comet from space or some government experiment gone wrong — common fears of recent times.  The ‘newer’ zombie’s hunger for human flesh and will find and attack any human to get what they desire, often in the most fast paced, claustrophobic, and gory way possible.  And these monsters don’t die when their creator does, instead they create more zombies through their bite, making their numbers grow exponentially, infecting not just our country, but eventually the whole world.  As for killing them, most movies rely on killing the brain by shooting, beheading, or a knife through the eye.  The genre must now use extra violence to compete with the wars and crime that are seen every evening on the news.

Yes, the most recent zombies reflect the immigration problem at the Mexican border, terrorist attacks from the Middle East and diseases like Covid and Ebola.   These ‘frightening people’ and the diseases they bring are now a part of American society.  “They will take our jobs, put a drain on the economy, overthrow our government and take over our culture, and heaven forbid, most of them don’t even speak English!” is a frequent fear expressed by some.    Not only will these monsters kill us, they will bring down our whole nation and civilization. Images of survivors wandering a vast cityscape of empty ruined buildings, foraging for food and safety, prey on our primal fears of being alone, vulnerable and desperate.  Without our technology and the help of others we are forced to be our own police, food provider, mechanic and doctor; we have become very specialized in our culture and most are not prepared to learn all of these skills.  More vulnerability awareness.

Zombies just hit the spot when you want to scare someone, don’t they?  Who knows what zombies will look like in the future, what they will do?  I believe they will echo the fears of the period.  So, next time you are watching a scary movie, especially one with zombies in it, try to figure out what it is about the monsters that triggers you.

The writers and actors have planned on your reaction. Were they successful?

Yes Is For… Yes! Say Yes!

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Yes!

I said it. Yes, I’ll do the A to Z Blog Challenge this year! Yes!

Am I glad that I did?

Yes!

Am I glad that I asked the folx who come to our weekly craft gathering, A Good Yarn Craft Salon and Makerspace to do it with me?

Yes!!!

Did we create something amazing?

Yes!

Did we do more than we thought we could?

Yes!!

Would we do it again?

Yes!!!

There’s something magical about challenges – National Novel Writing Month, Month of Letters, the A to Z Challenge, Month of Letters, the A to Z Blogging Challenge… They focus our attention on what we can DO. Not on what we are reading, or consuming, or scrolling. But what we, as ourselves, individuals, just you and me, can actually DO – write, or make, or speak, or say, or move… And by doing that, we remind ourselves of our inherent birthright: we are meant to be creative.

I’ll say that again: we are meant to be creative.

And when we, each of us, make something, just for a moment, we are reminded of our inner power and sometimes, even, a spark of our own inner joy.

And that, my friends, is why I continue to do challenges. Not because they’re challenging, though they are; not because they’re kind of silly and made-up, because they are; but because, for the duration of the challenge, I’m reminded that I can DO this. And together, WE can do this.

One more day of the challenge, friends; check back tomorrow for Evey who will take us home with Z Is For… Zombies!