Encounters

Layers create the dynamics of our lives. What appears in front of us has a depth beyond and a shallowness before in an intersection of space and time. Nothing stands alone, even if it takes a solitary path. A simple melody is a sequence that allows each instant of life its moment and one moment would not be the same without the other. 

In the formation of the aesthetic of life, a rhythmic flow doesn't have to rhyme in order for it to follow the channel it moves along. Shifting ground, the layered forms don't stay in place for long. A new formation is created and develops so life can take place there. Just as the seasons change, so do lives and friendships that never held their place entirely forever. 

As I walk the world, the landscapes appear in front of me exposing my body to the growth that feeds my spirit and opens my consciousness to the experience of all that is interconnected and related. Flowers emerge where fungi once stood before. Leaves have fallen and gather where I stood years before. This isn't just my experience, but as time and seasons cycle, I notice that even in the similarity of life's patterns, there are still surprises of wonder. In the space of life we share, off and on the internet, there can be these layers, what is shared and what is a continuation of what has formed. As life keeps moving, so do the overlapping and colliding of reality. 

 

Transforming Moments Together

A transformative moment is not always created intentionally. Many of these transcend words in the moment they are experienced. Living within the power of these experiences sometimes takes us away from the control that is our sense of place in life. Such a sense of control leaves us with stability over our choices and our feelings. However when there is a change in this reality; be it something comforting in our lives that is lost or something new and less familiar, we can either feel the experience or run from it. And sometimes these changes can change how we think and feel about life and can influence what we do purposefully create.

For me, these experiences transform my understanding of life. These experiences doesn't necessarily have to be detrimental in order to provoke change or new understanding. Sometimes they can be held in place while the emotions of the moment run deep and the thoughts and inextricable connection of the universe brings you closer to the whole reality of the wonders of life.

Grasping onto to our realities can help us feel how shifting forces and experiences are a part of our own. When I feel this kind of reality, that of many others' intersecting with my own, I know how small I am, yet how integral this feeling is to my humanity. These kinds of experiences are usually brief, yet last in my heart a lifetime.

I lived on Long Island when the World Trade Center towers were attacked in New York City on September 11, 2001. I wasn't in the city to witness the horror, but I felt the immediate reverberations of fear and concern echo across people everywhere around me. I was aware that many competing forces demanded for the attention of the nation as the area around New York became numb with shock and later changed by grief and outrage. I had seen the World Trade Center towers in person and had walked in the shadow of their magnificent height. To hear of their destruction and the death of many lives continued to alter my understanding of our multiple, complex civilizations that exist and interact across our daily lives and histories. 

As the decade changed course from this pivotal day, so did I. I ended up moving away from the area that was once home and become a part of a new landscape. Western New York was culturally and socially different from the familiar on Long Island. And then almost a decade later, I returned to Long Island and New York City for a weekend. During one stretch of time, I wound up being intrigued by the reality that I hadn't been to downtown Manhattan since the attacks on September 11th. In seeing the setting sun fill the gaping hole that once held the site of many interactions that shaped lives around the world, I stood silent. Changed. The words that could have escaped my mouth were removed by the space of time. 

How interconnected we really are. How these realities of wonder, shock, memory, transformed my sensitivities and thoughts of each person. How fragile we are. How our connections can strengthen through understanding. May this understanding be one where we see how each difference is also our similarity, how each uniqueness also brings together our whole world. May this oneness be unifying, not in fear, but in harmony. Let us know that in loss, we remember how this moment was formed from our connected beings and in that new moment may we stand with courage in remembrance and hope for our moments in this shared world.

Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan - 2009

Special Olympics statue at the State University of New York College at Brockport

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Feeling the Heartbeat of our Lives

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

There is a rhythm that exists in each of us, beating like a drum, ringing like a bell, circulating and moving together with every living thing. What is felt with one heart can convey the human experience. The idea of the human experience may be cliche, but the experiences are real and felt in powerful ways. It was recently on a walk with a friend that I saw again how the actions of others ripple past the immediate interaction that took place in any given moment. The walk itself embodied this, and the understanding of human pain and joy that together in paradoxical ways form our lives. It is hard to understand how sorrow is part of the darkness that fuses angst, disbelief, and sadness to the moments that we wish we could hurry and leave behind. These adversities can be pivotal in helping us feel the warmth when cherished and held with a tapestry of connection.

In the heartbeat of life, we can think about the place we are living in. It isn't always happy or sad, angry or fearful. It usually is a mosaic of the feelings we have about our lives. Minutes become days and moments become memories. Life is a combination of such things. Walking freely with the wind with those who have chosen to encountered life's beauty with me alongside. I've found that in walking, conversation becomes more fluid as it incorporates the passage and change of time and life everywhere.

Laughter from the heart comes from the places we realize and know. As we understand our shared, collective experience as people, we live. Gathered together we can hold hands, for none of us has experienced what another has, but each of us may be listened to and cared for and in turn be a light of hope that beats together if we take the risk to step beyond our grudges and listen. Barefoot we feel what is shaping us, changing us. Barefoot we arise and walk over to the beginning of the next moment. May it be the wonder that makes us cry with hope that together we can build something for the future of our lives and those we love. So it may be these feelings that hold us to the moment to create, shape, learn, live.

Gathering Together

People have gathered together to share the goodness from their lives for as long as people have been around to harvest of the fruits of their hopes and dreams. These hopes and dreams are often visions of community and prosperity; a sense of well being and home. This has allowed them to see and imagine what shapes their interactions, and to form community based on their common needs and experiences.  As a way of coming together to discover and encounter community, home, food,farmers markets are created to form a community full of aromas and sounds, sights and satisfied taste buds, and also the salutations to the new experiences greeting our sense of touch.

Within these avenues of samples, scintillations appear in people's eyes as they meander slowly among neighbors and through the cascade of tents and booths  looking for the finds that will nourish and delight them for sale by neighbors near and far. Life is formed by the stories we tell, the laughter from our hearts, and the smiles as life is made by the hands that grow it.  I feel alive a part of this interaction as important as the labors shared have become our memory that is always an important part of our lives. We fill our senses with flowers and coffee beans and the days loaves from the bakery as music fills the air from radios and performers. It is here we create community, experience our lives and begin our stroll along the hopes of our neighbors.


The day at the market is a day to join with neighbors and strangers, people from abroad, and from our home. To live with the fruition of our lives, to experience with our senses, to know the energy that is raw and creative flowing from our hearts, our tastes, our moments. At the Rochester Public Market in Rochester, New York, gatherings form on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to bring the ingredients together that yield smiles and joy, a time shared, a friend made, a voter registered, and a community built. The markets near you, and the markets near me are in my understanding the connection of the experience we together have in the building of today and tomorrow from the common dreams of yesterday.

Sights at the Rochester Public Market on a Saturday in June.

Light From the Soul

Life's precious moments cannot be held onto, because like water, they are cherished and felt, before slipping away. The memories may linger, but whatever was happening gives way to whatever will happen, or is happening. Our lives can be touched and forever changed by the momentous or the quiet murmur that strikes us where we are able to receive and know it before it passes away.

The human soul can be evoked, and evoke as music or art. Music as a force can drive into our souls and rouse us into action like nothing else. The soaring of melody and the undercurrent of harmony may mount our hearts and leave us in tears for music is one of the few expressions where we can feel solidarity with our sister, understanding with our brother, angry with our condition, or jubilant with the connections we forge with our ancestors and the celebrations we have with each other. As music is created from the conditions that we feel in our soul, it is shared by those that sing or play with the composer, and maybe even embellished as the community and kinship is formed. 

Holiday music can also create connections to ourselves and to others. This afternoon as I sat in the Hochstein Performance Hall in  downtown Rochester, New York and heard Madrigalia, a Chamber Chorus from the city, sing for "A Cup of Good Cheer." The festive music really illuminated the overcast day with a brightness that infected the children listening to this program of Live From Hochstein. As the soaring voices reached the balcony where I was sitting, I saw the children sitting nearby with their heads resting in their arms looking out over the balustrade. One began bouncing energetically during the jazzy rendition of Jingle Bells as the warmth of the seasonal tunes burst forth to resonate with those celebrating the season's joy and hopefulness. Without words, we can express our simple joyfulness and excitement or thoughtfulness that brings us together to connect with the music and tradition of the time. 

During the moments of song over the course of the hourlong concert, the expressions of Christmas were found filling the performance space with wonder and reverence creating and evoking images of the nativity and decorations that adorn edifices this month. Without these expressions at this time for these people the soul could not have been illumined in that way as the collective voices sang out to share the warmth and gladness of a moment of memory that formed before giving way to whatever came next. 

A serene peaceful scene of snow and pine.

Free

Though we in the United States often talk about freedom, we don't often talk about feeling free because quite honestly, we are usually bound by the fetters of insecurity, regret, and worry. All these things make it impossible to be truly free, and similarly, make it impossible to feel free to be yourself; the person you are and no one else. Yet, when we let go, being free can release us of those persistent pieces of our thoughts that edge out the moment where we can create our present which gives us permission to shape our future.

Moments of freedom come from this release, and can also be available in activities where we must focus on ourselves and our surroundings or find ourselves missing the way forward. In contra dancing, each move is part of a sequence, both alone and with a partner and other pairs of partners that are part of a certain timing. Although there is often time to catch up if something is missed, it still alters the flow slightly. As such, flow allows for moments of freedom within contra dancing. Even the music allows us to breathe and move in to community with ourselves and others sharing the set with you.  Recently when I was dancing, there was a moment between the neighbor whom I balanced and swung with where the rhythm, movement, and connection provided an interpersonal oneness that was not necessarily spiritual, but understanding and knowing. With worry and doubt, this couldn't have been experienced, but in the present, we can take what we bring to each interaction and allow it to shape both our reality and thoughts towards what was and what is so that the past doesn't always have to be a trap on our present.

These minutes of dancing can be short or long, and they can release me into a freedom of joy and deep contentment that leaves me accepting the future and the past as beautiful parts that are shared in the present. By sensing the beauty of life in its freedom that you must give yourself permission to experience, the way through to the future is unlocked by release and embrace.

Contra Dance at Cornell University - Ithaca, New York