Dear Friends,
I’m in Arizona this week, completing my certification in Equine Facilitated Learning with Linda Kohanov. We’re focusing on opening up our creative intuition – we got to make music with Steve Roach and today we’re exploring creative movement through horse dancing. Wow – what a fun adventure!
This morning as I sat writing, I began to wonder about the strange music I could hear off on the fringes of my awareness. Haunting, subtle, and sweet – as it continued I paused and listened to the long, low, breathy tone. I could feel a space opening up inside of my body where this sound could resonate. This felt peaceful and exciting at the same time. All at once my mind darted in and put a name on it: “It’s the water kettle!” Doh.
Hmm.
For a moment I felt deflated. I had been listening intently and even rapturously to an every day thing.
Then I got excited. I listened again, not with my mind, but with the deep chamber of my heart, the resonating, labyrinthine, cavernous instrument of my physical body. Thank goodness that in spite of my mind’s labels I could still hear and feel the music.
There is a story I heard from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, drawn from the wisdom of this country’s native peoples, called “Coyote learns to Dance.” My favorite part is when Coyote goes walking in the evening past a field of corn. He hears the rustling and the rhythm of the wind moving through the field, making music with the corn. “Sh-sh-sh-sh!” “Sh-sh-sh-sh!”
All night long he dances with the corn people. Dancing, dancing, to the music, wild and alive. And in the morning when the workers pass by on the way to the fields to dig their long straight rows they see Coyote curled up in a pile of husks, sleeping away and they laugh and laugh – ‘Coyote is crazy!’ ‘Coyote had too much to drink.’ They make fun of him.
But Coyote – knows how to dance. This is a knowing not of the mind, but of the bones.
Can you hear the music?
Namaste,
Erin
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