dance – Anonymole – apocryphal agitators

Writer’s Log: 2480

February 6, 2022

She lifted her skirt and began to dance. At first, Adella only swished and stepped. But soon her rhythmic hips whispered to her wrists and they to her shoulders and they, in turn, to her voice. The words to the song came easily. Memorized through years of communal singing, the lyrics burst out with vibrant trills and shouts. All eyes followed her. Adella’s crimson blouse, its ruffles wavering, gave fleeting peeks. Her bleach-white skirt billowed and flashed her tan legs. She cast back her head and laughed. “Frederico, Marcello, join me. Margarete, Chicas, please don’t let me dance alone.”

Who could deny her? Glasses drained and chairs squeaked and soon the family and all their friends were dancing. Dancing with abandon, without a thought as to who pranced well and who only shuffled, who matched the beat and who fumbled to keep up.

Dance releases something within our hearts, a connection to our primordial spirits. Joy bubbles up and tingles our senses, lifts our step, loosens our restraints. To dance is to open oneself to the world.

Adella dropped the hem of her dress and clutched her breast. A great squeezing had seized her lungs. At sixty, she imagined living until her hair turned white as Mama’s. Her daughter, Consuela, caught sight of her stricken face and rushed to catch her as she slumped to the dance floor.

The polls are in.

For nearly all of you, you read the above without prejudice of content or doubt as to quality. The editor in you remained quiescent, perhaps only bumping your conscious at that authorial interjection I let slip.

I’m afraid I do not join you in this trend.

I do applaud you though. I hope you never lose such an ability.

Thanks for stopping by.

A bramble vine basket

May 30, 2018

Humanity evolved creating stuff.

Everyone in a tribe or clan contributed to the group’s survival. If things needed to get made, everyone (I imagine) pitched in. Sure some segregation of tasks took place, but I suspect most jobs were shared across gender, age and ability.

Here you see a simple bramble vine basket I made just for fun. (I later hung this up in a small tree in the woods thinking it might become a nest for some woodland bird.)

BrambleVineBasket

The thing is utterly simple yet effective. Crude but serviceable. Just what, we could imagine, some bygone set of folks traversing the hills and valleys of ancient lands — eons ago — might make, on the spot, to help them gather berries or herbs or for ceremonies to honor deities and spirits they found compelling.

It probably took me 30 minutes to weave from wandering bramble vines I found in the backyard. The effort was thoroughly fulfilling. Taking a weed and turning it into a functional tool easily cast my psyche back to a time I know our ancestors found invigorating.

In those times, everyone (I’m sure) participated in the survival of the People. Sharing was a built-in response to everything that was done. If you had two, you gave one away to another in need. Of course you did. And you did this knowing when they had two, they would do the same for you.

The unit of survival was the group, the tribe, the clan. Your kin were all those people around you who knew you and protected you — and you protected them. When the group needed housing you all pitched in. When the clan needed to process an animal — all were on deck. When you found a cache of vines to make baskets, you picked all you could, shared the resource and if you wove many, passed them out without expectation of recompense (not entirely, but the spirit was there).

I think we’ve lost that altruistic sense of collective prosperity — enacted on a daily basis. Giving when you can. Accepting kindness when you can’t.

A simple, empty basket seems the most unlikely symbol of charity, don’t you think? But, filled with wild-picked berries, you can see what a gift it might be.