I thought I was done. Performing. Apparently, I am not. I have at least been taken in by my own pitch: These are very very short dances!  I am – at best – enjoying moving with my friends.

As part of the Harbor Residency, Tina and I had the opportunity to share our work-to-date with a small group of students and their teacher from the Blue Hill Harbor School, a project-based high school.  In May, the school stops holding regular classes and instead the students participate in field trips, workshops and projects of their design. We gathered such thoughtful and useful responses from them that will help us as we go forward to fine-tune.

This dance came together like a puzzle, of sorts: together, with each other, and with the music. A visual and aural piecing together . . . a wild ride!

Tina remembered this as we were working to ‘fill the gaps’

“Thomas Merton wrote, ‘there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making its-bitsy statues.’ There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making its-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, and Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

-Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek