"Becoming Salmon I am"
is my Self Portrait I drew before the dance. I had been eating salmon everyday the week before as I was traveling thru France. Every bite was so delicious, and then I remembered I was dancing them and felt bad, wrong. I shared this with my daughter and she said, "Well Mom, you are what you eat!" It was perfect to hear that. It became a way of honoring salmon.
Now some words in response to the drawing after I drew it:
I have a tail, a tale to tell, I have teeth like a Kokanee Salmon in Colorado. I see light running thru my body being channeled. I have arms and legs, I walk on the earth, I swim down, I swim up the current of life. Spreading out and reaching toward I walk into the shadows!
This is brilliant! Love that you became one with salmon! Your salmon is jumping off the page, so alive and also continuing to live through you. ; )
ReplyDeletelove the drawing - reminds me of our salmon kite dance... salmon with legs / legs with salmon body! thank you for sharing... beautiful becoming!
ReplyDeleteReminds me tangentially of something I read a long time ago from a Gary Snyder interview. Paraphrasing: it was on the "biological origins of meditation." That in a time where over the millenia, we hunted to survive, and this meant we had to spend very long periods of times in suspended immobility with one pointed focused alert — ready to act — concentration. He talked specifically about Northwest Coast fishing, where the hunter would crouch near where salmon where exploding upward, focused intently, ready to spear in a split second. When I was teenager back in the 80's, I was in a puppet and mask company — Dreaming Crow — where we did a piece about an Inuit community during an animal drought. A time where a hunter might poise with spear over an airhole in the ice waiting without moving for many many hours. You miss that instant, your village starves.
ReplyDeleteThe biologic origins of meditation. Dancing, mingling and consuming souls. Dance those memories. They are millenia old.