dance #183, summer solstice

Sunday June 21, 2009

Summer solstice

8:31 p.m. – 9:02 p.m. A thirty-one minute dance on Wards Island Beach. Standing ankle deep in Lake Ontario. Tiny waves gently gushing. Rhythmically lapping up. My feet sink deeper in. The dance lunges deep and wide taking in the expanse of the lake and the sky. I join the dancing birds and the sounding waves. Composing with the chatter of people, and the drummers and singers whose sounds waft quietly, barely audible beneath the clatter of gulls above and the red-winged black birds in the rushes behind me. A graceful, flying, swooping, lurching dance with arms tethered and arcing across the sky. Back lilting, listing, joining the helical turnings of the birds circling.  This is a dance for the lake. And the birds. I dance and pause and dance again. Deep calm. In-gathering energies. Each time taking in the changing light, the changing sensations as the sun is setting on this, the longest of days. When I sit down to draw, a tiny, curious spider clambers up onto the blanket with me. Watching. Alice is by my feet when I return home to post.

This solstice dance begins after my first actionaday to celebrate Natalie’s half-revolution. I count three hundred and sixty five tiny waves lapping up against the shore. I take a deep breath at one hundred and eighty three. Each wave is so different, each moment transforming before the count is through, waves lapping up into each other. Moments escape before moments are made anew.

~ by nmyers on June 21, 2009.