I just returned from North Carolina’s mountains and pines, swinging my arms around my mind with Havi Brooks and all & sundry. Doing the Dance of Shiva, of which I am a practitioner (poor) and fan, just as I’m a fan of Havi’s quite personal take on personal (ahem) development. Also, it’s like kung fu without the killing. The dance, not the personal take.
Actually, it’s a system of 8 basic arm positions grown into a sort of language, perhaps, or at least an algorithm for “conscious liberation,” as they call it. Patterns get built and systematically taken apart before they’re rebuilt. It messes with your head and the rest of you too. I’m still processing it all, especially as all the personal things I took with liked to collapse before I even got out of the car in Lexington, my commitment to be more frivolous dashed against the limestone, alas.
But no worries. Here’s a memory, one of several burned spinning in my mind:
Saturday night as the sun’s slipping behind the trees, Havi at the front of the space, leading 20 or so people in a complex Shiva Nata form. Music, getting lost and swept up, going mad a little keeping up. Dropping mistakes left and right, really flailing. I stood in the back, befitting my poor practice, so Havi’s head appeared to bob on a sea of twirling arms. And she was gone. Not lost among the arms, just gone. “She” had disappeared inside or outside somewhere, lost as when you get lost doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and the world sublimates away. There were just arms flowing through the eight positions, left to right, up and down, top bottom strange charmed.
Punchline: Shiva Nata is a yoga practice, which reminds of this quote my friend Tom Crippen pulled from the ether.
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