I was born in San Francisco, August 10, 1954. Year of the Wood Horse. My future as a dancer was determined by a mystical experience I had at age 4, while performing a dance I had made, embodying the life cycle of a flower. A woman with white hair played beautiful music on the piano while the audience sat in a huge circle around me. After sprouting and blooming, then dancing and leaping ecstatically in the sun, I started to wilt, and I knew it was time for me to die. Though I expected to be overwhelmed with sadness, a beautiful female figure suddenly appeared before me, that I realized later no one but I could see. (She had the same beautiful face I had seen in a huge bush when I was less than a year old, and had no language with which to tell my parents about it.)
She said, "You do not die. Nobody dies. You just come home to me." I believed her. And I believed in her. I wanted to know more about her. I knew that dancing had made her appear, so I thought if I keep dancing, I will be able to stay close to her.
Thus began a relationship to dance as the doorway that opened into her dimension, whoever she might be. Not knowing her name, I was always on the lookout for clues. Over the years I encountered many possible identities, but none ever seemed like the perfect match: Mother Mary, Mother Nature, Gaia, Tara, Kwan Yin, Isis...all faces of the Divine Feminine. Finally, by surrendering the rigid, unexamined belief that I am a singular entity, I have come to see that I am two: the self and the soul. She is the part of me that does not die. That sees everything as the dance of creation, the rising and falling of waves, from the heart's beat and rest, to a dancer's leap into air and fall back to Earth, to the taking of a form and the releasing of it, to life and death. And in writing, just the same: the waves of feeling riding on the imagery of poetry, its tones and melody, the frequencies of sound, the rhythms in the words.
As of this writing, my muse is very happy to see that I am waking up the musical (she calls it "her" musical) that has been sleeping on the shelf for two years. I am picking up the search for a composer to bring the lyrics to life. As it centers around young inventors from eight different countries, it will need a composer attuned to musical styles from various cultures. It is a story of faith in the human creative spirit, especially in the young, the faith that we can reverse the destruction of our ecosystems and save our glorious mosaic of unique cultures, and their understanding of nature as a conscious, harmonious collaboration. The working title is S.O.S., which refers not only to Save Our Souls, the universal distress signal invented in 1905, but Summit of Solutions, the climactic event proposed by the heroine, a waitress named Zinha from the matrilineal Bissagos Islands of Guinea Bissau. In this event the young inventors are finally given the spotlight they deserve, before an audience of representatives from every country. And of course, there is humor, and there is love.
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