It is Spring!
March 27, 2021

The conversations I’ve been having lately with the quarry ensemble have focused on what this year of struggle has shown us to be important - simplicity, meaningful connections, spaciousness, time to ponder, a new perspective on the familiar. A friend said “It is my intention to allow the spaciousness of this time to continue.”

Last Wednesday, I was sitting at the quarry with a dancer who is joining the ensemble, talking about the project, our shared art form and our lives, when a mink rounded the corner from the “cove” and dashed across the ice to the rock riprap – a dark brown rippling tube of muscle. Yesterday, I stood watching a fox standing so still on a pile of rubble watching me. I waited. After a time, she/he turned and disappeared. There is something about witnessing another species that expands and changes me each time.

For those of you who might have missed the project film called While We Wait, created in this pandemic year, here it is again.

Please let me bring attention to colleagues who are contributing their efforts to the big picture:

• Diane Gayer, landscape architect, is part of a group of people in North Hero, VT who bring art and the creative process to the region - GreenTARA Space.

• Susan Morse, whose photograph graces this March letter, contributes her elegant sense of color and design to each month's newsletter.

I would like to end this update with a poem by Lynn Ungar that circulated a year ago, as meaningful today as it was March 2020.

PANDEMIC

What if you thought of it

as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

Until next month,

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