cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
 WEEK SEVEN. conversation by clair and anna

 

The sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?  Tagore


~  ~  ~ 

I like that I found this after doing several days of washing up, while listening to Sounds of the Seventies on the radio, dancing as I cleaned, splashing water around. It led me back to 'For a Dancer' by Jackson Browne: "Into a dancer you have grown/from a seed somebody else has thrown/go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own."

anna


it is natural for the water to reflect the surface it is travelling over.  

i guess this is true for so many things... everything exists because of the last thing and the thing before that or the present thing.  how we all interact with our world... how it is all a game of dominoes.
clair


"Will you carry the burden of their lameness?" echoes through my mind. I have been 'lame' and am still limping, though my gait is steadier day by day. I won't carry the burden, but will lend my arm. It is hard to stand tall and strong alone. We interact with each other as well as with the world. I am he and you are she and we are all together.
Anna

i like that  anna, a lot...  .)

...maybe each of us 'carries' or holds each brilliance and each 'weakness' but each of us carry it differently...with different accent and dominance... different ways of interacting with each holding, or lack of holding, (dropping) we encounter...
clair

Those sands, those begging sands, in the way. Just grains - no bigger than a grain of sand, we say - but see what they are when gathered together and how they change. We struggle to walk on dry sand, run and dance and whoop across the vast open freedom of wet sand at low tide.
 
This makes me ache to swim alone naked in the sea at night.
 
Thanks for this - I am loving it! x
anna

for me the sea is so deep and vast and cold, in my memory, that i am scared at the thought of swimming in its body at night...what makes our experiences different?  are you talking of a sea which surrounds other countries?

mind you, the motion of the sea is more than beautiful, i like to lie star fish shaped on the top... the more relaxed you are the more you float. then i am wafer thin.
me too x
clair


I was thinking of the freedom, the sensations in your body and soul, but when you ask 'where?' I realise it was Shoreham beach.
 
And when you say 'scared', with a jolt I remember that I almost drowned there, twenty years ago, underestimating the sheer power of a rough sea, not even considering the shelving of the shingle or the point of the tide. My costume filled with stones, dragging me to the bottom. As fast as I could push myself to the surface and grab a pinch of air, I was dragged under again and again and again. At the moment of knowing I could not last without a proper breath, soon, very soon, I was thrown out and onto the beach. My legs, past the knees had turned white with lack of oxygen and could not bear my weight.
 
And yet I write of swimming alone in the sea at night without a trace of that experience in my mind.
 
I won't go in a rough sea on a shingle beach ever again, but a calm, flat, shallow sea on a moonlit night...
anna


yes, i see....pretty cool that you can write of swimming alone at night without being haunted by that experience... .)

i was just thinking, there are special skills, possessed by everyone of us...things we are specially good at, (they could be quite unusual skills or those not recognised by our consumerist and money driven society), but wouldn't it be amazing, if all our special skills were seen and logged and then our job on the earth was centred around those traits and we could all be special and the absolute genius that we are, and in the job we do.

one of yours would be this.
clair