Written in Tuesday night writing group. First memory
I remember skipping down a brick sidewalk and falling. I think I was four years old. We were in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was back from the war — World War II — and going to Harvard Business School. I fell and hurt my knee and started to cry. Both parents got angry. “You shouldn’t have been skipping around.” “Stop crying you’re not that hurt.” I learned that making a mistake was a terrible thing. I should be very careful to get everything right.
That’s a pretty tough assignment. Of course, I didn’t get praised for getting things right, I just got ignored. But that was better than punishment. Luckily for me, when I got to school I did well. The things I did right were praised, and what I did wrong was corrected. And the same thing wouldn’t be OK one day and unacceptable the next.
Still, the fear of doing things wrong has stayed with me all my life.
And what about things I’ve done right. The best thing I did was build Neskaya, a piece of sacred architecture for movement arts that are also spiritual practices like Yoga, Martial Arts, and Sacred Circle Dance. I discovered folk dance when I went to Europe after I graduated from Wellesley. I did a bunch of Greek dances with Greek friends I met in Paris on New Year’s Eve. It took me a while to find folk dance in this country, but when I bought a house in Brunswick Maine and settled down, I found that a folk dance group met on Wednesday night and I started going. The first time I went, the teacher came in with a record under her arm — this was 1970 — and taught us a new dance — a very simple dance. Three steps to the left and three in place. She put on the record and it was bagpipes — my Scots and Irish ancestors rose up in my blood and I was on a moor in Scotland with a bonfire and a full moon rising. Actually, the music was by a Breton named Alan Stivell who started the resurgence of Celtic music that long time ago. I had never heard of Brittany — it’s part of France that sticks out parallel to Cornwall, and for years in history the Bretons and the Cornish was more connected to each other than to the English and French governments in London and Paris.
I moved to Franconia New Hampshire to get married and brought some tapes of my favorite dances. I started teaching a small folk dance group. Someone told me there was Sacred Circle Dance on the green at Danville for the Equinox, so I went and they were doing dances I already knew with a candle at the center
I notice that when I fell and hurt myself, my parents were angry, not comforting. For a very long time I got angry at myself whenever I did something “wrong.” Finally, I learned to be compassionate instead. But it took a long time.
I say that “the same thing wouldn’t be OK one day and unacceptable the next.” That tells you something about my mother in particular