{"id":6337,"date":"2019-09-23T08:49:43","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T12:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6337"},"modified":"2019-10-03T14:39:22","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T18:39:22","slug":"legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6337","title":{"rendered":"Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because of Stephen Jenkinson, I\u2019ve been thinking about my legacy.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t care if people remember me.\u00a0 <\/span>If Neskaya\u2019s still going, I expect they\u2019ll have a memorial service like the one we did for Evie<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>What I do know is that Neskaya<\/a> and Circle Dance have changed many lives and started new dancing circles, and the ripples from that, the \u201cwake\u201d I\u2019ve left behind, feels very good to me.\u00a0 <\/span>I think of Sues Dunlap telling me she was dancing with Mary & Floyd, because I had showed her some dances one summer.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t remember where or why I taught them to her.\u00a0 <\/span>And I think of Carol & Tory telling me that my example of a woman who went to graduate school was important for them.\u00a0 <\/span>That really surprised me.\u00a0 <\/span>But I dropped out of Stanford, got hospitalized, lost a bike belonging to one of you…\u00a0 <\/span>you don\u2019t remember anything of that?\u00a0 <\/span>And Jo telling me \u201cEverything I know about Spirit I learned from you.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>There have been lots of times when people have told me \u201cWhen you said such-and-such, it changed my life.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I didn\u2019t remember saying such-and-such, but recognized it as something that was so much a part of my thinking that I didn\u2019t think of it as anything special.\u00a0 <\/span>Several people have told me that Circle Dance saved their lives.\u00a0 <\/span>I suppose that\u2019s true of me too.\u00a0 <\/span>When you are depressed and can\u2019t enjoy anything, what is still worth doing?\u00a0 <\/span>For me it was folk dance and then circle dance.\u00a0 <\/span>I remember a workshop at Kripalu, at the end of a guided meditation on dying, they started playing Neil Diamond\u2019s song<\/a> from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and I sat up and began to improvise movement to the music.\u00a0 <\/span>A woman came up to me afterward where I sat writing in the dining room, and told me my dancing had changed her life.\u00a0 <\/span>All these things I did not believe at the time.\u00a0 <\/span>but I guess I recorded them on a virtual page headed \u201cEvidence to disprove the hypothesis that Jenny is worthless.”\u00a0 <\/span>Now I can accept them as happening, but I\u2019m still not quite sure that they mean I have been a source of good in the world.<\/p>\n

What legacy did I receive?\u00a0 <\/span>I think of Jenny Murdoch and Gramps Clark and their death stories<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>I realized recently, that my father gave me a lot.\u00a0 <\/span>He taught me to drive on my first car which had a stick shift, and how to \u201cdouble clutch\u201d and use the engine to slow the car down.\u00a0 <\/span>He taught me to balance my checkbook.\u00a0 <\/span>He read Deep Wood to me, and the poems of Robert Frost.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In fact I have, and treasure, a small paperback book of poetry, held together by a rubber band, that went with him through the war.\u00a0 <\/span>He described a scale model of the solar system \u2014 \u201cJupiter is a golf ball knocked out of the stadium\u201d \u2014 and a scale time line for the earth collapsed into a day.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cAll of recorded history is in the last second of the day.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Mother\u2019s sister Carolyn saw the attic room of our house in Maine as a \u201cbeatnik pad,\u201d and gave me a record of Puccini\u2019s La Boheme.\u00a0 <\/span>Following her instructions, I and two girl friends constructed \u201cThe Broken Bottle,\u201d named for a champagne bottle broken in a ceremony.\u00a0 <\/span>It became a kind of play room for my siblings as they reached adolescence.\u00a0 <\/span>It was also the first appearance of the impulse to create special environments for creativity, play, and exploration.\u00a0 <\/span>That impulse reached its full flowering in Neskaya.\u00a0 <\/span>Aunt Betty, my father\u2019s sister, kept a special eye on me as I was growing up.\u00a0 <\/span>She always gave me meaningful Christmas presents.\u00a0 <\/span>One Christmas she gave me a recording of two of Mozart\u2019s late symphonies. I said “But Aunt Betty, I don\u2019t like Mozart.\u201d\u00a0 (<\/span>I preferred Stravinsky and Prokofiev.)\u00a0 <\/span>She said \u201cKeep the records and learn to like him,\u201d and I did.\u00a0 <\/span>In fact I bought a CD of them after wearing out two recordings on vinyl.\u00a0 <\/span>She also gave me the role model of going into therapy.\u00a0 <\/span>Aunt Mimi, a friend of our family who lived in Maine, offered me a mothering love, always glad to have me come for a meal.<\/p>\n

My legacy from my mother? \u00a0A determination not to be like her. \u00a0And possibly also my sense of creating fun for people. \u00a0I remember a birthday party for me on the little beach at Biddeford Pool, I might have been five. \u00a0There were tiny clear plastic animals hidden around, and I saved some of them for a long time. \u00a0For her parties meant drinking, for me I tried to create events that were fun, but also fed the soul.<\/p>\n

As well as my family legacy, I also was given a lot of valuable guidance and support by Miss Hill<\/a>, my astronomy teacher at Wellesley, Deena Metzger<\/a> and Jalaja Bonheim<\/a>, and all of my therapists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because of Stephen Jenkinson, I\u2019ve been thinking about my legacy.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care if people remember me.\u00a0 If Neskaya\u2019s still going, I expect they\u2019ll have a memorial service like the one we did for Evie.\u00a0 What I do know is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circle-dance","category-present-day","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}