Movement Blessings – Mostly Dance

I was introduced to the Korean sijo in a recent poetry class I took. The teacher mentioned it along with haiku and invited us to explore one of the forms. Since I spent some time last year writing haiku and creating watercolors to accompany text, I was intrigued to delve into this new form I was hearing about for the first time.

What is sijo? The Poetry Foundation provides a place to start:

A Korean verse form related to haiku and tanka and comprised of three lines of 14-16 syllables each, for a total of 44-46 syllables. Each line contains a pause near the middle, similar to a caesura, though the break need not be metrical. The first half of the line contains six to nine syllables; the second half should contain no fewer than five.

While the form is not as well-known as haiku, a little more research found some treasured classics translated into the English. This one by Yun Seon Do (1587 – 1671) particularly caught my attention.

You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine,
The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade.
Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?

There are regular writing contests for haiku and groups that meet in both the United States and Japan writing and sharing haiku. There is not as much activity happening with sijo although I did discover that the Sejong Cultural Society has a writing competition. The Sejong Cultural Society’s purpose is to “advance awareness and understanding of Korea’s cultural heritage among people in the United States by reaching out to the younger generation through contemporary creative and fine arts.”

In the past few weeks I have written several sijo. I liked the fact that sijo were often shared as songs, sometimes with drum accompaniment. Soon I was thinking of simple choreography that might fit one of the poems I had written. Why not explore writing sijo and creating dance movements to accompany the words? I had fun doing just that.

This sijo is for the winter solstice.

December darkness descends: fewer hours of sunlight.

Energy emerges from friendships — reach out to each other —

Recognize your inner light: open your heart with joyful love!

And here is a link where you can see the movement. I invite you to do the simple movement with me. https://vimeo.com/895910726

When I shared my sijo and movement with the poetry class, one of the members asked if she might share it with her church group. I was very touched by the request, and that was part of my motivation for figuring out how to video it to share with others.

When I was working with haiku, I created over thirty haiku with watercolor illustration and selected some to share online in this blog. https://mostlydance.com/2023/03/24/an-experiment-writing-haiku-with-accompanying-watercolor/ While I haven’t decided yet whether to create a series of sijo with accompanying movement, I am intrigued by the idea.

In Costa Rica, being so close to the equator, we only experience a small change in the balance of light and dark each day. This particular year I am feeling the darkness more. Let’s light candles and call forth our inner light to remind ourselves that each day after the winter solstice there will be a bit more light.

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In my last blog I mentioned how well the Prime Minister of New Zealand had handled the pandemic. Jimmy Levinson, friend/reader, sent me a picture of a woman hugging another and said he had just added the picture to his wall of heroes. I have to admit I didn’t know who the woman in the picture was, even though her name was printed underneath. When I said so, Jimmy wrote back that it was the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Oh… I thought to myself, that is what you get for not watching the news. Here is someone managing a country very well and you don’t even know her name. So I immediately googled Jacinda Ardern and began learning about her. And wow, if I had a wall of heroes she certainly would be there.

I learned that she is just 39 years old. Uri Friedman wrote in The Atlantic, April 2020:

Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis…. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing.
During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance “as we all prepare to hunker down.”
She introduced helpful concepts, such as thinking of “the people [who] will be in your life consistently over this period of time” as your “bubble.”

On June 9^th when she learned the country was free of COVID she is quoted as saying “I did a little dance.”

Picture of Jacinda Ardern — part of Jimmy’s Hereos’ Wall

I love that my friend has a wall of heroes, but that should not come as a surprise to me because Jimmy is a very unique and special person. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he was my next door neighbor. Through the years we have kept in touch. F. James Levinson, as he is known professionally, has had an outstanding career in Public Health and Nutrition projects throughout the world. Here’s a link to his bio as part of the Board of Directors of his son Noah’s organization, Calcutta Kids. Noah has won awards for his work with Calcutta Kids which is an organization “committed to empowering the poorest children and expecting mothers in the underserved slums in and around Kolkata, India.” I strongly encourage you to check out their website and even consider donating to Calcutta Kids.

I asked Jimmy to send me a photo of his Wall of Heroes and got 6 photos showing a diverse group of individuals, some I recognized and some I didn’t. The idea of a wall of heroes is quite wonderful and I am thinking how I might create that here in Costa Rica. It will not be quite as elegant as my friend’s, where each picture is carefully framed, but I am lucky to have a printer and can print out photos and maybe mount them on another piece of paper, and with my watercolors paint a frame. The first two will be Jacinda Ardern, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I will call it my SHeroes’ Wall. I look forward to thinking about other additions and while I will be focusing on women I will certainly include some men too. If you were to create your wall who would be on it? Certainly the quality of empathy and compassion from a leader will be an essential qualification.

As I think about compassion and empathy and caring about people, I remember how I ended many workshops that I led. It was very important to me that we left caring about each other and wishing each other well as we continued on our journeys. So we ended with blessings in movement. If it was a large group that hadn’t worked together for very long, we would pass blessings around in a circle. One person (usually myself or a member of the faculty, for the purpose of modeling the instructions) would turn to the person to their right and, thinking a warm thought, would express that, through movement, to the person beside them (without touching). Perhaps they would circle their neighbor’s face or place one hand near the person’s heart and the other on their own heart. Or maybe they would encircle the person and then starting at the person’s head, gently move their circled arms down to the person’s feet. That person would then create their own movement blessing for the person next to them.

If it was a small group that had worked together for several days, each person would go individually into the center of the circle and then the other participants, one by one, would go in to offer that person a movement blessing. No matter which format we did, we ended by blessing ourselves.

With the very challenging world we are living in, we need every tool we can find to help us. May we bless each other and bless ourselves. And let us create our own wall of heroes or sheroes so we are reminded of how many caring and compassionate leaders there are, and have been, on our planet.

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Tag: Movement Blessings

A Sijo Poem for the Winter Solstice

Compassion: Learning and Remembering