http://www.eventbrite.com/event/418331240/?ref=esm...

10 Class Punch Card for any of Melina's Women's Club in Newton Location Belly Dance Classes

I've always had a problem with frameworks. My grad school professors would always say that to me: what is your overarching framework? Stop asking so many questions, Melinda. Just pick one essential question and go from there.

But why not ask a lot of questions, why not frame things all different ways. There are so many ways to look at life and to live, and people change and contexts shift, and self discovery is a constant process and nothing is fixed, except the natural laws of the earth:
we are born, we live, we die.
we love.
we make connections with other humans. We try to see a big picture -- OH! There's my framework, I see it now: The Big Picture. We are born. We die. We figure out how to live a good life in between these two events. We do the best we can. We try things. We are alive, we are living our one and only life. Let's not waste it with regret and fear (or academia).

I try to live my life with integrity, where my actions are outward expressions of an inner life and moral compass.

Nietzche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to the moment – not discouragement – you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Visit Melina's website, www.daughtersofrhea.com, for performance and touring details. Visit her circus website, www.cirquepassion.com for information on her family's tented circus shows. She also has a new blog, www.tipsfromthehip.blogspot.com.

(excerpted)

[...]

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

[...]

To be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but more in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Dance for me has always been a way of life. As a family, we live to dance and we dance to live. Dance is a movement between worlds and a way to connect myself to place. As a kid, when I would first arrive in Athens, Greece to pass the annual six-month stint with my mother Rhea, on day one - right away - mom would pick me up at the airport and say:

"Melinda honey, we are dancing at such and such a place tonight. You’ll be able to learn the choreographies very quickly today and we’ll figure out your costume. You can rest tomorrow."

Blam. Welcome to Athens, welcome to my mother’s life. And I would do it. I would leave my unpacked suitcases in the hallway, learn the choreographies, put the costume together, dance with mom until 2 a.m., then fall on an unmade mattress on the floor and sleep like the dead. As an adult I have figured out a few sly ways to say "No" to my mom, (ways such as, "No, Mom, that’s not l’m doing tonight") but truth is I like the philosophy of plunging in and have faith in the powers generated by getting out of your comfort zone, especially if you are going to dance. As a concept "plunging in" after a long trans-atlantic flight is good, forces you into the new routine right away, the new life, the new language, the new time zone. Mom’s rhythm. Only problem is, as a kid with this kind of trailblazing mother I learned too easily to deny my own rhythm, my own instincts of settling in. It was easier to go with the flow than to obstruct it. Especially if its Rhea’s flow, which is less a flow and more a raging river of creative bohemianism. And I’m happy on those rapids.

Poetry
by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open,
planets
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fires and flowers
the winding night, the universe.

And I infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.