This is my contribution for Blog Action Day. This year's theme is water. I recall a ferry ride across the Mississippi in the setting sun in April 2008. My intuition was going haywire giving me something about a "water installation." As I landed in New Orleans, I noted a department store mall storefront on Canal Street with the words charity : water. I wrote it down since the serendipity was too vivid to ignore. I'd never heard of charity:water before.
I kept getting hits of intuition and inspiration involving a water installation, ("but I'm a writer!" I protest to the universe). I continued to brush these inspirations away.
After the Gulf oil spill April 2010, I understood the urgency and regretted that I didn't follow through. So that's partly the inspiration for the following.
"Water is the driving force of all nature." - Leonardo da Vinci
Setting: Sometime in the "future."
Women dressed in diaphonous cloud gingerly twirl with jars balanced on the tiptop of their crowns. In single file, they tiptoe to a well. One filly breaks into a trot and the rest scatter bouncing and bounding in a frolic to the spring. Behind them the scene is draped in waterfalls. On their return with filled jars weighing up to forty pounds, they circumnavigate the circuitous stream feeding the spring in a slow dance that exudes both sublime saunter and rapturous giggle.
The live installation celebrates the purification of water worldwide and the emancipation of women from retreiving water from miles away and storing emotions.
One grey-eyed dancer takes a large clay jar and pours water tenderly into a thin-necked copper pitcher, another woman with flowing black hair pours a jar into a wide porcelain pitcher. Each chooses her own vessel.
Spritely as a naiad, the porcelain pitchered empress brings the pitcher to a young man sitting in the circle.
He looks into the pitcher as if a mirror, and reflected and refracted in all the pools they see passing emotions skipping across the sloshing oval like a stone across a lake--a flash of fiery anger, an image of an old grudge, the anguish of an ancient trauma...a flood, perhaps---and the stone stops, the ripples fade, the water stills and pitcher is passed to the next in the circle. He stands up and joins the dance.
The celebration is performed on a regular basis. No two the same. We can't tell you when the next one is exactly as time itself is fluid--we'll be expecting you.
Beautiful Pictures in your blogg :)
Have a fabulous day
Love
Alexandra
Posted by: Alex | Oct 16, 2010 at 07:40 AM