I’m heading down to the Dragon’s Egg in Ledyard Connecticut this weekend to meet up with some of my creative family – long-time collaborators Sharon Estacio, Jeffrey Peterson, and Meredith Mandel. A bit of dance & music playing time together in holy space. It’ll result in a showing on Monday at 5:00pm. I know for me, the effects will continue to reverberate. Deep family time is like a stone dropped into a water, sends ripples out and out.

Thinking and loving family – in increasingly complex and beautiful ways –  so much this Christmas season, even as Stefan and I spend a somewhat austere, monastic week at home. Reading again of the last pilgrimage of Thomas Merton to Asia, I remind myself of the primacy of compassion, love. Perhaps a major “technical” lesson I can learn in dance, in music is that love, music, dance,  family, god –  these things, in no particular order – are all different refractions, approximations on the same nameless image.

On Christmas Day, we pilgrimaged up through the Champlain Islands to visit St. Anne’s Shrine on Isle La Motte, with a walk of The Stations of the Cross, right on Lake Champlain – a wild windy day on the water.