We build a house together

Today is the last day of this work. GRIEF ENCOUNTERS

When i began on Monday i didn’t know much of what would happen. If it would fail.

If people would come and if anything of any significance would happen.

Last night i was visited in my dreams by some of the people i have met this week through this work. In some way i realise as a dancer i am always working with traces of things, the echo as it returns, the memory of what has moved, and how in some way things still move in long after the encounter.

Yesterday i sat with two men both had to leave their own countries.Both leaving families behind.

We held stones and together began building a wall.

What looked like foundations of a house, one he had drawn 10 minutes earlier with his wife and child outside.

Slowly he takes out his wallet and places two pictures in between the stones.

His wife and his daughter. We build a house and it needs a roof. So we find paper and make one. We both gently place the roof on the stones. he places 3 pictures inside of his family and himself.

He told me their names and then begins to imagine a life together again, and i began moving and he spoke into the dancing.

The dance itself became a dance of hope.

A hope dance..

a kind of leaning headfirst into the imagination of the possible.

He stays for a while then we have a handshake. One of those handshakes that also leaves a trace.

I have been changed by his presence.

I realise this process is a practice of sharing losses, and of listening, but also hidden somewhere in there is the practice of hope.

A child runs up to me, we talk for 1 minute and I explain what I’m doing.

He does an impression of me dancing, smiles, and writes on the paper.

I miss god.

Then he runs away.

I dance and he looks back for a glance.

I have been changed by his presence too.

A man talks to me about a sculpture of another artist, an upturned boat made of grave stones. A dedication and reflection of all the people who tried to reach safer lands in little boats who could never carry them safely. This sculpture was just outside the building.

I sit with the stones think about the walls that my house in wales in made of.

I think about home, and territory, and ‘cynefin’ which is a welsh word for habitat,

and the word Hiraeth in welsh is a longing, a deep one that is built into the bones.

Our longing and our losses are also the foundations, or the rubble thats left of what we love or have loved.

I heard that this week a lot, the sound of longing. It’s in between the words, in the sighs. In the gestures or the absence of them…. one of the men wrote peace of mind next to a picture of one of the dogs from the children on Monday.

It’s hard not to see how all of this just belongs together.

A giant web of mess, destruction, creation and beauty side by side.

At the end of the day today.

The stones will all go back carefully into the fjord

and be there long after us all..

one by one.

Carrying the stories….

I may have learnt from these conversations this week that Our losses are a way of navigation perhaps.

Not in Somber way..

but..

if the desire for belonging and the feeling of home was a voice singing far far away

you would have to stand so still

and close your eyes so you could hear it.

So that you could begin walking in its direction.