DANCE!

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

Emma Goldman

We went to a Dance Recital tonight and this quote kept playing in my head as I watched our ten year old dance her heart out.... We had been gardening the hours prior to the recital–setting up containers upon containers of seedlings for space undetermined. This brings me joy: the idea that we can plant things, share live things almost anywhere we can find a patch of soil. Marking the in-between-places, not as some grand gesture of Change or Sustainability but an offering of the practice of living things. We prepare to live outside the grid. Not completely outside the grid but a percentage. Grow a percentage of our own food. This is not a radical act nor a great one, only the expression of life. We realize that we are not putting ourselves in harms way as graffiti artists did in the eighties–tagging private property–pushing us to the question: is there such a thing as public space? You see, we don't feel the need to chase after danger in search of notoriety, but what we do see is that the ways and means are very much a part of the purposes. Like the author of the above quote, we agree, that if we separate the ways and means from purpose to establish ends, then we are doing nothing more than proselytising a new religion.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution" reframes the very notion of revolution by taking into account the importance of play. Play in the sense of free play and in terms of slack or room to move. Over a hundred and fifty years ago as Michael Pollan reminds us, we had this Darwinian Revolution, the revolution of a perspectival shift that rendered the very notion of revolution into evolution. From Darwin AND Goldman, we feel the importance of practice, play and pleasure AND to leave behind the in-between-spaces would result in the belief in Miracles. That is to say: something out of nothing and we all know the nature of things is so much wonderfully MORE!