Transcriber: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning, everyone.
Please join me; let's begin.
Take a deep breath, and relax.
Me too.
Get comfortable;
really settle into those super, fantastic plastic metal chairs you're sitting in.
(Laughter)
And let your body get soft.
Then notice the feeling of your feet in your shoes,
and let them really rest on the ground.
Nice.
Now close your eyes.
And really do that, I can see you.
Notice all the small sounds that are happening around you.
Really rest in this small moment of solitude, among all these 640 people.
Now, open your eyes, and introduce yourself
to the person on your right, and your left,
and if you already know them, greet them with warmth.
Really take them in, and remember their name.
(Loud chattering)
Lovely.
Now find front; that's me.
See if you can continue to hold these people
in your awareness as we move on.
This is a crude video that my husband and I made of our daughter,
when she had just turned two.
Clearly, very unrefined, it was never meant for public consumption.
But we watch it occasionally,
because it reminds us of a few very essential things.
I wanted to share it with you today,
because those essential things are what I'd like to talk with you about.
If I were to create a filter for this wonderful TED notion
of "ideas worth spreading",
that filter would be that any idea worth spreading
would need to not only provoke a more mindful present for me,
but would need to inspire and propose a more healthy, and a more productive,
and a more honest future for our children, and for the planet.
When I look at this video, I am reminded of the tenderness,
and the delicacy that is at risk,
if we don't immediately embrace a more mindful way of being.
Being with ourselves, and being with each other.
And it is this idea of "being" that I want to explore with you
in our few short minutes together.
Because it is my deep conviction
that this simple, yet profound idea of "being-ness"
is really what we must move towards, and what we must practice,
if we are to create the kind of compassionate, and just society
that I think we all want, that we deserve, and we are totally capable of.
When I look at this short clip of footage,
I see certain qualities of "being"
that I must admit are far too absent in my day-to-day meanderings about.
Perhaps you will feel the same.
When I look at her, I see a softness, and an ease,
and a connection to her senses.
I see an embodiment of her whole self;
her whole being is there, her corporeality is present.
Now someone might say, "She's sleeping; of course she's like that!"
But anyone who's ever raised a child,
played with a child, nurtured a child, or taught a child,
knows that this is our birthright;
we come in like this, regardless of race, or gender, or sexual orientation,
or social-economic status.
We come in with this capability of being present with ourselves,
at all times.
And it is only through maturation that we are often seduced
into developing other habits of being, that perhaps, are not as productive.
Habits around speed, habits around consumption,
habits around ownership, habits around tenderness,
habits around temperament, habits around impatience.
I know for myself, when I am enclosed to her habits of being expressed here,
I feel my own joy, I feel my own connection to the world,
I feel my own embodiment.
And in that space, I sense my creativity, my authenticity,
and my own agency;
and that is where I sense my own extraordinary qualities.
I am going to imagine that is the same for each of you.
What I also know is I've developed this sort of detritus
of bad habits along the way.
I find that I need to practice my better habits.
That little score that I did with you at the beginning of our time together,
was a score that I do with myself two, five, on my bad days 20 times a day.
When I find myself seduced into an argument with my daughter
over what she's going to wear to school,
or my dog licks my leg for the 20th time,
or I'm in a traffic jam, and I'm late for something.
Or I've had a really bummer, collaborative meeting,
or I've heard news on the radio that is fully disheartening.
I have to practice cultivating that sweetness, that softness,
that presence.
So that I can bring myself back to where I am,
so that I'm capable of dealing with all that I am feeling.
In my work as an artist, I've tried, over the years,
to extend this practice of "being-ness" to the larger cultural body.
Our neighborhoods, our sidewalks, our cities, our communities.
I think of those areas as bodies.
I have attempted in my work to create opportunities
for each of us to be more present with where we live,
and how we live in those places.
Whether it's taking derelict plots of public land and asking,
"What else could this be to contribute to a healthy society,
besides a place where people throw trash?"
Or, looking at our urban inter-sections and asking, "How does our body
- I believe in the body -
How does our body function in these large cities with all this noise,
and all this detritus, and creating projects for people to enter
and consider their relationship to our built environment
I have spent many years cultivating a relationship with public space;
spaces that we all exist in.
These slides are resisting.
I've also spent many years asking myself,
"What is the quality of being that I get when I'm in a natural space, in a forest?
And can I extend those kinds of qualities,
those kinds of "being-ness" to other environments?
And what does public space offer me?
What am I allowed in these public spaces? How can I participate?
What is my agency in these kinds of spaces?
Trying to create apertures for you and for me,
to more deeply embody where we live, and how we live, where we live.
My most courageous and bravest project was my recent one, where I decided,
"What is a neighbourhood And how does one form?"
Because we had this opportunity to watch the south waterfront,
- which is a large urban environment -
spring from earth.
What is a neighbourhood? Is it the buildings? Is it the people?
Is it the tissue that holds people together?
How do we form those things, and what is the nature of all that making?
Over the years, I've tried to cultivate that sense of being in myself,
but also cultivate that sense of being in the community in which I live.
So we can be more active, more present,
and more engaged with the areas that concern us.
Our cultural body, our cultural way to embody.
I'm going to perform a solo for you now that I created in 1994.
It is a meditation on being, it is a meditation on presence,
it is a meditation that you can enter with me
because I believe that we need to stay with our bodies as we go into our future.
Do you consider the experience of your body?
Do you value it?
Should I value it?
Will you consider the experience of my body?
Can you value it?
Should you value it?
Need we value the experience of another as part of our own?
How much is memory the living body
of all we have seen, felt, sensed, thought, experienced, and inherited?
The architect of our fate.
The body is the medium of our living;
of our work, our play, our learning, our loving.
It is the reservoir of our experience,
and the continual translator of our every emotion, thought and memory.
Do you know that the earth, and the human body are both 75 - 80% water?
Have you ever felt the trans-formative power of chi?
Or run a marathon, hit the wall, and continued on,
fully aware that your body had passed into a semi-altered state?
Have you ever seen and heard someone give birth?
Or, given birth yourself?
Have you ever had a dream one day, that occurs as an event the next?
Or been knowledgeable with information in a dream,
that you know is not part of your own waking consciousness?
Many of us have probably heard the story of Lazarus;
said to have been raised from the dead by Christ.
But do you know the story of Black Elk,
said to be impenetrable to arrows in the Battle of Wounded Knee?
Or the accounts of the kung bushmen,
who dance ecstatically in the flames of their campfires,
only to finish untouched?
Or the stories of the extraordinarily physical abilities,
demonstrated by the Taoist monks?
What is the body of your work?
Who is the body of your play?
Where is the body of your thinking?
Feeling? Sensing?
When is the body of your resting; your loving, your dreaming?
What is your body now?
The body of today, or the body of yesterday?
Or of tomorrow?
Does your left hand know your right hand?
We forfeit a lot when we dull our experience of the body.
When we let the surface of our skin harden,
become impenetrable to the events around it.
Awareness of the terrain of our own history
only gives us fuller sensation, experience, perception, thought, memory.
And even possibly, wisdom.
The stories our bodies are telling could tell, would tell,
when we listen, allow them.
How much do we each self-censor?
And how much is memory the architect of our fate?
We can feel the pleasantly resonant, or terrifyingly painful memories,
rise and fall, to and from, the surfaces of our skin.
Nudged from their dormancy, like perfectly preserved fossils,
by a faint, but lingering smell.
Or an unexpected shift in the light,
or laid anew by a sound, or touch,
that feels as if it has pierced the very core of our being.
What is the mystery of memory?
That physically imperceptible, seemingly ephemeral substance,
that inhabits our bodies and seems to escort us, through each passing day.
As it is like skin, we share, shed, and create new ones continually.
Others come to know, and see us through them.
Just as we see ourselves reflected back, as if like mirrors.
Will you consider the experience of my body?
And how much is memory the architect of your fate?
I remember the night last August, when my bones finally slept,
after a long period of intensive work.
It was a satisfying feeling of weight, at the core of my body.
At the marrow of my bones.
I remember the haunting hollowness of the air,
at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
And the unfamiliar feeling of containment
when standing on the west side of the Berlin wall.
I remember the emerging head of baby Anniko,
as she pushed her way out of her mother, and into the world.
I remember the taste of the food in my mouth,
as I watched the Challenger Space Shuttle disintegrate in front of my eyes.
I remember feeling almost suspended in time,
when I first heard the Bach Solo Cello Suites.
I remember the concave posture of my father's body as if it were my own,
as he waited out that disease called "cancer".
I quite proudly remember the sweet smell of my first successful pile of compost,
as I lifted the brown gold, closer to my nose.
And like you, tattooed somewhere within my place called "body",
are thousands of other ever-present memories
which live, and re-live themselves in me constantly;
the slow waking from a thick dream,
the near-nausea anxiety of telling my first lie,
the physical resonance when I recognise the land as myself,
the vibration of a laughter so deep, it threatened to rearrange my insides.
The caress of skin from one to another;
meeting, pushing, deepening.
Can these almost palpable recollections
teach, inform, sensitize, enliven,
distract, engender respect, humanize?
When we look at each other, should we try to blur our eyes?
Soften our gaze?
So as to see, sense and feel, not just the outer edges of the obvious,
but rather the resonance of every cell ripe with the living history?
A history so specific, so personal, so unique,
yet so much a part of everything existing around it.
And as we seem to be learning about all history,
it seems important that this history also be shared,
rather than forgotten.
This evening is perhaps a meditation on history.
These dances, possibly, a deliberate accumulation of memory.
This dance, a direct translation of my moment-by-moment experience
occurring before you now.
Who is the body of your work?
Where is the body of your play?
When is the body of your loving, your dreaming?
What has the experience of your body been?
What is it now, and what can it be?
Can you feel the breath of the person behind you on the back of your neck?
Let's practice.
Score for being extraordinary.
Slow down, and soften.
Pause to appreciate your breathing.
Rest.
Experience this moment with your whole being,
all of your senses.
There is no place to get to, but here.
Appreciate how peaceful it can be.
Just be.
If you want a new idea, you have to get rid of an old one.
From my point of view, practicing "being" is an idea worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)