Marya Mann : Blog : Dream Catcher Ties The Knot

Dream Catcher Ties the Knot

In Honor of the Marriage of
Amy Sue Minor and Joseph Andrew Willems
Saturday, May 16, 2009

E Ola Mau Ka Lokahi
(“May your unification be boundless” in Hawaiian)

the daring of the dream catcher dancers

A magnificent woman who danced with our Dream Catcher Dance troupe in the sizzling Illinois heat one summer 12 years ago is getting married this May.

Through celebration of the Dream Catcher, which symbolizes how we are all connected on the one sacred hoop of life, Amy helped a corps of artists, an Earth Crew, to reinvent a community in 1997.

Now, Amy is renewing the sacred hoop again at her wedding on May 16, 2009. I am reminded how people all over the world throughout all time have been renewing their belief in the sacred circle of life. With each celebration of marriage, the solstices, the planting and harvest times, birthdays — special times that we savor each other in inconceivably beautiful ways — we honor the ongoing circle of life, the source of love, and what keeps the circle sacred and eternal.

The wedding ring is the symbol of the sacred hoop of life too, echo to the sun, moon, our solar system, the galaxies, and the sense of knowing where we are in life, who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going.

During our Dream Catcher Celebration, Amy, her parents Susan and Mike, and brother Michael came together with scores of other family and community to renew our link with the sacred circle of life. We were young enough to think we could rejuvenate our community with a tri-county Dream Catcher-weaving, dance, and celebration arts project, and old enough to know the obstacles that could stand in the way.

But it was like this: once we thought of it, we couldn’t not do it.

In a year-long series of events centered around team-building by weaving Dream Catchers, learning ancient and new choreography, invoking new stories from the real raw material of our dreams and lives, we would quicken the pulse of community creativity, harmonize, get people up and moving, swinging, and singing, and make collaborative art that mattered.

This is, mind you, the work of visionaries. I don’t claim that for myself, but when you see what happened, how joyful yogis and dancers in the heartland of America heard the global percussion music of a St. Louis band called Joia and brought forth a community artmaking celebration that is still being talked about, 12 years later, you’ll see what I mean about the Dream Catcher Dancers. We danced in the center of Southern Illinois, the belt buckle of the Bible belt, often in the middle of 5-ft. snowfalls or 105 degree weather, invoking the dance and our most private and public dreams to reignite the sacred hoop of life.

Some mornings it was so cold the snow popped as Susan, Amy, Michelle, Nina, Pat, Jane, and I would gather for yoga class at the Lotus Studio, or meet for dance practice at Dr. Hays’ unheated assembly room, and later we’d sip cups of hot chamomile tea to unfreeze our fingers and frozen toes.

We practiced yoga and dance, taught Dream Catcher weaving at schools, churches, Earth Day events, dances, and camps, and told the story children have loved all around the world: the story of how the spider spirit came from the dream world to protect all people from bad dreams. When we listen to our dreams, said the spider spirit, we will be happy, and move toward the center of our true selves, producing a prosperous world. When we don’t listen to our dreams, we move away from our true center, we suffer, and all of life suffers. But we can choose the right direction, the right thought or action, the right pathway, and create the life we want.

We would share dreams as we sat around the table, filling out grant proposals, etching out another series of collaborations with artists, musicians, or sculptors, moving into the lilac-scented spring. We inspired ourselves with the potential and beauty of art, but we did something else, in between job schedules, relationship needs, and the ongoing budget panorama. We re-set the mythic center of our lives.

We focused on something larger than ourselves that involved using our whole selves, our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits, for creating art. Amy’s grandmother Bernice Schmidt sewed silky blues and shimmering yellows and purples into show-stopping costumes that entire year. Her grandfather, Smitty, a retired coach, relished his new role cheering “Bravo!” rather than “Score!”

Amy showed up for the demands of rigorous yoga and dance training. She excelled in classes, glowed in performances, and volunteered to help others, but what was so special about Amy was the attitude she brought to everything she did. She had a warmth, a radiant light, unusual for anyone, but extraordinary for a 17-year-old.

This was true of all the Dream Catcher dancers, who learned how invigorating it was to make their bodies into prayers, motions of aliveness, positive affirmations that stir the quantum field of life.

Forming a common body of movement with five or ten separate bodies is an amazing experience. With their movements, the dancers experience the power of using mind and muscle in elegant and rhythmic waves to bond with the unified field. Together, they weave the cosmic threads into a fabric of beauty. In choreographed cadences and in freestyle motion, the Dream Catcher Dancers moved powerful energies that year. Looking back, I don’t think any of us were ever the same again.

I watched Amy grow from a shapeless, pre-pubescent girl child with sparkles in her hair, into an accomplished dancer who brought harmony and grace to everything she did.

Yoga’s geometric and flowing movements stirred a deep resonance in her. She easily moved herself into timeless postures as though she were a yogi in a former life. She knew instinctively how to spiral her arms, legs, and spine in Trikonasana, the triangle, and double herself over into Halasana, the plough, like a shining fold in the hem of the universe, composed of other worlds, yet finely tuned to every awakening cell.

the dream catcher vision

Throughout 1997, the group of five dancers — the Dream Catcher ensemble— joined with other bright, energetic, talented artists to create a community arts celebration. The Arts Ensemble workshops to jumpstart community creativity through dance, music, and theater, inviting everyone in the community to express their values through art, was as significant as the art productions we created. The common willing of a common world, whether it’s a community, a performance, a project, or a commonwealth, is an immensely practical effort, not the least abstract. When neighbors help neighbors, no matter what their culture, color, or past, toward a common good, we inhabit the world differently. We learn to trust one another, and can more easily trust ourselves.

Sharing multi-cultural dances with schoolchildren, we taught them to move their bodies while imagining healthful futures. As their feet touched the Earth they knew the support of gravity, the emotion of delight, the mind of appreciation, and the spirit of their best visions for themselves. They were learning through intentional movement how to focus only on the good dreams, wiring them into their nervous systems, as all of us can do.

We churned up so much positive energy that spring and summer, through yoga and dance practice, by meeting the demands of community, artmaking, and rising to the occasion. Centered like strong pillars of light, healthy in our spines, we took it upon ourselves to honor the Dream Catcher, the ancient symbol of connection on planet Earth. With its threads linking each part of the sacred hoop through a common center, it shows how all people are connected in one web of life, on our one planet, our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy.

Amy’s mother, Susan, my lifelong friend, a yoga teacher and dancer, helped bring the Dream Catcher Dancers to schools, scout groups, organizations, universities, and nursing homes. In art classes, festivals, and events, we taught children to weave Dream Catchers, showing them how to bless each half-hitch knot. They learned the legend that says dreams are the one source of wisdom that is entirely yours. They are nature’s wisdom speaking to you.

We showed teens, children, and adults how to use the Dream Catcher to repel evil and draw in the positive life dream, to send prayers for the individual with each feather, and to bestow blessings with jeweled beads at chosen knots in the cord. They made Dream Catchers for themselves, for each other, as art pieces, prayer objects, and for using all the shells they collected at the beach, for transforming bits of wood, spoons, thread, and feathers. Infusing them with the sacred breath, they learned to whispering, “It is good. It is good. It is good.” And everything became good!

As the dancers teamed up with students in triads and sextets to make 4-ft., 6-ft., and 8-ft. Dream Catchers, we fostered healthy collaborative relationships and shared respect for what art means to each person.

Amy, like her mother Susan, was always patient, a champion of the underdog who thrived in service to others. Like her father, Mike, Amy was resilient, ready to bring strength and skill to the job at hand, whatever needed doing, without complaint or resistance. Except on days when it was so hot the hens were laying hard-boiled eggs. They qualified as scorchers. We worked half-sessions and ran slower rehearsals then.

Singers Ella Anstruther from England and Bonnie Israel from Texas flew in from points East and South to work out musical numbers with pianist Davis Felts and local composers. Amy, Susan, the two Lindsays, Michelle and I danced to their tunes and the musicians made tunes from our dances. Everyone who joined the ensemble was willing to make something out of nothing, which is basically what art is: making something out of nothing. Making sure that what you make is what you really want to make, that you find the path of bliss, the path of least resistance, that you make something beautiful and authentic. Jon and John, Skip and Lexie, and everyone who worked with us that summer felt reengaged and valued in our community. Appreciating the web of life, so life appreciates us.

Often, as we held hands, a dozen or so of us standing in a circle like the Dream Catcher, we would look deeply into the eyes of each other. We found trust there, and it made us feel like we had come home. As collaborators, we felt in contact with a larger source, remembering we were one with the web of life, the grass, the seas, the birds, the stars. People like Amy, Susan, Patty, Debbe, David who played the thief, Brian, and Rich, all who gave such light to others, even as they stood easily in the spotlight.

the dream catcher sculpture

Musicians, dancers, writers, actors, choreographers, a Broadway costumer, a DJ, and a set designer helped weave together scenes and choreography from personal dreams, constructing a public dream, a vision for celebrating how, together, we create positive energies for a positive future. Of course, we were creating it as we went along, collaborating in real community and building the social and technical relationships to accomplish our dream as we went along.

I call this the classical MIUAYGA Principle: Make It Up As You Go Along. This added the thrill of uncertainty, experiment, and surprise to our radical vision. Remember, this was a decade before the T-Mobile Dance at the Liverpool Street Station made the internet rounds. We were out in the actual Heartland of America, Illinois’s golden corn fields, performing outdoors, at concerts, and in conferences, moving intentionally to manifest a good dream, a renaissance of art in the center of our country, in the spirit of the Dream Catcher, in the sweltering late summer heat of the Mississippi River Valley.

Indoors as well as outside on the grass, under maple trees, shaded by sun-drenched oaks, we continually made Dream Catchers, weaving with as much dedication as Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian weavers who reinvented a nation through weaving. Our threads were dances, songs, and words written in midnight story sessions, with choreography and a score designed to invoke a new harmony in our community.

Finally, we finished the new script, “Iktomi and the Dreamcats,” in time to present at the August community-wide event, Centralia’s Chamber of Commerce Balloon Fest. Dancers, musicians, and performers re-created the story of Iktomi, a legendary spider spirit from the dream world, in front of a 20-ft. tall, 1000-lb. steel and rope Dream Catcher.

Brain, the actor who played the spider spirit Iktomi, climbed this magnificent, sky-piercing sculpture at the climax of the Dream Catcher celebration, but it had been built over many months by the finest workmen in Southern Illinois. Centralia Cultural Society stage designer, Arnold Gluck, metal worker Mike Minor, and property man Kevin Wilkins bent and welded the shafts of metal in 100-degree heat while worked with dancers on a nearby stage near the Dorothy Forest.

During rehearsals, people gawked at the size of the metal wheel sculpture. But the daring of it, that something so large, erected finally near Catfish Pond in Foundation Park, carried the whispers in its latticework, the message of renewal through the sacred hoop. . . connect, engage, celebrate, connect, engage, celebrate. . . People sensed the vibration of that connection, the power of our intention, and they were moved by it.

To see how we are all connected to the Earth, and through the center of the Earth, to each other, in pathways that run like the Dream Catcher threads through the wheel, changed the community. We tried to speak about how these streams of infinite loving connection, which run through people and collaborative art projects as well as through the massive distances between the larger wheels of life, our solar system and the galaxies, but we realized the only language to express this connection was the language of light, the vocabulary of the the arts — dance, music, painting, and theater.

In the many ways of love, The Dream Catcher vision and the dances we created spoke to me deeply about how our love for the Earth and for each other can change things. I wrote in my journal one night: “Through this kind of love for the Earth and each other, anything is possible. The one reliable thing we know is that we are here to give and receive love, life, and laughter. The spirit of the Dream Catcher helps us do that. We learn from the Dream Catcher that we are beings of light in a web of beauty.”

community power: the dance of life

As Amy stretched in the studio, ran errands, and encouraged others, she brought her cheerful attitude to the increasing number of tasks we faced as the celebration day approached. The community celebration process and event involved more than 600 schoolchildren, 100 adult volunteers, artists, and educators, and thousands of others who either saw or were touched by the Dream Catcher project.

We celebrated the physics of dance, how we could move beyond our limitations, and find more resilient parts of ourselves. As
we all learned more about the inner meaning of the Dream Catcher, I watched Amy blossom. She wore shoes as little as possible that summer, preferring like the rest of us to feel her feet on the Earth and soft grass between her toes. As we danced, we felt the Earth supporting us, and we were renewed.

Each person brought vibrant talent, skill, and grace to the process, which culminated in an awesome, memorable performance on August 16, 1997 as part of Balloon Fest ’97. In the sizzling heat, hundreds of people watched as we reenacted the sacred tales, danced the ancient dreams, and sang the songs that continued to echo in people’s minds long after the celebration was over.

renewing the sacred hoop

We have the ability to honor what is most alive in us.

We can honor how you and I are alike, or we can note the differences that keep us apart. We can choose.

The choice made that summer was to honor life, each other, and our Earth.

What struck me most about Amy was her dedication to the dance of aliveness. When people show up with passion for beauty, gratitude for being alive, and the commitment to making every day a work of art, they are successful. The entire community rose to meet the moment, re-creating this, the true art of life, the dance of aliveness.

That’s the visionary art I want to write poems about. That’s kind of creativity that is reawakening the world. It’s the art that overflows from beautiful, open, and genuine hearts. You know it when you see it or hear it. There’s a tone of authenticity, an elegance, a quality of simple truth. Not glitzy, but Gaiacentric.

“Oh my Gaia! It’s about time!”

Amy and Susan and all the ensemble members showed me this kind of elegance, reshaping old alienating tendencies from a former time into a natural harmony, an true ensemble, where being together to enjoy life is the point of the day, even when we were scavenging for a generator to run the music, drummers who could meet on Tuesdays, and cars with gas to buy materials and carry us to the next Dream Catcher day, dance, or event. The ritual of it, the orderly ascension of original, live performance, teaching what we cherish, and of being able to do something to help restore peace and ardor in the body, and thus peace in the world. All creation, we understood, came from this basic outlook: No matter how hot that summer got, we would always remain cool. And connected.

To all the Illinois folks who participated in the celebration arts process that sage-scented summer: BRAVO! You helped to bring brave new dance and community theater to thousands of students, audiences and supporters, and sparked changes that reverberate even now, and throughout the future. You are true artists of the heart!

Now that Amy is getting married to the love of her life, Joseph, at Majestic Falls in Aviston, Illinois, I send love from Hawaii to bless your wedding, in the Heartland of America. May your love for each other be reflected many times over, and may our powerful circle of love expand.

I send you a gift of imagination, a lei of sacred plumeria flowers from the Big Island. Entwined in their white-velvet flowers are wishes for your dance through life to be healthy, prosperous, and wise. I wish you lots of crazy wonderful fun, rolling in the waters of life like two dolphins drinking in the essence of the sea, in a way that will enchant you both forever.

Remember this one truth: whatever is the question, love is the answer.

I send the vision of you and your family, Amy and Joe, Mike and Susan, and all your clans, living, giving, and receiving more and more light.

E Ola Mau Ka Lokahi. “May your unification be boundless.”

And so it is!

Big, Beautiful Blessings,
Marya

To find out more, please contact us.