< 501: Verb

I sat beside a hay bale on a farm in Vermont and surveyed an open barn doorway lit by twinkle lights and vibrating with the memory of fiddles. The eves dripped, conjuring thoughts of an evening punctuated by skipping through puddles, whooping with the thunder, and carving paths through the torrents with a blue feather. Across from me as the last of the droplets slid down my eyelashes knelt a fellow weather worshiper. Connected by the rain we talked, simple things mostly-

Where do you live?- A yurt in New York, but I went to school in Boston



Moonshine Music Festival (c) TW Collins

What for?- Electrical Engineering

And the ever difficult,

Why did you choose that?

 “I’ve always been fascinated by making something out of nothing”

Simple, but stupefying.

The poetics left me reeling.

Today it is raining again and as I reflect back on this encounter I have realized a truth about why I have chosen to be an artist.

Hold on to your hats- None of that “It makes me feel free”, “I can let out my emotions”, “I can say the things that words cannot”, Hallmark business.

I dance for the same reason that humans are enthralled by newborn babies.  

Confused?

Understandable.

Let me return to farms. I recently watched FarmHer, a PBS documentary profiling women in agriculture. About halfway through the program, the videographer zooms in on a small tray of verdant potted seedlings as a dirt encrusted hand motions gently, reminiscing on farming and miracles. Ten days prior, these tiny plants were encased in a protective coating underground. Cells negotiated and differentiated. Roots spread out. The reaching fingers soaked up water and made a deal with new shoots- I’ll hydrate you if you nourish me. Gametes battled their way towards the light. Shoots wriggled past soil, fertilizer, perhaps an insect or two, and the lucky ones pumped their fists triumphantly through the Earth. Viola. Plant babies.

We are floored by birth, but it’s not the baby itself that is miraculous. The tiny warm thing squirming around becomes a source of wonder because of the processes that brought it there- conception, pregnancy, growth, cell division, development, turning a thought into a creature. Looking at that baby, we don’t see an object, we see all of the actions that brought the baby here. The miracle is that those actions ultimately manifested as a person that will continue navigating the world through yet more actions.

The baby in a parent’s arms, or pushing up though the soil, or stumbling around on 4 legs is the physical manifestation of millions of processes. It is evidence of verbs.

Life as an artist is about being aware of those processes. It’s difficult to understand because the rewards aren’t often tangible. In being this way though, art is miraculous. As a performer, I get to be that newborn, the result of thought made manifest and brought to fruition, of making something out of nothing.

I dance because I am a verb.

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