Day: February 8, 2016

This one is really for Ivi.

My earlier mention of Buckminster Fuller started the memory mill chugging again, as I began to recall how the Bucky photo session came about. It was because I got a call one day from my friend, P.T., who was deeply involved in the so-called human potential movement (or however that wave was being characterized) and who was working as an assistant to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of “On Death and Dying” and a leading internationally-known researcher into that subject who famously described the five stages of grief. My friend — this was sometime in the mid- or late 1970s –told me that Kubler-Ross would be speaking at an upcoming event — the World Cooperation Council, if I have the name right– that I should attend, that Findhorn people as well as my “hero” Fuller would also be speaking, and that she could probably arrange to get me a press pass.

So it happens that my friend P.T. was an utterly obsessed dancer (she started taking ballet lessons, in a class of youngsters, at age 30, for example, because her parents would not allow her ballet lessons when she had been a young child and she suddenly realized at that late date that she could still give it a whirl; she also was already a formidable interpretative jazz dancer at that point, even as she was pursuing her doctorate in cancer research).  And she had told me that Kubler-Ross had once expressed the regret that she had not spent enough time in her life … dancing! This led me today to try to find the exact quote (from sources like this and this), and I finally found something close on Wikipedia:

In Switzerland I was educated in line with the basic premise: work work work. You are only a valuable human being if you work. This is utterly wrong. Half working, half dancing – that is the right mixture. I myself have danced and played too little.

In our latest Seattle communique from Ivi (Sunday evening?), she mentioned that she was planning on several upcoming dance nights for the next week, including doing one of her new favorites, Bachata.  Here is a vid to help us (me, namely) to understand what this is about.