Dancing beings

not teaching beings

We are dancing beings, not teaching beings…

“Dançantes, não docentes”

Questioning my premises of belonging to home, homeland, family, 
territory, vertical architecture, wars and books, 
my heart, in migration from the questions of here, 
finds hammock time, once again. 

Time to lounge in the warm spring sun, watching red tailed newborn squirrels learning to swing upside down to catch bird seeds… how a freshly fledged titmouse dialogues with his parents, in unmistakenly loud calls. Warm enough for a first huge swallowtail to float away and a first tiny blue celandrina to find dogwood.

And time to find a new Ciclo Selvagem/Savage cycle of talks, ¹this time about Mother Water, where Ailton Krenak suggests it is time for music and for dance.

“Somos dançantes, não docentes/ we are dancing beings, not teaching beings…”

It is an encounter between Ailton Krenak, Mateus Aleluia and Joao Paulo Tukano, ²inside a boat, navigating the waters of Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro.

There are whales around us, Ailton says, they are made of rock. Many see the rocks, but they do not see the whales…

and here an earlier post of mine, where Paulo Velho teaches us how to untie old knots in a hammock, with more from Ciclo Selvagem.

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1. Ciclo Selvagem has a Youtube channel and a website, worth visiting many times, slowly. https://www.youtube.com/@selvagemciclo8

2. From their website, in translation:

AILTON KRENAK is a philosopher, environmentalist and a major voice of indigenous knowledge. He is one of the creators of the Ciclo Selvagem, cycles of studies about life. He lives in the Krenak village, on the banks of the Rio Doce, in Minas Gerais. He is the author of several books, including “Ideas to postpone the end of the world” (Companhia das Letras, 2019) and “A river a bird” (Dantes Editora, 2023)

MATEUS ALELUIA LIMA, from Cachoeira, Bahia, is a singer, songwriter and well known researcher of the pan-African musical ancestry of Brazil.

JOÃO PAULO TUKANO is an anthropologist of the Yepamahsã (Tukano) people, born in the village of São Domingos, in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Land, in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the Amazon. He was the first indigenous person to defend his doctorate in Anthropology at the Federal University of Amazonas, where he is a professor. João Paulo is co-founder and one of the coordinators of Bahserikowi - Center for Indigenous Medicine, the Tukano-Desana-Tuyuka Living School.