Groping in the clay, like a blind man at the beginning of the world, feeling the moist insides of every flower, the sculptor reveals a dream. Forms agglomerate in the swamp of the first gestures; a monstrous being generates an angel. The secret animal emerges from chaos, and the anathema is the body itself. Fingers press the consistency, create air and transparency, endure gravity. The caress is rescued from eternal chaos. An unbridled beauty reveals its insides for the first time.
(by Rolando Toro for the sculptor Dorli Signo)
One of my dear teachers, Eduardo Bustelo, the most intelligent and noble intellectual from San Juan I ever knew, had the experience of sustaining his greatness in humility. It was splendid to share conversations with him. He knew as many countries as he did books and enjoyed a visionary intellectual openness. In those years, while I was turning 25, he was writing El recreo de la infancia (Childhood Recess). In those conversations in which I bombarded him with existential questions, Eduardo responded with a curious certainty: “After 40, you will understand life and you will no longer ask yourself so many questions. You’ll just want to have time to play.” I didn’t understand the mystical answer, but I was content to listen to him. Eduardo died at the age of 69. Perhaps I will live a long time, but I would have liked to visit him more often. He knew how to shape his life like clay.
Bustelo believed that during the fourth decade of life, people gain a certain wisdom that allows them to unify criteria, theories, and beliefs with the experiences that arise in their personal history. By integrating these into a lifelong learning process, we can recover the innocence that we lose in adulthood due to the social norms in which we are educated.
At my grandmother Carmen’s country house, where I lived during my childhood, hot summers were synonymous with walking barefoot, bathing in the drought, climbing the plum tree to write stories, harvesting fruit, playing at treading grapes to make wine with my grandfather Juan, dancing among the wildflowers, and making crafts with clay. Those, and so many other things, I stopped doing when I started working, and ironically, I returned to them to shape my life, to create another form, to give meaning to my breaks, to heal myself from work stress.
When I finished the biodanza training, I wanted to go to the call of clay, a line of deepening that Rolando Toro calls “probing into the unknown”, from the unconscious to the enlightened consciousness, of which there is very little material and to facilitate it with the mastery of those memories of my muddy childhood because not only am I already a lady of forty but I understood life.
On this occasion I bring to the writing, my experience of clay-dance connection so that you are encouraged to go through an experience of ecstasy next summer.
The human ritual
Since ancient times, both people and animals have used mud to cover their bodies as a ritual of cleansing and purification. Today, native peoples of Africa and the Americas hold sacred connection with nature and use mud in a ceremonial way to treat ailments, invoke protection, abundance and connect with spirits. Since anthropology, it is known that the human of all times has been able to take advantage of the benefit of clay in skin care and the manufacture of kitchen utensils, construction and power objects.
Clay originates from the decomposition and erosion of feldspar-rich rocks (mineral species of various colors that are part of igneous rocks, such as granite) and by the action of natural factors such as water, ice and wind. This alchemical process transforms the bedrock into fine, plastic particles, rich in hydrated silicates of aluminum, with sodium, potassium, calcium, and small amounts of magnesium and iron. Minerals needed for health care.
The dance that also has a ritual framework linked to the manual contact with clay slowly immerses us in the depth of the sacred bond with the primordial. Biodanza in Clay, created by the Brazilian priest and facilitator Dorli Signor, is a proposal of deep expression to inhabit humility and let out the internal flow of life experiences. The contact with a tangible mass of water and earth has a powerful therapeutic effect capable of creating infinite forms, both aesthetic and those with meaning. In addition to enabling us to create new experiences from what breaks or ends. Mud is a material that represents, metaphorically, the genuine human condition. In it we find the experiences that make us be who we are and the ability to reshape what we want because, as the Spanish philosopher, Jorge Larrosa, says, “experience is what happens to us, what happens to us, what touches us. Everything that crosses us and changes us”. Clay has the virtue of greatness that dwells in humility. The wisdom of silence and the immensity that dwells in the desert. The mud rescues the innocence that we keep under existential shells rehabilitating the ecstasy of our identity, the return to the simple and the openness to pleasure. Immerse yourself in the mud healthy, repairs and rehabilitates the possibility of rebirth.
Among the body benefits of clay baths is relaxation of the central nervous system. Total immersion in mud can relieve pain, reduce inflammation in areas affected by arthritis, rheumatism, throat conditions and muscle problems, for its anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties. It also has mineralizing, absorbing action and power to neutralize acidity improving healing and skin health.
The workshop of biodanza in clay provided it in a form of experiential retreat during the summer, in lands sanjuaninas, on the banks of the Rio de los Patos and under the divine protection of the Andes, with emotional dynamics of radicalization and immersion in a clay pool for people who already practice biodanza. A great possibility to connect with body cenesthesia and take advantage of the medicinal properties of clay.
Gratitude to my teachers, farming ancestors connected with the land and my mother gardener, for allowing me the mud in childhood to be reborn, from the most genuine, as an adult.
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