Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • Tuned by the music

    Day 28 of 52 Nia dance

    I’ve been thinking the last several weeks that my various Nia trainers have instinctively chosen a routine that was (somehow miraculously) meant to meet my specific needs on any given day. Today, while dancing Deep Dive with Kellie Chambers, I realized instead that I am embodying the RAW guidance: Relaxed, Alert, Waiting. It’s a way to be open and meet the dance at the beginning of class.

    Dancing Deep Dive is like swimming in a warm ocean. It’s all about the flow. And with the first sounds of the first song “Happiness” by Vargo, I knew what was coming, as I’ve danced Deep Dive many times. Today the dance was fluid, the moves all smooth and connected and buoyed by the music each step of the way. At first I thought it was the perfect follow-up to yesterday’s wild and energetic dance experience and wondered how Kellie managed to nail it again. Then I understood that I’m doing this. Me. Relaxed, alert and waiting to embrace whatever comes. It seems a little embarrassing to share this thought process, but there it is.

    Dancing Deep Dive is a good way to understand what trainers mean when they say “dynamic ease.” It’s not ease in the sense of being inactive, it’s ease in the sense of the muscles moving in a supple way, without extreme effort, simply moving the way I move when I get up from a chair and cross the room.

    I imagined the instructors serendipitously designing the class around me. What is more true is that I’m emotionally available to go where ever the music leads.

  • Whoa, kiddo!

    Day 27 of 52 Nia dance

    I just never know which me will show up for dance. Today, dancing at our local YMCA with Kellie Chambers, my six-year-old self ran the show. What a party!

    There was leaping, skipping, laughing, off the beat, on the beat. I barely kept her from bumping into other dancers. Also, there is this side hip bump thing in Nia that I’ve never really mastered. The six year old didn’t care. We (six-year-old me and sixty-nine-year-old me) just flung ourselves happily around.

    What a joy.

  • Pressed flowers

    The practice of preserving plants by pressing them goes back hundreds of years. I began playing with pressing this spring and am now making cards with the results, which come from our garden.

    It’s a sweet little hobby. Learning that American poet Emily Dickinson also preserved plants this way and retained them in an herbarium, a volume of her pressed flowers, was a pretty delightful surprise.

    Harvard University retains this volume, which is now too fragile for even the scholars to touch. But the university has created an online archive of the herbarium, which is an amazing and completely different record or her work.

    It’s worth a look. The delicate flowers and blossoms preserved across the centuries, I find quite touching.