When a 1 1/2 year old child I know hears music being played, she goes close to the source and dances while twirling happily – oblivious to the world around her.

Another four year I know asked to see the Yo Yo Ma and the Mark Morris Dancer’s CD over and over again.

While working with students in a Montessori classroom, I enjoyed watching the children dance and twirl to world music with carefree abandon, using diaphanous scarves.

If you want to appreciate the beautiful and sensorial aspects of dance, bring a child to an evening performance and enable opportunities for dance.  The person who will learn the most in this situation will be the adult.

I was fortunate enough to see “Amelia” a few years ago in Vancouver. La La La Human Steps came to town recently to present their show Amjad.

For more videos, You Tube has a good collection of clips. This dance troupe’s multi-media presentations, along with their raw and sometimes explosive energy, and the slow building of tension towards the ending, is not to be missed. I have seen this troupe four times in Japan and Canada ,and each time the ending comes suddenly and too soon.

David Bowie and La La La Human Steps

If you appreciate the sensorial aspects of life, it’s hard not to like the movie Scent of the Green Papaya. The film feature birds chirping nearby; rain falling on leaves; floating flowers; wind blowing a strand of hair; wooden elements and pottery elements in a home; a cricket in the garden; and, sounds on a hot night, for example.

One of my favourite sounds is the semi (Japanese for cicada). The semi repeats its song over and over again in a rhythmic pattern, with a pause in between. When you hear that sounds you know you’re in the midst of the hottest “dog days” of summertime. Semis are less attractive than the cockroach, but not reviled because they do not get into dirty places. If you can design fabric as thin as a semi’s wings, are a talented fabric designer.

Other Sounds:
This website offers up a number of well known and much loved sounds in Japan – such as the sweet potato (Ishiyaki imo) call.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.

(William Blake, 1799, The Letters)

Image source

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree,or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

(Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862)

Image source

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

(Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”)

Image source

One generation plants the trees under which another takes its ease.
(Chinese Proverb)

Image source

Knowledge is like a baobab tree - one person’s arms are not enough to encompass it. (African proverb)

Watching this commercial, it reminds me of the sensorial impressions that young children receive from the world around them.  Some are positive impressions and some are not as beautiful (unfortunately).

During a walk through an avenue of cherry blossoms, the children I was  with gazed in awe as the blossoms fell around them.

Children help remind us that you don’t have to intellectualize this type of experience.  You can enjoy it without saying a word.

While living in Baghdad as a school girl, I first noticed a pomegranate hanging over a garden wall. It was ripe, with seeds bursting out. Next to the persimmon, it is one of the fruits I consider to be the most beautiful.

“The Fruits of the Earth” (Andre Gide)
Let me tell you of the pomegranate; of its juice, sourish like the juice of green raspberries;
Its wax-like flower the colour of fruit;
Its closely guarded treasure;
Its partitions in the hive;
Its abundance of flavour;
Its pentagonal architecture;
Its skin giving in;
Its grains bursting;
Grains of blood dripping into azure cups;
Drops of gold falling into plates of enameled bronze…

An interesting history of the pomegranate.

Image source .

Image source .