MayDay Parade 2007
Section 2 Leaders:
Bart Buch
Lindsay McCaw
Anne Sawyer-Aitch
When we forget the water,
We forget the child
who begins in the water.
When we forget the child,
We forget ourselves,
and then
We forget the world.
-Florence Dacey (1981)
At Some Point We All Crawled Out of the Water
We are walking, permeable membranes full of the stuff. We celebrate the fertility of this glorious substance and the beginnings of life in the Great Pond. Various forms of life -- plant, animal and human -- that quicken and grow in water are represented, such as water lilies, lily pads, frog eggs, tadpoles and frogs, cranes, ducks, and human babies.
Our Pond is Water at its best, when it is left to do what it does well -- provide a healthy, nurturing environment for life to surge and emerge.
- Anne, Bart, & Lindsay
MayDay Parade 2007
Somos Agua - Sunday May 6, 2007
Masanari Kawahara
Parade
Section 2:
All Life Begins in the Water
Toda La Vida Empieza en
el Agua
Our Father of Waters, with his singing flotilla, is inspired by the rhythmic, musical quality of water. The boats play with the idea that we are all carried by or supported by water,while the image of Old Man River runs through many traditional songs.
Our
Mother of Waters is inspired by various water goddess traditions,
including Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec
goddess of running water and springs,
and protectoress of all new-borns.
She is often described as having water lilies in her hair and a “jade skirt".
Poem of Procreation (excerpt)
Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and
of America,
The drops I distil upon you are the drops of fierce and
athletic girls,
and of new artists, musicians, singers,
The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their
turn,
I shall demand perfect men and women out of my
love-spendings,
I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I
and you interpenetrate now,
I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them,
as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,
I shall look for loving crops from birth, life, death, immortality
I plant so lovingly now.
-Walt Whitman (1856)
The Peace of Wild Things
When the despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives
may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great
heron feeds,
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry(1968)
Photos on this page by Liz Welch