Flamenco # 3 / yoga # 62

I think my body is just not right for flamenco. My teacher is a tiny curvy Spanish woman who has been dancing flamenco since her early teens. I am a large gangly white woman who's been training her body for yoga for the past 6+ years. My body just doesn't get flamenco. I dance flamenco the way a giraffe staggers after it's been shot with a tranquilizer. I have actually started a poem describing all the awkward things about the way I dance flamenco (starting with that giraffe line). I was glad that last night marked the halfway point: three flamenco classes down, three more to battle through. And, you know, it kind of isn't even fun? My teacher is so talented and so interesting, but she works us really hard. There's no chitchatting, just work. One of the things I liked about the modern dance class was the camaraderie that built up among us, but I can't even remember the names of two of the women in the flamenco class.

Not to say that I'm not making improvements. I am definitely improving, and my body is starting to get it. I had a couple little moments last night where the posture actually clicked into place. Then it immediately clicked out again, but, well, what can you do. And the shoes make my feet hurt a lot.

Anyway, enough whining! Only three more classes. I am learning patience and perseverance. And flamenco's good for my hands, anyway, and it's a great workout.

Did 25-30 minutes of yoga this morning even though my yoga room was unavailable. I moved the coffee table to one side and did yoga in the living room. Nice.

books 2009: St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality, edited by Elizabeth Clark

This is just a tiny little volume, but I've been working on it off and on for a few weeks now. I'm returning to my St. Augustine poetry project, thanks to some inspiration from F, and this has been on my shelf waiting to be read as research for quite a few years now. Only a few passages were pertinent to what I'm doing, and much of that I'd read before (in the Confessions), but it was still really interesting to see Augustine's take on these issues, and consider how times have changed since 400 AD, and where I agreed with him and where I didn't. Augustine's opinions here basically constitute the foundation of the Catholic church's position on marriage, and having had that imposed on me for 12 years of Catholic school, I was really intrigued to see where that came from, and what Augustine was arguing against when he came up with these positions.

In his writings, Augustine looks back to biblical times and notes that people like Abraham had a different tradition and thought of marriage in one way, but by Augustine's day times had changed and people thought of marriage in a different way. I found myself wondering what Augustine would have thought of our modern world and how he would judge us. Stuff that might well end up in a poem at some point, so, nice.