Water Dances

Have you seen Rango? No? Get thee to a theater, man!




My favorite scene is a rather insignificant one in the overall plot of this existential homage to spaghetti westerns: At high noon on Wednesdays the citizens of parched Dirt line up on Main Street, empty bottles in hand, and do a little dance. They perform this absurd ritual with deadpan sincerity and particular care to detail. They do this dance on their way to the Great Spigot where they hope to receive their ration of a dwindling supply of water. I like this scene because it highlights an obvious mass-scale OCD quality of human behavior. If we pray just right, eat the right foods, do the yoga workout with precision, then every little thing will be all right.

I had to include yoga here. It's my pet ritual, and one I have to take with a little grain of salt even as I take great pleasure in it and feel it is a useful vehicle for waking up to my life. It is a dance though, and there is a fine line between it becoming an inane rote performance in quest of something else and being simply a kinesthetic meditative experience of the moment. I will continue to practice as long as there are instances of the latter. There are plenty of other rituals in my life that I've shed off like a rattler's unneeded, too-small skin. That's how a snake grows, right? When the skin's too small, it's molt or die.

Anyway, do go see Rango, and then talk to me about it. It's an escape, but a good 'n.