What is duende? I had a spare morning while I was in Milan this past November to teach at the Etnosfera Dance Festival and I took the opportunity to take a workshop this from Miriam Szabo and her two assistants, Monica and Carolina. What exquisite women they all were, to look at, to watch dance. They danced with passion and abandon, and the wildness of gypsy duende. Miriam talked a lot about duende, and it had got me thinking and researching! Miriam’s words during the workshop echoed what I say to my students about dancing from your soul, living with passion. It is important to make each step count, and to move with intention. It is easy to get stuck in your dance, to get weighed down by too much structure and technique, or the latest craze in our somewhat subcultural-moving-toward-the-mainstrean dance world, or the need to have the funkiest costume, instead of mastering what you feel, and doing what you do best. I have gotten tangled up in that web on occasion, but have always tried to stay true to my soul, to be authentic, and let the dance lead me to my ultimate expression. More on the ideas of duende to come…

I met a fascinating woman at Wordstock a few weeks back. Wordstock is the large Portland annual book fair, where this year I was involved in two booths—North West Association of Book Publishers, and Portland Women Authors. Deborah Dewit Marchant was the woman I met through another friend, and she was beauty standing in front of me. I don’t mean beauty like the cover of a Glamour magazine, and although she was beautiful to look at, it was her spirit that captivated me. We had a fun and quick connection, and I visited her booth full of her photos and painting books, as well as cards and other products. Amongst her books, I found one that was calling my name—a book of photographs that riveted me on the spot. I traded her my book for her photo book called, Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life. I devoured the book on my trip in Italy. (I love to trade, it means so much more than money…)

And I fell in love with the book, and her photographs, her touching insightful words about her vision and ideas of beauty, and her story of her personal creative process. In this book, her search for beauty involved her photographic journey, and the photos are exquisitely simple and often lonely images of the most delicate of light, as she traveled around the world on her quest.

Deborah writes about…”the difference between discovery and creation. We each have a source inside which grows by living our lives, yet—at the same time—this source is the origin of our life’s map. It is the mystery within us. It is the wellspring of our personal chronicle and the secret code that guides us.”