Clare and Resiliency

“…The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” — Genesis 2:15.

You don’t have to be religious to understand why this passage appears in the scriptures that define three world religions.

We learned to work with fire. We shaped stone and smelted metals. We came to manage water and to cultivate lands. We domesticated animals for the nutrition and the labor they provide.

Two centuries ago we made an exponential leap. Machines used stream, not muscle power, to mass-produce and transport goods great distances. To feed a ravenous family, we’ve placed more demands on our earth’s resources than during all the millennia before.

“…And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.” From the book of Jeremiah 2:7.

Clare Tallon Ruen is not a scientist but stewardship of the earth is central to her work as a dancer and a teacher.”

Clare diagrams and executes movements, creating what she refers to as ‘movement models’ which she combines with music.

She introduces school children to the interplay of the earth’s ecosystems. Recently she engaged students in a group pantomime to dramatize how sand and wind work to help common marram grass dominate the dunes of the Great Lakes.

She can explain that by creating a “rain garden” you can disperse storm water from your downspouts and filter the currents flowing across your lawn so that contaminants are diluted instead of concentrating in rivers and oceans.

Clare is involved with the concept of ‘resilience.’ It implies that if we’ve pushed our planet beyond a ‘tipping point’ as some scientists fear, we’ll need to find ways to help it recuperate — in the same way farmers rotate crops to let a field rest fallow and fleets retire from overharvested fishing banks.

Discovering the natural world as a child has fueled the curiosity of great scientific minds. Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge and Maria Mitchell wrote that “science is not all mathematics and all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.”

They would have understood and applauded what the dancer and teacher who visits our corner coffee shop is about.