“Shake Your Hips” by The Rolling Stones (1972); original by Slim Harpo (1966)
I wanna tell you ’bout a dance
That’s going around
Everybody’s doin’ it
From the grownups down
Don’t move your head
Don’t move your hands
Don’t move your lips
Just shake your hips
Do the hip-shake, babe
Do the hip-shake, babe
Shake you hip, babe
Shake your hip, babe…
There wasn’t much joy in the COVID-19 experience, I think we’d all agree. The nearly three years of vertiginous tumult seem mostly a blur in looking back, with the raw scars on our collective mind and body and spirit to show for it, not to mention the continued fiscal strife in its wake. I’m not sure why but I began taking photos of these abandoned masks. I think at first I just found them visually interesting. Something curious that hadn’t been there just months before and then was suddenly everywhere in many colors, shapes and states of disrepair. A demon-blossom of sorts. And then maybe they evolved into a reminder of the unpredictable hardship that attends living in this world. A symbol of loss and of sacrifice but also of resourcefulness and resiliency. Put on your mask and keep going. If you lose it, put on another one. Keep breathing. Because nothing lasts forever. Control what you can. And in that process, little deflections often pay dividends. You can always nudge, if not fully “disrupt” yourself. My walk to work was a lessened drudgery for the search of downed masks. I changed my route to increase the odds. Sometimes even strayed into traffic. And when I encouraged a few friends to join in the diversion, it was a second deflection toward a shared experience (the nerd in me is thinking of electrons jumping to another orbital in levels of excitation… but ripples on a pond would suffice). A collaboration! It’s a pretty simple formula, really, be it in science, music or art. Notice something. Study that thing from different angles and perspectives. Share your findings. Encourage others to do the same. Compare and contrast the results. Combine and integrate and alter. Reinterpret. Laugh. Marvel. If you’re lucky, cry. You never know what will emerge — it just might land like the shambolic, drug-suffused, bluesy and yet totally awesome amalgamation that is “Exile on Main St.” Shake you hip, babe, while I shake mine. And for all of this happy-strange experience, I am thankful to my “mask crusaders” (JS and family, RR, BK, AG, DW, RH) for infusing some fun, some real upside surprise into the dour days of COVID. And it is my sincere hope that we might again converge on a new creative project, whether it be silly or serious, fully-realized or fatally-flawed. Something once eloquently said about the journey eclipsing the destination seems to apply here. Cheers!!
Great Exudations 