Similarities

Last weekend I attended my masters class. This time it was our creative movement class. We discussed and practiced many different ways to incorporate movement into our regular classroom activities. It was great to see how teaching second graders about the states of matter could also include movement. The teacher had her students (us) move like the molecules in a solid, then a liquid and finally as a gas. I am sure actual second graders would have been more creative in their interpretations. I presented a lesson on the layers of the earth, what they are made of and how they move. I asked the students to get into groups representing the Inner Core, the Outer Core, the Mantle and the Crust. They came up with a movement to represent their layer of the earth as well as a chant they could say while doing their movement which would include some information about what the layer is composed of and what sort of movement goes on in that layer. It was fun to see members of my cohort enjoying a science lesson.
The Sunday afternoon part of the class was when we presented our group creative movement project. Our cohort was split into four groups and we had to come up with a movement piece that reflected our similarities and our individual natures. When we first got into our group, I thought we were not going to have much in the way of similarities. However, as we started discussing who and what we were, we found many similarities. The project we finally came up with was a slide show with photos of ourselves and our ancestors and our descendants to some gentle music. We moved as the music was playing (I wouldn't call what we did dancing exactly.) One of our group read the poem by Robert Frost, Two Roads. After she finished we did what is called active stillness (frozen poses) while each of us told or recited a quote that meant something to us. It was amazing how well the quotes all fit together. We then went up on some risers in the space we were using and joined to each other with some beautiful scarves. We had many of our class feeling something special by the time we ended. I was amazed at how similar, not only our group was, but how much we had in common with most of the cohort. By the time we finished the discussion on our presentation, I felt we should sing As Sisters in Zion.
I find we are more similar as women than I had previously thought. We need to celebrate our similarity as well as our uniqueness.