Flamenco and more

I've been staying with a friend in South West Spain, flamenco country. The landscape is uncompromisingly hot and arid . In some of the beautiful parks in the towns there grow date palms, aloe vera, washingtonias, as well as a vast, gangling giant of a tree, a Ficus from Australia. Its hollow sounding roots extend out at head height, shaded by its enormous asymmetric branches, a tree that shelters and hosts innumerable species, including us below. In David Abram’s new book 'Becoming Animal' he describes us human beings as part of the interconnected web of nature. Often scientists isolate one part in order to understand it, but ultimately everything is connected to everything else. And then I ponder the superb flamenco performance we heard and saw one night . We were enchanted within the dancer’s passionate performance: the speedy and earthy rhythms of her feet, contrasting with the elegance of her fingers and the swooping and bending of her body. I felt I was experiencing a whole ecosystem in one, it was not just one art form, it was a system of art forms, and they mirrored the wider surrounding. They directly related to the passionate and harsh landscape from which it has grown. Maybe, as well as our bodies, culture evolves out of landscape too?