I hope you dance.

Exerpt from Lee Ann Womack's I Hope You Dance



We stumbled upon this statue, Dancing Bear (by Pauta Saila) when wandering through Ottawa a couple of years ago. He is the first piece of public art from Nunavut in the far north to be displayed in Canada's capital city.

The Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic use the Dancing Bear as a recurring art theme, typically in soapstone carvings much smaller then this one. The polar bear is top of the food chain, the ruler of his environment, and feared by all. Because of this, it is considered a great honour, and a very desirable thing to come back as a polar bear in the next life. And the Dancing Bear is seen to be just that- a person's soul re-incarnated as King of the World, and understanably quite happy about it.

Today, I feel like Dancing Bear.