DANCE for JOY

"I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community. I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul. Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling. Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego. Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers. I praise the dance.

O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you." ~ Saint Augustine





in these past months, i have found so many new sources of joy...they have been overwhelmingly inarticulatable. and yet profound in a way that screams to be communicated, celebrated.

dance has been one of these.

i have never thought of myself as a coordinated person. i quit ballet as a young, contrary girl who preferred pastimes requiring less patience. more ferocity. but it's lived in my bones until now, when i've begun to listen to its music...i started to unlock it a little in my last semester of college when i took a contemporary dance class to add a little spice to my stressed senior schedule...in the years that have followed, yoga's found a way in too...
the part of me that honors the moon and the depth of the water and breath that offer this "EQUIPOISE" to my fire...

and finally, the joy of dance.

now that i'm letting go of a preoccupation with what it looks like, what it's SUPPOSED to look like, i feel free, and it's something that feels authentic...

don't get me wrong:

i still get totally frustrated with myself for not knowing how to make my feet and arms match sometimes, not knowing how to bring myself into alignment with the music as it washes over me...and in these moments when my mind tries to controlcontrolcontrol i loose the connection completely, just like in those yoga poses in which i analyze the synchronicity into fragments...

so this is about the whole person, the free person, the spontaneous yet purposeful person-- the one who finds the effortlessness, the weightlessness in the work, in the sweat, in the challenge that is the natural explosive quiet peace at the heart of it all.

like everything, i can construct this into a metaphor for life, a meditation on the parallels that are, in spite of their constant presence, always epiphanies, revelations...and i do, daily...because all veins of my life, all of the sinews of this body that i'm webbing of the physical mental emotional energies that i am, touch this: teaching running laughing skipping comforting confessing swimming crying listening observing...

practicing heaven on earth so the angel dance is just a natural next step...