How To Step Back Into The Dance of Life

Last night I had to push my weary body to take that first step back into the dance of life, by returning to dance. It was not easy and it was exhausting. How strange the struggle is, of going forward with life as usual, when life is anything but usual. How to allow myself to attempt to experience joy, without guilt. How dare I, but how dare I not. It felt like the moving walkway in the airport, that you try to find the perfect moment to step onto, without missing a step. To step back into my old life with the people and commitments and find that opening, because yes, things are not the same as usual. Yet those places of solace, those comforting richnesses are still there, I just have to step into them, to find that opening. How strange to enter the dance space and see the poem that was strewn on the floor, the same poem we were dancing when I left three weeks ago, a lifetime ago. There was a comfort in that sameness. Like in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy awakens from her "dream" to find all is still the same, waiting for her as if she had never left.  It felt that time had somehow stood still, and that the dance had waited for me. In reality, it is the longest Mary Oliver Poem we have danced to date, so I was soothed to see that I was there the first day we started dancing it, and would be present to continue the poem until we were done. The line that chose me last night, did not particularly speak to me, from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? My line was, "And I would touch the faces of the daises," but when Winky commented that maybe it meant to be gentle with myself, I felt touched, moved, held, loved. The line my fellow dancer chose spoke to me in a more immediate direct way, the way that I have been feeling " but suffer my devotion."  so I know I danced that line too. This is what it feels like right now. How devotion always seems to bring suffering of some kind. The devotion does not feel like a choice, but is the suffering inevitable? I am trying to figure this one out, to dance it out in my life right now with baby steps, the only dance steps I can take at this moment. And the last line of the poem is, "I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home."