And Then You Dance!

Last night I was overjoyed, to be able to have a clear head and heart and attend dance. It was a celebratory dance for me, a celebration of life! I danced with every bit of heart, and soul and energy I could draw from within, as we said our final goodbye to dancing Mary Oliver's poem, The Messenger. We had been saving our weekly lines in an envelope, and last night was the night we each gathered our lines and rearranged, reconfigured, reinvented, transformed and paste our lines onto our envelope to share, and then to dance. The poems my fellow dancers spontaneously created, in reaction to their saved lines, moved me and astonished me, (one of the words of her poem, by the way, was ASTONISHED). My lines, created themselves into the perfect Messenger poem for me to dance my celebration. I continue to be grateful for a place to show up and dance my life, however it shows up at that moment. Having a place to retreat to each week, when my life and my body allow, is a blessing, as is my dance community. It is my spiritual practice. The past week was more challenging than imaginable, and being able to dance it out , was a true gift. When I danced on Sunday, my dance was much different. It was filled with fear, trepidation, tentativeness, the unknown, contraction, smallness, powerlessness, rubber leggedness, and emotions that I could not even begin to name. Last night was different, a very different dance. It was a different life I was dancing in. A dance of new beginning, of hope, of gratefulness, a feeling of a personal Spring. This is how my poem became my dance of the moment, reinventing Mary Oliver's words, to perfectly fill me, the way I needed to be filled last night. Her words are like chameleons, and they never cease to amaze me, even when we took liberties with the original poem, to be what we needed her words to be for each of us:

"We live forever.

Are my boots old?  Is my coat torn?

We live forever.

The phoebe, the delphinium,

We live forever.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird~~

and THAT is how and why,

We live forever"