This isn't the first time I've written about dancing, but this isn't something I've written recently. I've been reading through some of my old journals this week and realising how I haven't been sharing much of my writing with the world for some time now. So I have decided to offer some bits from my old journals.
This excerpt is from a couple of years ago. Life had completely changed in the blink of an eye; I became pregnant, then suddenly I was a mother, and then overnight the world closed in on itself. Nothing within me was the same as it had been less than a year a previously, and the world around me was also transformed.
There came a point when I realised something in my life was missing and then one day I realised it was that I had stopped dancing. I wrote this brief piece at the time of that realisation, almost as an homage to the many nights I existed only to dance. I realised I was grieving a way of being that was no more and I was deeply missing the version of myself who inhabited the night in such a way.
Coming back to dancing felt like coming home; but that's for another day!
Can you relate to this? How does dancing make you feel? Have you forgotten to dance lately?
If so then it is definitely the time to find your way back to your body and dance...
Journal Excerpt #1 The Way I used to Dance
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I used to dance.
I’ve been remembering the way that I used to move my body; as though there was little consequence. The lights were low and I felt them shimmering upon all of us, fairies floating in lasers - or was it simply dust?
I can still taste the magic on my tongue. It is salty and fresh, a sea breeze caught between hundreds of worshippers, with the glaring sun squashed into our semi-darkness. This was the temple of my undiluted dreams where, sometimes seven nights a week, I would pray and give confession; I would pray and give confession with my hands, my arms, my torso, my hips. I would stomp and writhe my deepest truths into the sticky floor. I was often unsure as to whether my eyes were open or closed; whether I was singing or silent, but no matter what, my body would move.
I was a gazelle, an elephant, a giraffe, a lion. I was slinking through grasses on the Serengeti plains. I was invincible, elastic, ecstatic. I was anything and everything I could conceive of, all at once. When I would move my body, reality shifted with me. Music flew through me and I became shattered glass vibrating itself back together.
When I think back to these days and nights, I remember the way I would sense everyone in the room. There was such an oppressive air, yet somehow, stifled in the shadows, it felt like freedom. I wondered to myself, did Eve know the apple would taste this good?
I lost any sense of individuality; I was the drop and the ocean, and the wave was surrounding and within me. When I moved like this, my body stopped being definable matter. All particles of me joined forces with a larger cause. I became a whirling spin-off of a larger entity, growing and shrinking as the music built up and dropped - pulling in and out I was woven anew on a spindle of tantalising beats.
Tonight I am thinking about the way I used to dance; remembering the way I would move my body. I’m wondering when I ceased to be so wondrously connected to Earth and sky; when I let my hips keep hold of their secrets until they froze and became afraid of cracking open again.
