DANCEMEDITATION

“Flesh is the only destiny.”
––Kim Edwards, from The Secrets of the Fire King

What does Edwards mean? She goes on to poetically detail the protagonist watching her autocratic father rot into death before her eyes and under her care. And still I don’t understand the opening line. But I agree in my heart. Flesh is the only destiny, the only real challenge, the house of hope, the Reign of Terror, the prison, the ecstasy, the doorway.

Doing daily practice is––really this is an embarassment to admit because the remembering and re-experiencing of daily practice shows how I’ve forgotten to do it–-a joy. Daily practice gets easier every day. My body takes me to her Body waiting in the sanctuary. The waiting One seems to always be wearing silk. She slides her arms around me and I slither into Her and we begin our rolling around to the music, our giggering and gigging and gigue-ing. Daily is easier. Once a week is tough; plenty of time for muscles and tissues to have gotten involved in other things––tension, sedentary positionings, forgetful locomotions, rigorous and unbalanced parcel toting. La la la…One hour of Dancemeditation a week is buried under the bricks of bad living.

But daily work, even just 45 minutes, begins to engulf my concsiousness. It sings out long after the session stops, molding the edges of air around my walking legs, stroking up my back as I lean forward to pick up my grocery bag. Daily practice turns my day into a Dance. It mothers me all day.

Your dance will heal you.
––from my mentor, Phoebe Neville

It was utterly gloomy here this morning. When I first woke, in my leaden lower body I remembered Grandmother. She lurched slightly as she walked, her bowed legs, which eventually gave at the knees, wrapped in a kilt or wool skirt. She loved to walk in the woods, stop and watch the birds which she knew well––all their names, male and female colors, and their songs. Her lower body, to my child-eyes, was a vast, tipless pyramid. I never saw her thighs. Ever. Not in pants. Not in a swimsuit. Not naked by chance. This morning my legs felt like that.

Then I slept. Sleep, like rain, melts away the crusty points of pain. I repeatedly forget that sleep is not only about psychic rest but also about mending torn bits. My legs are back again with all their distinctions.

I will performing a dance dedicated to grandmothers this Mother’s Day as part of Echo’s Mother’s Day Celebration in NYC. So perhaps this sleep gathered my own Grandmother to me. Or let her out of me.

My dance will heal me. It will. It does.

Tags: body memory, sleep dancing

Shadow & Light again, only this time I cast the front of my body––her ventral plane––into shadow and illuminate the back, the dorsal plane.
She is iridescent, as if covered with fine rain-bowing scales. A reptile. An upright fish. I feel how I was once a fish, my belly mostly facing the pull of gravity while the a little filigree of fins carved wavy lines as I swam, peeking up once in a very long while above the succulent ocean into something so thin. Air. Wind. That was many incarnations ago. Now my back is mostly where I sleep. In my dreams, it communes with the center of the planet.

My friend Anastacia tells me that in the Hawaiian system of body significance, the front of the body is the Past, the middle is the Present, and the back is the Future, because we can’t see it…

Tags: dorsal, Shadow & Light, ventral