Ever have those moments of “oh, this is the universe speaking to me coming through the body of my dance teacher.” Little moments that make your ears perk up. You say to yourself, hmmmnn, i’d better take note of this, it might come in handy later on. So we are in our class yesterday and someone in the class asks the question, “How do you make the moves look so fluid? When we do them they seem jerky, forced.” And so my teacher, Helen, thinks for a moment and says, “What makes dance fluid and beautiful is not the moves themselves, but instead the transition between them. Because we are constantly moving we must seek to find the grace in the spaces between the movement.” My universal attenae were standing at attention.
Helen has always described dance as a way of “falling gracefully”, since we are always forcing ourselves off balance and then “recovering”. Just think of what it means to walk. For a few seconds while your foot is in the air you are technically in a process of ‘falling’ to the ground, shifting your weight from one foot to the next. Leg up, hovering for a moment, the foot lands, whew, stasis. Whup, leg up, here we go again. If we are to contemplate it too much we might actually hesitate to even attempt it.
And so I wanted to write a brilliant post that talked about the ‘transition between the movement’, maybe something about how one goes about finding the grace while in the midst of change. Maybe I would talk about how I find the amount of change I seem faced with currently rather daunting. But the words just don’t seem to be coming right now. I am not going through a bad time (as someone has suggested), merely a transition. Or maybe I would just write about how I am still sitting with those words from Helen, letting them float through my psyche so the meaning comes out at some point in the future when I am ready to grasp it. Just like the books one reads at the perfect most appropriate time in your life, they seem to find you when you most need them. For now maybe I will let it be a bit of a mystery.
“Only through mystery do we live, only through mystery.” -Federico Garcia Lorca
later that same day:
So much work to get through today, yet the woods have seduced me with their smells (blooms and cedar), and the sun with it’s warmth. Not a surprise. I am easily seduced lately. I walk through the world in a tank top and my table cloth skirt. My face gives away my guilty pleasures with little patches of bright red showing on my nose & cheeks. The water in the pond begs me to go for a swim. I wish I had worn socks as my running shoes are rubbing quite a bit. Walking in the woods one must always confront change, sometimes in drastic ways. Fallen trees divert paths, dead animals are common, (i’ve seen dead birds, rabbits, snakes, groundhogs, deer, squirrels, fox, mice, and the shiny grey intestines of some unidentifiable creature), erosion alters the landscape from year to year, water moves and shifts, animals build (beaver can take down dozens of trees in one short week!), there is the constant change of seasons, plant strains taking over, overpopulation of bugs (last year was the year of the killer ladybugs), new life (I see two baby ducks here as I sit writing). There are also several young teenagers frolicking in the woods today, humans are so good at altering nature. i am like a protective mother watching them with a suspicious eye.