When I dance I return to sanity. Without it the world is some crazy place where I sit in ergonomic bucket seats, communing with machines all day long. If I didn't dance, I would no longer want to live. I'm not trying to be histrionic, it's just that common sense says my body was made to do all these little twists and turns. For its own pleasure.

I think of Butoh dancer, Muteki-sha. She does one dance, "Niwa" (the Garden) - a single life-long project expressing the continuity of a dancer's life. She says, "Niwa is a forgotten garden, very tiny, very JapaneseSI wanted to see my life from the perspective of a woman seated in a garden, watching it bloom and wither." That one statement sustains me. I am not alone. I've danced through many agendas, some culturally dictated, others self-set: to be beautiful, noticed, loved, respected. To be acknowledged, expert. I have danced through the desire to be thin, agile, strong or sensuous; through wanting to be free of aches. I've danced to blot out emotional pain, to avoid anxiety, to face anxiety, to calm myself, to excite myself, to amuse or bemuse myself. I have worn through dancing to be free of identity and self. I am no longer distressed when I fulfill an agenda yet continue to dance though my reasons no longer exist.

All other meditation practices have come and gone but my dancing meditation or meditative dancing or dance meditation or meditation dance has not left me. It treats me like a bumpy hand-woven sweater - when it sees how well knit I've become, it grasps an end of my thread and tugs. My ego identity unravels into a thin wiggly strand. It drapes over the edge of the world into a nice quiet little nowhere.

Arrival and Salvation

The other day someone said to me, "If I could only get a Dance Meditation practice going I would be okay." Implicit in her statement is the notion of arrival and of salvation, and mostly that arrival is some sort of salvation. She'll be okay when she arrives in an eternally unchanging, reliably discernable safe place. Dance Meditation practice appears to be, before she actually does it, that haven.

But if she does her Dance Meditation practice she'll find herself in the middle of motion. When I was seven I sailed with my parents from Cape Cod up to Deer Island, Maine. We were always shifting and counter-balancing to stay level as the ocean shushed under the hull. Going ashore after a month out at sea, the land came up sledge-hammer hard underfoot. If life-force is the frequently-referred-to ocean, a person who practices Dance Meditation probably begins as a boat and graduates to a submarine. Eventually she will metamorphose into a mer-person, breathing water in. Then a paramecium with defining membranes so sheer barely a skin of separation remains. This deep diving practice can ease her out of that fundamental terror which separation, or the illusion of separation, inspires. It will acclimate her to the nature of who/what she really is - a nexus of connected-ness and incessant change.

I no longer want to arrive because my vision of 'arrival' alters drastically as I evolve, each view better than the last. Arrival itself is ever-changing. Arrive, then set off again. Pack. Unpack. Set-up house. Take it down and leave. After a while I carry less and less, acquire less and less, need less and less because it's too much to haul and dust and insure. In this a process of psychic nomadicism, arrival is just another movement.

These days arrivals, more often than not, skirt the realm of understanding and description. The world is flat and curved. Dense and transparent. It is a place where contradictions no longer boggle me because they fall outside cognitive jurisdiction.

My physical sense has an imagination all its own, drenched with knowing. Its subtle tentacles taste the world and this wakefulness permeates my day. I am always in my body. I walk down the stairs, a stream of bottle green fog trailing me. My white hand reaches for the door and becomes a peony. The petals swivel around the doorknob. It clicks open. I stand. Bare feet and wooden floor share warmth the sun has left behind. The skin from sternum to navel yawns wide and a slow, thick nectar avalanches forth in the same cadence that measures descent after orgasm. I remember the Arabic word for this - 'falaq' It means 'dawn', but also 'to crack open', 'to break apart'. As in, "the sun cracks open the night to begin day". I am always in my body and what a beauty it is.

So this is the sort of arrival Dance Meditation practice comes to. And it may be a salvation for my friend if she too can experience salvation as waking up inside a moving body. This is far from the Christian model where salvation means rising up to heaven as pristine, flesh-less souls. In Dance Meditation salvation lies in recognizing that the body is "...the very space where we become who we are." It is a miracle of spiritual construction. It is a messenger, genius negotiator, poet, musician, painter. All of our body is access to all that is not our body.

Body is a web of consciousness. A pure intelligence.