I’m home alone today… experiencing a cough that is wearing me down and congestion that is filling my head with goo. But, I am alone. Gratefully… I am alone.
The house is cool and dark, with curtains closed and gentleness all around me. I am calm, nursing myself back to health, nourishing my soul and being kind and loving with myself.
I could go into beat up… complaining to myself that I’m missing an important workshop, that I’ve upper limited myself.
But the truth is… that is not true. The truth is… I know exactly where I am and what this about.
I am releasing.
And I feel grateful.
I felt called to search for something to watch as I stretched out on the couch, luxuriating in the feel of stretching the full length of me like a relaxed cat. I felt my muscles pull and stretch, twist and turn, as I moved my body this way and that, trying to find a comfortable position wherein I didn’t drown in my own fluids.
And then I coughed. And coughed. And coughed… until I couldn’t breathe. And then I rasped in my breath and calmed my body, willing its temperature to come back down to normal and the spasms to ease.
The movie that called to me was one I had never heard of… One Last Dance with the late Patrick Swayze and his wife, Lisa Niemi. I didn’t know what it was about. And, I really didn’t care. It was a movie about dance. Pretty much every movie about dance is a hit in my world.
I watched the lovely moves of the opening scene fold and unfold on the screen and I was captivated. It was not a top-quality acting piece, but it was still so beautiful to watch for me.
And then… near the end of the movie, Chrissa, Lisa Niemi, did a monologue that moved me to tears and it was in that moment that I realized why I had been called to the movie…
When I was about 14 or 15, I discovered dancing. I was so in love. To dance was this flight, this intoxication, this moving through colors… reds and blues and greens and… It was like my soul sweated out every pore of my body. And I was larger than myself on stage because I wasn’t just this *touching her body*. And I felt like, if I could take all of that, and put it in my dance and only one person got it – got this thing that we are – it was worth it, ya know? So, what did this girl decide to do? She decided to go to New York. And that wasn’t a good idea and I took all of that stuff into class with me and… oh… I don’t think that was what they were looking for. But, I kept at it. I kept at it. And… and then I got into Alex’s. Ya know, I vowed… I vowed that nothing like that was ever going to happen to me again. So, I went on… I went on this big campaign… I went on this big campaign to learn how to be like everybody else because I was not having such a good time of it and it seemed like nobody else was having such a big problem. Okay? So… I went on this big campaign… to learn how to dress, talk, behave… and I learned. I learned… that I felt like a cheater, like a big cheater, because I left everything that was important to me behind with that girl who danced. But, you know what? When you had me dance today, I remembered. I remembered myself. And, ya know… it makes me realize that dance is something you can’t kill. So… what do I have to be afraid of. I don’t have anything to be afraid of. Thank you.
She was speaking my life. Although my love of dance started when I was 3, the rest of her monologue was totally me. Word for word. I left behind the girl who danced and tried to be like everyone else and every day since I made that choice, I didn’t like myself. I missed the dance.
I have been invited out to the dance floor again. And I am ready to dance. And I am so grateful for the invite because my heart has missed the dance.
And for me, dance is LIFE!
