Love Dance

sometimes if you move for love, it makes the dance bigger. i mean, like dancing because of love, whether for yourself or for someone else, dancing for love only generates more love. i experimented with this love dance last nite. some really beautiful afro-peruvian music was on the ipod and i made out like i was a whole other person from some other country. not like i really ever claim america as an identity anyway...but for this new dance i was consciously someone Else. Else was like a flower blooming in the light of the full moon, undisturbed by crickets or branches i couldn't see underfoot. i was Else, and she didn't care about a thing except being inside the music. the voices in the music floated in and around my body. causing me to sway and rock. my hips plunged into the peripheries of my known parameters, pushing the limits of space, making the boundaries seem unimportant. it was not a dance of might, but one of curiosity. how many ways could i switch my hips, how long could i hold my balance with one foot in my hand and the other spinning on the ball of the foot.

the lighting was low and the shadows loomed on the walls. i caught myself, delicate as she was, a dense cut-out of darkness mirroring me and expanding my body to the ceiling. what if i was really that tall, i wondered, where then would my shadow go? i followed the line of my body on the wall, seeing where it rippled with the percussion in the music. my shadow, unlike me, was unstoppable. She leaped over the door knob, the molding of the door, the dresser, and even spilled onto the carpet without interfering with the dance.

i spun around a lot, finding something extremely invigorating about the wind of my lapa enhancing my momentum. Spinning is one of my favorite things to do, seeing fixed things become mobile makes the world more bearable. a new friend of mine, who first saw me dancing OSA in Chinatown a few months ago, admitted reluctantly that he thought i might be "a lil crazy". i laughed and told him no worries, in fact, i told him that i think everyone else is crazy for not dancing. he asked why, and i told him, that movement makes sense to me because the earth, the planets, the galaxies are all moving, even the sun erupts. all of nature moves, the clouds rain, the ocean waves the flowers blossom. Everything in nature moves, that's why we have this phenomenon called Life. Life, as it happens, depends on movement. humans, like us, are no less connected to all these other life forces, and as such--we must move too! the more we move, the more we cleanse, the more we heal, the happier we are.

i told him that to me, it's crazy to see masses of other living beings not dancing, or rather, moving through life with such low frequencies of movement. within all of us is an infinite range of motion, and we need each frequency for life. imagine if the ocean only expressed herself in low tide. this mono-frequency of ocean movement would mean we wouldn't benefit from high tide. can you imagine how this would effect fisherpeople, surfers, boaters? everyone depends on the ocean to express multiple frequencies of movement.

so too does the earth, does the whole world's constant vibration depend on the positive, diverse, expanding frequencies of its inhabitants. the next time you find yourself in your body, ponder this: how much movement have i contributed to this life, to this world?

(hint: there's no such thing as "too much" movement!)