Dancing in Light

From 1981:

[…] I know that when I dance I feel the life-giving force.  The beat of my heart joins with the pulse of the music, and I breathe with each melodic sigh.  I can experience any emotion and express it dramatically while I draw the reflection of my soul through my body.  I feel.  I breathe.  I move.  I am alive.

[…] I want to communicate and I speak with my hands.  With my wrists slowly turning and my fingers gently following, I pull my hands to my forehead.  […] I lean back and lift my arms to the heavens; the cool melody tickles my face and arms dropping specks of light to be quickly absorbed into my flesh.  The joy of life unites me with freedom and I respond with long spins and skirts swirling wildly about me.  The compelling throb of the drum continues and I stretch my abdominal muscles in slow and hypnotic undulations.  […]  I stop abruptly [to capture the built up flow and relish the space that the temporary cessation of movement has provided with the audience.  This creates a suspended “what next” tension that beckons one in to anticipate and engage with the next movement.]   I resume the movement as I stoop into turns and curves of my hips [with my eyes downcast].

I celebrate life and all that is in it.  I want to express every emotion conceivable.  […]

From 2014 last week:

My heart rate keeps slowing to as little as 33 beats per minute as the techs and nurses in the hospital tell me.  I am short-winded and having a hard time saying a long sentence without taking a shallow breath that is afforded me.  I am scared.  For some time I’d been battling bouts of depression again and trying to get my body to cooperate with feeling vital, but had finally slowed to a grade that seemed like it needed a fully conscious choice to continue.  I needed to hear my beloved tell me that he would be better off with me in his life than without me in his life.  He told me loved me and wanted me in his life.  I needed this in order to feel a strong fight – reason to send positive messages to my vital organs.

I’ve learned to love and to feel love.  I’d been getting over some dharma blues and recognizing that everyone has and is having to continue with strange life events that we cannot understand.  Why there is fortune, why there is misfortune, why some babies live just a few short months crawling forward and dying in starvation, why clueless pedestalized stars get the luxury of eccentricities to the degree of killing themselves through drugs and alcohol and endless partying.  Our stories all have such bizarre twists and turns, and yet I find that I love my friends and family more through it.  We've schlepped along the best we can sometimes and it hasn't always been that easy.  We need to forgive ourselves and we need to forgive others.  I want to go on and be happy, so I bring the words “I just wanna celebrate – another day of living” in to my mind and soul.  I tell my heart I love it. 

I get up from the bed, IV pump tagging alongside, and place a folded towel down to the side.  I’d been training with work friends for a 5k and just a couple of days previous had successfully done one of my training honor runs quite well.  My heart had helped me move forward and breathe rhythmically although I was conscious of my extra weight and how much better I’ll do without the heaviness.

So now I jogged in place to get my heart rate up – to pump vital oxygen and life force through my body – to resume health and get back to the business of living and getting out of the depression.  I was dizzy.  My heart rate would not budge.  I felt no increase in pulse.  The drug they had given me on Friday for high blood pressure which was the wrong drug for me was keeping my heart rate down and I was not experiencing the simple and forgotten joy of what it feels like to have ones heart rate pick up with physical activity to deliver breath, energy – prana.  It was not happening at this time.  I had to rest.  I had to have patience.

Today:

I recalled listening to a TED talk about depression from Andrew Solomon.  In it he says that the opposite of depression is vitality.  I recommend listening to this lecture.  The depression scale inventories ask about if we are finding less joy in the things that used to give us joy.  I’d found in my dharma battles that this had become so.  I’d done so many things, had so many adventures, but wasn't finding the same ecstasy I used to when it came to living life in physical form.  The only ecstasy I was finding was in deep meditative states.  Staying in Samadhi is not conducive to actually moving about and living in the real world.  So what was that secret ingredient that used to give me so much joy to experience life?  --The VITAL ingredient?  The answer required deep pondering that only being taken out of work and being put in the hospital to be confronted with life/death questions would provide.

I went back in time and remembered when I was just out of high school and was experiencing all that I could do and wanted to do.  It was exhilarating.  There was so much to do and I felt a deep sense of infinite human potential.  It seemed that the universe as infinite also provided potential that was infinite.  I could feel this on a visceral level.  Remembering that helped me re-experience it.

I also had to come to terms with the chemistry of our physical bodies.  It is important for me to take drugs that hadn't been important to take before.  I had to realize that my soul incarnate needs the added chemistry just as much as it needs water, nutrients, and exercise.  My body doesn't need to weigh this much and taking the weight off will hopefully make me require less of the human-made chemistry.  For now, I need to feel alive, vital, engaged with my loved ones and be able to re-recall that our souls dance in ecstatic joy in a universe of infinite potential and that love is the most powerful force of all.

As I close this, I’ll turn the music up, and

(from 1981:)  [feel the…] jolt of energy thrust through my being as I turn down into a half-stoop.  [finding brassy rhythmic patterns] I stretch and flow. [spinning and swaying, shaking and raising arms to heaven until I tire and lie down on the floor] my body becoming one with the earth, [imagining my pulse and the earth pulse melding, imagining health and new beginnings for all.]

Let’s DANCE!