This post is an act of procrastination: writing about something I ought to be doing.
You mustn’t deprive your soul of that which feeds it for too long. We grow and it is the hope that we learn to feed ourselves when we are hungry. Or thirsty for drink or tired for sleep. We ought also learn what it is that feeds our souls.
It has been several months now that a yearning hunger has overcome my insides. I can viscerally feel a gap, an empty, gnawing space at the center of my chest that needs filling.
Feed me with song and sound, with movement and community, love for work that tires the body. Take me somewhere my soul can feast. Somewhere sound vibrates my insides.
I am on the train, sitting, standing, overcome by the desire to move. Imagine not having eaten for four months, and becoming suddenly reminded of your hunger. Imagine your famished self and then your gratitude for just an apple or a piece of bread. Even the soiled, fluorescent cars of the train are transformed into the most enticing space for dancing when it has been months since your hunger for movement has been fed.
Dancing is the ultimate in honesty. Every moment spent doing something else represents varying degrees of lying. Spending too much time lying and not enough telling the truth is dangerous; robs the days of value and meaning.
Things are happening now that force me to let go of all superfluousness. Some suction power is pulling me away from the place I live, the city, the state, the continent. And my life is becoming a speck within a vast landscape of time and space. The view from here is breathtaking. So little truly matters. From here, I know the one meaningful thing I can do while I am alive is to be a consciously dancing, embodied being.
As I fly further and further from that which is not vital, I am filled more and more with the intense certainty that I must have a dancing life. Everything else is literally falling away. My family is being scattered. My friends remain distanced. Every day is filled with uncertainty. The power to define my fate seems to slip through my fingers but then I look down at the hands that remain. These hands, this body, has been with me through greater upheavals. It remains around me still.
Tell me body, what would make you the happiest doing, if you could do it right now?
The answer, so plain and simple,
I want to dance, I want to move, I want to hear music. I want to explore. Discover. I want to share this joy with others. I want to sweat and fall. I want to create through moving form. I want to feel pain, tension and triumph. I want to struggle against gravity. I want to find myself in space and push it around. I want to dive in and work. I want to be immersed in process.
This past week, my co-workers and I have been graced by the presence of a group of Tibetan monks who created a museum exhibit displaying both Buddhist and scientific perspectives on the five senses. They warn us of the dangers of getting lost in one’s senses. They tell us that the body is a subjective lens and our experiences through the body are not always dependable or consistent. True, but as they reach for consciousness and awareness through daily chanting and meditation, I used to walk into a studio – deep breaths, coming to self, getting to the heart of things, dropping out of the madness just through this subjective, undependable body. This flawed, ever-changing mass of flesh and bone. My purpose, my meaning. My anti-drug.