I’m done with words today.
Maybe it's a cloudy month of winter talking (or not talking) but its certainly a clear feeling. What I really want is to be drowned in loud music I can feel in my organs and I want to dance and sweat until I can’t move anymore. I want to be swallowed up with motion, letting my body move itself in whatever way, untracked, non-verbal, without any agenda except to surrender to aliveness. It feels like some kind of prayer.In my first year in NYC, in 1998, I would go to “Body and Soul” a house party at a club in the west village that was largely alcohol and substance free.
It started at 3pm, and the DJ-genius Francois K and others played to the most mixed up, eclectic crowd of a pulsing, dancing human herd. People came. To. Dance.I would bring a backpack with a change of clothes and a water bottle because I would get soaked through with sweat, and well, that doesn’t bode well for a long subway ride home. The best part? I was home by 9pm. And I love an early bedtime. When I think back to the way it felt to move, with people, without conversation, without phones in-hand, without knowing anyone and leaving with nothing, I feel a deep longing.
Not so much for the dance (I get to dance all the time) but for that kind of togethering. It was like being in a gorgeous storm with a whole lot of people, saving themselves and each other by letting the forces move them. And no one was talking and no one was capturing it to tell anyone about what they were missing. (Ugh, yes, I do hear my grumpy old man creeping in here..”in my day….”) What I want to share is NOT that now everything is worse, and back then it was better, blah blah blah…What I want to share is that visceral experience, the experience of being swallowed whole by a rhythm and togetherness through movement.
The way we are when we stop explaining ourselves to each other, and make space for each person’s moves, and the collective flow.Finding self and another through the body has maybe taken up the most space in my heart. When I led an authentic movement workshop this last Sunday in my local studio, I got a little glimpse of that. It wasn’t like the storm of a club. And we weren’t swallowed. And there definitely was talking. But for about 20 minutes, people found themselves, and found the group and I’d like to think that they were saving themselves and each other by simply being authentically alive together.I felt fed for days.