Come Alive

Reverb10 Day 09 Prompt:
Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010?
Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

::

This Invitation:

Each week, I accept this invitation to a raucous revival, a moving meditation, a chance to Sweat My Prayers. It’s a party. It’s a scene. It’s my church.

along with 149 other dancers, I

drop into the music

put my body in motion

leave the confines of my mind

breathe through my feet

dance my barefoot way to that wild and feral place I long for during the week when I’m out in ‘the real world’.

The music is eclectic. Motown. World. Jazz. Classical. Indian. Country. New Age. Old Age. Aquarian Age.

No food. Only water. No small talk. No talk at all.

This party is silent.

Our bodies talk.

‘We speak from the heart, not from the tongue.’ {M Franti}

This is sacred space.

Sweat drips.

Bodies slide and flow past each other as if choreographed finely. Something is directing things, but it’s no mind at all.

::

This wild place within:

I’ve tried to put into words how it feels to go to this wild place within.

It’s so foreign to this made up world we move in day in and day out.

In this place, my body is the earth’s body, and her body is mine.

Dancing, I can feel her power move through the cells and sinewy places within.

She comes up through the feet and out the exhale.

Her anguish makes itself known in my own heart, and I breath it in knowing her anguish is mine. How could it not be?

::

Today, I found my way to this powerful post by Holly Friesen:

Singing Rocks and Howling Wolves

Five years ago while painting in the woods, I had an encounter with a wolf. That creature’s golden eyes pierced through my heart and opened up a much neglected wild place within. My life tore open in ways I could never have imagined prior to meeting with his feral gaze. I started to paint ferociously. My “safe” lovely watercolor landscapes could no longer contain the wild energy that I felt building within. I began to paint larger, then I changed mediums, first oil and now acrylics. I left behind any people, places or habits that could not support this new passionate energy surging up through my body and spilling out onto the canvas in a frighteningly violent manner. Several months into this explosion I was diagnosed with breast cancer and in between daily radiation treatments I would paint, paint, paint. I walked through the woods and started to experience the earth’s body as my own. I recognized a deep connection that I had always understood intellectually but now I was feeling it inside my own body. This is now the place I paint from, that deep wilderness within. A wilderness that sings, and screams and howls with terror and beauty. Yesterday was one of those days in the studio where the earth’s voice just came flooding through my body and bursting onto the canvas in all her textures, shapes and forms. I am in love with paint and all it teaches me about this bond with the earth, and that wolf keeps howling deep within.

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Within seconds of reading Holly’s words, I was transported to this wild place within where I “experience the earth’s body as my own”, this place of the dance where I

Come Alive:

.

Today I dance and come alive.

My hands connect, molasses-like energy stretching

from mama earth to the tips of my fingers.

As I perch on my paws, I feel her spirit

suck me into her tendrils of love.

She tells me to make my presence known.

She asks me to step so strongly on her

that there’s no question I am here with her.

.

She asks me to track myself,

to be so aware of where I am and where I am going,

so much so that my path wraps its way around and

around until I am simply the dance.

.

Today I dance and come alive.

I feel his pulse, absorbing it into my body.

I feel her love, letting it run down my arm and fill my heart.

I feel their joy, knowing it is also mine.

How could it not be?

.

Today I dance and come alive.

::

Singing Rocks and Howling Wolves shared here with the permission of Holly Friesen
The image, Summer is Dancing, is by Alice Popkorn shared under CC2.0.