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How I love the movement that has come in my life. As I glide into old age, dance in various guises comforts me. For exercise I now do a Nia class, but under that, feeding that, is something called dance meditation. A sweetness has come from moving this body. Dance meditation makes me go within. The moving shakes me up on many levels. Here I am, caught in the mental box writing requires, hours sometimes at the computer, and if I make time to move, my world readjusts, moves into now, a physical now. I become more than a forehead. I become present.

I also practice Osho’s active meditations. Why meditate at all? It beats taking Prozac, and I find myself deepening and softening. I can’t have my heedless, headstrong, unthinking youth back. Meditation makes that bearable, makes this part of my life interesting. In India, it used to be (may still be) accepted that the latter part of life was about spiritual journey. That  journey makes this stage of life sweet instead of bitter, fathomless instead of regretted.

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Beautiful and fluid

I realize I have a relationship with one of my veils. I have three of them: a cool blue for my remote moods and a cream with smears of color that I don’t know yet; but it’s my orange pink one that always talks to me when we dance together. I first got to know her during a veil session when Dunya demanded that we dance and move in micro-second slowness with our veils. Beautiful and fluid in my hands, I was startled to hear her suggest, hello, why don’t you do this….and we’ve been vibrant dancing partners ever since. She’s been Spirit that caresses and enfolds me and that I throw back to the sky in joy. She’s been Butterfly that waves and pirouettes before me. She’s been Cover that I stand beneath to slowly show my own shy soul. She’s been the wings to my angel, the play to my child. At the Fall Intensive, she shivered at my feet like a fairy sprite. She invited me to leap in and out of the hole of floor her silky fabric had left uncovered. How many times can you do it? she asked, and I was a girl again in my response, jumping in and out with glee. Then she suggested we shift between and among the other dancers, sneaking in through the tight holes of spaces they left in their own dancing. She is naughtily playful. She is reverent and floating. She’s glorious. I love to dance with her. Not for the first time, I had to kiss her on her cheek when Dunya summoned us off the floor. She’s my sweet orange spirit, folded away now in my suitcase and later into a drawer where she’ll lie fluid and plotting both mischief and dear devotion for the next time I unfurl her and send her shimmering into the void of Me. 

Written on the plane home from Dance Meditation’s Fall Intensive