I Am A Dancer

​This is my last night in the States before heading back home to Australia. This is an ending and a beginning.
Ai-yai-yai-yai-yai... Tonight I am an exquisite vessel brimming with feeling, emotions like weather blowing through my soul.

This last six weeks has been a dance into divinity. I have discarded skins, sloughed off stories, dived into my darkness and been swallowed by light. I feel like ouroborous, eating its tail, light into dark into light into dark, the perfect oscillation, the cosmic ohm.

Words can only approximate the entirety of the thing, are mere fragments of colour in my internal rainbow. I need to express where I am while it is fresh, before I return to the shape of my life and this state becomes dream.

So.

I came to the States because instinct demanded I must. That wise ancient voice inside me shook me by the hair, shouted at me in the breaths between sleeping and waking, insisted that I must go, go now, go dance, go dance here, go dance with these teachers. Like a stone in my shoe, like a splinter in my thumb, a maddening itch I could not ignore. Go dance. Now.

I learn in the presence of. Not through books or videos or theories, I need to download information through my body, from someone who embodies that very thing. My teachers have been Jonathan and Lucia Horan, both children of Gabrielle Roth, the visionary who called this dancing path into being decades ago, before shedding her body and dancing now through fields of stars.

So I danced. At first I was self conscious, clumsy, working through the crusted barnacles of past stories, of judgements and projections and old wounds. I danced them all. And the water began to flow, the edges began to soften, and somewhere in the hours and days and weeks of dance I found something profound, something utterly magical.

I am a dancer.
Not in terms of being able to bust out moves or showy tricks. I am a dancer not of doing, but of being. I got out of my own way and there, nestled like some perfect pearl at the centre of my being, this simple truth was revealed. I am a dancer. I woke slowly, at first, shy as a maiden, then with more confidence, more vigour, more spirit and soul.

I am a dancer. 
I breathed life into this newborn part of me that is as old as creation, and she awoke, she awoke, blessed be; and her limbs started to move and her heart flowed with gratitude. Shy and tender and ready to flee, but there was nothing to run from, only toward, toward myself, my life, my truth.
I am a dancer, and every time I say this more tears come.

I am a dancer.
I could write this in the sky, carve it into mountains, shout it into all creation. This is a journey I will never leave, I can only fall deeper into myself and dance what is true. This is who I am, when everything is stripped away. I am the place where earth meets sky, where ocean kisses sun, and my heart is the dance floor and has no edges, because everything is a circle. I understand what it means to be danced, I understand it in my bones, my belly, my talons, my teeth and fur. My wings rip the sky, my fins slip through water, I am a dancer and I am danced by the Isness and the Oneness and everything in between.

I am a dancer.
I danced and the skins fell away, one after another, discarded husks littering my feathered feet. I danced and all the doors and windows in my heart flew open, and winged things flew out and away, free to soar. I danced and the music stopped and I rang like a silver bell, vibrating with love and bliss and connection and purpose, knowing at last who and what I am.

So this is what I am bringing home, this vastness, this poetry, this magic. I am deeply, deeply grateful to everyone with whom I shared space on and off the various dance floors, to these brothers and sisters of the dance who have nestled into my heart so thoroughly I am bereft in their absence. To the indigenous space holders who gifted us with their wisdom and ceremony. I am so thankful to have been cradled by Gaia in all places; to have danced in the desert and jungle and high on the cliffs while the whales sang their slow songs, deep in their liquid dance.
And I am grateful beyond words to Jonathan and Lucia for holding such perfect space, for your endless wisdom and authenticity and for showing up, again and again and again, no matter what. For living this lineage. For blazing a path. For doing your work. For being.
​
Thank you.

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