The trail which brought Manny and me to Auroville had continued west from Pondy to Mysore, to the Tibetan Settlements near Kushalnagar, over Karnataka's Western Ghats, to fall (rather heavily) to earth on Goa's southern beaches. Good relaxation, if a little empty after the heights of spiritual and community travel we had engaged in to that point. Palolem beach was beautiful, and completely built out for the tourist season, about to break on the beach like a tidal wave.

Because I didn't really have the chance at Verite, I took the time to send mail back east, a note in gratitude of the movement space at Verite Hall. Education was a primary part of the mission of the community, and their large and elegant group center hosted everything from meditation to movement to study circles; in the last days of our stay, Dariya, who is a member of another group at Auroville, offered an evening of free dance. Glad for a reason to move the body with less deliberation and more celebration, I joined her group.

While at the University I studied Modern, and as a prerequisite, some of the highly-stylized ballet forms. The men in the class included: a physically inept football player who had the hots for one of the girls, apparently bad enough to reel him into a class for sissies; some guy looking for a sluff class, who dropped out immediately after he broke his first sweat (somewhere around minute 10 of the first day); and me. What was my excuse? I loved movement, had been practicing T'ai Chi for years, wanted something to counterbalance the competition of the municipal soccer league… oh, and I had the hots for one of the girls (who, it turns out, had the hots for a classmate not mentioned in this paragraph) and I wanted a sluff class.

Maybe I was exploring my feminine side again. Maybe it went with the poetry and with the comparative arts course, or with Accelerated French (pour quoi la vélocité…?), or any of the other shots across the bow of the good ship Bohemia, as it sailed rapidly across my line of sight, without stopping to take me on as a passenger… only to be becalmed somewhere in the Sargasso of the mid 1990s…

At any rate, it was fortunate that the girl's undisguised disinterest turned my hots into coals, and that the immense amount of work involved in the class didn't deter me from staying on, instead engaged me in the world of the physical, and I soon found myself the sole remaining male in a roomful of young and beautifully spirited women.

I could make up stories… to feed my ego and perhaps your imagination. But there was none of that, or not so much, anyway. Instead, I enjoyed the more subtle energies uncovered by exploring a space of feminine strength and determination, allowing connection to occur within limits which made physical contact in class possible, without automatically being accompanied by a sexual charge or undertone. What occurs rather quickly, when one suppresses the primal energies — when you quiet the screaming drive to Mate and Only Mate, those energies which override the senses with a bludgeoning force — what occurs is the blossoming of a delightful garden of sense and subtlety, as though your eyes and your body had been blind before, and new lessons, much better lessons about the nuance in relationship is learned day upon day. Every day is a new fragrance… another quality of touch, sometimes simple, sometimes veiled… the thousand words spoken in a moment's glance… the resistance or softening of spirit revealed in a moment's contact, or even sensed before contact is made, in the passage of air between bodies.

In all of this, the smallest details of a life are written on the breeze of a passage; and I was honored with the opportunity to dance through a semester, with outer eyes and inner eyes opened to so many surprises and delights. Who would have thought, that the sylph who moved like air over water held in her heart a knot of iron, a blacksmith's hammer, turned in a foundry's fire? Or that the retracted spirit who began the semester rigid against the wall, ungainly in her physical form, would blossom as she learned her steps, turn from rags to riches in the story of her life, leave the class as royalty? Who would have known, that woman's beauty, that called so loudly for a partner, was calling to other women alone? Or that all of these energies, when watched through the lens of the physical, without requiring psychological order be made of them, who would have thought they could shift so from one day to the next, one hour to the next; that the human heart as it receives and gives could be so malleable, water turned in its current by the unseen forces of wind and gravity, water sculpted by the gesture of weather into a new form with each passing thought?

I learned in one semester that movement is celebration, and that surrender to movement allows the tension of thought and musculature, which narrows one's attention, to expand again, expand further than imagined or than imagination, and all the colors and textures of living are brought out. My years in Brazil certainly deepened and broadened my previous training, and the joy of dancing — during Carnaval or on New Year's Eve the music and the movement went on 'til the moon stumbled groggily to bed, and the sun was rubbing its eyes to wake again — was the lesson of the land. Dancing, as in Dancing, like the samba or faró or polkas or any of the latest or oldest rhythms and choreographies; or as in Dancing, like the Lambada, the "big lick", which I never managed to be uninhibited enough to attempt, no matter how much I drank, or other forms of what most gringos would consider sex-in-public-places. Whether you are on the vanguard or back in the pack, the Brazilians have got one thing right: the burdens of life are dropped when you sing and when you dance. As long as you are singing or dancing, whether in bed or out of bed, you will have successfully set aside your baggage for the while.

Since my days at the University, I have practiced a number of kinds of movement meditation, and paths for personal connection, from partner yoga to Osho meditations, to leading meditative dance classes ("trance" dance, but where the intention is to be present, get found, instead of getting lost) — but I hadn't really found a space where expressive connection was at the heart of the practice. Dariya's dance evening at the Verite Hall was a step beyond a class where you move to become intimate with your own movement, to know your body's subtleties; instead, the class was free expression on your own if you wished, or with other partners of the group, if you were interested and able to play in the exchange of energy between your Self and another Self.

I had seen this some years ago, in a park in Montreal, midsummer — there was a drum circle, and this guy on a trumpet blowing wild jazz over the pulsing undercurrent, and there in the middle of the circle, the members of a local dance troupe, allowing themselves to move naturally, without any intention to "dance" — that studied movement of feet in patterns, or bouncing movement of body to music — instead, to Dance, to simply allow the movement to happen, alone and then with a touch of hands, or draping themselves around and then away from each other, or in groups moving into and out of knots, on the ground or standing, running or still. I had watched them, fascinated and inhibited, seeing both the beauty and the integrity of contact — this was the movement of trained dancers, who had known each other for some time, and who had built a relationship of trust and professional physical intimacy (and probably less professional as well) that allowed an easy and deep contact, sailing on the currents of the music.

It was into this space that I found myself stepping, unexpectedly, that night in southern India. My great fortune was to be admitted into a group that had already developed some sense of familiarity with one another, and who had some skill in their movements. Two or three of the group had clearly trained in dance, and it was… delightful, I was filled with delight… to express the nuances of movement and touch and not-touch that I have within me, to watch the amazing interplay of energies in even a small circle of people. I use the word energy because all is expressed nonverbally, and the art of movement is in fact the art of the story: someone who has trained their voice can express more in song than someone who has not; someone who has trained on a violin can transport an audience, while a beginner with a violin would make the listener cringe. Just so, those who have trained in expression, and have allowed the body to be an instrument of expression, can communicate on levels of subtlety, feeling the slightest variations of approach or retreat, and the histories revealed in those movements, that would be lost on one who has not taken the time to train… and to watch… and to watch more.

There were few dancers at the Hall, perhaps a dozen, and all so incredibly unique in tone and openness, in the softness or firmness of their energy. This evening came at a good place in our trip, and this trip at a good place in my life, and so what the world offered was received just right. What good fortune to connect with dancers: the trained and freed hearts and movements held such eloquence. So often one moves around or with others, whose bodies have practiced fewer tools of communication, so that at times a body shouts!, at times a heart is mute and afraid, at times an energy is jagged and loud, and at other times almost inaudible. There is such sweetness in the nuances of heard and spoken through this Dance.

Like attending a fine concert: one in which you are, at one and the same time, musician, instrument and audience.

So once again, thank you India: the brief time moving in Verite's space was memorable in mind and within the cells themselves: it was an unexpected homecoming.