I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

First I believed in magic, and then I didn’t, but that was only because I had learned - or been taught - the wrong definition.

You see, when the faeries existed, back then, when the spirits existed, they really did exist. When a quarter appeared under my pillow (or was it a dime? or was it a note carefully written by someone watching out or me, from another world?) it was physically, but magically was not, by the hand of my father or my mother. When I read C.S. Lewis’ amazing words of hope and of challenge, it was not as if those worlds and those creatures existed; they were there as real and as tangible as my breakfast, and realer, perhaps, and more tangible than most of my lessons.

Somewhere among the trials of innocence, lessons of winning and losing.

And then: that young mind, that open heart, has almost no distance to travel, from saying “I won” to “I’m right”, and… ah! Then my dear hearts, dear children, you have lost your sight, your liberty of movement, and each step forward will be a step to be retraced.

I have taken a few lessons from another text. I traveled, I went as far as I was able, to Asia – such gratitude to an early lover, who was my guide to losing self, how could I have done it alone? – and stayed until I could not recognize my thoughts. They came and queued up at night, they spilled onto page after page of notebooks, they tripped out into the night over a bowl of gudeg and a cup of sugary tea, they danced back and forth from my west to their east, a blurry trance of who? who? who am I? I seeded doubt like a farmer seeds rye, deliberately, to defeat the ragged weeds. I embraced doubt, with love, like a man embraces his partner, or a woman embraces her mate. Ah, into that beautiful blindness.

There are two kinds of roads.

I see the first so clearly: I can allow my eyes to drop from the horizon for a moment, and there are my feet, one before the other, one after the other, while the world slips away underneath a pace at a time. That’s about two yards, if I am running, or one if I am walking with purpose, and maybe only a foot if I am sad and feeling slow. I can close my eyes and see that progress. I can close my eyes and feel my weight, feel the world’s attraction, and the gentle roll of heel-to-toe that’s like a dance, we learn to stand and swing to it, and make our lives the music of accompaniment. Those magical shoes you put on early and can’t take off, that dance you to joy and to sorrow, from birth to death.

The illusion of independence begins with the snip of the umbilical, is furthered with a slap, is fulfilled as we are weaned, walk, and then withdraw to our own beds; we lean into our own efforts, rise to our own challenges, inflate with what we perceive to be our personal successes, deflate before our personal defeats. We desire a fruit, find it, and bring it to these lips: so the feeling of hunger passes. We choose a destination, a mountain peak, and climb with these limbs, fuel this body, attain the summit. This body tires, we lay it down, and it finds rest and soon recovers. We reach and do not touch, and our heart sighs. We touch and the one we touch departs, our heart cries.

Here is the canvas of the sky: one long stroke of gray where it is brushed upon the blue blue pastel of the day, it is an overhead wave, a sun-shade, a blanket pulled up past the eyes, water-color wrung from a sponge, a light’s-decay. And then it rains, of course. As cold as it can be, with just enough vigor in the shortening sunbeam strands to heat those flecks of ice and melt their hearts as they hurl earthward. So they fall instead of float, merge instead of mass, drop instead of drift, and winter waits another week or more to make its white appearance.

And every lover brings as his or her gift another reflection of the quality or your loving, and the  quantity of your love.

Sometimes the arc of a love is as long as years, sometimes a lifetime. Or the music of a relationship may last some months, crescendo, soften, then complete: the dancers bow to one another, and leave the floor to take a ittle rest, or step to find another dancing partner. Or there might be the shortest, sweetest meeting, like a flash of light or lightning, the flash of a camera, the flash of his smile, the flush of her face. No matter the length, all loves are transformed; all loves end. If the agent is time or illness, if the agent is fear or frailty, even if it is disinterest… all loves polish some facet of your life, show you your desires, light up the little dark places you had kept hidden, and make your loving better (if you are watching), and your being warmer and brighter (if you are watching or not).

The beauty of travel is not the road but instead the footprint of the traveler; not the wind but in the taste on the wind; not the cathedral but in the stillness its walls contain, in the cool of water two hands cup from the river; not in the kiss, but the moment before the kiss, the sweetness of meeting, the poignancy of parting; not in the song as it reaches the ear, but when it reaches the heart, or shakes the limbs into dance; not in the fruit but in the body’s knowing how fruit sustains; not in sleep but in the freedom of dreams; not in life but in the fine beads of living that comprise it.

Samuel Pepys did not have a laptop; but if he did, imagine the number of words.

I imagine also that the kinds of conversations between Sam and his digital ego. Cataloguing the mundane, the divine and the profane, the human attempts and the human failures, the hope that attends the former, and the regret which follows the latter. In the polaroid snap of an internet eye, it is all captured, clearly or blurred, and offered up like a neon flash on the downtown strip.

So many people looking for new work these days. Not only because their position was economically eliminated, but also early-life or mid-life change, or a lack of satisfaction or fulfillment that has crept in over time. On a long mountain hike this past weekend, two of our companions spoke of their desire to move out of their current employment, and into something… new. Something better, and not only in terms of dollars, but mostly in terms of feeling fulfilled.