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.

From “cannot imagine” to “will not accept”; from “will not surrender” to “can never forget”. The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

Nineteen eighty-four.

What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn’t have to do anything; we didn’t lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its passage playing and tugging at our hair and our clothes, the sun baking the asphalt underfoot and burning our faces to leather.

What we repeat becomes our center, that’s sure. So when the wind is kicking up spray – when the movement of the air is really howling round you – we return to what we have repeated, what has become our rote. If it is made of wood, you will likely float; if it is a stone it will sink you.

Lately, the home that I thought was brick turned out to be sticks, and the sticks turned out to be straw, so that with a lick of the wind, with a flick of a match, all of the concrete that protected me from storm turned tinder, and took flight or caught flame. Work which together lifted me and a company as we grew together arrived at a natural and logical completion, so employment will change. A partnership which saw two continents, two children, two farms and two languages has followed the same living arc from a birth to a death, and all the twos have become ones. The home which housed a family now surrounds silence, both delightful and hollow.

Was the phrase “to harp on” really coined by Shakespeare – Still harping on, my daughter? – or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public?

Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the Artist as Creator of All Things has got to go. The real artist is a channel for sunlight, not the sun itself: she drinks in the world through her senses, a true tantrika whose openness to life is unlimited (and not limited to sexual connection, as some small spirits would consider the Tantra, a Reader’s Digest version of the Kama Sutra), and being filled to overflowing with sight and sound and touch and taste and scent – as well as that subtle combination of what we do not outwardly sense – allows that water to pour out in whatever form it may take.

In our naturally egocentric way, we consider our senses channels of information that bring the world to us. We scan the horizon to identify threat or opportunity, we read; we listen to what is hidden or to what is spoken, what is sung; we are drawn to scents and repelled from odors, and we delight in the flavor of what is pleasing, disgorging what is foul; we feel heat and cold, abrasion and softness.

The mind’s eye is easily occluded, as simply and as naturally as clouds form and veil the face of the Sun. Or the eye’s perception may be overwhelmed by the colors and the kaleidoscopic movement of the world. If that eye is clouded, we experience the surfaces of things; beautiful, plentiful, absorbing. But in all places the eye of the mind can seek further, see deeper, and finally deliver greater satisfaction as one becomes part of the environment, and the environment becomes part of you.

I appreciate all the more how cultivating the habit of choosing Light instead of confusion changes not only my inner world, but paints the external as well. Early morning yoga feels to me as though I myself, infinitesimal against the backdrop of planets and galaxies, and infinite tracts of empty space, am the agent of sunrise: I lift my arms to praise the morning, and we move into the light of the sun.

When the eyes are open, all of Creation is reduced to surfaces… imagine the poverty in a world of surfaces. As though all that an ocean offered us was its waves! As soon as the eyes open, the interiors begin to close, the interiors of everything that sight obscures from us, the interior of our selves as well.

Eyesight is the sense of abstractions and of interpretation; we interact with the world at a distance, when our other and more proximate senses cannot give us their information. To close the eyes, one is taught, is to live in darkness; but to close the eyes with awareness, to be listening with your being, invites light – so much more than one can imagine.

The earth turns toward the sun, the wake-up alarm rings; the cats begin to mill about the bed, waiting for their food; traffic begins to burn its way toward places of employ; a day begins.

The first moments of one’s day are the moments before the universe was created: all of life is waiting to be defined. In sixty seconds, or one hundred seconds, you are with the Creator, and invite the day to become what it will be.