I was thinking this weekend of the metaphor of the trees: those that cover the lower peaks of the White Mountains, their roots knitted together like fingers knotted in prayer, interwoven with matted grasses and weeds, and held in place by the understory of bushes and brambles. All of that green life exposed to the winds of winter and summer’s storms, in little more than a foot of soil: beneath that veneer, granite ledge.

Lonny was the product of big energy and tiny town, where the limitations imposed by three square blocks of homes – an Alcatraz adrift on an ocean of unswimmable wheat – fueled the kind of incendiary pressure that could only come out wrong. Even back then, when I was eight and Lonny was nine, his combustion resulted in trouble; so years later, when I heard that he was in the pen for grand theft auto and some litany of other offenses, it was disappointingly no surprise: the wide world never succeeded in changing Lonny’s first impressions, nor would he be able to see it as anything but an endless, confining small town. A twitch in his heart was too large for his skin, a cruel itch, an irritation for which he found no balm. Maybe he didn’t look hard enough. Maybe he took off in the wrong direction, followed the wrong leader, and never got righted.

Recently someone asked me about the form of dance I practice – the form I aspire to, really; and like all good forms it is small enough for me to wrap my arms around, large enough to contain my curiosity, lean enough that an evening costs a few dollars and yields a fortune, full enough that I think I will never find the end of it.

I talked about the improvisational “jam”, the coalescence of a couple of dozen movement artists, with no talking, no music, only the sound of sliding or shuffling, running or slowing feet, deep breath… sometimes spontaneous laughter, sometimes spontaneous stillness, deeper because it is shared. My friend tried to imagine that space for a moment, as much as one can really imagine it, foreign as it is, and asked “How can you dance without music?”

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.

I. Our Daily Dance
 
The waning moon has this hour turned above the crowns of trees, and spilled its liquid light into the yard. So this evening is accompanied by a shadow of sun’s heat. The same moon that years and years ago was torn from earth’s belly, born from her and borne away on some celestial tide: once blazing with the fire that gave us life, now its patient ashes spy upon our daily dance, at times shy and out of sight, at times winking at our plight, or otherwise full-faced and offering its white-washed world for these our fine somnambulisms.
 With no one’s arms to hold you from these sights, the dimensions fall one into another, you join the ranks of every color-blinded creature as it flies or crawls or navigates the night, employing sharper, duller vision. A leaf-rattle makes the paw pause mid-step, a stick snap shakes the courage of the smallest, while above the sudden flush of air or nearly-silent slant of wing makes cowering the act of statues, whose hearts race from one moment alive to the next, still alive, alive yet still, praying to not be prey, hoping for no tooth nor talon’s spike to rake the nerves.
 
Some of us are larger: suffer less.
 
But suffer even so, adventure when better ventures aren’t reached by opening fingers, opened hearts. A footstep starts the body where the spirit would prefer to stop. Still. A stick snap stops the world around the boots of men: who goes there? What would a man be wanting of the night, if not a hunt of one sort or another?
 
The moon will not stand still; her mother moves below her, always at arms-distance, always departing. The child spins as if to turn away; the weight of their connection means she’s always falling toward her elder. A pure, white face: smiling as she rises her hello, sad as she departs. A desert of desire, whose fires went out so long ago, depends on stars’ impressions to light her further face.
 Who wouldn’t see a spark up there? Some ember that was better than its gray surround, some flickered flash of life that kindled past to second sunrise, companion star, golden guide to keep us honest and awake and in each other’s arms, to banish sleep in favor of a man or woman’s favored sleep companion.
 
 
II. Gift of Sight and of Delight
 
One can speak more plainly. An apple, for example: there was nothing woman ever gave a man that would be his unmaking. Genesis requires rethinking, since its metaphor is cactus-garden, is painful to embrace. If (for example) Eve opened Adam’s eyes, it was to preciousness of life. I suppose that might be blinding, but hardly expulsion from the Divine; invitation, rather.
 
There is some bland assumption by the readers of those ancient runes: a paradise was lost, to be regained at last when body’s been betrayed as temporary residence, reminiscent of a slum-lord’s tenement, reminiscent of a child who’s given no delight or - more likely - never found its gratitude.
 
I do not sign that lease.
 
Paradise is every moment, but skill in seeing clouded by emotions or events. The paradise of creation is in company of men and of women, building walls or raking them down, raising pillars of life or whirling in the great river of each other’s dancing, scratching at the earth or forging teams to push back need, or needing the sweet waters of ourselves to wash upon that labor, to loose the earth of us and make us one.
 
No, an apple, or a pomegranate, maybe have been a gift of fruit, of sustenance, of sight or of delight. The days that followed, simply striving to maintain that paradise. If missed, at times, or if (at times) we fail to be delighted, still there’s no mistaking it exists.
 

Flying out of the east in splendor        the silver beauty of the wings, oh beauty poised and driving like twin knives,        and all those migratory lives depending, as it happened, on the magic   of rivets and steel webs        and pilots immune to fear – so be it, he travelled west, before the sun could dog        and trouble him, falling headlong into a desert ground, seeded with aloes   and yucca and dryland sage:        if the least of these seeded also a desire to dive, to dig and bury his winged feet,        to cover his travel with a delicate frost and keep his eyes from leaning further west:   to say I will decide contentment        as one decides the right soap for the wash, or chooses the ingredient for a meal –        so be it, may the peaks there overtower him, reminder of his measure and short life,   let the wind lift every morning        with common scents, and expected small delights, his name be humbled and diminished        for lack of yearning: Ah, yes, a clever man, but where his passion went–?   Continued on, unmindful of the desert,        the terrible, bleak terrain of it, and perished in a gully, dried to a fine chili-dust        that mixed with the sand and disappeared for all its fire and redness.   That may be a kindness: to cull from his ambitions        a circle smaller than his shadow, an innocent hedge-row with a few slow flowers;        not to ache so for so many colors; that is why he travelled west,   dismissing Eden, perfect in its past,        to praise and kiss his partners for their human dress and dreams;        to balance the rolling rock with the slanted path, the day’s graces with the night’s small death;   oh, let the rest depend on silver wings and say enough, as final as it seems.

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.

At a birthday party the other night. A glass of wine, a meal, a toast, easy talk, genial anecdotes, a circle of laughter, good night. Somewhere along the thread of a conversation, one of the party-goers mentioned (wistfully, patiently, perhaps resignedly) that she was wondering when she would find “Mister Right”.

Anyone with some measure of intimacy with their own heart would recognize the source of that comment and, judging the intelligence and sense of the speaker, would guess this wasn’t flippancy, a cliche that echoed some dull ache, but rather carried the volume of sentiment, height, length and depth. The words we use float on the surface; the waters described can be impenetrably profound.

Some words seem to be born of an inner and shared light…

For me they may arrive after the stillness of meditation; but just as often the softest and most human words are accompanied or are led by a melody. All creation is frequency, is a movement of waves, from the highest vibrations of quasars or atomic particles to the lowest throbbing of stars in their orbits.

Or, in our daily rounds, from the bluest light to the reddest, those frequencies of creation which our eyes perceive; from the whistle of a kettle or the hum of a bee to the drone of a bowed bass or the rumble of thunder, in frequencies which our ears perceive; to the cycles of ocean waves, whose interstices we hear as they crash to the sands, while their slow pulse, like the breath of the planet, moves through our bodies noticed, unnoticed; to the celestial hum of the earth spinning on its poles; to the year-long wave of a planet around its sun; to the millennial arc of a sun around our galaxy’s core, a music so slow that only the Spirit can listen, leaving ourselves to intuit from our cruder senses.