Remember When You Were Ten?
/Do you remember turning 10?
How exquisitely sad that moment was for you?
You were - and would be for the next 90 years - a double digit.
Never EVER would you be a single digit again.
The agony of that.
I cried for hours the night I turned 10, cuddled in bed with my sister and my mother.
My sister, only 7 at the time, was curled up behind me.
She clutched a handful of my pink flowered nightgown in one hand, and patted me on the back of my head with the other.
My mother, who was lying on the other side of me, held my hand and stroked my forehead.
It was sweetly painful, to feel the deep loss of my singular digit status.
I am in a similar state now, not because of any age I am turning, but because there is a profound loss happening.
And though it is devastating in a certain way, it is - in another way - sweet, pleasurable, and immensely gratifying.
I am talking about dancing.
This is what is happening:
I am attempting to sift through the debris until the root of dancing is found.
I am asking myself:
What is essential?
What is true?
What is urgent, necessary and vital?
I am waiting.
Waiting for the dust to settle.
Waiting for my body and my being, to be free.
Waiting for the cellular frame - both inside and outside the body - to shift and re-locate itself so that the fall into the dancing may begin.
This dance finds itself within a mysterious, complex, and ever changing relationship to the human form.
Movement systems connect and couple with this molecular re-patterning within the body, inside of the universe, and among the stars.
The stars, which, when one is dancing, are essential.
Essential, because it is through the dancing that there becomes a “felt” sense - rather than an intellectual knowing - that we are made up of the same material as the stars, and the stars are made up of the same material as us.
All separation then, dissolves.
Time and space tilt, rupture, wrinkle, fold, and twist in on themselves to unearth the thing that has always been there: the magical, supernatural, shamanistic, mystical and witchy realms of the human experience.
In the minutia and never ending to-do lists of daily living, we forget that this element of existence is there at all times: shimmering under the surface.
I am attempting, in my dancing, to bring the shimmering out from underneath.
I am attempting, in my dancing, to encounter and shimmer with the witch.
do not choose the lesser life.
do you hear me.
do you hear me.
choose the life that is. yours.
the life that is seducing your lungs.
that is dripping down your chin.
-Nayyirah Waheed
With Warmth and Jivey Vibes,
Joanna
of
Joanna and The Agitators
sweetly agitating/persistently upending
xoxo jo