How did you bring in the new year? I danced my way into 2024, a most excellent way to enter the fresh blank page of the next chapter. It doesn’t happen often enough, the dancing I mean, on the dance floor I close my eyes and no one else exists, not even my dance partner. I am alone and not even me, myself. There is only the tone, beat and rhythm passing through my body and articulating the story of the music. My limbs, head, face, hands, feet, all express the sounds coming from the band and I’m completely lost in it. I feel it like the blood coursing through my veins. Several drinks had brought me to this place of abandon and disinhibition. Sobriety means I’m self conscious and self conscious dancing is the worst kind of bobbing about in front of one another. So some wine and good music loosen up the parts, by that I mean my brain and my body. My soul. I’m free.
I have no idea what it looks like from the outside, to an observer, but when it happens there is private elation and I dance like nobody’s watching. I feel myself the architect of my personal universe. I’m not asked to dance very often and totally understand why. For the other, it’s hard. I’m not really with them and what I’m doing is completely ‘out there’. Embarrassing, possibly. BB gives himself up to it and doesn’t try to rein me in, perhaps my antics give him license to cut his own groove on the dance floor. We have fun.
There is something primal at work here. It comes from a different place. Base and fundamental. Akin to the hunter/gatherer thing of our predecessors. As a child I adored dancing and showed off, to my mum and family, all my childish moves. Ballet lessons instilled some discipline and learning to count beats to the bar, clap time, form arabesques and discover a polka just fed into the joy. It’s a language that speaks more articulately than words for me and I love words….
Across the globe people dance in ways specific to their culture, their tribe. It is within all of us. I’ve always felt there to be a natural vibration at work all around us, all the time. A beat which emanates through and out of the Earth. It’s a life vibration and we can find ourselves in harmony with it, or out of step. Our own hearts beat it out. Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times…. it’s our inner drum, a singular instrument and particular music that plays throughout our lives. As we age, that beat may grow fainter, lose some of it’s steady rhythm. Falter, miss a beat, suffer an arrhythmia and possibly stop. Our unique music is leaving the big picture to join an even bigger picture.
Our son in law is a drummer. He earns a living from it, he teaches and plays. When he comes alongside a nervous student in a performance with a beatbox drum and taps out a pulse in support of the main player, he is joining his rhythm to the student’s, making music yes, but also aligning those two beats together. I think there is more at work here. A form of communication. A type of love. I’ve lain my head on BB’s chest many times and listened to that strong steady rhythm playing behind the chest wall. It regulates my own.
For centuries drums have been used by people to communicate across distance, to code messages, the drummer communicates through phrases and pauses, low tones referring to males and high tones to females. So too on the dance floor, that beat behind everything is what first moves into us as form and sets the tone for what the body’s answer and response becomes. Every response unique to the owner. Drums can capture the pitch, tone and rhythm of human speech which speaks to a different receptor within us. In writing this it becomes clear to me that everything is connected. The threads that hold us together are many and varied, passed from one generation to the next, from Alpha to Omega. One beating heart, many rhythms. That when we dance, we literally tap into that invisible thread, to our natural and original state of joy and move it out into the space. Our hearts raise their own tempo. We’re both intimate and separate.
When I look at a flower I feel a sound emanates from the heart of it, it’s different for every flower - just as it is for us. There’s a glorious alleluia. Delicate or robust, tinkling, booming, breathy, dulcet, euphonious. Snowdrop and hellebore, iris, pansies, rose and lily shiver and tremble their silent sound into the air we breathe. Our hearts beat, we inhale and all of the different vibrations unite and form one localised sound in ourselves. It’s happening all over the globe, all the time to all of us but too often we’re so busy keeping up, it passes us by completely.
I participated in an online event yesterday, with Wim Hof, the Iceman. It was a brilliant way to spend the day. I relearned his breathing method for accessing the deeper part of our brain. We shared an ice bath, the breathing exercise assists with moving through the pain of submersion into super cold water and staying there. In the tutorial he spoke often of being ‘in tune’ with our bodies through our breathing. He spoke of the proven beneficial results of breathing our way into altering our white cell count, our red cell count, opening up our arteries, strengthening our immune system, slowing our heart beat and building organ health. As a species we are only now recognising the great gift of ourselves and our incredible potential. Scientists all over the world are exploring what he and those who have mastered the technique are capable of in controlled studies. Wim’s main mission is and has always been to bring love. His equation for love is health plus strength plus happiness equal love. Simple. Can you see why I mention it here. This is the dance of life, in which we are all participating. Our movement, our unique rhythm ripples out into the world from the moment we join it at birth. No-one dances it like you do.
As I tumble these words out of my head onto the page, I feel there is a dance in them too, they spill and fall, rest, pause and settle. It is contemporary and the shape of the letters forming the words, structuring a sentence, building a paragraph and constructing an idea is a choreography of sorts. I see connections everywhere, between this and that, past and present, you, them, me. Wim’s breath, my own, yours right now as you take these words into yourself.
My daughter sent through a piece of footage she’d rediscovered. She is a dancer of immense talent and her request had been for a piece of shadow dancing. I love to support any projects our children are working on, so submitted my own. My skills at filming myself, adding music and shadow dancing leave a lot to be desired, but I include it here as an illustration of the ways our bodies can communicate. My arms are moving to the music inside me and the birdsong. Set your dance free, allow it to be seen as you go to collect the Sunday paper, listen to the Earth’s beat and tune yourself into your soul by your breath. Let’s dance our life in 2024. Be well. Till the next time.
A
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues…….