dancing by myself

by bam

perhaps you should know: no one else was home.

it was an otherwise ordinary morning. the sun was golden, was pouring in in that way that sunbeams, come november, pour like molasses on a tall stack of flapjacks.

the birds, just out the window, were chattering like schoolkids on a bus on a fieldtrip.

i was trying to write. i decided, maybe, a backbeat would help. my brother, one faraway now, one off in maine, came to the rescue, as often he does. he knows music, has a collection as eclectic as any i’ve ever known. global music is his thing, africa, ireland, new orleans, brazil, guinea-bissau, india. water drops pouring through copper pipes, he has made it be music.

i slipped in a disc, one he’d once made. sao paolo ripped through the speakers, and there on the rug, i was twirling, was clapping, was flowing like some sort of teenager who wasn’t afraid, wasn’t ashamed, was lost in the bass and the backbeat, and the forest of sound that came crashing my way.

did i mention that i was alone?

and then as the volume rose, and so too the sense of abandon, it hit me how home–that place that after a while, after we pay some attention, haul in the art work that stirs us, lace it with blankets and pillows and odd sorts of collections that remind us–home is not only four walls and a roof.

not at all.

home is the ultimate intimate relationship we all yearn for. it is the space where we can be naked, and i don’t mean without clothes, although that’s possible too.

what i mean is it’s the place, the rare sanctified place, where we can be the wholeness of who we were made to be. we can pull back the armor, the shields, and the shell. we can be the turtle undressed, if we so choose.

we can rock. we can spin. we can pound on the floors with our toes.

we can slip into skin that feels at once selfish and stripped of the self. we can indulge in the rhythm of being wholly alive, to the point we lose track of our selves.

then, we think, oh my God, please not let there be a reader of meters, who just got a glance in the window.

i’ve seen it, i’ve caught it, with children. tiptoe down in the basement, and there, behind a door that’s half-closed, a 5-year-old boy is pretending he’s there in a stadium. he’s throwing and cheering and running the bases all at one time.

and then, the second he sees you’ve arrived, he flinches and turns into stone.

the magic is dashed. is over. is gone.

it’s back to a dingy old playroom where the heat never comes.

when we’re home, truly home, and no one is watching, we get to try on our very deep selves. not deep, mind you, like some kind of a far-reaching thinker, but deep like down to the place where the wires run straight from our soul. where we are, maybe, as close as we get to the being God once had in mind.

a creature who twirled with all of the rhythm and nuance, and reckless abandon, deserving of a hand-made design. an original, in every which way.

what a magnificent thing then if there is one place in the world where we feel back to the womb. where we allow our home to be more than merely the place where we eat, where we sleep, where we soak in the tub.

how amazing that home is the place where we get to practice. get a taste of the feel of being, well, completely at home. we can dance, we can sing, we can pretend we’re some sort of a hero. we can give speeches, if that’s what we please. we can write, and recite, poems. and we don’t have to wince or to blush.

for that is the gift that, in the end, we’re all seeking. it is eden without all of the apples. it is, i would think, the point of this whole exercise, really.

it’s what we are seeking, time after time, in most every relationship that matters: a place and a space where we don’t have to explain. where we simply can be, can unpeel the layers, and not be embarrassed.

the more we undress, the closer we are to our life’s truest love. and how blessed it is that the place where we live is, in some ways, as close as we get to that place of total abandon.

no wonder we get through the door with a key that unlocks no other place.

it is a sacred thing, i would insist, to come into a space where we can dance with abandon. where we can be not diluted, or half of the plan of the God who imagined us.

but where, with every inch of our skin, and all the room in our heart, we can fill out the shadows and cracks. we can be wholly at home in the soul we were meant to be.

talk about dancing naked. eek. would someone please tell me if this made one ounce of sense. i write with my eyes closed sometimes. pretend i am all alone, which i am. only the minute i hit that gray button, kapow. i’m not so alone with my thoughts anymore. but this whole thing here–the chair, that is–is an experiment, an experiment in exploring the homefront, the near and sometimes the far, searching always for grace in the everyday. we’ve never touched on anything close to the joy of dancing unwatched. for me it’s dancing (the undulations of dance undo me, but i was always afraid of the stage, of moving my body). for some it’s writing poetry. there is a something all of us love, but we’re too bashful, too shy, to indulge with an audience. how blessed that home, like a love that is wholly accepting, that rarest of love, allows us to be our nakedest self. i find that, frankly, exhilarating. how about you? and to connect an even larger dot–isn’t that what it’s supposed to feel like to know you are wholly accepted, loved to your core, by God, most of all? take it and dance, people…..
p.s. i wish i was such a techno-wizard that i could weave in here the same backbeat from sao paolo. so you could dance while your read along…..apologies….