October Asides
Dance as Authority
So, the most significant authority I hold, to myself, is that authority I find in dance. Sure, I have a PhD, and I do not want to make light of those letters, because I came through a form of fire (which took persistent drive, ahem!) to earn. However, it is within dance that life vibrates for me and reveals its power to awaken the living – even from the deepest sleep. Awakening means the capacity to open the lids on any experiential container that offers insight into right living, right mindfulness, and right relations with rightness defined by a loving concern that is not bound by personal agendas but rather seeks to recognize deep truths captured within the pure nature of this cosmos. I know, because it has done this to me and that has become the base and the core of my authority.
Yes, the living sleep with their eyes wide open. I know that, because I see it all the time and I can say, yes, again with the authority of dance, that we can do something about that – at least for those who seek to experience and delight in their own particular brilliance – which is always continuous with the world's.
I pursued a PhD in hopes of realizing what the world of knowledge forms understands about the instability of always being a mind that is a body (and vice versa), the delights of inevitable change, and the skills necessary to dance life. I sought to be able to enter the conversation about what dance does when it is lived as a knowledge form and not merely shelved as the expression of a self performing movements. Not that it isn’t that as well … but it is so very much more.
Along the way, I have never stopped learning, because this path enters a bottomless pit of unfolding realizations – one I have gratefully fallen into. After all, there is no awakening that is absolute. Right? We never arrive. At least, I never arrive at a place of getting perfect understanding. Always a beginner, because as they say, education, at its best, leaves us recognizing how little we know. That’s where I live. But the possibility in dance is, if we are lucky, that we learn how to learn through connecting the dots present in the details of our bodily felt experiencing of being engaged intra-actively with/as/and of the world.
So, Aside Too, is an example of entering into the process of connecting the dots. I am tracking ideas of balance, in-equivalence, and betterment. So, Aside Too, is an example of entering into the process of connecting the dots. I am tracking ideas of balance, in-equivalence, and betterment. I intended to contextualize it against our current political frames, socially if not on the level of governments, however that would take an essay. Let’s do that on a Breaking Bread or in another format.
