September Asides
Generating Joy
How do we deal with a growing population of people who justify the greed that easily comes alongside wealth and power? Where is the line that gets crossed when inequivalent power and greed ignores ethics and the well-being of the many? I turn to our dance to try to understand. I ask myself, where does inequivalence live in our moving together, and I find it all over the place. However, where I find it, it is in motion, it is continually changing positions between beings who are supporters and ones who are supported, between leaders and followers so that the leaders follow the ones they lead (I always credit these words to Ray Chung), between the ones who are on balance and the ones falling. Dance is earth made visible as motion.
The fixity of our political system, with economic incentives built to reward the few, justifies greed. Its lack of incentivized motion. It is abusive, not only of humans, but of the whole planet and all its beings. This is something we each face, some more directly than others. How do we understand ourselves, take joy in our humanity, let these amazing hearts soar, let our body beings touch a world with care when so much of the world is suffering the consequences of other people’s power? I see and feel suffering. I ask myself how to be caring, consequential, and part of the solution. If I am more than a single being, (I often teach what Thich Nhat Han calls interbeing, and what I call dancing “as” your partner), does that mean I must touch suffering? Yes, I am afraid it does.
I am afraid that touching suffering will take me into suffering, too. And, because my heart moves alongside, as, and within other hearts, I suffer as well. My only other choice is to ignore, as best I can, as long as I can, the situation that is arising. And, that is not who I can possibly, ethically, be. The suffering is on my doorstep, in the birds that become fewer on the pond outside my door, in the trees that are struggling with climate droughts and fires and harsh rains. It is in the people, who work at underpaid dead-end jobs or who don’t even have housing, and who have little access to joy in their lives. It is here.
And, as a dancer, my job is to not hide from hard truths, but at the same time not succumb to joylessness. My job is to touch, through the pain, the brilliant beings who are present wherever we look. Joy does not mean happiness, but rather it means grace. There is joy in the greatest grief, not because of grief, but as that which is the very reason to grieve. My job is to see more than is easily evident, touch through the dull into the vital. This job is to reach the suffering and quiet my instinct to turn away. It is to learn to transform my own being when I suffer.
I seek transformation, but where suffering can’t be transformed, my work is to sow the seeds of beauty and discover in that action alone, there is hope. This does not require that the world, or the one who suffers changes, you understand. Yet, this huge effort is so that the earth has access to her joy nature, through me. My job is not to reflect what I see, but to enter, seek movement, find the life within, and re-cognize its beauty. Not for me, but through me, may I learn to generate joy within, by seeing the beauty that surrounds me. Then, all is not lost.
Can I do this work? I do not know, maybe yes, maybe no, but I will put all my heart into it. It is so very important in this historic moment.
