Dancing Eternal

Two weekends full of music and dance in LA. Yes, dancing.

Is it my diversification of my experiences in Los Angeles, shedding
my tried, dried, confining skin like a snake, leaving behind the old
and moving into the new? Or is it the diversification of Los Angeles
that is bringing dancing into the city? Is dancing the bridge to
community?

"I actually looked up from my music during the anthem," said a fellow
choir member, "and they could not have looked less interested, so I
was shocked when they applauded heartily when we were done."

I laughed, as I had the same experience that day. It reminded me of
Zora Neale Hurston's (the namesake of my snowboard, for those of you
who have wandered into my pictures to see her) essay, "How it Feels
to be Colored Me," in which she writes about going to a jazz club
with a white friend, being swept up into the kinetic energy of the
music, swaying, bopping, throbbing with the beat, only to turn and
see her white friend merely tapping a finger.

Even Hungarians do not have a party without someone breaking out into
dance (and if not, it is only because they are too drunk).

This passage also came to mind at the beginning of the music/dance
weekend. After a long lapse of venturing out to the Hollywood hipster
scene, the mystical east-meets-west trance renderings of DJ Cheb I
Sabbah at, appropriately, the Temple Bar, tastefully attired with red
walls, red lanterns, Buddha statues and black for balance, draw this
turtle out of her shell. Like the bar and the music, the crowd was
eclectic (and not the usual, cliché KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic
crowd, though they were sponsoring the event). Even before the first
act (starting a fashionable hour and a half late), the crowd was
dancing -- from the arrhythmic swaying of what looked like migrants
from the Joshua Tree Festival last weekend, to the flowing moves from
the Middle East, to the jagged moves of hip-hop. Music and dance as
a medium for melding cultures was further emphasized by the
performers with DJ Cheb I Sabbah: first a belly dancer and then a
woman in traditional Indian costume morphing from traditional Indian
dances as seen in a Bollywood movie to classic hip hop moves from an
MTV music video, all performed with a radiant smile that was
completely contagious.

Sunday transformed my usual salsa dancing experience. Salsa, in my
experience, involved leading or following, a certain level of
thinking, of coordinating. Salsa clubs are filled with performers
and purists of salsa. While I love it, I often feel I am not quite
up to par yet. Tonight the Rumba Room teemed with celebrators of "no
work on Monday." Pure salsa was not on the agenda. In fact,
though I had some fabulous salsa partners, I also left several sleazy
men, those who confuse dancing with groping, on the dance floor. No
worries, because with this crowd, you didn't need a partner to
dance. "Come on," instructed my Mexican friend, "this is the song
EVERYONE dances to at family parties." I nostalgically remember days
of Hungarian parties young and old dancing together, and am thankful
to rediscover places and people who celebrate dancing. Thus, I led
myself, exhilarated in just enjoying the festive cadences of the
sexy, Latin rhythms (replacing the Hungarian csardas of my
childhood), which coaxed me into staying until they closed despite my
early morning plans.

Ten a.m. on Memorial Day, in a wooden room that resembles a capsized
boat, I sit on my yoga mat surrounded by about a hundred others on
yoga mats under sunlight streaming in large skylights. Ethereal yet
rhythmic Sanskrit chants fill the air as we move into our Platinum
Meditation. I did not expect to sweat in this two hour meditation to
manifest victory, but we did. We danced in a yogic way: repetitive
motions, arms overhead then down to the floor, and, later, feet
waving in the air like bugs trying to create enough moment to return
upright. We breathe in time to the gong, bodies still, a dance
within the mind and spirit.

From here we head out to Hermosa Beach for the Memorial Day
festival. Cover bands sing of letting the mind go, welcoming joy on
a magic carpet ride (yeah, I know there are other interpretations)
"It's just like the meditation -- rock n' roll meditation," says my
partner in Memorial Day adventures. The crowd joins in, "Let the
sunshine in." A Pear cider helps here as the music is really rather
mediocre. Still, it is LA, and folks are dancing in the sun, exposed
and free.

Dancing with the Stars

The desert is a vortex where all forms of our selves converge and
meet, unable to hide in the vast openness of the valley, where even
the stars are exposed to all in their full glory. (Or is it just
remote enough and hot enough for friends to gather at private pools
for a bit of daytime skinny-dipping and nude sun bathing?) This
weekend the new LA Lychee ran into the Lychee from hippie college
days and Lychee from New York clubbing days: from places where people
dance under the stars without pretension in their dreads, the men
topless in pajama style pants, the women in halters and mismatched
cotton skirts that flutter in the wind like wings, where body odor is
a sign of one's carefree oneness with nature (though I am ok with the
fact that I never really got this one and grew to find wonderful
organic deodorants and lotions); from places where the funky grooves
vibrated through the air dictating the movement of bodies until they
are all one moving in various directions in harmony, like an amoeba
that does not where to go so pulsates in its stillness; from places
where Latin rhythms sing the universal languages of love and unity
that move deeply through the energy rising in each body-- swaying
hips, opening hearts -- rediscovering the beauty of surrender as we
allow ourselves to be puppets to the music.

Beyond the illusion

April 2007

 

I don't really know how to write now, not here, in public. 

 

As Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, "This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning."  They are helping a bit, but I can't just throw them out there, these are words I need to hold onto because right now they seem to be all I have.

 

Yet, there is a part that tells me I need to work to maintain connections, to not just retreat like a turtle, feeding off of my own mass.  Eventually, I have to poke my little arms and legs and head out and make my slow progress onwards.

 

My students are teaching me how to do that. 

 

Lessons come where you least expect.  As does comfort. 

 

Nine days out of a school year is an eternity.  I had lived a lifetime in that week and a half.   I was a new person going back to someone else's life and job.  My administrators didn't seem to notice my absence, never mind my alteration.  I had been transported back in time, a new me meeting with a world that has not caught up with me yet.  I wanted to be back with the rest. 

 

Teenagers are notorious for being self-absorbed and generally disagreeable human beings that prey on weakness like lions and hungry packs of dogs.   Teachers mock them for dramatizing the ebbing and flowing of relationships.  I wonder where and why we lose that concern as we grow older.  I am convinced it does not make us or our lives better.

 

Teenagers also know anguish.

 

At 7:20 am, two girls hand me a big fluorescent orange poster folded into a card, decorated with stickers and inside written letters offering their condolences and comfort and sympathy.   I am glad I am at my desk, the card is big, and the students are reading silently as tears blur my vision.   Just ninth graders, the rest of the class don't know how to respond. The girls note in their card how even the boys were sad when the heard the news.  (And one boy did email me an awkward, unabashedly sincere condolence.)

 

Third period, my seniors: each walking in and coming over to give me a hug, one by one, then quietly sitting down.  I composed myself enough to stand.  One of the beautiful young ladies walked up to hand me a card.  "We all want you to know how sorry we are," she hands me the card and gives me a heartfelt, long hug, a hug of family and love.

 

It wasn't really a card, but a piece of plain white paper, folded as a card, with messages from various students in the class.  Teens love this -- writing notes in community, like signing a yearbook or t-shirt -- knowing there is strength in numbers.  They are good at this.  Their messages contained a sincerity not watered down by appropriate phrases or worries about offending my faith or my family.  With the confidence of youth, who believe they are discovering all in the world for the first time, they remind me how my mother is in a better place, looking down at my teaching and proud; they offer to help me laugh and get through this, even just listen if I needed to talk.

 

Suddenly, all the professionalism I try so hard to maintain between my students and I, thankfully, melted away.  There we were, human beings stumbling through life, though I have been doing it a bit longer. 

 

This reminds me of my mother, who even in the grip of illness, never lost this adolescent, childlike genuine concern for others. 

 

I thank these students for reminding me that this compassion exists in other places, for seeing an inkling of this legacy of my mother in me, and for sharing it with me as I relearn how to live my life as this new me, this orphaned me.

 

--------------------

Addendum:  

It has taken a few weeks to feel comfortable posting this.  I wondered if this new territory into which I ventured, emotionally, with my students would be a short trip.  It is not.  I should mention the new joy I have been able to find in my fifth period class, one that has been a rocky relationship.   I continue to get little notes from time to time, little words and gestures that let me know the students know that though I function, this loss weighs upon me.  We laugh more, though, and share more deeply.   Oddly, the opposite seems to have occurred in many of my other relationships.  Adults like to think that I am functioning, not dwelling upon my loss, not feeling sorry for myself.  I am busy.  They buy the illusion.   I, at times, buy the illusion, need the illusion.  I am also thankful for being able to set that aside, to be both functioning and mourning in one instant, to live and to remember, not in opposition but simply as the experience of the moment.  

. . . and now

I am now a UCLA Writing Project Fellow

I don't know what this means except that I now feel a bit more
confident with the part of my identity that writes, the writer.

To commemorate the event we had to write similes about writing and a
given object

This is what I wrote:

Writing is like a boy's sports watch
Looking so simple, innocent, practical
Until I try to write
The three balls on the second hand
Tick, tick, ticking off time
Mocking
All I do not comprehend
All I cannot control
Boys
Sports
Watch
I hold and wonder
How I chose this, how
I am a writer.

Then and Now

I remember you most in the breath.

What I take for granted each moment, an inhale and an exhale, the
focus of all your energy.

Even now, in yoga, as I draw my attention to my breath, deepening and
lengthening, imagining the opening of each bronchi into bronchioles
into flowering alveoli reaching down into the smallest corner of my
lung, I wonder at the resilience of your body, continuing on with
only half the breath I have.

My most shallow breath your deepest.

The fact of the end of this struggle hits me again, for the
thousandth time. I wonder when it will really be comprehended.

One instant, one breath, and it all changed.

I find a card you sent with some pictures of our ancestors. There is
no date. "Poppy," it reads, "-- a symbol of consolation, rest, and
repose." On the inside, "While others keep you in their hearts,
please keep hope and faith in yours." A sympathy card.

Even now, as I focus on breathing through the tightness of grief, you
console and comfort.

And I remember you most in the breath.