The truth is that I long desperately for the simple and the stark. That I look around at the complicated ways we exist. At the stories we tell. And the loneliness at the heart of it all.
I have fought for the truth my entire life. Raised by lies. Married to lies. I’ve fought to hold a sense of true while standing on a wonky moving ground. It felt that if I didn’t stay vigilant and fight for the truth, that the ground would swallow me up whole.
So in the quest for truth, I became a lawyer only to find myself immersed in this world of story telling. And posturing. Where our simple humanity seemed to have no business being.
Then I found dance and movement. Movement. The purest and truest of ways to be in the world. As soon as we start to make sense of it, describe it, contain it. It starts to lose it’s purity. The words and contemplation starts to narrow and contain experience.
I dance in the park quite often inquiring into the reality of how it is we move and exist. I would inquire for hours into simply shifting weight from side to side. The many ways I could experience left. And the many ways I could experience right. The the endless pathways in between. And in this simple inquiry, I felt so ridiculously alive and complete.
I would ask myself, why if I felt so alive in this simple inquiry, was I teaching dance in ways that felt so complex. So layered and complicated. Why is it that we need to be so entertained by this form, or that form, or the promise of this or that. To lose weight, to free your soul, reach spiritual enlightenment, to lead you to ecstasy. Why must we entice with such promises, when reality, for the sake of reality, is so shockingly beautiful.
I came back to teaching movement classes recently. This past Sunday the inquiry started with the simple sway that happens naturally when we stand in stillness. This simple tiny sway that can be tracked back to a nearly imperceptible shift of weight. To the left. Then to the right.
What I can promise you, beyond a shadow of a doubt is that we all sway. That we all shift weight. Trust me when I tell you that we all spiral. That we all rise and that we all fall. That there is truth and justice found here.
Finally, as a teacher I can stay true to the truth and to myself. I need not make shit up, I need not pretend, I need not resort to anything other than the simple reality of what is already moving in us. And that this simple truth is magnificent, and fascinating just as it is.