🎶

“I sometimes forget

that I was created for Joy.

My mind is too busy.

My Heart is too heavy

for me to remember

that I have been

called to dance

the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile

To Love

To be lifted up

And to lift others up.

O’ Sacred One

Untangle my feet

from all that ensnares.

Free my soul.

That we might

Dance

and that our dancing

might be contagious.” ~ Hafiz

 

“Such a beautiful poem – This is so you! I really thought, and hoped, that it was you who wrote it❤️” ~ Friend

 

Oh … I know 🥰 I wish it had been me too. But there’s also something really magical about finding words so true to you that you have not found a way to express, yourself ❤️ My dance teacher read this out a few months ago before class and I had a serious alignment moment and had to just receive

receive

receive ❤️

I call it a G*d-moment. When the universe reaches down and takes your zip and fastens you up; I immediately pull my tummy in and stand up straighter, the Universe got my attention, “I’m listening…”

“You know this, this is you”

When those words come through and your heart neither stops, nor explodes, it doesn’t skip a beat but it does something out of the ordinary. It recognises the words. Like seeing someone walk towards you on the street that you haven’t seen in a while or haven’t seen before and you want to smile at them. You know this familiar face. Or…. Do you? You feel like you should.

Yet…. The Dancer in the rain can’t publish that poem as her own. But it feels like it should be.

It makes me think of how little I’ve written since I committed to writing more…

Although there are various notes on my phone which were the start of something that I haven’t sat with.

Does that mean I haven’t sat with myself?

It’s a resounding yes. And I just haven’t been there… I haven’t been able to give creativity and vulnerability a chance to get locked into the solid permanence of words. The pendulum swings between the greater knowing and knowing nothing great at all.

“I should explain that I’ve spent my entire life in devotion to creativity, and along the way I’ve developed a set of beliefs about how it works – and how to work with it – that is entirely and unapologetically based upon magical thinking. And when I refer to magic here, I mean it literally. I am referring to the supernatural, the mystical, the inexplicable, the surreal, the divine, the transcendent, the otherworldly. Because the truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment – not entirely human in its origins.” 

– Not my words either, this is a quote from writer Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love…yes, her)

2022, I didn’t stop. Well, just as I began to restart after the extended lockdown I kept myself in, COVID knocked me for 6 and post COVID anxiety and depression hit. Hard.

This piece isn’t about that though, but it’s a thing, and like all things “depression-related” they are not spoken about. I discovered this when I took myself to my doctor, desperately sad. Desperately not myself. Desperately terrified and completely dreading the Europe trip I’d booked for myself, that I’d promised myself I’d take in 2022. That I knew I needed: “You can work anywhere” they said, “You’re unattached, young and have a great passport. What are you still doing here?”

‘Go out there and live, explore and experience new things again, make the most of this stage of your life, everything is temporary’ psyching myself up, ‘You’ve got nothing to lose’

So, in true “me” fashion I bought a flippin’ one-way ticket to Italy before I chickened-out.

And then “new, exciting and different” seemed the worst possible thing. Presenting myself to my students without the distance of a screen in between, presenting myself to my team when I had forgot how to dress from the waist down…

But I did it, I learnt what a capsule wardrobe was, I got on that plane and I had a wonderful and challenging but reviving 5 weeks from Pisa to Lisbon to Barcelona.

We sweated in the Italian heat wave, we teared up as we met, simultaneously giggling at how tall and how small we all actually were in real life. I cried tears of joy observing conversations; an empty space briefly filled. I realised how much I missed doing my job in person.

In Lisbon, I took myself on solo adventures with the added dismal date dotted here and there.

I got real french kisses from French DJs in Barcelona (Well, kisses – plural. DJ – singular)

I came alive again.

I recognised the flirt in my eyes again.

The techno-girl who without a drug or a drink (although not against) could get swept away by the beat and become one and the same with the pulsing crowd but still, somehow, stick out enough to lock eyes with sexy-himself.

 

I came home. Energised. Then, my doggy died.

And then,

Tragedy struck.

I lost a best friend.

A light went out. This precious friend and heart-work companion – We had got to the point where we were finishing eachother’s sentences. We were connected deeply through 5 years of community service and love.

She was fatally bitten, by a Great White fucking shark. One spontaneous week away. First early morning swim in the bay and I received a missed call from her cousin who’s never called before, I called back “What’s happened?!!?!!” I didn’t even say hello.

“…There was a shark babe. She didn’t make it. She’s gone, babe. She’s fucking gone”

It took me 10 minutes to speak:

“But,

Are you sure?

No!!

No!?!

No no nooo nooooo nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!! NO!!!!!!!!!!! NO!!!!!!!!!!!!”

 

You see, writing this kills me.

I still cannot believe

she

is

dead.

And whilst everything stopped

Nothing could stop

I suddenly had 2 full-time jobs

It was just go go go go

floating in a wired-daze from day to day

The gaping hole she left behind has propelled a small army of warriors into coming together to find some light and somehow move forward, possibly laugh and dance and …. try not feel guilty for… going on…

 

So, stopping has not been an option. Everything has needed me

Everywhere I needed to be

Holding tight onto her 3 year old baby

Self-soothing has come in sieze-the-day-spending-sprees

Darkness has come in “I wish it had rather been me” 

 

And in moments over the last few months words have come through me,

Some from my human heart

Some my higher self

Some from this grief stricken robot who I’ve seen videos of – who is she?

 

Survival.

 

I’m fatigued just writing this. But the point was, I haven’t written the raw stuff. I have quoted someone else. Because I haven’t been able to risk it…  I haven’t been able to risk cracking open as I lock this truth into black on white.

And the pendulum swings between the greater knowing

and knowing nothing great

at all.

 

But it’s okay. The words find you. Even if they don’t have the chance to come from you.

 

At the risk of sounding like a groupie, I need to revert back to Liz again to tell this tale too; Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story in my absolute favourite Ted Talk – Your illusive creative genius:

” …the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, ‘run like hell.

And she would run like hell to the house and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.

And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it ‘for another poet.'”

And unlike Liz who cannot identify with that way of receiving, I do. 

I often speak about words looping around my head, sometimes for days, until I get them out. Sometimes it’s not days though, sometimes I know I have minutes before they leave me and countless times I have pulled over on the side of the road to write before I lose them.

This is often when I believe I am receiving –

Having a higher self download. And I do believe there is a very legitimate channelling happening then. But I haven’t had that wisdom recently, so this is it…. Just the honest survival of a human heart.

But in dancing my way through living, these words – my soul’s longing was gifted in words – a divine embrace from the universe.

Keep dancing

✨🌼

“I sometimes forget

that I was created for Joy.

My mind is too busy.

My Heart is too heavy

for me to remember

that I have been

called to dance

the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile

To Love

To be lifted up

And to lift others up.”

 

So, let’s hear my prayer once again

 

“O’ Sacred One

Untangle my feet

from all that ensnares.

Free my soul.

That we might

Dance

and that our dancing

might be contagious”

 

I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while, oh imaginary reader!

Hopefully this makes up for that.