Just Another *Magic* Monday

Mondays can be a wee bit crazy around these parts. They aren't especially long or full days for us, but somehow even the everyday seems harder to accomplish coming off of the weekend. I actually work just a 1/2 day on Mondays, but it's the fullest half day I could imagine, lots happening with two groups that both require a lot of energy and attention. I get the girls dropped off at their in-home daycare, around noon and then I am off - and first on the agenda is teaching my weekly modern dance class to senior adults. Typically, I arrive just a tad bit grouchy and out of sorts, not very successfully having prepared and geared myself up for the drop off into immediately full afternoon transition. But the second we start to move, it's pure magic. This group of people, they are my heroes - all retired, most fairly new to dance - but committed to not wasting away their later years, and rather filling it with things that bring meaning and light to their lives. And dance does just that. Watching their souls light up as they improv nearly brings tears to my eyes. I wrote a little ditty about them in my Spilling group a few weeks ago, and I thought I'd share. (The italicized sections are actually from the writing prompts, quotes from Rumi.)

This being human is a guest house.

Today, I thank you all. For unlocking the door and welcoming me into your arms.

Your soft, swirling, lanky, trusting, awkward, willing, dancing arms.

The soft sun lays a simple pattern on the smooth floor, the little tips of my toes pressing and rooting into all that is there, all true.

I feel you behind me. Watching, opening, enveloping. You are my heroes. Of today and of living.

I find beauty that is beyond me in your fearless thud to the floor, your long - never fully extended but always and forever reaching - arms, your nymph like and sifting legs gliding across the floor. In the lack of trained bodies that unfurl into willing and joyful hearts.

Your open beauty is rare and unknown. There is no desire to be, only a desire to do. To feel. To be in.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

You do what I have longed for, what I continue to long for. The joy of the world and of the dance perches atop your tense, trying fingertips.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

So come, come whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, loving of leaving - it doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair.