Light Dancing

Light Dancing

So others see - and hear as it turns out  - the dance. 

White Man Dancing - Grief, God, and a Unified Theory, the book that has grown out of fifty plus years of grief work, political struggle, and spiritual wanderings (and will soon be published by Amazon), has dance as a primary focus.

And way back in 1989 Jeanette Winterson, in her fantastic fantasy Sexing the Cherry which evokes both physics and the metaphysical, sees the dance transcendent.

In the book the dance teacher Fortunata, tells her dancers that “Through the body, the body is conquered…”

Then - 

She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity. Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday? The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground. 

Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again…

Winterson, Jeanette (2007-12-01). Sexing the Cherry (Winterson, Jeanette) (pp. 76-77). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Surely MS Winterson accesses and adapts Sufi “Turning” in the previous passage. Plucks it out and inserts it into seventeenth century England. And the book is fantasy after all. It’s not real. Right? Really… Right?

The dance in White Man Dancing is like Sufi “Turning“, but a new translation of the Sufi meditation. In WMD the dance tells a story which leads to an experience of transcendence. It’s not a fantasy. It’s real.

And within the context of the book it’s offered not as a ritual to be copied and endlessly repeated, although it could be used in that way. It’s offered as an example of one unique individual’s experience of a singularly unique spiritual path. The two primary focuses here are -

1. In this time, in this universe, the vast majority of folks cannot relate to the spiritual translations they've been taught. Since we are, each of us, unique in all the universe, it is reasonable that we may need a spiritual path that relates specifically to us. 

2. Our addiction to weighing and measuring as an answer to all problems, coupled with the depth of our denial, has relegated transcendence to the scrapheap of superstition. Transcendence is the “baby” that has been thrown out with the “bathwater” of organized religion. White Man Dancing - Grief, God, and a Unified Theory is am attempt to both reconnect us with our capacity for transcendent experience, and connect spiritual direction to every aspect and moment of our life-cycle.

 The dance in WMD attempts to share one individual’s experience of transcendence. There is a need out here. To bring the experience of the infinite into the finite. Not to measure it, it’s immeasurable, but to experience it. Without the experience all the rest of the weighing and measuring, the quest for order, is meaningless.

For me the lessons stretch back into childhood before I really understood what I was searching for. And the attempt to share reaches back a long time too. With this particular issue, the precursors to this blog, and of White Man Dancing, are deeply rooted in the first book Remembered Gifts and New Directions (which is available free at www.sena.org ). It tries to share the transcendence I was lucky enough to experience, on rare occasions, with dying folks with whom I worked.

So once again -

There is more.  

You know there is.

Our path may need to be unique.

But our sharing doesn’t.

Gather. Talk. Teach. Learn to listen.

We can do this.

Together.

love,

bill