The Moon wasn't up yet...

I backed out of church tonight and thought...man, it's dark.

The kind of dark you could feel, cold and soft, the kind of dark my backup lights could only hold back a few feet, unlike normal.

As I drove, I noted the lack of light pollution, the interstate lights usually refract off the cloud cover and make the sky turn a peachy orange.

No, it was just one...beautiful, dark, star-filled night. The kind of night I could imagine in the Lion King movie with Mufasa and Simba talking about "The kings of our past" looking down on us...it's so mystifying, seeing them twinkle, simply because they're stars and that's what they do.

 Made me think that...maybe, connecting with a universal energy, might be something like becoming a star. My ex-friend group and I were playing one day at college and tried to figure out what each of us would be if we weren't Christian. We had bi-polar nihilist, an epicurean, two ethical humanists and me, the emo transcendentalist.

 But what if there is something about the energy....a total energy that keeps everything moving...not the "force" but A force, the reason why stars sing and trees reach towards the sun and the waves keep running up the beach to reach land and don't get there...what if there's an energy that lives in everything...and makes it dance?


Honestly, have you ever thought about life as a Dance?

The world spins beneath our feet without us realizing it, but if it stopped its cosmic revolution around its partner, the sun, we would all die. In the same way that if a woman walks away from her partnership, or a man drops his lead, the dance dies...

Our lives live in revolutions around each other, from the simple turnings and kickings of a fetus in the womb to nations being destroyed and rebuilt all because of powerful words on fragile paper...To tribes being wiped out and relocating as cities grow and die...Everything is a cycle, ever revolving, ever weaving, everything has its own speed and rhythm. Everything's a dance, trying to fit and flow your way through everyone else's movements and patterns. The magic happens when you find a pattern that you recognize, and when you can match yours up to it...and meet their eyes and know that you aren't fighting each others energies, but like two draft horses hearing the clang of the hitch, energies binding and enabling much more to be accomplished than could be alone...


I am a dancer. I've never been able to play music, or find it inside myself to bring out, but I know how to respond to music when I hear it. Even if it's just bobbing my head, the music and rhythm speaks to the very nerves that control my muscles, I can't help but move when the feel is right. It's why it's so difficult to look at people and wonder if they feel the same rhythm, if they have that same spark, if I played the song that's in my blood, would they know how to dance to it...If I started dancing in a public place, would some one walk up and join the partnership? I've always wanted to try...

Tonight, I thought, it would be beautiful to meet a dancer in the shadows before the moon rose. To hear a soft voice lilting around my ears and a soft breath upon my cheek, to watch and name the stars and as the moon rose, see the lights rise in the dark eyes, knowing that there was dark fire that burned like mine, mysteries that weren't solved and questions dancing around answers, knowing they could be solved and yet...enjoying the chase.

As I write this, my cat's asleep on my bed, and the lights are on. She's turned in to quite the writer's cat, as long as she has my blanket, she's asleep and at peace no matter what I happen to be doing. Yeah, I'm doing the domestic thing...

but there's still a part of my soul that longs to be somewhere under the stars, hearing and singing songs or learning to dance an entirely foreign and beautiful dance with a huge bonfire going, seeing the ageless flames that maybe the first humans might have gazed into...each fire a window to the ages of man through the years...each blaze a remembrance of all the blazes before...

Seeing that timeless fire turn to soft embers in the eyes of another...a knowing look, ageless in itself, knowing that ages are to come and that there is no end to the things to be learned...Another dance is coming, a new song is going to be heard and then the energy that lives in our blood will truly awaken and we'll understand joy and freedom and taste a bit of heaven when we see someone's new-found smile...

As the Dance begins again...and again..and again...