Everybody Dance Now

Here’s my response to the Prompt Challenge:  Tribal Daughters’ Dance.

The dance motif often shows up in my writing and artwork.   I’ve written a short story featuring a bailaora who encounters a dark stranger, and I’ve written about my experience, years ago, taking a belly dancing class. I never really noticed this frequent theme until I started thinking about this prompt.  It’s made me stop and wonder why this is so.

I’m certainly not a dancer.  No, I don’t have the elegant athleticism of a ballerina or the pixie-build of a Dancing With the Stars hoofer.   Yet, when I turn on music in the privacy of my living room and start bee-bopping to the beat, I become like all the women who ever danced in their tents in front of their sisters, mothers, aunts, and cousins.   Those voluptuous women of ancient times, with curves only childbearing can give them, danced to celebrate births, marriages and sometimes just for the fun of it.

Sometimes they danced to connect themselves to the source of all things.    In a qigong class I took a few months ago, the instructor gave us an exercise.  We were to slightly bend our knees and begin rocking in a circular movement while at the same time rotating our arms in front of us like we were stirring a cauldron.   The purpose of this was to visualize stirring up energy from the earth to invigorate our own internal energy.  With all of us in the studio doing this together, it felt like a dance.    It was invigorating because I felt as if I had  tapped a deep vein at the source of my being.

All of us can “dance” like this.  Even the simplest movements can touch this energy.   Another qigong movement is to stand in place and gently bounce by lifting and dropping the heels ever-so-slightly.  It is a barely a  movement, but it can uplift and energize.

So ladies, and gentlemen too, it’s time to start dancing, even if it is only a bounce.

Take a look at this video.  These ladies know what I’m talking about:

Lori G.  (c)  image and text.

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