Guest Blogger: Alice
My daughter wrote this for a class assignment in a dance class where they were asked to do something kind for their bodies. It is a writing about going beyond your light, and coming back to Center. Lynn
I didn’t know this was my something kind until I did it, and perhaps this
is counter-intuitive, but here it is: I quit “Megawatt” the PILOBOLUS dance
piece that I’ve been a part of since August. It started by trying to set a
boundary with my rehearsal director about tech on Sunday, that I need to go to
Quaker Meeting for Worship and that is not something I’m willing to sacrifice
as I have already sacrificed so much for this piece. I didn’t mean when
initiating this conversation to withdraw from the whole thing. However, this
statement lead to a conversation about how I’ve been feeling all semester. I
ended up telling him that doing this work has been really hurting my heart in
addition to my body, I was crying because authority figures intimidate me and
it was an uncontrollable nervous bodily reaction. He reacted by saying we would
phase me out. This was a surprise, but welcome as I had been considering
leaving the piece for the spring. More importantly than the details of my exit:
the reason.
I was born, raised, and am
a practicing Quaker. My faith has taught me to do nothing but listen to the
“still small voice” inside us each, the fraction of God in each of us. And I
believe that part of our collective job on this planet right now is learning
how to listen to and follow ones heart/intuition. On the day of the PILOBOLUS
audition the company members told us all about their philosophy of work, of
pushing and going, of bigger and better. And that small voice whispered, and I
shut my ears. As I went home that day my head was hurting, I was dizzy, and I
was out of it. I was worried I was concussed. My body was speaking. In the
intensive week one of the company members, whom I loved and appreciated dearly,
told us horror stories of the things he and other company dancers have done in
the name of this work. My small voice asked, “what for?” I left those 6 hour
long days, with my head and body throbbing. My body was screaming. And I didn’t
listen. My heart and body kept speaking throughout the process and I kept ignoring-
I kept being unfaithful. I won’t recount all the greater impacts this had on
other aspects of my journey. But finally there was no choice, but to listen.
I have been taught my whole life to listen. And I know
that so much of my calling and work in this lifetime is about dismantling the
paradigms of pushing and going, of bigger and better. Those paradigms are the
narratives that have driven the colonization of the Earth and its Peoples. That
is a mind frame that I cannot create or embody art within, because I make art
to CREATE. I have watched this work destruct, many dancers, in different ways.
And those convictions that I hold so deep could not stay hushed by my sense of
loyalty to a previous commitment, or by a sense of obligation.
When I came home that night one of my dear friends, who I meditate with often
and knows my heart in a tender way looked at me and said, “Alice you look
lighter, you look so much less stressed out.” He’s been asking me all semester
in random moments, for reasons unapparent to me “are you okay? You looked
stressed.” And I’ve always denied, not only to him, but myself. I asked him how
he knew, and he told me it’s in my body language. And that's how I knew this was my physical research. My body is responding with relief, and the headaches I've been experiencing after every rehearsal during this process left. My heart lightened. And I feel the presence of the Divine in a way I alarmingly have missed for a long
time. I feel freedom.
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