I understand myself through dance.
I understand the world through words, both written and spoken.
I also create myself through dance. Following breath and energy to allow my body to express its instinctive and visceral stories reveals to me, through noticing and big mind witness, what sort of me needs to be embodied.
Talking and writing is the same. By following threads of thought and idea and imagination, the possibilities of worlds outside of me take shape. Some of these possible worlds beckon me to step into them, to take the actions necessary to make them concrete. A large number fall away, making space for new possibilities to arise and entrance me.
This can all sound so… vague and metaphorical until you see it in action in seemingly simple ways, and if you’re not someone who creates their worlds — their very lives — through words, it is easy to miss.
It took a while for my father, after his stroke, to start future speaking, and when he did, my mother and sister and I felt some space to breathe. His will to live was strengthening (because after a very bad stroke, one’s will is tested, to say the least).
His future speak got more confident as time passed. The “if” fell away and was replaced by “when.”
The other evening my husband and I were getting ready to leave my parents’ house after having dinner with them, and my father was talking about how it was good that my husband only works 4 days a week because the other three days, they would be golfing and fishing.
My husband, a painter who is more of a visual and concrete person, started to speak of other scheduling conflicts that might arise. I teased him out of that line of talking and got us back to my father’s ideas about golf and fishing.
Afterward it hit me that this was something my father and I share, along with his father, my papa. There is some DNA level need for us to speak out loud about what “could be,” and we need to do so in very definitive and “it will be this way” terms.
We are not exaggerating. We are not blowing smoke.
We are life making.
We are sending ideas and convictions and prayers and hopes and wishes and dreams out into the world in the form of words.
Some of those will come to fruition, for sure. They gain momentum when they meet up with something needed in either us or the world. They gain momentum the more we speak or write of them. They gain traction when our intentions get more weighted and clear.
Eventually I can’t tell if I am acting on the idea or the idea has become powerful enough to act on me.
Years ago, I was standing in my movement studio at the front windows. A big celebration was going on behind me and I was watching the lights of the cars passing on the busy streets below.
A friend walked up to me and said this, “You are the only person I have ever known who gets an idea… and then makes it happen. You make something out of nothing. Like this… this space and all these people… How do you do it?”
I just stared at her. Doesn’t everyone do that, I thought.
At the time, I hadn’t put together that I was raised by a grand wizard. My father… a human so full of dreams and even more filled with the capacity to see them through.
Not every single thing he dreamed of came to be, but everything that came to be was something he dreamed of, something he dared to speak out into the world.
And I am his daughter, here to make magic with words.