Remembering how to move

Joy, a group of us are spending the whole Samhain weekend exploring sacred dance. For me dance is liberation, it is subversive, it is passion, it is magic.

Time and time again authorities of one kind or another have tried to regulate or even ban dance. They have claimed it is immoral, that it is wrong for women and men to move together. They have shunned the body and denied its beauty and grace. They have feared the renewal and change that dance brings. They have recoiled from the idea that creation is danced into being and have tried to convince us to accept the unchanging word incised in stone instead.

If dance was denied me I would do everything I could to subvert that law. I would sway with the trees, move with the leaves, dance with my eyes as I watch the butterfly. I would dance with my very breath. In utter stillness I would be one with the dance of the genes within me.

The mistrust of dance in the major religions of the world is a symptom of the fact that they have, by and large, forgotten how to move. If you dance you move, adjust, change, discover new ways of being, new patterns in the world. Inerrant scripture and fixed law deny the truth that we live in an ever changing universe where all life is constantly adapting, changing, evolving. Our genes are not fixed. If they were we would stagnate and die. Thankfully they have not forgotten that they were danced into being by the Goddesses and Gods and they will continue to dance until the end of time.

And here is the heresy major religions fear. As we dance and move and change with the Goddesses and Gods our imaginations expand and we touch the mystery of being, of divinity of sex and creation. In so doing we become free to re-invent the Goddesses and Gods as they link hands and bodies with us in the dance of life, wonder, magic and renewal. Dance opens us wide to new possibility.