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.

Lady of the Labyrinth

My partner and I have just returned from a weekend of sacred dance with June Watts deep in rural Wales. We stayed in a lovely early twentieth century house set in a delightful wooded valley. Lambs in the fields, swathes of daffodils in the gardens, everything bursting with life in the sunshine. We created a traditional seven circuit labyrinth in the garden and danced to honour Ariadne and explore Her myth. Beloved Ariadne, source of creativity in nature and human culture. Some words of Homer came to mind, Diadalos created a dancing place for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. How the Goddess loves the dancing place!

We remembered how the Greeks had spun the myth to discredit the Minoan way. The bull turned into a monster, The labyrinth as a place of human sacrifice. Ariadne portrayed as the betrayer. We danced for truth, for beauty, for Ariadne. One dance I found particularly evocative. Set to an ancient melody with an unfamiliar rhythm it became our processional dance for those who would leap the bull and find life.

One final thing made the weekend perfect. The secluded spot meant it was possible to experience real darkness. I live close enough to the city to be bathed in light pollution at night. At home it is never possible to experience real darkness and the utter beauty of star light. The human heart yearns for the peace and beauty of real darkness. To enter the dark is to enter the labyrinth, to walk an unknown path, to feel the Goddess there beside you and at the still centre touch timeless eternity.

Awakening Earth

On Saturday my wife led a day of sacred dance to celebrate the awakening earth. There is something unutterably beautiful about dancing with others to honour the sacred. For me dance is the herstory of creation; In the beginning was the dance and the dancer was a woman. Sacred dance heals, empowers and brings unity and joy.

The world and faith seem to have been seduced by the word. But the word divides - Credo, I believe - but what of those who don't? What about the guilt of not believing it all yourself? The word takes away our freedom by codifying dogma. The word makes us passive as we sit quietly and listen.

Dance unites - it unites those who dance together in the circle, it expects no credo other than a belief in our common humanity, it takes us back through generations of mothers and fathers to the first outpouring to the sacred tens of thousands of years ago. Dance makes us free, it carries no dogma, it brings profound power and healing. Dance makes us active in every sense as we embrace space and time with our whole bodies.

It is so sad that the patriarchal religions of the word are so suspicious of dance. Maybe they cannot abide the freedom and empowerment it brings? Maybe deep down they still see active, moving, raptured bodies as sinful? Maybe it is that women have always been the real power of dance? But that is their loss and I embrace the freedom, the grace, the beauty, the power and the rapture that dance brings. The sense that we are all divine parts of the one circle of life I know as Goddess.