Poetry Dancing

I find it is usually easier to dance than speak words, do you?  Dancing seems to merge our dreaming with our feelings. Dance seems to be the first language for a child. Babies do their wriggles before they can speak.

I believe we all break into random dance without realising it. This has nothing to do with being great supple dancers. Dance is as much of a language if we are stiff, robotic, and do not seem to be in time with anything. When we do dance we are certainly in tune with something.

Vibration urges us to dance. Vibration that may not be heard, may not be seen, but it is there and we dance to it.

Dancing is not just limited to moving to groovy music.

Sunlight during the rising sun often inspires me to dance. This is not a burst into some frenzied idiot dancing but a subtle skippiness in my legs, arms, and other body movements.

I think bright morning sunlight infects many of us like that, especially if it seems to be dancing through branches of trees, especially if the tree branches are also dancing in breeze.

I find that a sunrise morning dance also provokes imagery. Its as if the sun rays take on an image of a person joining in the dance.

Allowing that impulse to be free to be, rather than siting and clouding ourselves with a ‘this is daft’ attitude, it is wonderful for setting the intent for the day. That morning light dance is an overall joy for the day happening.

Its like a charge from feet through to head, the passionate connection to all that is happening around us. A wonderful feeling of nourished oneness. The perfect breakfast.

A morning experience like that, confirms that life spirit is present. We may call it god, goddess, visiting angel, or not bother to name it ebut let it be.

From these sunrise breakfast dances we may discover we use dancing during other parts of the day to shift gears, to express feelings, integrate our surroundings to ourselves and flow in a stream of intent.

Dancing can help us to get things done, or help us make decisions. Often, dancing is more effective than meditative silence. Dancing can also be silence as body movements replace the chattering mind.

Recently, through an illness that kept me in bed for over two months, I used this time to explore sound, and through the few minutes without pain every hour or two I built an over the bed recording studio. With the equipment being so small these days this is possible.

I wanted to surround myself with sound, 
as sound caused me to ignore and overcome pain.

It seemed obvious to create ambient meditation type of Music, and I did that for a few days. But in bed I was missing dancing, as I do a lot of dancing in the kitchen while preparing food.

So I started messing about with basic beats then creating all kinds of percussive loops and putting ambient melodies over them.

That was actually more effective for pain relief. An infected leg that I could not move, was moving a lot when the headphones were on playing back the beats I had created.

Beat motivating movement was confirmed as a subconscious process, then. No way was I focused on the beat and my movement to it. It was all an unexplained synchronisation sensation.

Each time this happened there was no pain but energy build up, and very strong prophetic visuals, as strong as out of body experiences I have had.

After ‘awaking’ from those twilight zone dance experiences, the ‘enlightenment’ was on how this sound synthesis is wonderful directed onto parts of our body and mind that needs healing. It was ultra strong medicine.

Sound therapists with their talking bowls, gongs, drums, rattles, tuning forks, harps, etc. have known this for thousands of years. I have friends who provide these services and they all have amazing integrity and connection with what they do.

Sound therapy is not something I have worked with much, well not with instruments. I have shared sound experiences with tree sounds, birds, water and similar. I must admit that I do introduce the percussive vibrations of these sounds, though.

Where it is percussive there is dance.

What I worked with, in the healing bed, was digital and electronic sound generation. I was using sound samples of real instruments rather than directly using real instruments. It did work very well for my circumstances, though. That surprised me!

A 2019 project is to get more crystal bowls into the labyrinth gardens. I did vow not to include items mined from the earth. Maybe wooden drums and flutes are more ethical, replaceable and sustainable? I will brood on this further. What do you think about when you consider crystal bowls?

I have been reminded how sound, vibrations, have been the language of consciousness through the hearts of tribes since the birth of humanity, and ‘spoken’ through dance.

If we have evolved through primates, watch how monkeys, chimpanzees and apes dance to express themselves. It’s an honour to be somehow related to them.

While traveling through North America I met tribes people who danced for rain, for love, courtship, and sexual fertility. Some danced sequenced dances with each dancer representing something from the sky such as sun, moon, mars, a comet maybe, shooting stars. With these dancers they dance orbits around each other, to be as the sky.

All of these tribal dances seem to unite the dancers into a groove, egos surrendered and individualism dissolved. From that grounded groove, they travel off into ecstasy.

I have not been to African countries so my experience of their ‘dance’ is from immigrants, documentaries and YouTubes.

African dances seem to be very focused on work and hunting. A lot of dancing before they go off to either, to get their mojos and spirits lifted. African dances seem to be very nurturing for their people. They are very inclusive of onlookers who they are eager to lure to join in.

A lot of bardic archiving wrapped up in their dances too.

All of these tribal dances seem to be wordless poems, 
expressing the consciousness and becoming archive too. 

As for white folks dancing, Scottish ceilidh dancing, sean nós dancing, set dancing, social dancing, line dancing, jive dancing, salsa, what are they all about?

Its fun, I love it, dancing with intent of order, yet we can still make it swing and become a consciousness language, and mating language too.

The moral of my rant here, if there is one, is dance when you can no matter how disabled and stiff we are. So dance we must. Dance for the provisions of each season, and dance for no reason.

There will be more dancing at our Fire Dance Garden and other Labyrinth Gardens at Carrowcrory this year. Dancing is among our poetry performance and storytelling too.

How, when and where do you dance?
What visions does this awaken you to, and what wellness does this nourish?

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