The Dance is the story of how we can live soulfully on a daily basis. It is the story of discovering why our quest for self-improvement does not lead to happiness or better lives or a more peaceful, just world. It is the story of finding who we really are, becoming all we are and knowing it is enough. It is the story of our struggles with those things that make it hard to remember who and what we really are, the places where is easy to become afraid-in our culture, the places where we deal with sex and death and money and power.
The Dance
By Oriah Mountain Dreamer
I have sent you my invitation, the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living. Don’t jump up and shout, “Yes this is what I want! Let’s do it!”. Just stand up quietly and dance with me.
Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiraling down into the ache within the ache, and I will show you how I reach inward and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, every day.
Don’t tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart. Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.
Tell me a story of who you are, and see who I am in the stories I am living. And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.
Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be … someday. Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next…
I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring. Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will. What carries you to the other side of the wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness ?
And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those that we once loved out loud.
Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart, and I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.
Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are. When the children are fed, but still the voices within and around us show that soul’s desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.
Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs that you want our children’s children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle, not to change the world, but to love it.
Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging. Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.
And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest intentions has died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breaking us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside, or from within.
Don’t say “Yes!” Just take my hand and dance with me.
