start dancing

start dancing

"To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful."
~Agnes De Mille

I stepped out the shower this morning to the sound of Bach's Concerto No. 5 in F minor playing on my iTunes.
It's amazing how music can usher you to places you'd entirely forgotten about.

I was suddenly dripping in memories of sunlight- dancing on polished wooden floors.
A percussive fire burns in the fireplace, intermittently sighing to a large, open room.
A wall of glass looks out over the moving waters of Three Mile Harbor.
I am five.

This is one of my favorite memories.
My family had a beautiful old house in East Hampton until I was eleven or so- I can't remember exactly when- and I spent the first three years of my life there.
This was in the 80's, when East Hampton was still a sleepy community of quaint surprises.

I used to wake up early in the morning- before anyone else- and go downstairs to light a fire and turn on Bach's Concerto No. 5 in F minor.
I'd transform at the sound of the poignant piano into a prima ballerina in a grand production of Swan Lakeian proportions.
My performance would be so moving, I imagined, that it would melt human barriers- it would reunite our lost and troubled world, just like it reunited Odette and Siegfried.

Perhaps that was my way of coping with divorce and a fragmented familial life.
Whatever it was, those moments in the proscenium of my mind were a refuge, a glorious grand jete of hope and faith that one day, humanity would come together in nascent understanding.

I wish we'd all just start dancing.