I've been dancing. Wednesday nights. Release. I am woman. Slant of your hip curve of your thigh. Move as you want to need to feel to. In and out. Forwards, fro. It's sensual, not sexual. Shift heart over breast, breast over thigh, circle and tilt, rhythm in soul.
This is my therapy. The movement of hip and heart.
I wrote the following over a year ago. And, as our dance instructor mused "everything... everything is movement" I returned to those senior year final writing thoughts.
I was born from movement into movement. Created by two bodies in their motions of love I have continued moving ever since, first from my mother’s womb into awaiting arms and then on to my own waddling feet that have at times both stumbled and danced.
As I lay down on brown paper to have my body drawn I simply moved as felt natural and, when I once again stood on my feet, I could not have seen a more accurate depiction: a blue body in movement, dancing. Dancing forward. The figure’s movements were fluid, directed yet unrehearsed as if they were called by something unapparent to the seeing eye. And as my pastel-holding hand met paper, I began to realize the source from which they came.
Within a few strokes my blue body map was alive, bursting vibrantly. What had once been a hollow outline began to resemble a being as the chest was textured and filled.
I am a soul: a soul within a body. I am a soul that loves the crevasses of the home in which she resides, the curves and bends and fluidity of her feminine exterior, so much so at times that it is not my soul that directs my moments but my body that anticipates my soul’s desires. At times it is as if I am watching myself move, simply giving my body to the rhythm with the knowledge that its dance flows from a place over which my mind has no control.
This is, of course, impossible to depict with crayon or marker or word. We do not see souls but feel them. And while my body map portrayed one dimension of my being, a complex mind of lines and colors connected to limbs and a swelling heart, moving with ease between the contrasting shades of her background, it only begins to depict the self-discovery of my twenty-one years. There was movement and spirit within the body’s borders but no sense of the peace and desire that concurrently swell within my being.
I am a restless soul, full of both physical and spiritual longing. A colorful soul, with shades erupting from my chest and radiating outward, radiating inward, burning through each limb whenever caressed by feeling, thought, or sound. A peaceful soul, balanced between movement and calm. My body map does not tell this story, does not describe how my life has been defined by my soul’s movement, by its growth and its failings and its call—which has led me wandering under West African skies, across the Sahara and back home to Saskatchewan’s rolling prairies and my mother’s embrace, only to call me across the blue water once more.