Tuesday, June 2, 2015

A New Kind of Dancing

New growth on the wisteria bush

Slowly but surely, I am shedding all semblance of conducting my daily life as someone who works for a living.

 Now, almost 71 and celebrating one year spent in a healing from open heart surgery mode, I am beginning to enjoy life like I only ever dreamed might be possible.

I was expecting to return to  projects in which I was engaged,but my heart kept telling me - literally, physically - that I must now, instead follow my bliss.

Apparently, there is no more unfinished business requiring my attention. Some of my colleagues and acquaintances are involved in social change efforts in their writing, training, protesting, whatever ways of serving a world in need. Every time I attempt to commit my time to such a project, my heart races and pounds, intensifying its disapproval with the loud clicking of this new mitral valve.

Surely, my heart is not trying to say that I should not respond to the crises of this planet. I struggle mightily with letting go of all my skills and experience in human and community development process. Those efforts have proven with time to be not enough. I try to renew my commitment to a counseling practice which brings wholeness, balance, and harmony into peoples' lives. This is not enough. By continuing to hold on to these,  my heart rages because I am not following my bliss.

What might be forming in the present moment, slowly coming into being, is a mystery. Yet, it is creative. It is creativity. It is not a project. It is not a practice. Nevertheless, it is a way of a life of service in a whole new kind of dancing.

Bliss is a state of happiness, a flowing of refreshing and enlivening contentment - a getting lost in the creation at hand with no need of validation and no experience of its absence - a rare moment in the day slowly growing into a day long experience of an old Russian tune  sung with these words:

 If the people lived their lives as if it were a song for singing out the light, provide the music for the stars to be dancing circles in the night.

The body may be calm and the conversation gentle, but the heart spends the day dancing in the light, its beat steady and peaceful.

I could go on about what exactly it s that I am  doing that my heart is willing to beat peacefully for, but that would defeat the purpose of this blog's message.

Where is your heart leading you these days? How is this new kind of dancing working for you?