My friend Michael Noyes, born 1959, is a dancer. He thinks like a dancer. He moves like a dancer. He identifies himself as a dancer. When Michael teaches yoga, he doesn’t teach it as a series of static positions, instantly teleporting from one mountaintop position to another and holding it there. Rather, he teaches yoga as a dance, where the movements between the poses are as important as the poses themselves.
For Michael, yoga is dance, and dance yoga. There are some important things to learn from his approach.
First, when we dance with balance, power, and flexibility, we train our bodies to extend those skills to the movements of our everyday lives, like getting out of bed, picking up a load of laundry, and putting grocery bags in the trunk. We have the opportunity to approach life like Michael does ~ as a dancer ~ graceful, with intention, strength, and poise.
When I pull my carry-on bag down from the overhead, my stage is that airplane, my audience the other passengers, my one movement is the pirouette I have been practicing for hours in the privacy of my home. Sure, I could just yank the bag down like an oaf, but at my age (born 1956) I am well aware that some are watching me with questions that are in the backs of their minds, if not in the fronts: “What will I be like when I’m his age? How will my body decline? Will I ever need help getting my bag down? How much longer will I stay independent? Let me watch this gray-haired guy for a peek into my future.“
I owe it to them to say with my body, my movements, my dance, “If you care for yourself, life as an older person is very, very good. Welcome to the future!”
I owe it to them to become a silver dancer.
But there is a more important reason for approaching life this way, and dance yoga is the metaphor for this lesson. We all enjoy mountaintop moments in our lives ~ those times when things are good and we are happy. We hold those moments like poses for as long as we can. They are good.
But in-between mountaintops are the valleys, the ones we must pass through, the dark and confusing places, tangled with thick vines and rabbit trails that lead nowhere, trials and disappointments, the mottled sunlight of loves that come and go, of bright clearings and bitter darkness. This is where the learning happens.
I don’t know about you, but I spend far more time in the valleys than I do on the summits.
Sure, I could bludgeon my way through them like an oaf, hacking and cutting with a machete, and sometimes that approach is called for. But my preference, my intention, is to become a dancer like Michael ~ training my mind, body, and spirit to move with grace, balance, power and equanimity, through the valley to the next summit and back down again for as long as I have been given to put one foot in front of the other.
I will not trudge.
I will not bludgeon.
I will dance, and I invite you to join me.
Together, we are becoming silver dancers.
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Read a related post, albeit a slightly macabre one, called “What Bones Teach Us.” Still inspiring, in its own way.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.