Sunday, January 15, 2012

secret gypsy

Our gypsy selves will call to us at times. 'Remember me'... 'Re-Member Me'...

At first, a faint whisper, a body longing, a fantasizing...
secretive and seemingly out of place.
It's call grows a little louder and more forceful with time.

'But I am not a gypsy', you answer. 'What is this longing?'
Yet, it persists and grows...
It will strike fear in some timid hearts. Fear of the dark...the unfettered.
For others, it is a welcome invitation to be fiercely and full-heartedly alive.

We might cast a sideways glance at those raven-haired beauties who dare to wear outlandish earrings and garish colors...who swish around alluringly,
who are bold... even brazen, seeking no one's approval.
They hold strange fire that sometimes erupts in wild and ecstatic dance...

Some of us may keep a costume trunk or a special dresser drawer overflowing with all manner of exotic and wildly beautiful things that we would never wear in public...but somehow we had to have them, no matter what the cost.

In our private moments, sometimes the call is so urgent that we lower the blinds, turn on the music and allow our secret selves to emerge.
We put on practically everything, we paint our faces and we transform our appearance into something a little wilder and freer and, for a time,
we slip beyond our usual burdensome and restrictive identities.
Through the gifts of our hearts and imaginations, we reacquaint ourselves with those mysterious facets of ourselves...our hidden dimensions...
and we build a little on those foundations.
We wonder at what has been brought forth...a self so deeply veiled, a self that would be shunned by society...and even worse...by our own dominant selves.
But, nonetheless, a self that is somehow 'Us'.

I have learned and often say to people... "We are all made of the same stuff..."
Like it or not, it is true...
Look around...look inside...you will see for yourself.

We may stuff everything about us into tight suits, tight shoes, tidy lives, above society's reproach....but in doing so, we curtail our aliveness, our color, our fierceness...God-given.

Eventually, if you are lucky, all that stuffing begins to break loose. A few stitches burst and some of that chaos and longing makes its appearance.

There is a lot of unexplored life force in there.

It is not easily or long stuffed back inside.

It will disrupt your life...

That, dear one, is it's Gift to you...

It is the call to real LIFE, not small life as you have lived it up till now.

That is the cause of your discontent, your estrangement, your restlessness.

My advice to you is ever to dance....

Dance until you feel your limbs...your blood.
Dance until your mind can no longer object or judge...
Dance until your mind is subject to your body and the music and your emerging spirit.

Then when we have danced ourselves whole again, given credence to our passionate selves, we remove our now sacramental garments, charged with the beautiful energy of our dance, fold them lovingly and tuck them away again.

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