The Actual Dance is a metaphor for that ritual of being with someone you love as they take their last breath. It imagines another dimension in time and space, a liminal place, where the music of a grand orchestra fills the space around the lovers as they move slowly to the gentle or brittle sounds and then it stops. There is an end to the dance, there is an end to the music. The soul or essence of your love spins off as a tuft of cloud to somewhere else.
As lovers we think or imagine these moments with fear and trepidation. How will we be able to do it? We wish and pray that we go first. How selfish is that thought. Yet we fear that we lack the strength to withstand the crushing loss of a life partner, a parent, a child. We thoughtlessly wish it on our partner – that we go first not they.
The Actual Dance offers another point of view. It identifies a place within each of us that can hold us up and carry us to wholeness after that moment.
That place is love. Love is a tangible essence of who we are and is actualized when something of who we are entwines with the essence of another.
I don’t pretend to have the capacity to measure the depth of love between two souls. What I do know is that it happens and when one of those with whom we are so connected goes, that love connection doesn’t end. It lives on in our being, something of US – the two -- can never die.
These thoughts are provoked in part by the approaching holiday season. Christmas and New Years and Chanukah are the times when we often miss our loved ones the most. Yet it is the time that do remember and it is when we feel the US more intensely. It is through who we are – not just our memories of them – but of our essence and our continued vitality in the world in which we carry them with us.
I learned not from the moment but from struggle having faced that moment to make sense of it. There is peace and dignity and beauty – a gift. I get to re-live that moment during every performance of The Actual Dance.
So yes, it is a selfish thought to wish my own death first if only to protect myself from losing you. The real wish is that there always be an US – you and me…now and forever.
Just listen:
As lovers we think or imagine these moments with fear and trepidation. How will we be able to do it? We wish and pray that we go first. How selfish is that thought. Yet we fear that we lack the strength to withstand the crushing loss of a life partner, a parent, a child. We thoughtlessly wish it on our partner – that we go first not they.
The Actual Dance offers another point of view. It identifies a place within each of us that can hold us up and carry us to wholeness after that moment.
That place is love. Love is a tangible essence of who we are and is actualized when something of who we are entwines with the essence of another.
I don’t pretend to have the capacity to measure the depth of love between two souls. What I do know is that it happens and when one of those with whom we are so connected goes, that love connection doesn’t end. It lives on in our being, something of US – the two -- can never die.
These thoughts are provoked in part by the approaching holiday season. Christmas and New Years and Chanukah are the times when we often miss our loved ones the most. Yet it is the time that do remember and it is when we feel the US more intensely. It is through who we are – not just our memories of them – but of our essence and our continued vitality in the world in which we carry them with us.
I learned not from the moment but from struggle having faced that moment to make sense of it. There is peace and dignity and beauty – a gift. I get to re-live that moment during every performance of The Actual Dance.
So yes, it is a selfish thought to wish my own death first if only to protect myself from losing you. The real wish is that there always be an US – you and me…now and forever.
Just listen:
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