Found, one belly dancer
We all want to be found. We all want to walk into a room and feel comfortable there. More than that we want to be loved for who we are. For some of us the journey takes us far from the families we grew up with and away from familiar surroundings into unknown territory that is exciting, and in which, like a character in a play we can explore other sides of our selves. Inspired by Alain de Botton's TV series on philosophy I once made one wall of my bedroom into an "Epicurus' wall" - filling it with positive quotes and affirmations to remind me of how I wanted to be, my own form of advertising to my self. Long boxed away, one of them fell out of my airing cupboard recently when I was getting out the hoover, "In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." Andre Gide.
I remember laughing so hard at the scene in the film Mermaids where the older daughter, played by Winona Ryder, drives to a beautiful suburban home with white picket fence and flowers in the front garden and encounters, to her delight, a homely mother and father and two cute red-cheeked children. She sits down to dinner with them, trying to assimilate herself into their normality. I remember feeling that as a child, that I wanted to be from one of those spotless carpeted, endless gardened families who seemed, on the face of it, so perfect. And yet it's funny, I received an email recently from an old school friend. She visited my house once when we were kids and remembered it so vividly that when she got married she moved into my old road and lives there now. It's so much easier to see the beauty in the unfamiliar, we get lost in the magic of other peoples worlds and, in losing direction there, our intuition comes to the fore and we begin to know what we want and, eventually, who we are.
The strange thing about long voyages to far off lands is that at some point home is spotted on the horizon and the ship returns to harbour, laden with exotic fruits and treasures from the journey. At some point we all come home, we want to be acknowledged and accepted by the very people we moved away from. We want to make a home, to create a haven, sit down and discuss the journey with people with whom no explaining is necessary. In defining ourselves as different, we strip away the limits to freedom, we tear down the barriers to expression, and yet inside we want to be belong. Just as the performer sometimes longs just to be In the audience, clapping along with friends.
Natalie Goldberg, a writer I discovered in New Mexico, writes about the fear she had of moving away from the practices and traditions of the culture she was brought up in. She was so inspired by the learnings she received from other traditions, and yet was afraid she was moving away from roots. Yet in her book she says, every path took her back to her self. Took her back to re-examining those values she had been taught in a new light. She found that she stood sturdier in her own shoes having taken the journey, and brought back the fruits to others.
In some ways that is what I do - what i decided to do many years ago, after experiencing life in a grey office and deciding it was not how I wanted to live. I bring a magic and beauty into the room, so that people begin to be enraptured and the next thought they make is from the heart, which never fails to put a smile on a face. They experience the joy of movement, that bypasses the brain and tingles through the body. The exotic and unfamiliar mystical quality and reputation of belly dance intrigues people. Like a merchant or storyteller of old, I bring the foreign lands to them.
I remember laughing so hard at the scene in the film Mermaids where the older daughter, played by Winona Ryder, drives to a beautiful suburban home with white picket fence and flowers in the front garden and encounters, to her delight, a homely mother and father and two cute red-cheeked children. She sits down to dinner with them, trying to assimilate herself into their normality. I remember feeling that as a child, that I wanted to be from one of those spotless carpeted, endless gardened families who seemed, on the face of it, so perfect. And yet it's funny, I received an email recently from an old school friend. She visited my house once when we were kids and remembered it so vividly that when she got married she moved into my old road and lives there now. It's so much easier to see the beauty in the unfamiliar, we get lost in the magic of other peoples worlds and, in losing direction there, our intuition comes to the fore and we begin to know what we want and, eventually, who we are.
The strange thing about long voyages to far off lands is that at some point home is spotted on the horizon and the ship returns to harbour, laden with exotic fruits and treasures from the journey. At some point we all come home, we want to be acknowledged and accepted by the very people we moved away from. We want to make a home, to create a haven, sit down and discuss the journey with people with whom no explaining is necessary. In defining ourselves as different, we strip away the limits to freedom, we tear down the barriers to expression, and yet inside we want to be belong. Just as the performer sometimes longs just to be In the audience, clapping along with friends.
Natalie Goldberg, a writer I discovered in New Mexico, writes about the fear she had of moving away from the practices and traditions of the culture she was brought up in. She was so inspired by the learnings she received from other traditions, and yet was afraid she was moving away from roots. Yet in her book she says, every path took her back to her self. Took her back to re-examining those values she had been taught in a new light. She found that she stood sturdier in her own shoes having taken the journey, and brought back the fruits to others.
In some ways that is what I do - what i decided to do many years ago, after experiencing life in a grey office and deciding it was not how I wanted to live. I bring a magic and beauty into the room, so that people begin to be enraptured and the next thought they make is from the heart, which never fails to put a smile on a face. They experience the joy of movement, that bypasses the brain and tingles through the body. The exotic and unfamiliar mystical quality and reputation of belly dance intrigues people. Like a merchant or storyteller of old, I bring the foreign lands to them.
posted by Accidental Belly Dancer at 6:39 pm
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