Dancing Challenge Thoughts: 4th day of Earth (Mud)

Dancing thoughts day 4 (Earth transitions to water)

My movement from earth to water actually began a day early. There was a certain dissolution happening and sediment was being loosened but the waters were so dark.

Today I moved further up from the earth that I felt glued to and fixed upon. As I pulled up roots and allowed a certain buoyancy to fill my heart I floated up just a bit higher where the light reached.

I started this process in the shower. Still rubbing the silt from my eyes I allowed warm waters to roll down my skin, each droplet racing to the hard porcelain of the tub as I strive to stand straighter and more open. I flattened my feet against the firmness beneath me, braced myself against the reliable wall before me and let the waters dance on the back of my neck, ticking like the gentle fingers and warm kisses of my lover.

There was a constant pulsing sigh made by the water as it hit my skin and splashed the tub. I stamped my feet softly, imagining the splash that resulted happening in slow motion. Stepping out of the time stream i could see every droplet and each one mattered. Each one gave definition to the shape of the tub that i stood in making it sparkle and glisten like a bowlful of stars.

I’m not really comfortable with the feeling of the water.

Though I feel a powerful connection to it, I also remember another lifetime where it was a betrayer that sucked my breath out of me until I was set free, adrift in the darkness. My skin still remembers that life, or that dream, or whatever it was.

I have to actually, mindfully still myself to enjoy the caress of this water now. My foot stamping out a rhythm in the cascading soft white noise of the shower is part of that process. I let my left arm hang and sway and roll direct streams of water. I move it about like a great serpent in the canopy of a lush rain forest.

Not long after I am greeted by sunshine in my face as I step outside. I am brown and made to smile at the sun with my whole body and sway in the wind like the trees that whisper good morning all around me through their leaves. I wave back.

There are voluminous beautiful clouds in the sky. They migrate swiftly across the heavens seeking lolling imagineers who will do the work of seeing their forms and extracting creatures and shepherding daydreams. The whole time, we drive along the lakeshore taking my youngest to school. Earth, meets water, meets sky zooms along beside us. That motion washes the sediment of that past days of heaviness from my scalp and heart. It peels a layer off. I shed a skin and grow more ambulatory and more receptive to everything around me.

I’m awakened.

I sit through an early parent meeting for graduating seniors and it is excruciating. Why am i sitting in this cold metal chair when I should be in motion? Why does my child have to sit in this containment, force fed assimilation and alternate facts, that gets packed deep, so deep that their thoughts are leaden and she must struggle to motion. Luckily I have taught her to hold her breath and swim upstream. Little of it all sticks to her.

I flee the room at first opportunity back onto the earth and beneath the sun. I spin and am back into the van and soon back to my office. Where there is quiet and sunshine. Here I am still, of my own choosing as I find the music for the 4th day of this challenge. I get up and move and flow in the space before my desk. Anyone waiting for the bus on State street might catch a glimpse of me. I’m sure, every now and then a student catches sight of me doing strange dancing in my office. Another skin is shed in those moments. I am left damp with the sweat of my own transformations punctuated with sunlight reflected through windows onto the walnut brown of my skin.

I play with the shadows of my hands on my desk and chuckle to myself like a madman.

Gratitudes for today. Yesterday’s murkiness is gone and I am transformed waiting for new motion.

The mire of yesterday has awakened me more to today. There is great medicine in the mud.

Allen Turner

Writer, Storyteller, Game designer, Teacher, Dad, Table-top RPG geek. I'm just a dude who likes to share my wild imaginings. Follow me on Twitter @CouncilOfFools

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