So I feel like I'm a pretty good communicator. Not, like, in the healthy relationship sense necessarily, where I'm able to be open about my emotions with another person, but I feel really comfortable expressing myself verbally. I've always kind of taken this for granted, maybe. The more I read, though, and meet different people the more I realize that being able to say what I mean is really valuable and not universal. And I remembered the other night what it's like to want to express something and not to be able to.
I was walking up Center St late. It was like 11 on the 4th and cars were still lined up trying to get home from the Stadium of Fire. Someone was playing something hiphop-y and beat-driven really loud and I wanted to bust a move. Real bad. I wanted to dance at them that I felt young and alive and beautiful and I was so glad we all got to share that gorgeous evening. But I couldn't. I felt inarticulate and clumsy and kind of repressed.
Or sometimes the only thing my soul wants is to scream its way through a wild 10 mile run. Run until I'm squeezed dry, until it stops aching or trembling or whatever. And though I'm a pretty good runner, I can't always run until it's time to stop. I half-deal with the problem, then my body gives out and I'm left unresolved.
The running I'm working on.
I took a modern dance class once trying to teach my body the vocabulary of grace. It was mostly mortifying. Our final was a solo that we choreographed: I tried to express the liberation of expansive skies and the open road. I got an A- which seemed pretty generous to me.
This blows my mind.
And not just because it's in Spanish. Crazy hot and dusty and their flinging bodies. AMAZING. When I do approach this kind of ecstasy? And release? So gorgeous and perfect.
I'm a writer not a dancer?
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Bodies
Posted by Kjerstin Evans Ballard at 11:38 PM
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1 comments:
I like to think that every body achieves some kind of grace at some point, in some measure, even if we aren't dancers...
From B. Doyle's Grace Notes:
"The undulating grace of horizons and waterlines, of new countries looming up through the mist as the ship nears harbor. The graceful lines of land fleeing in every direction from where you stand in the furrowed field. The smooth sweet smelling grace of a woman with child, the muscular grace of a man's knotted back at work. The cheek of child, the shank of youth, the measured grace of the aged.
"The thin brave knobby-kneed yellow sticks that prop up herons, my wife's elegant neck when she folds back her hair with that unconscious practiced female flip of fingers, the slow pained kneeling of an old woman in chapel. The lope of an animal loping. A tree leaping very slowly sunward. A child's hilarity. The endurance of sadness. The shudder of calm after rage."
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