Here's more on why I dance; specifically, why I bellydance.

Imagine the ages of a person as concentric rings of a tree. The youngest parts of us are still inside of us, and each year or each age, we add another layer to our soul as it gets bigger. The only part we or anyone else can see is the most recent, hence most exterior part. When we see trees we see this year's height achieved, this year's bark. The sapling, even the seedling, is still alive invisible in the tree and it is a real part of the tree. It is not over. None of the rings of the tree are dead; none of them are over; they are all part of the tree. Hence with our subsequent ages. Our inner child is real, and it's still us. It hasn't been superseded by maturity, it has been joined by maturity.

Here's another metaphor: a string of pearls. Time is experienced sequentially. Maybe we experience only one pearl at a time, each pearl being a different age--but there is only one necklace and it's all us and each bead exists all together.

God is the dirt and water and air and sun that inhabit ever cell of the tree in a complicated exchange that unifies the entire tree. Those things were there before the tree and they form the tree out of material and they will be there after the tree is gone. Maybe it's more accurate to say that God is the system of patterns that creates a tree out of all these things...but my point is that God is in every part of the tree and always has been.

God is the string. It exists apart from the pearls and goes through each pearl like an axis and unifies the pearls into one thing.

Now think of different ages. I have been many ages. Each age is alive in me and never died. We're quite a crowd, me and God and all of our ages in this body.

Each age is attracted to bellydance for its own reasons.

I used to be a little girl. I remember spinning and dancing in a new chiffon nightgown that seemed extremely grownup and glamorous to me. I must've been three or four. The nightgown didn't hold up well. As the chiffon shredded I thought the nighgown was getting fancier. Eventually it disappeared from the rotation of available clothes, and I've never forgotten it. I wasn't a sparkle-princess type of little girl, but I probably could have been if Mom had not been frugal and practical. I'm still that girl. I still have that love of swishy clothes and sparkly, jingly bits that make me feel glamorous and special. I have that desire to wear ALL of the necklaces and bracelets at once and clip the earrings all over my hair. I have been known, as an adult, to embellish office clothes with bits of broken jewelry. I have been known to be immoderate, impractical, unfrugal in my presentation. Rarely, but sometimes you just have to make the little girl happy.

I used to be a sexually-magnetic teen. This was not an easy age. I was voracious for attention. I was untrained and therefore unscrupulous in its use when it arrived. I didn't believe it was real, either, and I didnt' credit the suffering around me. I was culturally savvy enough to know that my sexuality was as compelling as it was transgressive, and I formed a symbol of forbidden power to a certain segment of the population. I had already suffered mightily, innocently, ignorantly, and repeated from that segment of the population, and now that I had a clue and their full attention I was not motivated to be gentle. I'm still that girl. I'm still voracious, I'm still angry, and as an older person I'm increasingly voracious and increasingly angry, because my attention has gone. The sexually-magnetic person is still me, and incapable of understanding where the energy went. I have been known to wish for the power and the energy to come back. I want it to come back, because my suffering is still an issue. I have to take responsibility for the reality of rape without the possibility of seduction. It's all downside. I am still that teen and my power still feels new, like a dangerous surprise...but where did it go?

I used to be an actor. Rarely for money. I got good reviews and bad. Preparing a show and getting it on the boards was the reason I got out of bed in the morning (humanly speaking) for about ten years. Even at my age, 54, that's not an insignificant proportion of unforgiving minutes. Looking back, I think the reason I performed had to do with drama's roots in worship mysteries, and also because it gave me the skills and an ethical framework for managing the energy of attention. It's hard to be around a ton of energy, the kind people generate. But if you can learn the skills related to gathering up all that random attention, unifying and directing it, and giving it meaning, that's huge. That makes the world much safer for those vulnerable to energy. I miss being seen by a group and having the ability to direct what they notice, what they think about. I love that they see me, but I love even more that the "me" can represent new meanings in their minds and hearts, so that they are never the same again. And I don't only love the performing part. I also love the preparation, the study, the disciplines surrounding those skills. I love the bouquet of skill-sets that come together as people with different gifts create a performance opportunity, people who advertise, people who know what kind of lights to turn on and when to turn them on, people who help old ladies find the bathroom, people who feed me a lost line. The parade of images and emotions inhabited by actors is a creation of everybody and the audience, not just by the performers. I enjoyed the performing part best but I respected an miss the whole thing. I used ot be an actor--and I'm still an actor. Then I was a driven, obsessed actor and now I'm a frustrated, disappointed actor, but I'm still an actor just as I'm still 29 years old.

I'm a wife and mother. I used to be consumed with family life because when I'm in, I'm all in. I was a symbol of femininity in other people's eyes. I embodied, literally, fertility and nurturance. There are people in the room with me right now whose teeth and bones have substrates formed by my teeth and bones. People ate my fluids. (Were those fluids ever mine? distinctions between whose body is whose get destroyed in pregnancy are not fully restored for years. If bodies are tempered into time, work, and money, the boundaries between body and body are still not restored even though my oldest children are adults.) That symbolism is my body...they are contiguous. One cannot choose whether to be or not to be a symbol of this power. I am an icon and a totem and a fetish and there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm an athlete. Athletes train their bodies. Minds, you can educate in an instant with new info or a new perspective. Hearts, you can stimulate in the same way over and over again until a habit is formed. Bodies, you have to be much more patient. Bodies, especially at later middle-age, take a long time to adjust to tiny changes. Bodies are responsive, but they respond to slow, regular, predictable, gentle, firm, unending, deep, intuitive, wise, loving, persistent motions. Bodies reward us with strength, endurance, outstanding performance that carries us to new identities. Because bodies need to be addressed so slowly, so persistently, so tediously, it becomes a meditative act. Bodies can respond explosively. Bodies can get charged and charged and charged and then detonate, and maybe it's a Strug 10 or maybe it's an orgasm, but either way it has to be worked up to and then recovered from. And it can hit peaks, and the peaks can be hit again later and the peaks can get higher. Slow and meditative or explosively orgasmic, the body has to learn these capacities. The capacities are developed lovingly and have to be kept up. It's time consuming. There's nothing else you'd rather do, and the results are spectacular, but it does mean that someone else will have to change diapers or earn a salary while you work on it. I want that focus and discipline and time and spectacle.

I'm a writer. I'm a student. These are two sides of the same coin. My mind can travel--that's the wrong word--my mind is conducted in the electrical sense to every human place and every human experience and possibility, through words. Some I read and some I write, and some of the words are fact and some are fictional, and both the fact and the fiction are constructs in that they are words but they are discovered revealed and clarified in that their reality transcends words. What does this have to do with dance? I feel--I havent' experienced this but I believe I will--that dance has the same conductive properties. I will both teach and learn by dancing; there's a huge, fascinating, complex history and culture represented by dance that I can't wait to master or try to master. More than that, when I dance, I am with Miriam dancing on the other side of the red sea. I'm with Valmai, who refused to dance at the wrong time for the wrong reason on pain of banishment and possible death. I'm with Salome earning John's head in an accessory to judicial murder. I'm not just reading and learning and teaching about those people, I'm with them and they are with me. Just as I am with Josephine Baker and Rachel Brice and Moe Khansa. There is no death, no fidelity or infidelity, no purdah in dancing. All dancers are on all sides of all the walls and all the fences, in every place and time. The part of me that understands this is the writer and student; it's recent; it's right under the bark, and now that it's a part of me it always will be even after I die.

I don't know what the next layer will be. It might have to do with grief, magic, or other end-of-life issues--although I hope my life is just beginning its second half and not nearing its end. It will be a new thing that is added to the existing things. It won't be a negation or a breakdown or a discontinuance. If I live long enough there will be a new thing after that. All of these rings on the tree, or pearls on the string, are completely separate reasons to bellydance.

I want the fancy costumes with the swish of fabric luxurious against my legs and shininess and jingle. I want to feel excessive and expensive and visual. This is a childish impulse and that is absolutely ok with everyone who's ever worn a jewel or spread a rich tablecloth in order to set a table with china, crystal, silver, flame.

I want to be sexually admired and coveted. Oh well. That's the way it is. Better not lie.

I want to perform in front of others in order to focus their attention on me so I can choose the meaning of their attention and feed it back to them.

I want to embody an archetype and be part of the structure of the human soul.

I want to develop superior physical abilities and assert perfect control over them, in ways that people not dedicated to that discipline cannot develop those abilities and cannot assert that level of control.

I want to master a field of study and be a resource for other students--as a living embodiment of a living community, not as an encyclopedia.

I want to be next whatever is next.

Incredibly, the breath of God breathes through and unites all these sequential, concentric bodies and makes them one body. The breath and the dance is one praise. I have unity with God, with myself, and with all dancers. I dont' understand it.