Dance to the Music You Hear

“And those who were seen dancing, were thought to be crazy, by those who could not hear the music.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No one told me that not everyone could hear the music that I heard…

As a child, I just assumed the people around me were like me. Of course they were…in my child-like worldview everyone got along, everyone was a team, we all lived to create a harmonious place to live and be. And yet in the night when the stars sang, I sometimes wondered why more people weren’t outside, standing under such colliding loveliness. It was as if they didn’t even hear the songs of stars. Instead, they watched their 2-dimension television sets and raved at the wonder of it all.

Somewhere along my life I realized that who I was must not be the accepted norm. I must hide a part of my life in order to fit in…not just with my family but with my peers, my teachers, my neighbors.

They didn’t want someone whose eyes worked in a different way.

They were uncomfortable when a child called out truth, rugged and rigorous, instead of padding “what was” with enough deceptive deceits to make everything fit into that bag of nice. And so I earnestly sought to enter into this place called nice, this dreadful ochre colored place where nothing protruded beyond what most people wanted to hear.

It was a bland and tasteless land.

It was a land of great-unseen danger disguised and proclaimed as the “everyman’s dream, a place of unchallenged status quo.

But it was not my dream.

In this land of “ochre nice” there was no life, really.

The calling outs were muted, the knowings and growings were silenced and forbidden. It was a place where subtle senses where pushed aside in order to belong to the tribe of normal. Newly created TV dinners were proclaimed to be as powerful as loving, home cooked meals. Animals were dumb animals and fads were to be celebrated. Movie stars were the heroes and the underside of truth was covered with thick cement so it could not grow beyond a contained box.

I moved my intuitive side into an inner cave. At a young age I became a mother hiding her child to save it’s precious life. I would visit and yet had to live in both worlds. In the depths of this cave I created my own language with words never pronounced outloud because I had no one to speak out loud with.

But did I still dance?

I tried not to, until I could no longer sit still.

I danced with my babies and in my prayers.

I danced in the moonlight and deep into the places where only barefoot poets go. I was shamed when I danced, and told so many reasons why the music was all wrong. I was told it didn’t exist, it must not be allowed… and yet, I discovered that still I must dance in the music.

If I did not, I would fall like a brown, brittle leaf from the life I was meant to live. I would become lifeless and crumble to become one who had no purpose, no form, no reason.

I knew had been given a purpose, so years ago…

I had been asked to dance in a music that not everyone heard.

Ever so slowly, in those sharply painful years, a most timidly fearful child would peek out from her hidden and secret cave. This one, often punished for making waves, decided that she must embrace the life she had been given. And so she venture out, to unite and to be. Of course she faced much ridicule and misunderstanding. She knew, somewhere deep within, that it would have been much easier to follow in the way of the masses.

But would it?

Really, would it?

I knew I must live in the true answer of that question.

I have heard the explosion of color in the music: the rocks on fire-red that sizzle because massive rocks hold liquid ecstasy…the deep cobalt blue that causes spiders to spin fresh webs to collect dew tears upon.

The music of yellow, deep in the leaves of my ripe peach tree, the oriole breast full of soft and song. And the music of sweet green that causes meadows to become a land of lost and once forgotten joy, we enter into these long flower laden fields and vow to quit our foolish and wasted ways. And I have heard the music of white light, the music that holds all colors and all time and all worlds;

I have entered into these places that are set before me.

I dance in the music and become the music, step by bottomless step. I suppose this might be called a process, this unfolding. And now I can hardly remember why I was afraid of those who called me crazy, of those who thought mockery was powerful leverage or shaming could be a way of control. I forget exactly how it was to be so afraid of who I was and that my eyes see in the dark.

All of that seems like a very long time ago.

I spend my life now trying to help others hear their own music; it is too glorious not to share.

It is too powerful to keep to myself.

It offers too much healing to withhold from the sick and those who once labeled me as weird. Most of the time I can’t hear their words anymore. Their mouths move but the volume is turned off… I have forgotten what they said, their words and threats and false teachings fall off of me like brittle and crumbling leave. I stand next to the sky and I remember why I was born.

And this is why I dance… I dance because the music splashes color upon all that breathes or wants to have life. The music runs before us and through us, behind us and above us. And the deeper in I move, the more astounded and vastly delighted I become.