on words

I've recently been wondering about the words I say to myself before I go to sleep. Whether I call them prayers, incantations, desires, what I've been thinking about is if they still carry the same depth and meaning as they did when I first began to say them. Have they become a habit? This question in my mind began to form around the same time as when I started looking at all the lists I'd been making and suddenly only saw words on a page, not the unfolding possibilities I'd thought they were. When I really got down to it, it dawned on me that writing these words became too much thinking, planning, yearning, not enough just doing and letting things be or come in their own time. My impatience spilled out onto a page rather than my stillness moving me into an empty space where who knows what could happen.


Someone recently took some photos of me in the studio as I danced and as I looked at them it struck me that I seem as close to a prayerful, quiet place as I've ever seen myself be. I do enter a stillness there and I do bow down to what the experience can offer me. But I also rise up and wrap around something tangible that lifts me off the ground. The letting go of my thoughts is happening more and more, even as my body seems to be bringing up expression that doesn't want to be ignored. So I let it rise in movement which seems to be taking me both higher and deeper. I got so tired of writing out words for things I hoped would happen. As George Carlin said, "I gave up hope, and everything worked out fine." I've always channeled my hope through words as if they were something that, once formed into discourse, might tell the story of my life, especially the parts not yet lived. I could write down how I wanted it to look in some great detail and voilá, it would become...

I know there are the schools of thought that favor envisioning how you want your world to be, what you want right down to the color of the man's hair in the third row of Carnegie Hall when you play your premiere concerto. And by committing it to paper, it will come. I'd been indoctrinated into that way of thinking from a young age having been brought up by a California mom who used her positive thoughts to manifest everything from parking spaces to checks in the mail. And the power of word has worked for me, no doubt. But, honestly, there's a little something inside of me that now feels as if the specificity of writing it all down keeps my eyes too closely on the page, my mind too tangled with the details.

I just want to admit that I don't know how it all will look. I have no words. And that's better than okay right now.