On Dancing

Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.

That’s the theme of my Mandala---that pain often accompanies success. That anything worth doing is going to be hard. That in order to know what you are capable of; you have to test your limits.
You also have to roll with the punches, or as the blue fish in Finding Nemo says: “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…”

Where have I been and what effect does the past have on me now? I have been struggling through four years of therapy rooting through the past and confronting my demons; I decided last week I wasn’t going to do it anymore. There is a difference in washing through all the layers of muck that bog you down and reveling in a mud bath.

I threw out all my old photo albums and journals from the past ten years and even the foot thick medical file I had been packing around as proof to anyone who asked that I was disabled or had been disabled or that there was a strong chance of me becoming sick again.

I got rid of all that junk, those sore teethe, those heavy monkeys off my back and said good riddance to bad rubbish.

The only Dan that exists now is the person today who chooses to live in the here and now and only look towards the future, or as David Cassidy says “There is a gift of being in the here and now that I like to call the PRESENT.”

I live, love, live for dancing, and that is where I find my truth, the constants that I know will be there when all else fails, and as I explore my knowledge of not just dance techniques but of music as a whole, I am finding new ways to dance even when my feet never leave the floor—in the productions studio and on the piano which, after all these years, I am finally learning to play.

Tucson is a source of inspiration to me as well as my cat as well as my boyfriend Chris, but I also know that someday all of them will be gone, or conversely, maybe I will die first and they will have to live life without me.
But you gotta keep swimming, swim, swim, swimming.
Or as the case may be: dancing.