Dance, my heart!

The greatest journeys may travel not a mile.
I just got back from one that never left a room. I drove home racked with sobs, grinning and laughing too. That's what journeys do. That's what we want when we watch these great movies of stirring adventures, isn't it?. We want the tragedy lightened with a chuckle, the big-belly laughter dampened by a tinge of sadness. The moment of triumph, the shock of failure.
Fear. Relief. Love.
This is what journeys are about.
I keep looking elsewhere for them. I drive thousands of miles, fly thousands more. Anybody who reads this blog will know I only write when I'm traveling.

Well I'm traveling now. Traveling on a journey that started while snuggled on a sofa with friends, just watching dance videos. Traveling through love and anguish and insecurity and jealousy and just plain WOW how did they do that?! Through beauty, beauty made of suffering or of death or of the littlest seemingly mundane things. I will say of dance what I once said of literature, a number of blogs ago: it makes the ordinary a work of art. And not just the ordinary. Pain, addiction, love, loss, desire, business, humor - dance paints it all with the art of the human body. And after a few too many YouTube clips of SYTYCD, the floodgates of my heart were overrun. Open one emotion and you open the possibility of them all.
I shed a few quiet tears, and tried to maintain at least a little bit of composure as I hugged a friend goodbye. All I really wanted to do was bury my head in his shoulder and hold him tight and cry because life is so...
One word won't do it.
That rush of feeling when you see the person you love, that breathless awe at the first glimpse from a high vista, that crumbling when things fall apart, that warm comfort of familiar old friends...
We can communicate that in a dance, a look, a touch. A much needed embrace. A breath.
Poets can put it into words, I guess. I'm not much of a poet.
I'm restless because I sometimes forget that it is the emotional side of the journey I long for. The world is small compared to the heart. And when the world stops inspiring me, I don't always remember that that other, greater territory holds possibilities both endlessly gratifying and terrifying. But oh, how today reminded me. I am risen from the dull pain of apathy, freed from slow panic of boredom. And I'm kind of a mess. A laughing, crying mess who can't even write the term paper I left my dear friends for because this story was demanding release.
It's been a good journey. And this should make for a great dance someday.