The Dancers: Goddess Power

The Dancers: Goddess Power

The night February 3^rd of 2008 was cold, blowy and snowing.  Just like it had been since the first week of November; with yet three more months of winter to come.  That long hard season made sense. 

It was fish-fry night up on Fanny Hill.  I’d turned fifty in that kitchen just a couple weeks previous.  For all the bitter of the winter, Fanny Hill was not a bad place at all to have landed.  That too was part of things.

But it was a Friday night in February and I was at loose ends and feeling restless.  I watched the snow come down, appearing wildly out of the bare oaks, whipped through the big lights of the parking lot, and got a little stoned before heading out across the valley back to Kari’s house.

Rolling down empty Barstow, snow-below-zero and colder than fuck, I saw dancing girls in a café window, just the briefest of glances through body-fogged window.  I said to myself, “Self, those were dancing girls.”  And indeed they were, and I needed to see them dance.  Particularly so on this February night.

The heat from the cold, steamy and thick, heavy with the ululations of the dancers, the music wild, and the women themselves, swirling and chiming, moving--an absolutely sensual and enchanted forest--hit me with a force and power so unexpectedly.  I could only watch them dance for twenty minutes.  That river was just too strong to stand in for long, and I left with tears in my eyes, and an erection.

But the river had shown me what was important as well, and I knew now how to start telling this part of the story.  The Dancers are continuity and reconciliation, the loss of the place on the river settled into perspective.

Dancers I

The women dancing, the young and the older, many voiced and colored.  Three women too, at Kari's house then, and me.  Three cats and three dogs, though one of those, Kari's good Ginger, was slowly letting go of this world...and spent much of her time laying across my feet beneath the table where I had begun to paint, in her kitchen.  And as that sweet dog slowly slipped off, her elegy took shape in watercolor, of a flowing stream, an ancient tree, a piece of rock wall and an evocation to the Goddess. 

Dancers II

Many things seemed to come considerably clearer after that.  It ain't about me, at all.  Much as I try to make it so.  There are all sorts of ways to love, and to show love--but most important is to love.  And do your best about it.  You don't need to look too hard for the question. 

Dancers III