Sometimes You Have to Dance First
Okay, I'm writing now. Little late. Procrastination happens. It's okay. But here I am. Sometimes you have to dance first, you know?
My body is tight and achy, with little embers of inflammation caught fire on me, throughout my body. Shot on to me as if from a crackling fire in high winds, I feel the burnings throughout my body.
The achiness and the tightness go sortof hand-in-hand. Ligaments that haven't been stretched, exercised, or given proper blood flow or oxygen – tight and rubbery, like overcooked chicken. So horrible to think how we eat the very flesh we resemble.
Muscles tight and sore, unaware of their purpose. Knees with patellae flowing off track without evening knowing, like cars running over those ridges on the side of the road. My knees creak and crack and crumble just like a car tire over those rumble strips, but they don't know that they shouldn't. Or they're too busy fighting with the underworked and under instructed quad muscles and tendons to know. Cartilage like torn up pavement, hit too many times by heavy plows in the winter. Cellulite like frost heaves under my skin, warped and lumpy. Skin cracked like a desert road, baked in the unrepentant sun for years and years.
What do these things do in my body, the muscles, ligaments, joints? I don't know enough. It would be good to know, if for no other reason than to have better respect for my body. Instead, I've had my subjective experience to tell me how my body ought NOT to feel – how imbalanced it can get, how heavy and weighed-down. How you recognize yourself as more than a disease than a body, a disease more than a person.
Today I got the taste of health again, and it came on a day I woke up feeling so unhealthy. A gust of fresh air on a stagnant, fetid ship, caught in the doldrums – it was oxygen my body and soul needed.
Somehow I was feeling off this morning, and then I got a second wave this afternoon. I was going to jump into some spiritual homework (including this writing), but while I was getting some things sorted out I started listening to some music on my headphones while my husband napped upstairs. One song turned into another, and another, and before you know it, I was watching videos on how to wine, and soca workout videos, and how to samba, salsa, etc. Just having a great time moving to the music, opening up and relaxing my body, and trying to get my hips to do what seems like quantum physics for them: carribbean and latin dance. Proper whinin'. If I can learn how to do some proper dancehall and wining while in this quarantine, then I will be a very happy girl. This may have been worth it, to some degree ;).
So yes, procrastination for sure, but a better kind of procrastination – I procrastinated by doing something I loved, I needed, and gave me health and joy. True health and true joy. Thank you, God. Just to dance and hear good music feels so good on a day you woke up feeling awful and fearful. Thank you Jesus.
I've procrastinated FAR longer on giving myself the permission to just dance any 'ol time I want and NEED, than any other kind of 'work' I have to do, so there. There it is.
Sometimes you just have to dance first.
You know?
Bless up.