On a recent beach trip with a new friend, I found myself feeling restless and constrained by our intellectual conversation, which had once delighted me. He was asking sincere questions and sharing his own reflections on many fascinating, edgy topics, but something was missing. The moment he went down to the water, I leapt up on my haunches and siddled through the warm sand towards a pile washed up by the tide, pawing enthusiastically through the treasures that lay just beneath the surface. I assembled a small shrine of wood, shells, dried kelp, part of a crab’s claw just in time for his return, and dove back into the familiar safety of my non-challant and acceptably disembodied adult persona.
And yet, there was a tugging heaviness to him that stoked my sense of mischief, and I could not sit still. I edged off the blanket and began digging, furiously, in the sand. As he talked on as though determined to deny that something unusual was happening, I found myself becoming increasingly animated. After a period, the pile of sand I had kicked up behind me was so abundant, I no longer needed to crouch and relaxed with a laugh onto my pile.
“I’m enjoying watching you,” he said, his demeanor lightening in a barely perceptible way. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I responded, pointing at the hole I was digging, “but look at what’s happening!” Instead of just digging straight down, I had begun carving out the sides so that a lip of shadow was forming around the opening, capturing the light in a way more reminiscent of cryptic desert caverns than a humble hole in the sand.
“I want to play,” he said, politely acknowledging my enthusiasm, “but it’s just not in me. I need more safety in my life.” I rocked back onto my sand throne, respectfully subdued. “I get it,” I said. “I spent a long time sitting with a lot of pain before this playful one returned. And I had to build a home, job, community.” What matters, I’ve found, is establishing some semblance of a root structure in the way that is meaningful to us, and then just allowing whatever is to be and pass. That’s when the unexpected guests come, and we can invite them to play.
His eyes watered and an old memory rose to him, of times long past when he had last played, of when and why he stopped. This grizzled, subtely graying man, so determined to transform his life and relationships no matter what it took, suddenly appeared to me as anxious, abandoned nine-year-old boy with scruffy hair and cut-off pants. My body immediately became still. No more digging. No more excitement. I was simply transfixed by this suddenly full, rich human being in front of me.
“I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time today,” I said, unaware of my boldness. And he admitted this was the first time he hadn’t been worried about what I was thinking, whether I was having a good time, how he was coming across. I chuckled inwardly about how this was perhaps the first time I had accepted an invitation from a man while taking full responsibility for entertaining myself. And my intention had created this opening for authenticity.
As we talked, I noticed he had slid off the blanket and was sitting in the sand, brushing his hands back and forth through the sand, smoothing it along his sides. I couldn’t resisit. “I hate to say this,” I gently teased, “but you’re playing in the sand.”
A week later I found myself in an intense full contact dyad with one of the stronger, more fluid dancers at Friday night ecstatic dance. Somehow, we had gotten into a rhythmic circular pattern of movement where I was crouched so deeply my thighs felt they would give-way, and his contact was so solid, I was unsure if I had the strength to rise up or would end up on my knees. My attention was drawn to a younger man watching us from a deep, serene yoga pose. He was small, but powerful, had a kindly and familiar face, a displayed a touch of timid, but curious solitude that intrigued me.
I popped out for a drink of water when I saw him leave the floor, and he wasn’t much for conversation, but when we returned to the dance, I moved near to and slightly behind him. We didn’t make eye contact, but I felt his movements start to mirror mine in invitation. I bent my knees in a low, swaying crouch and he shifted into a downward dog, facing me upside down. I slid my foot near his toes and his hand brushed my ankle, and then I was weaving between his legs, sliding up his side, rolling across his back and chest and spiraling downwards as we climbed over and under and around each other, then leapt about like sparring chimps. Gradually we slowed and settled into the stillness of an embrace that held for an eternity, simply feeling the touch and scent of our damp bodies pressed together, his fingers massaging my scalp under my matted curls, the music vibrating through the floor, the sounds of our close breath framed by the movement of bodies around us.
These are the deeper, wordless conversations that happen when the grief has been dislodged from its hiding places and my body begins to speak to me in burrowing, in mirroring, in the vulnerable power of contact and exhuberance. There is a deeper intimacy beyond human language that invites a more authentic revealing, an opening through which a more profound exchange of giving and receiving can emerge. I have always been far more generous in my play than in my banter, as though my mind competes and my body invites. And through this opening, I connect not with the other as the source of my liberation, but with an entire ocean of flooding and receding that is suddenly woven through everything.
Death and dying master David Jenkinson says that in order to love anything, we must also love its ending. I wish I could say my heart stayed warm and responsive to that vulnerable boy I saw in my friend, and that I welcomed returning home from the beach to the laundry and cooking that awaited me. My ideal self would have risen from that polished dance floor graceful and dignified as soon as the music ended. But my mind stepped in to shield me from the hunger of the abandoned child, even as it clung to our adventure as a respite from the tedium of my life. And I stayed in that man’s arms, inhaling his scent, until he let me know he was on clean-up crew and I did an anxious dance around whether or not to give him my number. These were distinct, magical moments in time and space, and my mind did not know what to do with them besides cling and reject.
It is by loving the partings and ending as much as the meetings and middles, that I believe I will learn to live more fully. Otherwise, I am doing everything I can to avoid or hold on, pitting myself against the rhythm of life itself in a frantic bid to carve out what I think will lead me to greater pleasure. Where ever I am trying to control the outcomes, I cannot play. Play is an endless, jubilant “what if?” What if I plunge my fingers into the sand? What if I see what melody accompanies these words? What if I put my foot here, right next to his? And through seeing what delights us, and how the world responds, we come to know what we are at our core. You do not make a mouser by starving a cat. You lavish on it everything it needs and it will hunt for the sheer joy of it, because that is what its wild heart lives for when it is full and thriving.
It takes a tremendous amount of security and confidence to play. It takes knowing in our bones that we will be okay no matter what: that if something buried cuts us, we will heal; that if something we share is discarded, we will not abandon ourselves; that if another dancer moves away from us, we can still feel the way our bodies long to move in response. The inevitable moments of dissonance and parting bring me back, again and again, to the gentle hand of grief, guiding me towards what remains when I am alone, the sun is setting, and I have no idea where to go.
And it is not for me to say what you will find there.
Nancy