BELIEVE

Alex -
Amazing post, as always. And I so appreciated the chance to read one of your poems. It is glorious and painful and vivid. And I LOVE that nine days after you wrote that, I sent you an email, we had had no communication in between, in which I mentioned that the "the ground is getting more solid beneath my feet." You use the same words at the end of your poem. Maybe it sounds odd, but I love that small point of connection. It feels cosmic :-).

This post is going to get a long, now because I really want to transcribe something for you. It's not only inspiring, but raises some ideas about alternative healing practices to explore, both generally (somatoemotional release), and specifically (Dancing with Life on the Line...read on!!). And while we're talking about alternative healing practices, if you haven't already, PLEASE find a really good cranial sacral therapist!!

Anyway, on with my big-ass quote. This is from a book I'm reading called Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Gregg LeVoy. He is talking about (and at times quoting) Anna Halprin, the famous dancer. It reminds me of your story of the fabulous Ron. Anna had begun a process of drawing as feely as she could to express her inner life, and then she would "dance her drawings" to bring full expression to her deepest, truest voice. But one day she drew a life-sized self-portrait, and "in its geographical center, crouched in the middle of her pelvis, was a round, gray mass. It was a drawing she was unable to dance. Initially, she interpreted the mass as a symbol of an embryo, a scene of nativity, but she remained unconvinced by her own explanation because she refused to put it to the test: She refused to dance it.

"That night, lying quietly in bed and staring into the dark, she realized that the drawing was trying to tell her something she wasn't willing to look at. The next morning she went right to the phone and called a doctor.

"She told him about the drawing and she said she wanted him to examine her prceisely where she had drawn the gray mass, and when he did, he found colon cancer....

"Three years after a colostomy, Anna had a recurrence. She said she then knew she would have to make "drastic changes" in her life. When the doctor began outlining another radical operation and suggesting chemotherapy, she turned to him and said, "Give me two weeks. I want a chance to try something on my own first." That something was another self-portrait, which she described as "the perfect picture of health. I'm young, brightly colored, with my hair blowing in the wind, full of vitality. I suppose I thought that if I drew myself healthy, I would become healthy." But again, she couldn't dance it. "I tried, but it just didn't feel right, didn't strike a deep chord, didn't feel like me."

"In a fit of frustration, she turned the paper over and drew another image of herself, this one "black and angular and angry and violent." It was a dark, stiff, masculine figure, heavily armored and helmeted, stabbing himself with a knife, the colors all black and red, with blood flowing into a bowl on the ground. This, she knew immediately, was the dance she had to do.

"She did it in the company of "witnesses" -- family, colleagues, and students without whom, she said, she couldn't have undertaken what turned out to be a physical and emotional ordeal. It was a volcanic dance of rage and purgation not unlike the dances of rage done for the purpose of releasing stored-up anger and grievance by tribes such as the Dagara in West Africa. At the end of this exhausting dance, Anna collapsed and sobbed. "I needed the witnesses there to encourage me to go through with it, to face my fear, to express parts of me I've never given myself permission to express -- anger, grief, weakness, and vulnerability. They kept me honest, urging me to go deeper, reinforcing my sounds, calling out parts of the picture I needed to dance."

"Only then was she able to turn over the paper and dance the healing image. And only then was she ready to go back to her doctor, whom she prsented with one of the greatest surprises of his medical career: Over the course of barely three weeks, Anna's cancer had completely disappeared and has never returned.

"For twenty years afterward, though, Anna withdrew from public performing and worked on some of those drastic changes, on trying to figure out what her next dance steps would be. She especially worked on "my definition of art; why I danced, who I danced for, what purpose it served in anybody's life." She began searching for ways to make dance more "useful." She edged awayfrom theater toward ritual. She moved into a liminal zone between art and therapy, between dance and healing, and in 1981 she began working with people -- through dance and the "expressive arts" -- who were confronting life threatening illnesses such as AIDS and cancer.

"Her work with patients is based on what she calls the Five Stages of Healing, which outline a process of "identification, confrontation, release, change, and assimilation" of wounds and loss, personal and communal. she developed "Dancing with Life on the Line," a five-day workshop with a hundred participants structured on the Five Stages, which culminated in her giving a public performance attended by over a thousand people in the San Francisco Bay area."

If you are still reading at this point, thank you for hanging in there. I believe with you, Alex. I love you - Lindsay