Easter dance.

I don't have a proper Easter tradition now that Nick has grown and I am out of the basket and egg trade. But I do love reflection. I love any opportunity to think about spiritual growth and transformation, even the ashes to ashes, dust to dust business.

Mainly, I love second chances. I am happy to have had more than one (thank you kind friends and family who weathered the storms).

Today I will read and meditate and dance. I entered the weekend with a storm in my spirit. My insides matched the gloomy, mercurial weather entirely. Dark and ominous. Capricious. Will it be like this forever? Is this one going to stick in me, this crappy, fearful mood?

I took some steps yesterday toward redemption: teaching, reaching out, saying a prayer.

Today, I dance. When I get sedentary in body and spirit, my body imagines that it must be ill. Under the weather, so to speak.

But the minute I get out on that ballet studio floor and I begin to move and sweat and leap and laugh, when I begin to see my joyful friends, pushing through their own storms, I am again transformed.

I hope you have a beautiful, joyous, contemplative, transformative day.

Eat some candy. Find an egg. Read a poem. Say a prayer.

In closing, a little Mary Oliver for you. She says it better than anyone.

What the Body Says.

I was born here, and
I belong here, and
I will never leave.
The blue heron's
gray smoke will flow over me
for years
and the wind will decide
all directions
until I am safely and entirely
something else.
I am thinking this
this winter morning...
of transformation
Of course
I wonder about
the mystery
that is surely up there
in starry space
and how some part of me
will go there at last.
But I am talking now
of the way the body speaks,
and the wind, that keeps saying,
firmly, lovingly:
a little while and then this body
will be stone; then
it will be water; then
it will be air.