Dance.
I started dancing in college, after being introduced to it through the high school color guard. I tried all the different styles available — ballet, jazz, modern, latin, ballroom. I settled on modern, and loved it so much that I flirted with minoring in dance, though ultimately I decided it would be extra coursework with no payoff later in life.
In my last semester before graduation, I discovered a love for improvised modern dance. I could use the grammar of the class to weave complex ideas and feelings with my body, without the constraint of choreography. I could give my audience a glimpse into my soul, using the language I chose rather than that which was thrust upon me in infancy. I could live so fully in the moment that it seemed that no other time had ever existed, I had no past or future, just this exquisite NOW in which I was this flesh that spoke the rhythms of the planets, my cells, the tides of the ocean.
Soon after, my quest for order in the universe was fulfilled by practicing the religion of Islam. I say practicing because much of contemporary Islam consists of actions. I believed in one God, a transcendent and sustaining force, which Islam espoused, and I sought a purity in my character that was lacking in my western culture. All of this, needless to say, threw dance right out the window.
I thought it was worth it. I suddenly had this immense certainty in the nature of the universe, the purpose of humanity, and what I should be doing on a minute by minute basis. There’s no room for doubt when everything is prescribed. I moved to Syria to study Arabic for the purpose of understanding the Quran, which cannot be translated. I married a pious man. We moved to the US and had three children. I followed him, and he led.
He hated dance. All of it. He didn’t like seeing me dance. So I stopped. Years went by and I didn’t do one pirouette. As the children grew older, music and dance became more frequent in their media. They didn’t dance; they saw that I didn’t dance so they never thought it was something to do. Just to watch others.
Slowly, I kept hearing music that made me want to move. OddSquad had some serious dance tunes, there were remixes of Mr Rogers that were downright contagious, YouTube tutorials had killer soundtracks. Slowly, I started to dance a little to this music, alone, with no witnesses. Slowly, I started to throw little “dance parties” with my kids, hidden, of course, from their father.
One day the dam broke and I knew I wanted out. I didn’t want the mind control. I didn’t want to dismiss doubt. Satan wasn’t real any more than Santa. The Islamic view of Satan is that he is the Whisperer, he quietly gives us dark thoughts to derail us from the righteous path. I realized that this is the most convenient definition — any question you have about Islamic dogma is immediately attributed to the Whisperer. It’s really a complete system.
The next day I started dancing again. I danced in the kitchen, through the house, in the car. My thighs were sore for a few days after that, and I felt this immense joy in the freedom of artistic movement.
If God exists, He exists in dance. There is no room for whispers in dance. You are in the now, you are the present, and there is no past or future. Your mind, heart, and body fuse into a new entity, a powerful, radiant exclamation mark. You aren’t your mind, your heart, or your body. You aren’t your cells or the remains of stellar collisions. You are the medium. You are your dance.
