Message from a Dancing Moon

Have  you every really danced? Not a slight swaying to music but primal,  foot - stomping,  hip-swaying, wild-making dance? In a dance like that, you experience true freedom and power as you let your body lose itself to the rhythm of the music.  It is joyous.  But, also,  it is hard: you sweat, your body aches, your muscles work. 

The dance of life should be like that. Sure, you can wiggle your hips a bit, maybe bounce a little in tune with the music, but you'll never experience the release we all instinctively long for. If you let go, though...really let loose on the dance floor of life, you might fall, your flailing arms might smack a fellow dancer in the face, your hair might come undone,  YOU might come undone...but none of that will matter because you will be lost in the moment,  you won't care what those around you think, you will be putting ALL of yourself, ALL of your effort, into your present moment of full and complete experience.  It is not wild abandon. It is a focused, deliberate manifestation of joy. And it takes work. 

Life is not something that should be lived the easy way. Being that wallflower who merely sways their hips and maintains their composure is ultimately unsatisfying.  It may be simple, safe, "proper"...but neither is it real, tangible,  transformative...
Shiva's dance - you know, the one that creates the rhythm of our lives and our deaths - is not the wall flower's dance. His dance is the hard, heart-racing, blood-thumping  dance of all dances. I want to live my life dancing, as he does, in the ashes of my own transformations. I want to dance hard and fast and long. I want to go to my grave worn out by the intensity of the life I've lived, with sweat on my brow and a drumbeat guiding the pulse of my heart.

My life well lived? That life will take more passion and more work than I'll think I am capable of but, in the end, it is worth it because it is the dance I choose.