If you have a minute, I would like to tell you a story.  It is my story to tell, and, I thought that I had told it.  But we cannot tell what we ourselves do not understand, even though we are in the midst of living it, no matter how many words we use.

Let me begin with the punchline.  Healing, my friends, is not over when our bodies have knit themselves together after an accident or a treatment of some kind.  Healing may be the most powerful word-metaphor for the whole human condition, because, after all, isn’t that really what most of us seek with each and every breath? This truth is something that I am only beginning to comprehend.  And I am just now opening my eyes to the healing processes that are in me and around me, that I respond to without conscious thought,  that infuse all that I do and think and feel.

When I was younger, like many among us, I dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer. That feeling of spinning and turning and stretching is rooted in my depths, although I was never as graceful as my more talented nieces with whom I studied.  Later in life, I trudged weekly to the local dance studio to try and guide my very un-ballet-dancer-like body into the image of a swan in flight that filled my imagination.  Dance still represents the embodied essence of freedom to me in both the physical and spiritual dimensions, and you will find me more often at a ballet than an opera when I visit the Kennedy Center.

While there would be no Kirov for me, all that youthful effort left within me the gift of  a dancer’s understanding of the melding of body, mind, and soul that we mystical types call wholeness.  Art requires everything from us, all that is human and all that is divine.  It requires that understanding of wholeness.  Eventually, dance class was replaced by piano lessons and voice lessons and acting lessons and auditions and performances and recordings, all carrying with them that drive to use everything that I am.  I danced inside as I performed my favorite songs. My favorite moments on stage as a performer were always the big party-scenes:  the Bobby birthday party in Sondheim’s Company; the harem scene in Aida (I only got to watch the dancing there), and the grand party in Eugene Onegin, to name just a few.  Oh, yes, and to this day, I do a mean rendition of the Old Lady’s Song from Bernstein’s Candide.

Six years ago, however, that sense of wholeness was shattered. All the dancing stopped, the internal and the external, even though I continued to perform and to live and to move in so many ways.  I thought that everything was fine, but I did not realize that real motion had been replaced — replaced by fear, and uncertainty, and a kind of dislocation. I did not realize that my healing was, well, off-track.

You see, today, is the 6th anniversary of my heart valve replacement surgery.  I stop and pause and write about every other important anniversary in my life, but not about this one, until today.  I will admit it — I have spent most of these anniversaries in tears, grieving over what was, grieving over the time before I knew that there was something congenitally wrong with my heart.  I did not dance.  I did not sing. And, most of all, I did not write.  I did not use the one tool that has saved me when so many others have failed.  I did not yet have enough hope to consider that I might actually experience healing, that my spirit might begin to dance and sing again.

It is odd to think that you have talked and talked about something, to think that you have written about it to the point of exhaustion, that you have shared and over shared about it — only to find that you have barely written a word on the topic.  And yet, here I am on this, yet another of the days of remembrance in September, writing about this part of my story for the very first time.

There has been so much grief in these six years — the death of so many ideas, the loss of so much and so many.  There has been so much struggle — first the struggle to return to my studies at the Seminary, next my struggle to sing and perform again, and finally, my struggle to become acquainted with a body that was forever changed, albeit changed for the better.  It has been this piece of the healing process that has taken the longest to recognize and whose absence has colored all the rest.  It is this last relationship that is only beginning, now, to feel comfortable and friendly again.  Once again, I am beginning to feel a sense of the whole that is me.  Apparently, until now, this experience and these learnings were all too much to be held by the container of mere words and writing.  It was too deeply personal to be explained, even to myself.

In these six years, I have known the deepest of grief and the most exalted of joy, and they have existed side by side and simultaneously. I have, in one way or another, without knowing it,  been writing myself toward this understanding.  In these years of living my life, sometimes faking it in the hope of making it, always searching for a new way to be my whole self, I have, by instinct and by faith, learned the value of that often repeated, yet unattributed quotation (likely an Irish Proverb): “Dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening, and live each as if it was your last.”  My ability to heal and to be healed have depended on this awareness that I could not articulate, because no one could do this work for me.

And what have I learned?  Well, I have a few additions to suggest to those well-worn words: When you grieve, dance, that you may feel alive with your pain and understand the joy of just being alive, even though it hurts.  When you feel joy, sing, that you may experience the breath of  God.  And then dance some more, just because you can. And in your living, always love as if each day was your last.  You can show that love by dancing and singing, too.  Dance and sing your whole life long, because grief and joy are the inseparable partners of our human existence and of the divine love that dwells within us all.  

Clearly, when grief and joy, intertwined, are too personal and too deep for words, there is only one possibility:  drop beneath words and live into your incarnation.  Create, move, breathe. Or, in my case, dance and sing– dance in the living room, dance with your voice, dance in your soul. I didn’t understand that until now, I did not understand the dance that is required to embrace a healing of spirit, as well as a healing in the body.

This year, there are no tears this anniversary.  Instead, there is real gratitude and joy, for the life I have lived and for the live that I may be lucky enough to live.  And for now I know, the dance and the healing are one, if we just let them be.   And that healing, if we are lucky, continues our whole life long.