"Dance like No one is Watching" is Not Just a Cute Phrase on a Knick-Knack at Target

The advice in this column is not linear
or rational
or designed to take you
from A to B to anywhere
near the cover of Redbook.

Where it will
take you
is bliss
and beyond, when you learn
that the here is now
and the moment you start ecstatic dancing
from the kitchen counter to the pantry
with the peanut butter,
when you can dance
with the dirty dishes
from breakfast with the beautiful souls
you co-created into this world
with your incredible other,
then
is the experience of knowing
in the highest sense, in the sense
that teenagers would ask,
"Are you high?" as they do
in the presence of absolute ridiculousness,
of irrational, of emotional, of weird.

This is high.This is the feeling you seek
in the bottle, the bong, the line, the deep long drag
down into your lungs, in the buying of so much
or even what moves you to buy in
to something that gives you
a sense of being
more. Or perhaps you look
not to indulgence
but deprivation
and the pendulum swing over
to not this
or that
or that
or that
because the not having
has a sweet burn to it that becomes
your new high, your new shared experience
with humanity. We all love suffering
crave it
as much as we all crave the embrace
of each other, to pour ourselves
into each other, to empty out the separate
self and dissolve into
Oneness. But knowing that you want this
helps. It helps you to remember to dance, to love
these legs
these hands
this body you have been given
that is yours
and yet not yours
because it is a temple
whose steeple points upward
reminding you of
the vast beyond, the union
that you go towards.