In our culture, a subject becomes real once it is written. I knew from experience that that dance was a spiritual path––a real path––but after hunting through the written literature of spiritual autobiography, dance, and memoir, I came up short. No one had written this journey, or at any rate, published their experience. I had a task.
Once launched, the project became a bit of a Mount Everest. How could I verbalize experience that is wholly nonverbal and evanescent? What frames the magnitude of sensorial geography? In reading This Cold Heaven, Gretel Ehrlich’s wonderful account of traveling in northern Greenland, I sensed a way to attempt this endeavor: I would approach my body as if she were a landscape, traversing her wild terrain with my journal and my perceptions.
At the outset, I worked at conveying the sensation of living in the body. Capturing the dreamy pastiche of embodied experience required nestling words close to motion; I decided to journal at the finish of my daily movement practice when bodily sensation was fresh and easy to retrieve and, later, let reflections unwind. I had initially imagined that the written form would coalesce into a manageable collection of essays, an idea that soon fell away as my process developed. Besides sensation, my body surprised me with an arresting narrative––she wanted to tell a story, tell me secrets I’d kept hidden from my mind. This became a tumultuous research, and wording it felt like translation, stretching and tucking syntax, language, and grammar around the sweep and grind of bone and dance.

Memories of childhood body experiences, dance training, and Sufi study emerged at first as flashbacks. Fleshing these out into full memoir chapters introduced me to that messy magic memoirists invariably comment on. I watched my dim, uncertain, half-recollections harden into solid amber which I knew they didn’t deserve, yet could find no better way to pen the journey. Remembering and writing memory has made me a more defined being. At the same time, since finishing this work I have, for the first time, been able to forget.
In her introduction to Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg describes a group of zen monks whose rigorous practice takes them close to death, because it takes tremendous effort to wake up. She wanted her readers to know that any practice, including writing, requires sincere commitment. Writing this piece forced me to disembowel episodes I had never wanted to publicly speak of, let alone go on record. More than that, it made me strive for authenticity not only in movement, which was easier for me, but in my words as well. Only truth is right. Years of nonverbal meditation practice had taught me the difficulty of digging for one’s truth; writing this piece folded memory and thought into that striving.
To say that I love the increasingly exquisite journey my body uncoils before me is inadequate and inaccurate. This is better: my body is the exquisite journey. Love is not relevant, only waking is––waking before she leaves.

ISBN: 978-0-9801986-0-7 0-9801986-0-7