feeling something

photo by Jo Duck

Tumbling into dark places. It's easy. It's not wrong to continually hunger for stimulation, challenge and satiation. A career in which one's success hangs on the precarious scale of subjectivity continually taunts the dancer's heart strings. Patience. Remember the glorious reward of delayed gratification. The dancing career ebbs and flows, peaks and troughs and we have to learn to dance in time with this unforgiving rhythm, so that when those long-awaited crescendos and climaxes arrive, we haven't missed a beat, and we are ready to take off in perfectly harmonious rapture. 

I've been listening to The Ronettes a lot recently. One lyric that has stuck in my head:

"I wish I never saw the sunshine/'Cause if I never saw the sunshine baby/then maybe I wouldn't mind the rain" . 

Shrouded in my cloud, stinging and low, shafts of light have to force their way through the foggy ether - memories and summons of sunshine. The cloud lifts eventually. 

It's not that we have to be weatherproof (umbrellas are unwieldy instruments). There is a certain beauty in hardship and pain - an inevitable component of the life cycle, just as complete freedom and joy are. I want to feel the pungent plummet of rain as much as I want to revel in the golden sun caressing my skin, reassuring and full of promise. The darkness is there to make the light even brighter. I'd rather exist within this contrasting drama, even with the transient cataclysm of a storm, than the drab monotony of half-sung grey. 

I want to feel something, to gain something, to mean something. I shout it inside. Sometimes it's a shrill scream. I keep it in. If I let it out, I wouldn't be able to listen out for my music.

Poco a poco.

But keep listening ... it may be gathering momentum for a magnificent crescendo.