Ross A. Laird

Dr. Janet Roseman, one of my colleagues from The Union Institute, has written a chapter for a new book from Oxford University Press entitled A Time for Listening and Caring: Spirituality and the Care of the Chronically Ill and Dying (with a foreward by The Dalai Lama). Dr. Roseman is a scholar of dance; her chapter in A Time for Listening is about the relationship between dance and healing. As part of her preparation for that chapter, Dr. Roseman spoke with me about the nature of healing and creativity. Subsequently I provided her with the following tidbit (which, I believe, is quoted in the new book):

Everything dances: leaves in the autumn wind, waves traversing the trackless sea, planets and stars in their languid orbits across the heavens. Those dances, ecstatic or tranquil or suffused with longing, are a way of taking a stand in the face of oblivion. In the spiraling and turning that lead ever toward a core of aliveness, the dancer affirms the spirit, calls forth its voice, pays attention to the patient instructions of the innermost self. Dance, and its handmaiden music, are spontaneous and authentic prayers of the soul.

Breath and bones and blood are the instruments of the soul's expression: frail, small things prone to the many sufferings of the world. All dances are therefore devotions of vulnerability. The dancer beseeches the soul, asks to be carried into solace, into comfort, into peace. The soul's answer is movement: thumping feet, an arm descending in a gentle arc, a shout emerging from the grieving heart. The sounds and movements of dance evoke all the secrets, reveal all the hidden places of refuge and sorrow. When you finally see that the lights and shadows of all creation are within you, the only reasonable response is to dance them awake.

This awakeness is the essence of healing. Life stretches us thin on our bones, makes us brittle and windswept, makes us yearn for something we can't quite reach. Dance delivers us into the knowledge of the vast being that hovers over our shoulder. Dance cracks us open, makes us light as gossamer, then knits together our dry bones into a kite whose string is pulled by the invisible.