Ananda

This weekend, I danced.

I mean, I D-A-N-C-E-D!

I wasn’t trying to be cool, keeping the beat, or playing sexy. None of that. I had only one goal: to embody bliss. In exchange for that intention, bliss embodied me. Not just any bliss, but ananda, the Sanskrit word meaning spiritual bliss.

I have a problem; I married a man who is way too cool for me. (Of course, this idea is not from him. Couldn’t be, that would be uncool. I know it’s all in my head. The problem is IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD.) Andres has the kind of cool that is effortless. It’s not a coat he wears trying to be something. His very skin oozes cool. It’s in his blood and it seeps through his pores. He’s a fantastic dancer without ever thinking about it. He just has that je-ne-sais-quoi that can’t be learned.

And then there’s me.

I’m not cool, never have been, am perfectly fine with that. Except when I’m out dancing with my über-cool husband, my confidence quivers, inhibitions rise, and I feel awkward on the dance floor. I don’t think it’s possible to feel awkward and not look it. Until I met him, I felt pretty good about my moves, but ever since I started rocking the floor with the King of Cool, I’ve needed a cocktail and a fake-it-til-you-make-it attitude to keep up.

A few months ago I was thinking about dance. How it’s our birthright. How kids joyfully throw their bodies into music until there is no difference between sound and movement. How so many cultures around the world celebrate dance every day of every life. How mine doesn’t. How some of us lose dance as a regular part of our lives and others dance freely forever. How sad that is or how glorious that is, depending on who you are, where you were raised, and how you live your life.

I thought about my own relationship to dance. Saturday morning sunbeams across a black floor. Pink slippers, pink tights, black leotards. Decades later, it sometimes hits me, that feeling of love and desire to dance comes flooding in at 10 am on a Saturday, only ever a Saturday. Or my freshman year of college at an acting conservatory where my elective was tap dance and I learned the shim sham, and went down to a Seattle pier one sunny day to shim sham with a mass of much better tappers, and talk about joy! Or how I took a ballroom dance class through the Parks Department before it was remotely cool and I learned the basics of the foxtrot, tango, and rhumba in my junior high school’s cafeteria. I didn’t even have a partner, and how much I wanted one.

Now I have the best partner, but I am too timid to dance with him.

But I still dance. I must. When I was thinking about dance I realized that there is one dance where I feel completely free.

I call it my Living Room Underpants Dance.

Do you remember that opening scene of Charlie’s Angels when Cameron Diaz dances in her bedroom? I’m better. Seriously, I am. For all my outward inhibitions I can turn on the cheesiest, happiest pop music ever, I mean the stuff that’s pinker than bubblegum, and dance my little heart out while wearing my underpants because I’m supposed to be cleaning and, of course, that includes all the laundry. I let go and I let loose. There is a lot of twirling, wild leaps, random elbows, and it’s not unusual for furniture to be toppled in the midst. This goes on for about an hour until I can no longer move. The living room is still messy, my backs drips with sweat, and I am deliriously happy.

In fact, someone actually paid to watch me dance like this (not the underpants part).

A million years ago my roommate walked in on me, which immediately halted the dancing. She begged and begged to see it. When that didn’t work, she bribed me. Finally she coughed up $100 and agreed to absolute silence. After a few minutes I lost myself in the music and an hour later she swore it was the best benjamin she ever spent.

A few months ago, when I realized dance could be as much a part of my life as my living room is, I let go feeling the need to match my husband on the dance floor. He can rule that space as long as I have a place to dance freely too.

But this Saturday, that familiar longing, that deep childhood pull, propelled me straight into a Bollywood class.

Where, it turns out, I am a natural.

It’s a mix of middle-aged women and impossibly beautiful teenage girls who don’t quite yet understand their beauty. We were all there for the love of dance. I didn’t care at all what I looked like in class. I just wanted to dance with joy, which might end up being the secret of being a good dancer. Bollywood music, with its fantastic rhythms and lyrics about falling in love, brings me back into my own hopeful teenage body, full of innocence and bursting with promise.

I came home giddy and danced in the driveway for my three boys, who cheered me on wildly. I told my husband if I keep it up I can perform at Diwali in November, my birthday month. My 40th birthday month. I saw the light in his smiling eyes reflect my own. The more I become me, the more of me there is for him to love.

Last night I took my new girlfriend to a kirtan, a call and response form of Hindu chanting with incredible music. It’s a part of yoga I deeply love and haven’t experienced in years. I sang and clapped and was finally so overcome with happiness, I danced.

With abandon!

Each song was so perfect I didn’t want it to end. But it would and we would hold the beautiful energy of that song in silence before the new one began.

Isn’t that the best kind of living?

When each moment is so exquisite you want to linger until the next moment shines with its own shade of loveliness. Then you get a glimpse of your whole life and see each moment as a little glass bulb illuminated with light, and you recognize it as a strand of Christmas lights, and so you squint and spin madly so that the view from the inside is that you are dancing in the midst of stars.