Mountains And Starry Sky Bellydance

Had the  most amazing, incandescent bellydance show and gathering at my Thursday night dance teacher's home.  She lives in an intentional community far up in the Soquel hills; they have a wonderful pavilion under the stars, flanked by warm fireplaces, with a canopy and beautiful strings of colored lights winding around it.  I was in my best form tonight, and when the "free dancing" part started (non choreographed, with audience participation), I did gypsy style bellydance with skirt work (basically taking the full skirt which I wear in some performances and swirling it, holding it and dancing in a fast pirouette, etc).  People were quite impressed.  We then had an amazing community dinner, had lots of wonderful talk around a campfire, and then we went home.  I love being in this group of women as a dance troupe.  We are truly sisters.

As I sat in the campfire circle, on a log that has been made into a bench, I thought about how I feel hollow these days, like a gourd that has been scooped out.  I am in a new phase of grief about m.  I realize it will probably go through many phases. This feels like the times when I felt such sadness, knowing he never really took effort to "see" me. It takes time and effort to see a person, to see their worth, and I was always so unsure that he did, anyways, after the first few months, certainly after the first time I thought I was pregnant.  I never told him about the second pregnancy, the one I held secret and lost.  I still feel the loss of that not-to-be baby, sometimes.  Perhaps that is why this grief has been my shadow on my life's journey.

I expect I will write more about all this, so please bear with me.  I know that many who come here to read my words feel this sort of sadness and a long thread of grief about someone special they knew, the grief you might never really get over, the one that accompanies you through life. Certainly I wish he could have been there tonight. My troupe leader is going through something right now with someone who has left her.  There is another loss perhaps impending in my life, one that I dread in its utter, heartbreaking permanency and complete unfairness, the loss of someone so special to me, to a terrible illness. Everyone there, I expect, has felt that emptiness, that powerlessness.

But a hollow gourd still has much beauty: place a light in it, and it shines.