Balance and other acts

“I’m not good at balance,” I tell her. “But I finally get that you can practice balance. Like you practice breathing.”

“Yes,” she says, “like the Martha Graham quote. I’m not going to remember all of it, but she says you practice dance like you practice living.”

I am thinking about conflict, about how foreign it is to disarm conflict by bringing it closer. To pull conflict into us, to take its balance. It’s like becoming a cyclone.

I am more dangerous than I have ever been, and, for the first time ever, not dangerous at all. I am practice.

This morning, my massage therapist gave me a poem by Daniel Ladinsky. It goes like this:

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?