Five Minute Friday: Dance

          

By the time the doctor had announced "It's a boy" the third time, I had given up on pink. We'd even named the third child using the male version of our Grandmothers' names. By the time we heard "It's a boy" the fourth time, dance was the center of our life. By the fifth time we were looking for black baby ballet shoes just coz we knew. It was inevitable.

Braniac tried to fight it. Of all the kids, the one formerly known as Hippie-Freak didn't want to dance. But then one day he announced, in typical Braniac fashion, he'd start when he turned five and followed through with his promise the Saturday after his fifth birthday.

I've been watching them for eight years. It's as ingrained in us as reading. I watch The Teenager now, caught between the world of pain that has taken him out of ballet and the desire to return to the arts. I watch Thing 1 as he tries to push himself so he can achieve great things. I watch the joy and love of the dance in Thing 2's face as he zig-zags across the floor while practicing his spotting or leaps into the air trying to get even higher than the last time. I watch Braniac as he catches on with ease...things come too easily to Braniac. Now we ready for Babycakes first class because we know it's inevitable.

We don't know why. We don't know how they have been so captured. But they are, and they pull us right along with them.

~~~

Post-Script. The timing of this prompt was interesting in that just yesterday I was reading through some quotes on dance, looking for just the right thing and I found St Augustine.

I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community.

I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.

Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.

Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego.

Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.

I praise the dance.

O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.

~ Saint Augustine

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