I could have danced all night....

*feet together, knees over your toes, thighs tight, backside tucked, stomach in, chest out, shoulders back, chin up, neck straight. Down, two three four, and up, two three four....*

It's amazing how there are some postures that your body will just slide back into, no matter how hard they were at first, no matter how long it's been since you've tried to hold yourself like that. Even if your muscles protest a little, you know the shape, the feel, and it seems... appropriate somehow to move in that way.

*hands all with your partner, lead up a double and back, then cast off and come back to place...*

My mind doesn't remember all the dances, all the steps and names and patterns, but my feet do. If I try to think my way through the steps, I trip on the words and stumble over the slowness of my thoughts. But if I send my thoughts away and let my body take over, it's the simplest thing to move through the steps and the patterns. It's a kind of freedom I don't get anywhere else - no thinking, no worrying, and a kind of awareness of motion and being and self that I can't get from any intellectual activity or simple exertion.

I couldn't talk out the steps to War Bransle, but I can dance them with my eyes closed. As soon as the music starts, there's a direct connection to my feet, and they move in the pattern that the notes sing to them. And by the end of the night, even my mind is catching up to the rest of me. Burgundian doubles have gone from a meaningless phrase to oh-yeah-that to a part of a pattern that my mind recognizes, and even though they're reconstructing demarches differently than they were four years ago, it's so good to be dancing again....

And when the dancemistress looks at her watch and realizes that it's past time to end for the night, I don't want to make myself stop. I don't want to put my mind back in charge of my body, I don't want to just walk back to the T. I want to jump, I want to dance, I want to practice the new step we've just started working on. And it's two weeks until the next practice. I can still hear the music in my head, and even while I'm sitting still writing this, part of me inside is dancing still....

Moving right along....

Driving at night is like being transported somehow into an alternate universe, one made up of darkness and motion, where you're the only person there, and nothing exists except the car, the road, and you. There's a feeling of isolation, of depth to the quiet that doesn't exist at any other time, and of a freezing of time itself in the sameness and rhythm of the ride.

Black pavement beneath me, black trees beside me, black sky above me. Neither stars nor moon pierce the veil of clouds, making an eerie sameness between ground and sky. The dashed white lines stretch on towards infinity, hypnotic in their pattern. Ahead of me, occasional tail-lights flash, their redness a menacing glare that is, at the same time, reassuring, reminding me that other people still exist and share the world and the road. On the other side of the road, white headlights sparkle towards me like will-o-the-wisps, closet monsters commuting out to a thousand suburban bedrooms.

Sometimes the quiet is too much, and I need to turn the radio on. Dar Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, Barenaked Ladies, or any of a dozen other voice-of-the-hour friends ride shotgun with me, pushing the noiselessness away. Other times, the silence is what I need, and I let the hum of the wheels and the rush of the air fill my senses and create the background for my thoughts.

The morning commute is nothing like this - all too-bright colors of sun on mirrors, neon schoolbuses, and the harsh-edged voices of morning DJ's. Even the sleepiness of the other drivers is an energetic force in and of itself. At night, the energy is at once calmer and less tame, and the highway seems to wind through a different world than the same stretch of road follows through the day.

I've never loved driving, but at night, I can understand the people who do....