Dance and Kneel

this need to dance
this need to kneel:
                           this mystery:

                           Of Being, Denise Levertov

If you can kneel you can dance.
They use the same muscles:
beating hearts and ready legs.

Remember to Move

Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you. It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out. And how we may all be mobilized together to free him. — Nikos Kazantzakis, 'The March', The Saviours of God


Think of those gentle quickenings
when the heart picks up its pace 
and you finally start
to walk with the rest of the world.

We move when meditation
becomes mediation and
walking with every thing.
All desires find their ends,
as feet and beat are one 
and we move to the one 
who made our rhythm 
and who thus makes us.

It only takes one before the other, 
but we lack the courage to stride.
When we don't respond,
our steps are stilled, but
the beat of our desire will not die.

These are the throbbing times
when the heart beats you and
drags you along by the ribs,
stomping grapes in your chest
to make the wine for which we long
and which is itself our longing.
All of which explains why we're
so impatient when the stomping starts.

The burning is the half-remembered cue 
that greatness lies beyond,
but we're too dim to think it could be
anything other than utter tragedy.

In these moments the rhythm's will is done and
it has its way with you, who never made way for it.
It hurts and is scary, as are all things to the timid.

So give it room to move you,
because when it is not with you,
you are not with yourself;
though the beat goes gladly on.

I wish I could say these words have freed me,
or that this journey had a cadence to it
which got me where I wanted to go.

But these were really all
one simple step forward,
which now awaits the other . . .


Of like kind: Moving On