When I was a girl, Swinburne became my favorite poet because his sounds and rhythms were headlong, and because I sensed a powerful erotic mystery behind his words. He was a publicly professed atheist, but his poems were so pagan they fed my early stages of entry into the mysteries. He was no stranger to those mysteries in action, as I knew that for a certainty when I read his friends’ descriptions of his behavior when he was writing. He would shake and jerk about and–dance. Kundalini a century before the 1960s.

I lose track of what I have shared before and where I have shared it. This may be familiar to some. When I was 18 months old, I watched my slightly older cousin make himself dizzy by spinning around, and I imitated him. My imitation quickly turned from spinning into actual dancing. I did it every chance I had, and never stopped. When I was an older child, around seven or eight years old, I heard a mocking reference on television to some outlandish people called ‘Whirling Dervishes,’ and I knew in my bones what I had been doing. It was sacred to me, too. I could go much, much faster, though, because I was always alone. And I learned how important concealment was when I discovered how men responded to the mere idea. The only one ever permitted to watch, briefly, was a songwriter who composed music for the dance. Performance was not and could not have been part of my life. The curiosity of others disturbed me to the point of shutting down.

For twelve of my most active years, I lived in a single large room where I had a 12-foot dancing circle and no downstairs neighbor. Every other thing about that room was uncomfortable, but dancing there was bliss. Though others were around, I was not worried about noise because the music never needed to be loud and never needed to be insistent. Those who can dance to ‘dance music’ confuse me. I never danced the percussion because I hated the feel of it. The rhythm is in the time signature! I danced the lift of the melody. I can’t tell you how many times I danced to Sul y Blodau, which is more or less a dirge, because the melody has lift I could lean into like a strong headwind. ‘Uplift my spine,’ is what I always asked. That applies to both body and mind. As I became more mature I had less time for shallower music, and from then on it was Dorothy Love Coates.

Until age-related issues caused me to retire from dancing a few years ago, I began and ended every poetic composition by dancing, first to enter the poetic trance, and then to review what I had written down to understand it better. It’s a mysterious process, of course, and one I still don’t know how to describe. It is absolutely not channeling, as I must be closely focused on each word and rhythm, but I cannot account for the actual images and the meanings that I sense as they appear. Whole phrases and sometimes lines come to me intact, but I must still gently coax them into a coherent form. If I could not feel that I were in a particularly receptive state, I would never trust the words; too much opportunity for ego to do its damage, I fear.

The interior place where the real work occurs is the Imaginal, as I have discussed before. It is a shared space. Recently a series of podcasts online about non-verbal autists called The Telepathy Tapes has become quite celebrated, or scorned. Young people who do not speak have expressed through facilitated communication their ability to sense what others are thinking, very accurately. They describe a place they call The Hill where they meet with other non-speaking friends by telepathy. Those familiar with the work of Rupert Sheldrake will perhaps be reminded of his theory of Morphic Resonance. We are all connected to each other, all the time, a human Net of Indra; mostly we block it, but sometimes we see through. The Imaginal, like The Hill, is not available to all; one must be able to focus on its precise frequency in order to get through. Artists of the Imaginal communicate with each other there. One might go an entire lifetime without learning who one’s Imaginal peers are, but I know at least four of mine in ‘real’ life.

After dancing ended, I continued in the poetic work I was accustomed to do, and did not miss it as much as I had expected. I can hear singing in stillness. I do miss it every day as part of my process for getting along in the world, but there’s a story I have told before, and no doubt will again. For now, only know that though I have slowed down, I know everything I have ever learned, and it will all be shared one way or another. Stay tuned for news. Magic is afoot!