Meanwhile

So here I am again. After a wonderful year of working on my dancing with Kitiera and being a part of the Modrom Dance Collective it's time for Kitiera to follow her heart home to Seattle. Am I sad? I am ,though I am far more happy for her than anything. I must admit at first I sat in my room and panicked. I thought "oh great here we go again. I will be aimless and lost and have no teacher and waaaaa waaa waa. maybe I should just give up". So I sat down and started to make a list of things I wanted to do.

This list made me remember that I am responsible for myself, and that I am perfectly capable of accepting that responsibility. I often forget that though each of my teachers have been an amazing asset to my learning, they did not do the learning for me. They don't suck all the knowledge they have imparted back into themselves when I am no longer in close contact with them. These of course seem like logical things, but often when I am faced with change I regress quite a bit. For moments in time I have not moved passed that terrified little girl/adolecent who could barely handle walking out the front door of the house. The key to surviving this is to push through the crazy (not to say one might not linger there for a while), take a deep breath and move the next foot forward.

When I had "meanwhile, I keep dancing" tattooed on my foot on my last birthday it was in anticipation of those moments. It doesn't really have much to do with dancing (though I firmly believe dancing saved my life) and everything to do with the fact that I know that "I get up, I walk, I fall down" is the only constant in life. Everything continues to cycle and it is only by sheer will that we all "keep dancing".

So right now I'm in the growing cycle. It's painful at times of course, there are some moments I still think "why do I do this? I could just live" because each step seems so huge. Fortunatly it seems the urge to dance and be creative and live what I think is beautiful always seems to win out over those thoughts. So so far I've done quite a few things on my list. I choreographed a song I'd wanted to for quite some time. I've registered to dance at Desert Dance Festival which will be my first solo festival performance (why yes I have been doing this for seven years). In fact I applied to dance at the Redwood Coast Bellydance Festival also. I registered my domain tinaedance.com and even started working on it a tiny bit. I've started taking adult jazz and a mixed adult ballet/modern class. That latter being so amazingly synchronistic I can't even believe it. So yep, it seems I'm going to keep dancing.