As a little girl I would stand on my father's feet
to learn the new steps of a dance,
and till this day the cha cha cha is in my bones.

Life is a party ! my father would say--
always gathering neighbors, friends, relatives..
folks from here and there.

So--people came to join in the dance...

Fancy or low down...the cha cha cha, tango, bossa nova, boogie, twist, lindy, waltz--from the big bands of New York City to our tract house in the post war suburbs with a dozen records stacked for each mood...

Come into their gallery of the senses....

"My teacher told me one thing -
Live in the soul. When that was so, I began to go naked and dance."
Mystic poet Lalla- trans. Coleman Barks

"AS ABOVE, SO BELOW"
Perhaps my parents are dancing in another realm still,
before the broken bones, luggage of tarred lungs, dementia, before their dying,
there was so much art and dancing.
May this album honor them, not for the best parenting in the world, far from it,
but for their audacious, flirty, sexy, vibrant, passion for art and dance and music and each other.
This I carry on..this this!

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it."
Martha Graham

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
Martha Graham

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well
as all the pilgrimage places -- I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.
Saraha

The Enchantress
Rachel , my beautiful mother--a girl playing house, enchanted with my father's ways

My mother and father had something..of their own making.. May they find one another again in the vast reaches of space..

the moonlit ethers of body..

Where is that spanish guitar music now?
Put on a dress, light the candles and incense, follow a strong guiding dacner's hand...

the garden full- ripe as a peach

may all the artists they ever loved be there in every color

I walk with grace of their markings

even their darkess has a nightfalling song

We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once. Nietzsche

God prays by dancing. Thomas Merton

May my mother know I saw her dancing till the end of her days, it was her last prayer.

Inside everone is a shout of joy waiting to be born-David Whyte

"If you cannot find it in your own body, where will you go in search of it?" - The Upanishads

The Body is the shore on the Ocean of being-Sufi saying