One Last Dance

There are perhaps certain things that a guy shouldn't admit & hope to maintain some image of looking all 'manly'... but yeah, I often fail at that image anyhow, so who cares....

Skipped church tonight to watch the movie "One Last Dance" tonight (watched the movie with a girl if that counts for any points towards being manly again).... it's a movie put together by Patrick Swayze (from Dirty Dancing, which I haven't seen, but will have to watch some time) and his wife, Lisa Niemi. They star in it, wrote it, directed, produced & funded the movie... it's their 'baby' and they've taken good care of seeing it grow.....

Anyhow, I guess I'm not the best movie reviewer, or the best reviewer of anything... I don't know enough to know technical merit or anything, but yeah, all I sort of know in movies is what I see & feel & yeah, this movie was breathtaking... I'd recommend it highly to any dancers I know, to any artist I know and really just to anyone that appreciate's beauty, anyone brave enough to dream... the dances in this movie (woven in with the story) left me speechless & in tears, awed by the wonder, the grace, the beauty of the human form...

Recommend renting it, or ask me to loan you my copy of the movie (after it gets loaned out to some friends who I will force to watch this thing)....

But yeah, the movie opens with these dancers performing & Lisa Niemi's character voicing these words.....

"When I was about 14 or 15, I discovered some things inside of myself. I discovered that what was inside of me was infinite. That you can go down to the bottom of my soul & keep reaching, and reaching, and reaching... that everybody was like that, that the things, the power, the majesty that we all have as human beings is just unthinkable, unfathomable.and that's what I brought to my dancing......"

There was a time in my life (the ghosts of which are still present) where I would've written that statement off as humanistic, new age babble.... but yeah, I start to see now (and especially in this movie), the reality of who God made us to be. One person coined the phrase that human beings are the "universe next door", that, being made in God's image, He has also given us, even in our finiteness, a part of His infiniteness. The truth is that we can keep plumbing the depths of another's soul (or our own) for all eternity and never reach the end, the bottom....

I just start to realize how breathtaking it is to be human, what a great gift it is, how much of a mystery it is... how little I understand of it. Too often I am cursing the limitations of my humanity & cursing myself for weakness, for lack of discipline, for a ballooning belly, for feeling too much, thinking too much, not being enough of this or that.... and yeah, I forget to recognize the beauty, the majesty & the power of just what it means to be human.

Watching this movie, seeing people pour their being into the dance made me realize how the greeks & romans could've looked around & called people 'gods' - about how they mistook the image of God as being 'god' himself.... There is this aspect where, when our hearts are alive with passion, where we find our 'one thing' and pour our being into it, we blaze with this light, this incandescence, that is blinding in it's brilliance.... and yeah, I thought again tonight of how God sees us, of how He is not threatened by our brilliance, but captivated by it... I thought about tonight how that, as much as I long to be 'needed', I am often proudest of those I love when I see how little that they 'need' me, of how much they shine & are blindingly brilliant all on their own & don't need me to 'help' or 'encourage'.... There is such overwhelming joy where you see people you love 'get it' where they understand who they are & step into the true brilliance of being - of where they find the moments where they are free to be fully themselves, to fully embrace their passions & pains & really, really live as if this were their last moment and they were some dying star blazing brilliant in the night.....

...and I know that this joy that I feel for those I love is a fraction of the joy that He has for us, a fraction of the pleasure that He feels when we, even for a moment, even in our dreams, believe that it is possible to fly, to be free, to really live, to be brilliant..... and yeah, our person hood, our humanity is such a gift from God & I think He so wants us to live that out whatever the cost & yeah, we so often squander that by hiding ourselves trying to fit what is acceptable....

Later in the movie, Lisa Niemi's character describes it like this:

"When I was about 14 or 15, i discovered dancing. I was... I was so in love. To dance was this flight, this intoxication, this moving through colours; reds and blues and greens... and... it was like my soul sweated out of every pore of my body and I was larger than myself on stage because I wasn't just this. And I felt like if I could take all of that & put it in my dance & if it was only one person that got it, got this thing that we are, it was worth it, you know? So, what did this girl decide to do? She decided to go to New York & that was not a good idea. And I took all of that stuff into class with me &, well, I don't think that's what they were looking for. But I kept at it, I kept at it & then I got into Alex's... you know I vowed, that nothing like that was ever going to happen to me again, so I went on this big campaign to learn how to be like everybody else because I was not having such a good time of it, but it seemed like nobody else was having such a big problem. So I went on this big campaign learning how to dress, how to talk, how to behave, and I learned...I learned, but I felt like a cheater, like a big cheater because I left everything that was important to me behind with that girl that danced. But you know what? When you had me dance today, I remembered... I remembered myself....and it makes me realize that dance is something you can't kill....so what do I have to be afraid of... I don't have anything to be afraid of.... thank you...."

Those places where we 'remember ourselves' are beautiful, are the pathway to really living... spirituality is not about rules, about form and structure, it is about dance, about beauty & flow, about letting go & letting the One lead and move and flow with you & through you... to come alive is to let go of conformance, to let go of being in control, being 'normal'... and yeah, in those places perhaps we get to be extravagant, get to look like people who are infinitely loved by the great dancer, the great artist who did not consider it a shame to take on our humanity, but embraced humanity, so He could embrace us & deliver us from our fears (see Hebrews chapter 2).

Anyhow, watch the movie.... it's good & it'll do your soul good (unless you're too manly for that sort of thing)...

More wisdom from the movie that I haven't 100% gotten yet, but will ponder more:
"Watch out, the mirror isn't going to eat you up. The mirror can either serve you or it can destroy you. The longer you look at it the worse it can be for you. But when the mirror withdraws and disappears, that's when you find the mirror within yourself. That's where the real mirror is. ... you must look closely, deeply until there is no longer any mirror at all, just you... if you work long enough, hard enough, eventually you will have to look and this is good... "