enemy

jUst WoRk IT ouT

Posted on by cfox61

Recently, I was given a gym membership as a gift. I was thrilled. The idea that I could potentially transform this post menopausal dancer’s body into a work of art was entrancing. Mind you, I’ve never really exercised in this sense. Almost every day of my life, since the age of 5, has been devoted to my daily regime of plies, tendus and various motions with the intent of moving to music. Not exercise. Dance. Joy. Pain. The Zone. Nirvana. 

I’m game. Let’s do this gym thing. Ha!

I think, these machines are the enemy. I need an ally. Yes. Personal trainer-my crutch. I feel ridiculous. Intimidated. These gym people know what they are doing. And they are serious. And I am paralyzed and awkward.

How is it that, for almost 5 decades I have performed and taught in front of hundreds of thousands of people, that I now am so self conscious about being in the middle of the gym, in front of all these professional gym people and doing gym things, that I feel ‘stage fright’…really? I don’t think I’ve felt like this since I wasn’t chosen to be on ANY team during PE in 4th grade!

Once my trainer sessions are up…only 2 left…then what? I’m terrified. Taking off the training wheels is going to be like a C-section for me. But, I am motivated by the desire for my 23 year old gluteus maximus and striationous thighs. Count down to trainer weening…I. Can. Do. This. i think…or I could just go dancing…

the real gift

Posted on by cfox61

I hate to love you…paradoxically thinking or oxymoronically?

“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”Michel de Montaigne

I fear that I shall love, so does that mean I already love what I fear?

I have feared loving: “fear is the enemy of love”.

en·e·my ˈenəmē/noun: a thing that harms or weakens something else.

It’s as if we choose not to love because we fear “it”: it’s ability to take over our minds, our bodies and our senses.  Giving in to love can signify a complete surrender of oneself. I have always struggled with the concept of two people becoming one.

But…for me, this says it all.

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea