The Breath of LIfe

On a flat sheet of embryonic cells, a ripple is barely visible - as if an exhaled breath has blown across it - disturbing the surface and creating a shallow valley. The Breath of Life moves, and the movement stirs the flat sheet such that the cells begin to coalesce around the imprint of that ripple.

The trough deepens; the top edges meet to form a tube. This is the neural groove which becomes the rudimentary spinal cord for the new human forming inside his mama’s dark and quiet. She doesn’t yet know she’s become a vessel for new life to flow through her. But life has begun and it moves.

Mother moves; conceptus moves. Her dark and quiet is anything but still. Her breath, her  belly gurgles, and her walking gyrations keep the embryo in constant motion. The exponential growth of rapidly multiplying cells has a movement all its own. 

Life is Movement; movement is life. 

Soon, a heart pulse begins - too faint yet to be heard, but it’s there, lub-dubbing away. With luck, that ticker will last a hundred years or more!

Life is a dance. 

Mama rocks her baby; daddy swings him up in the air so blue. Before long, he’s running and sliding, and skating, and swimming, and swinging on ropes, and dancing, and dancing, and dancing.

I was lucky to figure out at a very young age, that dance kept me sane. Angelika and I were two years old when we met. Her parents and mine loved fine music. We lived across the way from one another, and choreographed intricate routines to Franz Liszt’s Rhapsodies, which included running at each other from across the room, and virtually flying, as hooking our arms stopped our forward momentum hurling us skyward. Perhaps each of us had a masochistic streak, but it was great fun to move all out - as fast and hard as we could play or dance.

When Angelika and I weren’t dancing, we were climbing trees, roller skating on our Eucalyptus pod littered patio, sliding down Echo Park’s steep and weedy hills, or riding bikes in Elysian Park. We were always on the move. 

How fortunate we were to keep the rhythm of life moving within us.

The stagnation of bodies in this digital and virtual world is worrisome. What doesn’t move cannot be fully alive.

How wonderful that my mom and dad allowed me to take dance lessons - first ballet at age nine, with Carmelita Maracci, and later, at twelve, modern dance with Anne Barlin.

By the time I was sixteen and my father had died, I went back to study ballet in earnest with Carmelita. She was the one my dad had chosen, and I felt some weird loyalty to his pick. She was a tough cookie, but I stayed with it - attending five classes a week and two on Saturdays. I learned quite a lot about the joy of movement, the lyric line of the foot just so in arabesque, and the discipline it takes to be a ballerina. I didn’t have the discipline, but I loved to dance. 

At eighteen, I added Classical Spanish Dance to my repertoire of learning. Digging into the earth with zapateado (foot work), while simultaneously reaching for the stars with crown and breast bone created a pleasurable lengthening of the spine, as castañuelas clacked a contrapuntal rhythm to the clattering of my 1920’s red Capezio Spanish heels.

On our hard-wood dining room floor, if you look closely, you’ll see the faint impressions of those breath-of-life red shoe’s exhalation having disturbed the surface of the flat wood, and curling my lips into a distinct smile of contentment and utter JOY.