While I watched a dance performance today, I couldn’t stop think about belonging. The urge to belong: it’s such a deep longing: I feel it in my bone marrow, it makes my limbs feel heavy. How we often feel like we are on the sidelines, not knowing the steps to fit in. How a dance is a set of repeated steps that a dancer learns to do and then repeats and repeats until they know how to do them without thought. But how not everyone feels able to learn those steps. Or has the right teacher or space to learn the dance. How we sit and watch the dance and wish we innately knew how to move the way the dancers move. Even if we know not all of them could easily learn the steps. Maybe some of them really struggled to learn. But from my seat I still couldn’t imagine being able to learn the steps. Yet I learned to be up on the stage moving, my steps repeating until they made a vision that transcribed a feeling that became a shared experience with the audience.

I think this is why I love to speak, to read my words in front of an audience. It’s why I’d like to learn how to perform poems. I ache for community. Being part of an audience that connects to the dancers on the stage: that creates a temporary community. The moment of belonging: a worthy magic.