by Gina Silvestri

Home is dancing with Erica. I am free, one with all women.

Floor drop the coat of insecurity that weighs on you like a dentist x-ray jacket. Dissipate the fear suffocating your clogged street strut as industrial trucks rattle your refusing-to-immune system. Silence the horns startling your fight-flight response no matter how many times you hear it, and tell it no, because space blooms here. We are ready to move.

Hello, body. Well-come home. Where cells matter. Where oh yes, breathing matters. Where all we need is air, music, and the vibrating energy of the free woman inside. Roaring outside turns to whisper as you cocoon, then dance in it. Translucent the hard walls with your hands and watch the way they move and grunt until it doesn’t matter who sees you soar, or what is trying to permeate your walls.

The music begins. I move, not thinking about where my arms or bottom or breasts will fly or if they look too big or too flabby or too bereft of womanly flesh to others. Here, we are as we are and all life is beauty worthy of honour. I crave to feel like this and be like this and know like this and live like this, I want it always. I want it a part of my blood and so I shall dance until I know it is.

Sweat begins to bubble. Endless minutes swirl by and piggyback more still. Clock time says it’s only been an hour, but wisdom says it lies, for there is only ever one time: the here and now. Don’t let passing minutes electrocute the heart, there is no past here. No future. No outside or inside or anything in between. I dance this too. I dance with wisdom until I can’t anymore. I dance for the lost moments spent visiting before, and later, and anywhere but here. I dance with the learning then explode with joy for I am here, I am right now. Alive. Vibrant. Blossoming as I must.

Meantime are flashes of her smile. The smile of Erica. Billboards would dye the goddess gray hair that frames it, yet she wears it proud, unlocking chains in the young eyes looking up at it before society has their ripe scalps jailed in the dark side of femininity. Forget photoshopped inkshopped electronic-chopped filling in of the naked wrinkles she wears without shame: nestle in the creases, roll over to the eyes, their full, round confidence. Soak in them, for only the rays of the sun shine brighter and clearer. This is Erica. Everywoman: untainted, undaunted, unspoiled.

She is you.

She is me.

She is Us.

We are the music. Rumbling, yipping, shouting, cooing, verberating, murmesating, vibrating the We in us the us in us all. Encouraging our cells to reproduce and multiply this energy everywhere we walk. To breathe from the feet that move us, uncage the unscented flower buds yet to be coloured in, and guide the lost cubs of the Lioness we all were once. Walk with us, Women. Remember the tendrils of Mother Earth and dance with them in our tree. Now is only ever the time.

To Dance Our Way Home, to this place where our ancestors shake their hips and stomp their feet, they dance with us too. In this space where life is as it’s meant to be: shining and nurturing right out in the open, not caged and stuffed down sewer wells then barfed up in hospital beds by chemical inducements who tell it in repeated code, “you’re sick you’re disgusting you’re wrong.”

No. You are not sick or disgusting or wrong. You are alive and cherished and free. Dance with us until you know it. We don’t need words, just the sweat and grunt and yin inside the yang of all women, whose nectar and song and oscillating curve are wiser than thoughts or words or incessant rumblings of collective minds.

Come then. Listen with us, make noise with us, be wide open and get raw. Cry, laugh, yelp, groan or join us silently, for Fridays we live like the spirits do and every week we do it again until all we do is do, even when our bodies let us do no more.

Alive begins, continues, ends here.

If not now, when?

Written November 6, 2007