Shall we dance?

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts

As Alan Watts reminds us, change asks us to move with it, not resist it. And as cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien wrote in The Four-Fold Way, many shamanic traditions viewed loss of spirit as a sign we’d stopped dancing, singing, storytelling, or sitting in silence.

Story has been my constant companion. It as much a part of me as my breath and as my bones. It is my way of making sense of the world.

But dancing? The truth is that I sometimes feel like I forgot to how to dance a long time ago. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but it was sometime after my mom was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia, but long before she died. 

There was a time when I used to be silly. I remember once having a birthday party, where I made my friends compete in a Friend Olympics featuring feats of strength (a Wii Just Dance dance off) and a battle of wits (answering trivia questions about me), and third category that I have long forgotten, but am confident was equally ridiculous.

The festivities, which featured prizes, were followed by a dinner where the conversation suddenly broke into a spontaneous tablewide singalong to Tom Jones’ Delilah. By the end of it, I was laughing so hard that nerve behind my ears was aching.

Somewhere along the line, caregiving replaced my joie de vivre with a grim weariness that even had my mom asking why I was always angry. In true non-angry fashion, I’d angrily respond, “I’m not angry. You don’t get to tell me I’m angry when I’m not angry!”

Of course, I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at the situation – at the unfairness of having to shelve my dreams while my favorite person on earth diminished and faded away from me.

In the five years since she passed, I’ve done a lot of grieving, a lot of self-work, and a lot of spiritual work, but not a lot of dancing. I’ve adapted. I’ve tried to adjust to change, but I’ve not done it with a spring in my step or a lot of joy in my heart – until lately.

While I have yet to reclaim my genetic germanic memory of how to polka through life, these past months, something has started to shift. After years of feeling stuck in what has sometimes felt like an endless loop of grief, it is a welcome shaft of light from behind the clouds.

I’ve often joked with my therapist that I sometimes feel like old Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm, who saw something nasty in the woodshed as a child and is still talking about it and letting it rule what she can and cannot do some 60 years later.

But I refused to become a modern-day Aunt Ada Doom.

And so, yesterday, I bought a car.

Not just any car — a red SUV that feels like freedom on four wheels. For months, I’d been circling the decision, worrying about timing, money, practically – and questioning whether I deserved such an extravagance. But something in me — maybe the same small spark that’s been longingly trying to remember how to dance — finally said yes. 

It was as though all the times I’d been told, “There is nothing you need to do or not do to make me love you – I simply love you,” finally wove their way my heart culminating in a beautiful moment of self-love that said, “There is nothing you need to or not do to be worthy of self-kindness – you simply are worthy of it.”

I purposely bought her on October 31 because it is the end and beginning of the year in my tradition. Today being All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead made it feel right to take her out for a drive as I remembered my mom and the many drives we took together. Going for rides was always a favorite pastime.

Before she got sick, it was a way of bonding and enjoying the beauty of the world. After she got sick, in those moments on the road, she was happy and for a few short hours, I could almost forget that I was going to lose her.

I followed the old routes my mom and I used to take, the ones that once felt like the pulse of home — the backroads along the river, the places we’d stop for pie or wildflowers, the parks where we’d hike and take pictures.

It was bittersweet. So many of the landmarks have changed. The old highway is partially closed right now, cut off like a forgotten vein. Fields that were once wide and golden are crowded with condos and construction signs. I felt her with me in the passenger seat, humming to whatever was playing on Spotify, looking out the window the way she used to — half here, half elsewhere. 

I missed her. I missed us. I missed an Oregon that no longer exists for me. But I also felt freedom and joy as I cruised down the highway in my shiny red chariot, singing at the top of my lungs like we used to do.

As I drove, I realized it was a kind of goodbye — not just to her, but to the version of myself who stayed. 

This car, this drive, this day felt like the first small step toward the life that’s waiting for me elsewhere. Maybe I’m not dancing yet, but I’m starting to tap my feet. I’m starting to believe that I deserve a life that feels spacious again — one where I’m not a caged bird with clipped wings, but a woman behind the wheel of her own becoming. 

And that has me thinking maybe change isn’t something we endure — maybe it’s the music that teaches us to move to again. 

I don’t know where the road will lead yet — or maybe I do. Either way, I’m not telling. What I do know is that I’m finally moving, even if it’s just to tentatively stretch my limbs, and that somewhere along the way, I might remember how to dance again.

Maybe that’s what change really is — a remembering. A slow return to the rhythm that’s always been inside us.