Dance Rx
If you continue waking up early in the morning with feelings of impending doom, then consider dancing all night. If you can’t decide what dress to wear—the red or the black—then choose the black (it’s slimming). If you can’t decide which dance to do, choose one you can do alone. Then you will be free to choose the steps. Or stand still and watch the dance swirl around you like a drunken galaxy. If those dark feelings followed you to the club like a sticky shadow, don’t let them lurk on the edges—an unpopular wallflower. Invite them to join you on the dance floor. Wear them out with sultry “one, two, cha, cha, cha’s”; the down, up, up carousel of the waltz; or polka’s raucous orbits teetering on the edge of control. If they’re still skulking about, a dose of jitterbug, foxtrot, tango, or swing might do the trick. (Avoid the lambada for obvious reasons.) While they’re composing themselves in the powder room after that last dance, ditch them (like a junior high “mean girl”), sneak out the back, and tiptoe home. Slide your tired body between the still-warm sheets, and then perhaps you’ll sleep at last—unhurried, unhaunted, delicious, restful, doom-free sleep.
Editor's Note: Susan English Fetcho wrote this piece while attending the "Cancer in Other Words" workshop run by Autumn Stephens. Don't miss "In the Cancer Room" by Stephens, her own meditation about leading the workshop.
Art Information
- “Dancing the Night Away” © Robin; Creative Commons license
Susan English Fetcho is a movement artist and educator, singer/songwriter, and video producer. She teaches performing arts at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, California.
Susan shares her 100-year-old home with her husband, David, with whom she runs foundlight tv, a video production company.
The unexpected “gift” of cancer gave her the impetus to come full circle and return to an earlier love of writing.
