I am getting ready to go away for the weekend with my dear friend. We are celebrating my birthday and we are dancing in the beautiful Sunshine Canyon. I can't wait.

I dance the 5 Rhythms, a practice founded by Gabrielle Roth. This practice has led me to my body, my heart and my soul. The practice includes five different qualities of energy that one moves through. And each rhythm, opens me to a new part of myself. It gets me rooted and uncomfortable at the same time. And years ago, in a college course that focused on movement and writing, I wrote these poems, fueled by the power of this practice. To learn more about the rhythms, you can visit,www.gabrielleroth.com.

Flow
Liberation.
Deep.
Intimate.
Plunging deep into sensuous, erotic water.
Feminine as it runs over my hands
and through the creases of my fingers.
Delicate and resilient
Touching everything and nothing at all.
My energy holds in the places I hate.
Stuck, not fluid.
Where is the love for my womanhood?

Staccato
Punctuate.
Alive.
Bones rattle.
Muscles tense.
Blood quickens.
Messy, tight, untidy are my depths.
Not enough, I say.
Does the root of the tree ask if there is enough?
Its roots drink the nutrients of the earth with abandon.
Withdrawing its mother’s offering.
Sucking in from the dirt what it knows is good.
My mother, my nourishment.
I am gasping, grasping for air on a cool clean mountain lake
bobbing up and down
as I slowly sink
under.

Chaos
I am kicking and screaming.
Drag me to myself
Rising from my bones, I am exposed.
Cowering in my blood, I am naked.
I have forgotten my beauty.
I have forgotten my beauty.
My offering is shit.
Stinky and smelly shit, dropped in your spacious lap.
Nakedness, nakedness, nakedness exposed.
Annoying, inconvenient, pinning me to the expansive ground.
I am nothing.
My root shouts, your ugliness completes me.
I am the whole.
You are my community.
My celebration.

Lyrical
I am my hand
sliding into a fleece lined glove.
I am sinking into my body, coming alive.
Free me now.
You are free.
My body speaks its truth.
Open and closed.
Alive and stuck.
Frustrated and relieved.
My wholeness finds me and breathes a deep sigh.
The labyrinth of life
My foot lifts and finds solid ground underneath.
My eyes find their way to crumpled, worn out bodies
and bodies in their prime.
Skinny bodies
Fat bodies
In the shining curious eyes of a child at play
and the burning windows to a woman, disappointed and lonely.
Each holding hands with the other
completing the circle of I am.
Different each time,
but complete.

Stillness
A deeper line.
Cold, rubbed links of metal.
Holding hard and fast
Unbreakable.
Nothing.
Everything.
Delicate fingertips touching in hello
and goodbye.
I am found in the wholeness of what Is
My Body.
The running water of my blood,
the unbending bone running through my leg
the meat of my muscle spanning my chest.
The ungraspable air between.
The holy spaciousness
of filling in.